The ancient kingdoms of the Caucasus: from the hominins of Dmanisi to Urartu, Colchis, Armenia, Iberia and Albania, and who ruled afterwards

In the Caucasus, in 1991, the oldest human skull outside Africa was found, 1.8 million years old, at Dmanisi, an hour and a half from Tbilisi, and since then people have never stopped turning up: Bronze Age farmers, kings who wrote in cuneiform, Greeks looking for gold, Romans, Persians, Arabs, Mongols and Russians. What you see in the region today, churches, fortresses, temples, alphabets, are layers of that history, and to understand them it helps to have the order in your head. This guide gives it, from the first settlers to the arrival of Russia, with what still stands from each period.

Before the kingdoms

The hominins of Dmanisi, five skulls of early Homo erectus that changed what was known about the exit from Africa, can be seen at the site and in the National Museum in Tbilisi. Then a long gap until the Kura-Araxes culture, from about 3500 to 2000 BC, farmers and metalworkers who spread from the two rivers that give it its name as far as Syria, and the Trialeti burial mounds, with their goldwork of the second millennium. In Azerbaijan, the Gobustan petroglyphs cover forty thousand years of drawings on rock, up to the Middle Ages.

The kingdoms

Urartu, 9th to 6th centuries BC

The region's first state with a name, a rival of Assyria, with its capital at Tushpa, by Lake Van in present-day Turkey, and stone fortresses, canals and temples across the Armenian plateau. Argishti I founded Erebuni in 782 BC on a hill in what is now Yerevan, and the cuneiform inscription recording it is still on the wall; the city celebrates that year as its foundation. Urartu fell around 590 BC to the Medes and Scythians, and on its ruins Armenia took shape.

Colchis, 13th to 1st centuries BC

On the Georgian Black Sea coast, the kingdom to which the Greeks sent Jason and the Argonauts for the golden fleece, a myth with a basis: the rivers of Svaneti carried gold, which was sieved with sheepskins, and at Vani, near Kutaisi, tombs from the 5th to 3rd centuries BC full of jewellery have been excavated and are in the National Museum in Tbilisi. The Greeks founded colonies on the coast from the 6th century BC, and later Colchis passed to Mithridates and to Rome.

Armenia, 6th century BC to 11th century AD

A Persian satrapy first, a kingdom under the Orontids later, it reached its greatest extent under Tigranes II the Great, between 95 and 55 BC, from the Caspian to the Mediterranean, until Rome checked it. Tiridates I raised the temple of Garni around the year 77; Tiridates III converted to Christianity in 301 through Gregory the Illuminator, whom he had kept thirteen years in a pit, and Armenia became the first Christian state in the world. The alphabet of Mashtots, from 405, and the churches of Etchmiadzin and Zvartnots belong to that Armenia, which Byzantines, Arabs and Bagratids later shared out until the fall of Ani in the 11th century.

Iberia, 3rd century BC to 6th century AD

The kingdom of Kartli, with its capital at Mtskheta, which tradition has founded by Parnavaz around 300 BC, and from which Georgia descends: a client of Rome, a battleground between Rome and Persia, and Christian around 326 or 337 through the preaching of Nino, a woman from Cappadocia. What remains are Mtskheta with Svetitskhoveli and Jvari, the ruins of Armazi and the basilica of Bolnisi, from 478, with the oldest Georgian inscription in the country.

Caucasian Albania, 4th century BC to 8th century AD

The kingdom that occupied present-day Azerbaijan and southern Dagestan, unrelated to Balkan Albania, which was Christian from the 4th century and had its own church and alphabet; the Arabs dissolved it in the 8th century. The church of Kish, near Sheki, and the ruins of Gabala, the capital, remain.

Those who ruled afterwards

Persia, Achaemenid and then Sasanian, which governed Armenia and Iberia for centuries and brought Zoroastrianism, of which the fire temples of Azerbaijan remain. Rome and Byzantium, which disputed the region with Persia and financed churches and fortresses. The Arabs, who came in the 7th century, Islamised what is now Azerbaijan and held an emirate in Tbilisi from 736 to 1122, until David the Builder recovered it and opened the Georgian golden age, that of Queen Tamar, which ended with the Mongols in 1220-1240. Timur, Turkmens, Ottomans and Safavids afterwards, dividing the Caucasus in two. And Russia, which annexed Kartli-Kakheti in 1801, received Azerbaijan by the Treaty of Gulistan in 1813 and eastern Armenia by Turkmenchay in 1828, and drew the borders that stand today.

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