User:Kober/sandbox/Prehistory of Georgia

Geographic background
Georgia, natively known as Sakartvelo (საქართველო), occupies a rugged terrain in western and central parts of the South Caucasus, a region on the crossroads of Europe and Asia, between the Black and Caspian seas. The territory of Georgia is composed of three distinct geographic areas: the Greater Caucasus range, which forms the protective barrier on the north, separating Georgia from the North Caucasus; the Lesser Caucasus mountains in the country's south and southwest, serving as a bridge to the Armenian and Anatolian plateaus; and the depression squeezed between these mountainous systems, bathed by two major rivers, Kura and Rioni, respectively, in the east and west, and transected by the Likhi and Meskheti ranges, which run in a south-westerly direction and join the Pontic Mountains in Turkey. These two mountain spurs divide Georgia into two, eastern and western parts. Western Georgia has access to the Black Sea. The presence of the Likhi Range as a mountainous divide played a role in the divergent ancient histories of eastern and western Georgia and later served as a line of political division in medieval and early modern Georgia, but it was no definite barrier for complex ethnic and cultural interactions that brought about the cohesion of the Georgian nation.

Geomorphological changes in the Caucasus region affect modern interpretation of earlier settlement patterns, but they are not completely understood. For example, southern Georgia, including the Tsalka Plateau, now an open grassy terrain, may have largely been consisted of oak-juniper woodlands in prehistoric times. Furthermore, much of the central Caucasus has undergone considerable alluviation that has buried sites sometimes beneath more than 2 m of alluvial sediments and small river pebbles.

Ethnic background
The people known by the exonym "Georgian" refer to themselves as kartveli, which, originally, was a name of the inhabitants of the principal central Georgian region of Kartli, but later, in the early Middle Ages, broadened to encompass all groups who spoke dialects of the Georgian language, then became the ethnonym corresponding to the territorial term sakartvelo ("all-Georgia"), and, subsequently, in periods of further political and cultural integration, come to include also the speakers of the sister languages—Mingrelians, Svans, and, to some extent, Laz. This historical ambiguity is reflected in the English rendition of the ethnonym kartveli and an adjective derived from it, "Kartvelian". This term is now mostly used as a linguistic category to denote the family of the four South Caucasian sister languages—Georgian, Mingrelian, Laz, and Svan. Sometimes it is still employed in its now-obsolete meaning as an ethnonym for the core people of Kartli, when dealing with the ancient and early medieval Georgian history.

Dmanisi site
The earliest archaeological evidence of human habitation of the territory of Georgia has been uncovered at Dmanisi, a multi-layered archaeological site in the country's south. Animal and human bones as well as stone chopping tools and flakes unearthed at Dmanisi have been dated to at 1.6–1.8 million years ago, yielding the earliest unequivocal evidence for presence of the genus Homo outside the African continent. Technological characteristics of the lithic assemblage from Dmanisi, composed of more than 8,000 artifacts, chronologically corresponds to the Oldowan or Pre-Oldowan African sites.

Of the five human skulls discovered from 1999 to 2005, the Dmanisi skull 5 is a fully complete hominin skull dated to 1.8 million years ago. The skull's features share several characteristics with traits found in early Homo skulls from Africa, such as H. habilis and H. erectus, giving rise to a hypothesis advanced by its investigators, David Lordkipanidze and his colleagues, that there was only one lineage of genus Homo that spread from Africa to other continents and many hominin fossils characterized as different species may have been different variations of the same species. These conclusions, published in 2013, caused a controversy within the anthropological community.

Lower Paleolithic: second phase
The subsequent fate of the Dmanisi humans is not clear. The second oldest prehistoric site in Georgia, a large late Early Pleistocene locality at Akhalkalaki, yielded faunal remains, probably deposited between 980,000 and 780,000 years ago, but no involvement by hominins could be demonstrated.

There is a significant time gap between the Dmanisi fossils and the oldest unquestionable archaeological evidence of the Lower Paleolithic Acheulean tradition in the South Caucasus, dated to at least 350,000 years ago, though evidence suggests an earlier arrival at around 600,000 years ago. This Acheulean habitat is represented by cave sites with more or less clear stratigraphy such as that of Tsona at 2100 m above sea level and those of Kudaro I and Kudaro III at 1600 m above sea level, all located at the foot of the southern slopes of the central Greater Caucasus. Some materials, such as bifacial billhook-type stone tools are typical of the Caucasian Acheulean, while other features, such as cleavers on flakes, resemble the Acheulean of the Levant.

Middle Paleolithic
The Middle Paleolithic (150,000–35,000 BC) in Georgia is characterized by a large number—up to 200—and diversity of rock-shelters, caves, and open-air sites both in the lowlands and highlands. This diversity and the heterogeneous nature of the stone industries from these sites reflect a cycle of abandonment and settlement in response to availability of local resources and the changes in natural environment. The Jruchula cave, near the town of Chiatura in the Imereti region of western Georgia, is the oldest Middle Paleolithic site in Georgia, dated to 260–140 ka, and the Ortvale Klde site, close to the same town, is the latest one dated to around 38 ka. Modern technological studies have demonstrated strong affinities between the blade industry from Jruchula and that from several Near Eastern Early Middle Paleolithic sites.

Remains of the Neanderthal species have been unearthed at several cave sites in Georgia, such as Ortvale Klde, Jruchula, Bondi, and Sakazhia, all in the Imereti region. Due to its favorable climatic conditions, the South Caucasus, especially western Georgia, like the Iberian Peninsula and the Crimea, seems to have harbored Neanderthals even after their disappearance in most other parts of Europe. According to a group of specialists studying the Middle Paleolithic Caucasian sites, archaeological evidence suggests that anatomically modern humans "arrived in the Caucasus a few millennia after the Neanderthal demise and that the two species probably did not interact".

Upper Paleolithic
In the Upper Paleolithic (35,000–10,000 BC), the fall of temperature in the South Caucasus was considerable, but the glaciation of southern slopes of the Greater Caucasus crest was less extensive. People sought refuge in the lowlands of western Georgia, where, the local environment of the Rioni-Kvirila river basin was warm, humid, and well forested, aided by ameliorating effects of the Black Sea and the buffering function of the Caucasus mountains.

The transition from the Middle to Upper Paleolithic in Georgia has been best studied at the Dzudzuana Cave and the Ortvale Klde rock-shelter, both in Imereti, in the framework of an international research project launched in 1996. The earliest evidence of the Upper Paleolithic culture at these sites is dated to around 34–32 ka BP, which is relatively late than in the Near East and south-eastern Europe. The early Caucasian assemblages are already rich in bladelets. Dzudzuana Cave also provided most detailed reports on Upper Palaeolithic faunal remains in the Caucasus: steppe bison, aurochs, and West Caucasian tur were the most frequently hunted species in the area. The site has further yielded what Kvavadze et al. have described as one of the earliest known dyed flax fibers dating to 30 ka BP. The Gvarjilas Klde assemblage near Chiatura, rich in geometric microliths, revealed the latest Upper Paleolithic phase known in Georgia.

The Upper Paloelithic remains have also been investigated at Satsurblia, Devis Khvreli, Sakazhia, Sagvarjile, Samertshle Klde, and other sites, almost exclusively in western Georgia. In more easterly areas, the human presence seems to have been very sparse during this period and into Terminal Pleistocene/Early Holocene when sites with Mesolithic industries appear.

According to Bar-Yosef et al., the early Upper Paleolithic cultures on both sides of the Greater Caucasus demonstrate similarities, indicating that the mountains were no more a geographic barrier for the dispersal of modern humans. A genomic study of Late Upper Paleolithic and Mesolithic males, respectively, from Satsurblia and Kotias Klde cave in western Georgia suggest that the Caucasian Hunter-Gatherers were a distinct clade that split from the Western hunter-gatherers—Mesolithic individuals, sampled from Spain all the way to Hungary—c. 45 kya and from Neolithic farmer ancestors c. 25 kya. They significantly contributed to the early Bronze-Age Yamna steppe herders, who migrated to Europe c. 3,000 BC, as well as the modern populations of the Caucasus and Central Asia.

Mesolithic
The known Mesolithic sites (c. 10,000–6500 BC) in Georgia are caves and rock-shelters with several regional variants. These are the Black Sea littoral sites of Kvachara, Yashtkhva, Apiancha, Djampala, Entseri, Tsivi, and Achara; the Trialeti Mesolithic sites of Edzani and Zurtaketi in south-central Georgia; the Imeretian Mesolithic at Darkveti, Sagvarjile, Chakhati, and Kotias Klde; and the Javakheti Mesolithic culture of the Bavra caves in southern Georgia. In Georgia's immediate neighborhood, the Mesolithic layer was unearthed at the open-air site of Chokh in Dagestan, Russia. All these Mesolithic groups were hunter-gatherers with more advanced hunting tools and strategy as suggested by abundance of animal species, including dangerous boar and bear, at the caves of Kotias Klde and Darkveti. Cut marks suggest that bears were hunted and butchered also for their fur and for ritualistic reasons. Hunting scenes are depicted as rock art in the Trialeti petroglyphs in southern Georgia, engraved over a number of periods from the Mesolithic to the Middle Bronze Age.

Early Neolithic
The transition from the Mesolithic to the Neolithic in the Caucasus region is poorly understood. Spread of Neolithic technology and innovations—Neolithization—occurred late in the Caucasus when compared to its southern neighbors. It lasted for about 1000 years, from c. 6000 BC to c. 5000 BC. Several local variants can be distinguished according to house and settlement types, and associated cultural and economic traits.

Based on lithic technology, two main subtraditions—the Anaseuli group in the lowlands, at Ozurgeti in southwestern Georgia, and the Paluri-Nagutni group in the foothills of northern Georgia—are defined. Among blade-oriented obsidian, flint, and ground stone industry at Anaseuli-1 radiocarbon dated to the 6th millennium BC, polished axes, grinders, and sickle blades are also found, indicating that crop cultivation could have already been practiced there. The nearest source of obsidian is in southern Georgia, more than 150 km away. The presence of domesticated animals in the early Neolithic layer at Darkveti was proposed by the Georgian archaeologist L. Nebieridze in the 1970s, but has not been confirmed by the new excavations at the nearby site of Kotias Klde in the 2000s. An important find at Kotias Klde was a cache of five longer (11-13 cm), complete obsidian blades.

The Paluri-Nagutni group has yielded a specific tool type, with hooked projections, similar to those recovered from Kotias Klde in western Georgia as well as Kmlo-2 in Armenia and aceramic Neolithic sites in Turkey and Iraq. Unlike Anaseuli-1 in western Georgia, ground stone tools such as quern-stones or grinders were not found at these sites, suggesting their economy was based exclusively on hunting and gathering.

Late Neolithic
The most important Late Neolithic culture in the Caucasus, illustrating the growth of permanent agricultural settlements with mudbrick buildings, is the Aratashen-Shulaveri-Shomutepe complex unearthed in parts of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, and carbondated to c. 6000–5250 BC. This culture yielded the earliest unequivocal evidence for the introduction of agriculture, house construction, pottery production, and metalworking in the region. The sites in Georgia associated with this culture are mainly found in the country's south, in the Kvemo Kartli region, at the elevation of 270 to 500 metres above sea level. These are Shulaveris Gora, Imiris Gora, Gadachrili Gora, Dangreuli Gora, Arukhlo, and Khramis Didi Gora. Human settlements formed mounds of 1 to 3 ha in area and 2.5 to 3.5 m in relative height. They were established in previously uninhabited places and consisted of dense, chaotic group of structures, chiefly one-room dwellings. Ditches and remains of human burials were found in Arukhlo and Imiris Gora. The Arukhlo site also yielded only example of cremation in the Stone-Age South Caucasus.

The 2007–2013 archaeological investigations at Gadachrili Gora revealed new architectural features of the Shulaveri culture, such as the existence of a large main building with secondary cells arranged around it in a cross-like pattern as well the presence of delimited terraces for storage purposes. The 2017 multidisciplinary study of ancient organic compounds absorbed into the pottery fabrics from the two key Shulaveri culture sites in Georgia provided "the earliest biomolecular archaeological evidence for grape wine and viniculture from the Near East".

Material culture of the Aratashen-Shulaveri-Shomutepe complex is characterized by obsidian-dominated lithic industry, near-absence of microliths, abundance of bone and horn artifacts, and introduction of coarse, handmade pottery, sometimes decorated, including with anthropomorphic motifs, such as the artifacts recovered from Arukhlo, Imiris-gora, and Khramis Didi-gora. Copper artifacts, mainly beads, found in the latest layers of the Neolithic Aratashen-Shulaveri-Shomutepe sites, such as Khramis Didi-gora and Arukhlo in Georgia, are some of the earliest known metal objects in the South Caucasus. Domesticated animals such as cattle, goats, sheep, and pigs are present from the earliest phase of this horizon.

The Aratashen-Shulaveri-Shomutepe horizon exhibits some relations with the Umm Dabaghiyah-Sotto and Hassuna cultures of northern Mesopotamia; it is totally isolated from any other known contemporary food-producing cultures of the Caucasus and manifests clear disjunction with the subsequent Bronze Age traditions in the area, leading Kohl to suggest that the culture was intrusive in the South Caucasus and consisted of small colonies of early food-producers from southeastern Anatolia and northern Mesopotamia who subsequently returned to their southern homelands or became assimilated with the local population.

The Late Neolithic of western Georgia is distinct from the Aratashen-Shulaveri-Shomutepe complex. It is represented by the Black Sea coastal sites such as Anaseuli-2, Odishi, and Makhvilauri, and characterized by the appearance of pottery, blade-oriented lithic industry, abundance of geometric microliths, and absence of evidence for the use of domesticated plant and animal resources.

Chalcolithic
The Chalcolithic in the South Caucasus lasted from from c. 5000/4800 to 3500 BC. It flourished, in large parts, on the territories assimilated in the Neolithic. Several features distinguished the Chalcolithic villagers from their Neolithic forerunners: a more mobile lifestyle; ability to benefit from resources across different environmental zones; diversified subsistence patterns, including wine-making; external networks reflected in a flow of commodities; and an advancement of metal production. Metallurgy seems to have begun in the Caucasus with the extraction of native metal since the 6th millennium BC, notably in the regions close to oxidic copper ore sources in the Bolnisi area in eastern Georgia. However, until the late 5th millennium evidence for extractive metallurgy and ore smelting in the Caucasus is scarce.

Two broad and distinct Chalcolithic horizons, best known through their ceramics, are identified in the South Caucasus: Chaﬀ-Faced Ware and Sioni Ware archaeological cultures. The former, found in many locations in the southern part of the South Caucasus, was more extensive and part of a larger tradition that reached from northern Mesopotamia to north-western Iran, with an important middle stretch in Azerbaijan, where the horizon is known as the Leyla-Tepe culture. In contrast, the Sioni tradition was local and focused in Georgia's Kvemo Kartli region, but also attested on both sides of the Araxes Valley. Chalcolithic settlements in western Georgia are characterized as the Darkveti culture.

Chaﬀ-Faced Ware culture
This culture is known for its typically undecorated pottery of distinct fabric, produced by abundant organic inclusions: chaﬀ temper added to the clay matrix. Metalworking became more active. At the Delisi settlement in Georgia's capital of Tbilisi, two metal articles—an awl with a square shaft and a knife blade—contained a high percentage (3.2-3.8%) of tin, while similar awls coming from Kviriastskali in eastern Georgia included 2.01% arsenic and 0.6% nickel.

The Chalcolithic people in the eastern South Caucasus mostly used mudbricks to build their dwellings. An important northern site of the Chaﬀ-Faced Ware tradition, Berikldeebi in Georgia's east-central Shida Kartli region, is notable for a mudbrick defensive fence and a unique three-room building, possibly a temple according to the excavators, Alexander Javakhishvili and Lili Glonti. The dead were buried in pit graves, ceramic jars, and burial mounds. Chobareti, an early Kura-Araxes terrace site near Akhaltsikhe in Georgia's south, contained an infant jar burial—not a Kura-Araxes custom—suggesting lingering Late Chalcolithic tradition. Burial mounds at Kavtiskhevi in Georgia's Shida Kartli and Soyuqbulaq in Azerbaijan, close to the border with Georgia, are the earliest funeral deposits of this kind in the Caucasus.

Sioni culture
A local Chalcolithic tradition known as the Sioni culture after a village in Georgia's Kvemo Kartli region, flourished from c. 4800/4600–3200 BC. The site is difficult to precisely characterize due to superimposition of later Bronze Age activity. The Sioni-type pottery, distinguished by ornamented rims and slipped surfaces, are found at several sites in central, southern, and eastern Georgia, such as Tsopi, Damtsvari Gora, and Abanoskhevi, but also in Armenia and Azerbaijan. Architecture generally had a stone base. At the Sioni site the basement of a circular building at least 12 m in diameter and with 1.5 m-thick stone walls was found.

The Sioni ceramics was distinct from that of the geographically preceding Neolithic Shulaveri culture, but macrolithic tools of the Sioni tradition has raised the question of the possible continuity between the two cultural entities. A subsequent link to the earliest phase of the Bronze Age Kura–Araxes culture was suggested by Karina Kushnareva and Tamaz Kiguradze. Farming and stock raising played an important role in local economy. A subtradition, with pottery suggestive of transition to the Kura–Araxes tradition, was that of Tsopi, with the eponymous site located not far from Sioni.

Darkveti culture
In western Georgia, most Chalcolithic sites had been occupied in the Neolithic era. They are sometimes grouped as the Darkveti culture. Caves and rock shelters, such as the Samele Klde, Dzudzuana, and Okumi sites, continued to be widely used. Open air settlements are also attested, with wattle-and-daub structures at the sites such as Tetramitsa and Chikhori. A few stone bracelets characteristic of the northwestern Caucasian Meshoko culture have been found in the Kvirila valley and at Tetramitsa, suggesting relations between the two cultures across the Greater Caucasus mountains. Evidence of early metallurgy—cold-worked and annealed rods, awls and other artifacts—are also attested in some settlements of this culture.

Chalcolithic v 2
The Chalcolithic in the South Caucasus lasted from from c. 5000/4800 to 3500 BC and flourished, in large parts, on the territories assimilated in the Neolithic. In contrast to their Neolithic forerunners, the Chalcolithic villagers enjoyed more mobile lifestyle and the ability to benefit from resources across different environmental zones. They had more diversified subsistence patterns, including wine-making, external networks reflected in a flow of commodities, and more advanced metal industry based on copper production. The excavated settlements are few in number, rectilinear in plan, and mostly mudbrick in construction. The dead were buried in pit graves, ceramic jars, and burial mounds. Burial mounds at Kavtiskhevi in Shida Kartli are the earliest funeral deposits of this kind in the Caucasus.

Based on ceramics, two broad and distinct Chalcolithic horizons are defined in eastern Georgia. Of these, the Chaﬀ-Faced Ware culture was more extensive and part of a larger tradition that reached from northern Mesopotamia to north-western Iran, with an important middle stretch in Azerbaijan, known as the Leyla-Tepe culture. Its typically undecorated pottery of distinct fabric was produced by abundant organic inclusions: chaff temper added to the clay matrix. Berikldeebi in Georgia's east-central Shida Kartli region is an important northern site of this horizon. It is notable for a mudbrick defensive fence and a unique three-room building, possibly a temple, according to the excavators, Alexander Javakhishvili and Lili Glonti. In contrast, the Sioni tradition—so named after an eponymous site in Georgia—was more localized and focused in Georgia's Kvemo Kartli region, but also found in other areas of the South Caucasus. However, no clearly defined type-site has been identified. The Sioni-type pottery, found at the sites such as Tsopi, Damtsvari Gora, and Abanoskhevi, was distinguished by ornamented rims and slipped surfaces. Small metal articles such as ornaments, awls, knives and fishing hooks, mostly of arsenic copper, are found throughout the Caucasus.

Similarities in cultural traits, such as pottery and burial practices, between the Caucasian Late Chalcolithic materials and the contemporaneous Mesopotamian cultures have been explained by various scholars as suggesting the "pre-Uruk colonization" from north Mesopotamia, migrant trading, or quest for metal ores in the Caucasus. This development could have been roughly contemporaneous with the seemingly sudden emergence of the metal-rich Maikop culture in the northwestern Caucasus.

In western Georgia, most Chalcolithic sites had been occupied in the Neolithic. They are grouped as the Darkveti culture. These were mostly caves and rock shelters, such as Samele Klde, Dzudzuana, and Okumi, but open air settlements with wattle-and-daub structures are also attested at Tetramitsa and Chikhori. A few stone bracelets characteristic of the northwestern Caucasian Meshoko culture have been found, suggesting relations between the two cultures across the Greater Caucasus mountains. Evidence of early metallurgy—cold-worked and annealed rods, awls and other artifacts—are also attested on some settlements of this culture.

Bronze Age
The Bronze Age lasted for three thousand years, from the middle of the 4th millennium BC to the early 1st millennium BC and saw profound changes in the Caucasian societies.

Geography
Throughout the Early Bronze Age, the South Caucasus, with the exception of the Black Sea regions of western Georgia—home to the precursors of the Colchian culture—was dominated by the Kura–Araxes culture, so named by its researcher, Boris Kuftin, after the major river basins in the region. Also known as the Early Transcaucasian, this culture flourished from c. 3500 to c. 2400 BC. The location of its homeland is difficult to pinpoint; it has variously been suggested to have originated in central Georgia or the Ararat plain, or it may have been of multifocal origin. Subsequently, the Kura–Araxes tradition spread throughout the central and eastern South Caucasus region, even at very high altitudes, and eventually extended further south across the Anatolian Plateau to the Amik Valley and beyond, reaching today's northern Israel, as well as into northwestern Iran.

The spread of the Kura–Araxes phenomenon was not continuous and there are gaps in distribution of the related material in several areas in the Near East. What this expansion as well as subsequent changes in the Bronze Age cultures indicates—ethnic currents and assimilation, the transformation of local customs, or the shifting of political or social relations with the neighboring cultures—is debated. If the Kura–Araxes expansion was due to the population migrations, then the people bearing this culture should have moved south to selected areas, avoiding some specific territories, probably controlled by more powerful groups. Giulio Palumbi linked the southward expansion of the Kura-Araxes to the collapse of the Uruk system in the Upper Euphrates region.

Georgia is home to a host of well-known Kura–Araxes related sites, of which Kvatskhelebi provides the best evidence for a complete settlement plan. Some of other important sites are Berikldeebi, the Sachkhere barrows, Khizanaant Gora, Amiranis Gora, Chobareti, Ilto, Samshvilde, Koda, Zhinvali, Grmakhevistavi, and Digomi.

Cultural package
Despite some regional diversity, this vast culture had a number of diagnostic attributes, especially the hallmark red-and-black burnished pottery, often bearing regionally specific ornamentation and surface treatments; standardized use of domestic space fitted with typical elements such as hearths and benches; and a limited number of metal and stone items.

The Kura–Araxes peoples formed a settled, nonhierarchical, and agropastoral society, located in small settlements, rarely exceeding 5 ha in size. The dwellings in the largest sites, such as Amiranis-Gora near Akhaltsikhe in southern Georgia, are quite dispersed, not densely packed together. Amiranis-Gora also shows evidence of deliberate terracing. The materials used in the construction of the Kura–Araxes dwellings vary from stone and wattle-and-daub in the highlands to mud-brick structures sometimes with stone foundations in the lowlands. Many sites, including those most carefully studied, such as Kvatskhelebi in central Georgia, lack fortifications and are simple open villages with separate or clustered one-room houses with central hearths.

The Kura–Araxes peoples herded sheep and goats and, to a lesser extent, cattle, and possibly engaged in forms of transhumance. Metal sickles have been recovered from several Kura-Araxes settlements. There is evidence for the use of wooden and antler light plows, such as the one unearthed at Kvatskhelebi. Metal production during this period was small scale, drawn on the metallurgical skills developed in the Chalcolithic. Significant evidence for mining relates to gold. An extensive gold mine at the Sakdrisi site, in Kvemo Kartli—destroyed in 2015 despite protests from academics and preservationists—was considered by its Georgian and German students as one of the world's oldest known gold mines.

The Kura–Araxes culture exhibits little emphasis on militarism and defense and uncovered burials yield little evidence of internal social differentiation within the South Caucasian early Bronze Age societies. This is in contrast to the succeeding regional traditions or the earlier, but overlapping Maikop culture in the North Caucasus.

By the beginning of the Middle Bronze Age, around 2500 BC, the dense distribution of the Kura–Araxes settlements went in significant decline and was followed by a markedly different, more sparsely distributed culture characterized by a sharp increase in burial mounds known as kurgans.

Early kurgan traditions
The first typical South Caucasian kurgan traditions to be identified were those of Martkopi and Bedeni, named after the eponymous sites in south-central Georgia east and southwest of Tbilisi, respectively. Other clusters of kurgans in Georgia from the late Early Bronze Age are found in the Alazani plain in eastern Georgia, such as at Tsnori, and on the Tsalka Plateau near Trialeti (Early Trialeti kurgans). Radiocarbon dating indicates that the early South Caucasian kurgan cultures initially appeared at the end of the first half of the 3rd millennium BC and some of these sites, such as at Sachkhere in Imereti, overlap chronologically with the latest phases of the Kura–Araxes culture. The Martkopi and Early Trialeti kurgans are less known and studied than the Bedeni tradition. Pottery production of the former shows continuity with the Kura–Araxes, while the funerary architecture is akin to that of the Bedeni horizon.

The kurgans differ in size and wealth of inventory. Some are monumental, surpassing the Kura–Araxes settlements in size; for example, the Tsnori-1 kurgan is spread across nearly 3 ha; some of the Tsalka kurgans have stone-lined pathways stretching more than 100 meters and sometimes linking neighboring kurgans. These tombs contained rich inventories, including tin bronzes together with arsenical ones, silver and gold jewelry, carnelian and frit beads, and large four-wheeled wooden wagons. A golden stylized lion figurine from Tsnori is an example of the metalwork from this period. Other barrows are small, rising no more than 50 cm above the ground. These differences reflect growing social differentiation and militarism. The societies associated with these kurgan cultures were not egalitarian but must have been ruled by paramount chieftains who wielded enough power to afford these monumental mortuary mounds. The earliest fortresses with cyclopean stone architecture, such as the citadel of Shaori on top of a steep peak overlooking the western shore of Paravani Lake in Javakheti, also date to the Middle Bronze period.

Parallel to these changes in material culture, the permanent settlements on the territory of Georgia shrank in number, giving way to a more mobile society, and did not revive until the end of the Middle Bronze Age, though villagers continued to till the land and practice a diverse horticulture. Rare evidence of village life is afforded by Berikldeebi, a Bedeni-type settlement, and Tsikhiagora, which lies above the Kura–Araxes layer.

Important feature of the Caucasian Early Bronze Age cultures is a rich concentration of preserved wheeled vehicles. These were ox-carts, the earliest of which were built completely of wood, with occasional metal fitments such as reign guides. Wagons and carts continued to be used into the Late Bronze Age and were, afterwards, surpassed by horse-driven spoke-wheeled chariots.

Two principal theories exist to explain the disjunction between the Kura-Araxes and later kurgan traditions. One, advocated by Pavel Dolukhanov and Gregory Areshian, suggests ecological reasons for the breakdown of the Kura-Araxes village-based agrarian society. The other, more widely accepted, hypothesizes the arrival of new populations in the region. They may have come from the south, northern Mesopotamia, as argued by Melikishvili, or from the north as posited by the scholars such as Kohl. In the latter case, the incoming pastoralists, using ponderous oxen-driven wagons, could have gradually moved south from the western Eurasian steppes into the South Caucasus and assimilated with the remaining Kura-Araxes peoples, adopting a more mixed economy.

Trialeti culture
The kurgan traditions dominated the South Caucasian archaeological record throughout the Middle Bronze Age, which continued to the middle of the 2nd millennium BC and saw flourishing of the Trialeti culture (c. 2000/1900–1700 BC), which, like the earlier kurgan groups, was characterized by evidence of strong social differentiation, rich mound burials, and fugitive settlements indicating a mobile population. New practices included cremation burial, the creation of ritual roads to the mounds, the appearance of painted pottery, and new forms in the metallic inventory; arsenical bronzes disappeared. Large kurgans at Trialeti itself and other comparable sites of that period, such as the Vanadzor culture across the border in Armenia, have yielded ornate gold and silver goblets, sometimes inlaid with semiprecious stones.

A rare glimpse into the lifestyle of the Trialeti-type settlements is provided by the Janisi site in Trialeti and by Didi Gora and Tqisbolo Gora in Kakheti in eastern Georgia. Tools and osteological material unearthed at Janisi, in rescue excavations during the construction of the Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan pipeline in 2005, suggest the local economy was based on a combination of farming and animal husbandry (cattle and horse) supplemented by hunting (deer and onager).

The ancient Near Eastern connections in the Trialeti culture are well recognized and best illustrated by iconographic details of two embossed silver goblets, one found at Trialeti Kurgan 5 in Georgia and the other at Karashamb in Armenia.

Late Bronze Age
The Late Bronze period in the South Caucasus lasted from c. 1500 to 1100 BC. During the Late Bronze and Early Iron Ages, Georgia and the Caucasus in general became one of the leading metalworking regions of the Old World. A long period of mobility and pastoral economy, with few archaeologically identifiable settlements, during the preceding Middle Bronze Age was succeeded by a more settled mode of life, agricultural economy, and the appearance of complex societies in the region. This transition is also evident in new forms of mortuary architecture, pottery, and metal material repertoires. Unlike their Near Eastern and eastern Mediterranean counterparts, the Caucasian Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age traditions formed a cultural continuum that lasted through to about 800 BC.

Eastern Georgia
On the territory of eastern Georgia, several different Late Bronze Age archaeological cultures are described, such as Lchashen–Tsitelgori or "Central-Transcaucasian", Samtavro or Shida Kartli, and Iori–Alazani. Their boundaries and characteristics are not always clear as these cultures frequently overlap, disappear in certain areas or interact with each other.

Social and cultural changes
The archaeological record suggests that the Late Bronze Age complex societies of the South Caucasus were rivaling militaristic communities based upon newly empowered elites. The reconstruction of this ancient landscape is based only on the visible remains due to the almost total absence of written sources. Archaeological evidence points to some interaction, but there is no indication that these early polities were held together by formalized relations of power.

This period is marked by the reappearance of numerous permanent settlements, which are usually large, frequently fortified, such as cyclopean fortresses—massive stone structures encircled by walls and sometimes equipped with ditches and ramparts—typically constructed on the steep slopes of mountains. Settlement distribution and cultural material suggest that those in charge of these hill forts exercised control over arable land and resources, but they may also have provided economic and defensive functions for their hinterlands. The southern Georgian landscape—especially the Tsalka and Javakheti areas—is dotted with such fortresses, often in an excellent state of preservation, such as Beshtasheni, Sabechdavi, Shaori, Abuli, and Avranlo. Some of the fortified hilltop sites, as shown by a survey in Kvemo Kartli, were positioned near metal ore deposits. In central Georgia, such as the Tbilisi–Mtskheta region, the preferred location for settlement and burial was the river valley.

Further, kurgans and their wealth of the earlier phases of the Bronze Age disappeared; they were succeeded by cemeteries, which usually consisted of individual burials, containing numerous functional and ceremonial metal weapons, as well as jewelry, including distinctive ornamented bronze belts, figurines, and ceramic vessels. Arsenical copper and bronzes were increasingly replaced by tin-bronzes, which were not locally available and had to be imported from remote sources to the east. Bronze metalworking peaked in terms of technical sophistication, diversity, and quantity. Cultural changes are also reflected in new ceramic forms; characteristic painted pottery disappear in favor of incised gray and black design.

Regional traditions
The Lchashen–Tsitelgori culture, so named after two burial-mounds, respectively, in eastern Armenia and easternmost Georgia, spread throughout most of what is now Armenia, northwestern Azerbaijan and large parts of southern and eastern Georgia and was distinguished for its advanced bronze metalworking. A typical example is the so-called Central Transcaucasian battle-axe, wide and symmetrical, with a blade with upward pointing ends, and a shaft hole that is oval in shape and defined by relief edges and a knob on the top. The culture is mostly known from tombs and fortresses. A rare example of a well-defined settlement is Sajoge, in the Digomi Plain on the outskirts of Tbilisi, with large buildings and fortifications, carbondated to 1900/1800–1300 BC. In the Shida Kartli region, central-eastern Georgia, the Samtavro horizon is distinguished on the basis of characteristic bronze leaf-shaped blades and pottery with zoomorphic handles. Some of the important sites bearing this tradition are Samtavro, a multi-layered site in the town of Mtskheta on the confluence of the Aragvi and Kura rivers, Khovlegora at Kaspi, and Treligorebi in Tbilisi, this latter associated with terraced dwellings and a large cemetery, including rich burials in wooden vaults. To the east of the Aragvi river, there was another archaeological subtradition, centered on the Iori–Alazani interfluve in Kakheti and characterized by typical bronze daggers with both composite and unit-cast handles as well as bronze unit-cast spearheads with two relief bands on the socket. Tqisbolo Gora, Didi Gora, and Udabno are the best studied Late Bronze–Early Iron Age settlements in the Alazani Valley, a subject of an international inter-disciplinary project. The Kakhetian sites of Shilda, Meligele I, and Melaani are notable for rich assemblage of material, reflecting the practice of hoarding.

Western Georgia
The Colchian culture (c. 1600–700 BC) was a discrete archaeological tradition so named by archaeologists after the ancient Greek appellation of a littoral region on the eastern Black Sea. This culture flourished in what is now western Georgia, both lowlands and the adjacent foothills, and further south along the Black Sea coast up to modern Ordu in Turkey. It is known from numerous burial grounds, settlements, metalworking workshops, and treasure troves.

The Colchian culture is genetically connected to the local precursors of the Early and Middle Bronze Ages—the proto-Colchian culture (c. 2700–1600 BC)—remains of which are represented almost exclusively by mound and hilltop settlement sites, consisting of log houses built atop a wooden, clay-packed platform. Material culture includes black polished and coarse pottery, socketed bronze axes, and bronze hoes.

One of the key features of the Colchian culture is a rich bronze inventory, frequently deposited as hoards, including distinctive axes with incised geometric and zoomorphic decoration, hoes, sheet belts, animal pendants, and elaborate pins. The primary centers of metallurgy were the basin of the Chorokhi river, Abkhazia, and the mountains of Racha and Lechkhumi, with considerable local variation. From the late 2nd millennium onward, active metalworking centers based on iron metallurgy appeared, such as that of Pichvnari on the Black Sea in southwestern Georgia. Iron was not in widespread use until about 750 BC. Substantial diversity is noted in mortuary customs, varying from shaft graves in central Colchis to the megalithic dolmens found in the north of Abkhazia. Burials were individual (pits, stone cists, and jugs) as well as collective with complete or partial cremation. An important feature of the Colchian culture was a ritual of drinking, as testified by carefully made drinking vessels.

Due to the high humidity and marshes, the Colchian littoral dwellings were constructed on platforms made of thick wooden beams or on clay mounds. Others stood on natural hills and elevations. Later, in the Early Iron Age, dune settlements on the coastline and open-air unfortified settlements on river banks or terraces also appeared. A clay model of an old Colchian house was discovered at Naokhvamu, a Late Bronze Age–Early Iron Age settlement near Senaki. Before houses were built, ditches were dug to roughly encircle the settlement. Mounds surrounded by a ditch are found at Namcheduri, Naokhvamu, Nosiri, and Anaklia. An important settlement that has the full Colchian sequence, extending from the 3rd millennium BC to the 4th-3rd centuries BC, is Pichori, near the town of Gali. The Colchian culture abutted and shared many items of metalwork with the Koban culture, which flourished in north-central Caucasus (c. 1400–600 BC), attesting to an intensive system of contact. A closely related site, that of Tlia, is also found at the south foothills of the central Greater Caucasus. Overlapping features with eastern cultures in Shida Kartli, such as the pottery with zoomorphic handles, may reflect the Colchian cultural expansion into eastern Georgia. Broad stylistic similarities in pottery led to some scholars such as Joni Apakidze into believing that the Colchian communities had contacts with the Aegean and western Anatolian cultures.

Ethnic prehistory of Georgia
Theories that attempt to reconstruct the ethnic prehistory of Georgia and ethnogenesis of the Georgian people are based on evidence supplied by archaeology, linguistics, modern genetic studies, and the ancient Near Eastern and Classical literary sources. However, many of the ethnic groups known from ancient records cannot be precisely located geographically. Nor can they be reliably associated with a specific archaeological culture.

Proto-Kartvelian language
The linguistic data are based on the reconstruction of Proto-Kartvelian, a common ancestral language of Georgian, Mingrelian, Laz, and Svan, and evidence of early contacts of these languages with the neighboring linguistic families. The data derived from the traditional glottochronological method suggest the existence of the Proto-Kartvelian language in the 3rd millennium BC or earlier. The bearers of this language lived in neighborhood with the ancestors of the Northwest and Northeast Caucasian speakers or peoples speaking languages related to these phyla. The question of the character, degree, and the very presence of kinship between the Kartvelian languages and the two North Caucasian groups is disputed.

Another linguistic system with which Proto-Kartvelian had early contact was Indo-European. The Indo-European speakers had already been present in Anatolia at the beginning of the 2nd millennium BC. Many lexical and structural­-typological similarities between the Indo­-European and Kartvelian languages have been variously explained by early contacts—direct or indirect—and borrowings or, alternatively, collateral kinship. Diakonoff even admitted the existence of "Pre-­Proto­-Indo-­European­-Kartvelian" in the Çatal Hüyük area in central Anatolia, which was denied by linguists such as Klimov and Gamkrelidze.

Proto-Kartvelian homeland
Precisely which region or archaeological culture was directly connected with a Proto-Kartvelian homeland remains unclear. Melikishvili conjectured that the the ancestors of the Kartvelians had already been located in parts of Anatolia and the South Caucasus by the end of the 3rd millennium BC and they subsequently assimilated the preexisting Indo-European groups of the Kura–Araxes culture region, whose language served as a substratum to the Kartvelian. According to Melikishvili, the final collapse of the Kura–Araxes culture and appearance of the Trialeti kurgan tradition was a result of the expansion of the Northeast Caucasian-speaking Hurrians from their base in Mitanni.

Diakonoff assumed that the archaeological nucleus of the Proto-Kartvelian-speakers, "descended from the men of the Çatal-Hüyük culture", was the Maikop culture in the North Caucasus, dating to the latter half of the 3rd millennium BC, and the tumuli in Kakheti, in eastern Georgia, while much of the South Caucasus was occupied, at that time, by the Northwest and Northeast Caucasian groups. In Diakonoff's view, the Kartvelians subsequently, between the 12th and 8th centuries BC, expanded further into the South Caucasus, including the eastern and southeastern Black Sea coastline, and played some role in Anatolia.

The Gamkrelidze–Ivanov hypothesis placed Proto-Kartvelian, on the evidence of archaic lexical and toponymic data, in the mountainous regions of the western and central part of the Lesser Caucasus, and Proto-Indo-European south of it, in Anatolia. In contrast, Johanna Nichols conjectured that Kartvelian originated in Central Asia, near Pre-Indo-European, and that it spread westward along a route south of the Caspian Sea, eventually reaching its present location. Otar Japaridze thought that the Proto-Kartvelian speech community was located in the central South Caucasus during the Kura–Araxes period; the arrival of Indo-European pastoralists from the north resulted in the appearance of early kurgan traditions and accelerated the differentiation of Proto-Kartvelian by displacing some of its speakers to the west and to the north, towards the Black Sea and the Greater Caucasus mountains.

Giorgi Kavtaradze, on the other hand, associated, in more diffuse outlines, the ancestors of the Kartvelian, Northwest, and Northeast Caucasian families with the central Anatolian Büyük Güllücek, Maikop, and the Kura–Araxes cultures, respectively, all of which converged in eastern Anatolia in the 4th and early 3rd millennia BC. In Kavtaradze's view, the proto-Kartvelian entity might have formed in central Anatolia at the beginning of the Early Bronze Age, possibly predating the Hattians, whose language served as a substratum to Hittite, one of the oldest Indo-European languages attested in the region.

Breakup of Proto-Kartvelian
The dissolution of the Proto-Kartvelian linguistic unity might have begun at the end of the 3rd millennium BC. The first to break away was one of the western dialects, eventually forming the Svan language. According to the theory postulated by Gamkrelidze and Ivanov, the Svan-speakers moved from the Proto-Kartvelian core territory in the Lesser Caucasus foothills to the west and northwest, into the Colchian lowlands, where they probably came into contact with and displaced the Northwest Caucasian or related languages, which might thus have become substratal to Svan.

According to this hypothesis, the remaining Proto-Georgian-Zan ethno-linguistic mass eventually broke up by the 8th century BC, with the westernmost group moving to the Black Sea coast and pushing the Svan-speakers further north, to the Greater Caucasus range. This group’s idiom gave rise to the Zan language, which finally differentiated into the Mingrelian and Laz languages—separated by a wedge of Georgian speakers from the east—already in historical times, in the early Middle Ages. The dialects which remained in the ancient Kartvelian homeland underlie Georgian, which expanded to some extent south and also eastward, to the present-day territory of eastern Georgia.

Ethnic prehistory of Georgia v1
Theories that attempt to reconstruct the ethnic prehistory of Georgia and ethnogenesis of the Georgian people are based on evidence supplied by archaeology, linguistics, modern genetic studies, and the ancient Near Eastern and Classical literary sources. However, many of the ethnic groups known from ancient records cannot be precisely located geographically. Nor can they be reliably associated with a specific archaeological culture.

Proto-Kartvelian language
The linguistic data are based on the reconstruction of Proto-Kartvelian, a common ancestral language of Georgian, Mingrelian, Laz, and Svan, and evidence of early contacts of these languages with the neighboring linguistic families. The data derived from the traditional glottochronological method suggest the existence of the Proto-Kartvelian language in the 3rd millennium BC or earlier. The bearers of this language lived in neighborhood with the ancestors of the Northwest and Northeast Caucasian speakers or peoples speaking languages related to these phyla. The question of the character, degree, and the very presence of kinship between the Kartvelian languages and the two North Caucasian groups is disputed.

Another linguistic system with which Proto-Kartvelian had early contact was Indo-European. The Indo-European speakers had already been present in Anatolia at the beginning of the 2nd millennium BC. Many lexical and structural­-typological similarities between the Indo­-European and Kartvelian languages have been variously explained by early contacts—direct or indirect—and borrowings or, alternatively, collateral kinship. Diakonoff even admitted the existence of "Pre-­Proto­-Indo-­European­-Kartvelian" in central Anatolia, which was denied by linguists such as Klimov and Gamkrelidze.

Proto-Kartvelian homeland
Precisely which region or archaeological culture was directly connected with a Proto-Kartvelian homeland remains unclear. Melikishvili conjectured that the the ancestors of the Kartvelians had already been located in parts of Anatolia and the South Caucasus by the end of the 3rd millennium BC and they subsequently assimilated the preexisting Indo-European groups of the Kura–Araxes culture region, whose language served as a substratum to the Kartvelian. According to Melikishvili, the final collapse of the Kura–Araxes culture and appearance of the Trialeti kurgan tradition was a result of the expansion of the Northeast Caucasian-speaking Hurrians from their base in Mitanni.

Diakonoff assumed that the archaeological nucleus of the Proto-Kartvelian-speakers, "descended from the men of the Çatal-Hüyük culture", was the Maikop culture in the North Caucasus, dating to the latter half of the 3rd millennium BC, and the tumuli in Kakheti, in eastern Georgia, while much of the South Caucasus was occupied, at that time, by the Northwest and Northeast Caucasian groups. In Diakonoff's view, the Kartvelians subsequently, between the 12th and 8th centuries BC, expanded further into the South Caucasus, including the eastern and southeastern Black Sea coastline, and played some role in Anatolia.

The Gamkrelidze–Ivanov hypothesis places Proto-Kartvelian, on the evidence of archaic lexical and toponymic data, in the mountainous regions of the western and central part of the Lesser Caucasus, and Proto-Indo-European south of it, in Anatolia. In contrast, Johanna Nichols conjectured that Kartvelian originated in Central Asia, near Pre-Indo-European, and that it spread westward along a route south of the Caspian Sea, eventually reaching its present location. Otar Japaridze surmises that the Proto-Kartvelian speech community was located in the central South Caucasus during the Kura–Araxes period; the arrival of Indo-European pastoralists from the north resulted in the appearance of early kurgan traditions and accelerated the differentiation of Proto-Kartvelian by displacing some of its speakers to the west and to the north, towards the Black Sea and the Greater Caucasus mountains.

Giorgi Kavtaradze, on the other hand, associates, in more diffuse outlines, the ancestors of the Kartvelian, Northwest, and Northeast Caucasian families with the central Anatolian Büyük Güllücek, Maikop, and the Kura–Araxes cultures, respectively, all of which converged in eastern Anatolia in the 4th and early 3rd millennia BC. In Kavtaradze's view, the proto-Kartvelian entity might have formed in central Anatolia at the beginning of the Early Bronze Age, possibly predating the Hattians, whose language served as a substratum to Hittite, one of the oldest Indo-European languages attested in the region.

Breakup of Proto-Kartvelian
The dissolution of the Proto-Kartvelian linguistic unity might have begun at the end of the 3rd millennium BC. The first to break away was one of the western dialects that eventually formed the Svan language. According to the theory postulated by Gamkrelidze and Ivanov, the Svan-speakers moved from the Proto-Kartvelian core territory in the Lesser Caucasus foothills to the west and northwest, into the Colchian lowlands, where they probably came into contact with and displaced the Northwest Caucasian or related languages, which might thus have become substratal to Svan.

According to this hypothesis, the remaining Proto-Georgian-Zan ethno-linguistic entity eventually broke up by the 8th century BC, with the westernmost group moving to the Black Sea coast and pushing the Svan-speakers further north, to the Greater Caucasus range. This group's idiom gave rise to the Zan language, which finally differentiated into the Mingrelian and Laz languages—separated by a wedge of Georgian speakers from the east—already in historical times, in the early Middle Ages. The dialects which remained in the ancient Kartvelian homeland underlie Georgian, which expanded to some extent south and also eastward, to the present-day territory of eastern Georgia.

Genetics
Ancient DNA studies have addressed several long-standing questions regarding cultural and population transformations in the Caucasus prehistory. The earliest aDNA data of modern humans from Georgia—and the Caucasus and wider Near East—has been sampled from two c. 26,000-year-old individuals from Dzudzuana Cave in western Georgia from around the beginning of the Last Glacial Maximum. The Dzudzuana population was genetically more closely related to early Anatolian farmers c. 8000 years ago than to the Caucasian hunter-gatherers first sampled at the late Upper Paleolithic Satsurblia and Mesolithic Kotias Klde cave sites from the same region of Georgia of 13,000-10,000 years ago.

The Dzudzuana population shared most of its ancestry with the Common West Eurasian, the ancestor cluster of the post-glacial western European hunter-gatherers of Villabruna, but it also had ancestry from the Basal Eurasian, a lineage that had separated from most other non-African populations before they separated from each other. The Dzudzuana-related population admixed with Ancient North Eurasian (ANE) ancestry in the Caucasus and Iran and with the North African-related ancestry in the Levant, forming the highly differentiated populations at the dawn of the Neolithic. The Dzudzuana population thus became the largest single contributor of ancestry to all present-day populations of West Eurasia.

The Caucasian hunter-gatherers (CHG) traced their ancestry largely (up to 64%) to a Dzudzuana-related group and carried admixture derived from ANE as well as another source that may represent an even earlier split than the Basal Eurasian. They were genetically intermediate between Eastern Hunter-Gatherers and Neolithic Iran individuals, who carried an ancestry derived from ANE–WHG and Dzudzuana–ANE admixtures, respectively. They significantly contributed, together with EHG and Anatolian Farmers, to the early Bronze-Age Yamnaya steppe herders, who migrated to Europe around 3,000 BC, as well as the modern populations of the Caucasus and Central Asia. Exactly where and when the CHG entered the steppe is not known.

After c. 5000 BC, unadmixed CHG disappeared in the Caucasus and northwestern Iran. Anatolian Farmer ancestry spread east through eastern Anatolia and the South Caucasus—as evidenced at Areni-1, Armenia—into Iran while CHG ancestry spread westward into Anatolia and the Levant. The millenia of population movement and admixture between these ancestral groups that continued into the Bronze Age resulted in a pattern of genetic homogenization.

Individuals from present-day groups of various geographic, ethnic, and linguistic backgrounds in the Caucasus have been analyzed at the autosomal, Y-chromosomal and mitochondrial level in several studies. While autosomal and mitochondrial DNA data appear relatively homogeneous across diverse ethnic and linguistic groups —the result of prehistoric population expansions that occurred around 29,000–47,000 years ago —the Y-chromosome diversity reveals a deeper genetic structure attesting to several male founder effects, which corresponds to several proposed or known historical events. These observations gave rise to a language replacement hypothesis which suggests that many languages currently spoken in the Caucasus are of relatively recent date and imposed by incoming groups with higher technology or ability to dominate the indigenous population. A study of various Caucasian groups by Yunusbayev and colleagues suggested that the core autosomal genetic structure of the region's populations may have been formed before the linguistic diversity, including the language families autochthonous for the region, appeared.

Human Y-chromosome DNA haplogroups G2, J2, and R1b together make up 75% of the modern ethnic Georgian population. Their distribution has a clear environmental pattern but transcend linguistic boundaries. These patrilineages come from different human refugia in the post-Last Glacial Maximum times; for example, G2 is thought to have originated in the western Caucasus, while the northern part of the Fertile Crescent could have been the ancestral area for J2. Studies have found a high level of genetic diversity in Georgian maternal lineages, with mtDNA haplogroups H and T occurring at the highest frequency. These lineages belong to the overall Near Eastern gene pool, with coalescence ages extending back into the Upper Paleolithic, thus suggesting they might have been present in the Caucasus at that time.

Tribes
A number of theories have been put forth to account for the origin and early ethnogenesis of the Georgian people. Some of these theories portray the basis of the Georgian ethnos as being formed through a complex process of coalescence of the earliest Caucasian autochthons on one hand and incoming groups from Anatolia—emerging in ancient recorded history between the 12th and 5th century BC—on the other. The questions as to who were these autochthons and exactly which group carried a proto-Kartvelian idiom are disputed as is the nature of kinship, if any, between the aboriginal and migrating peoples. Other theories have it that the proto-Kartvelians were indigenous to a relatively limited geographical area in the South Caucasus whence they gradually expanded to some other parts of the region and for a period of time beyond it, into Anatolia, where they came to be known to the ancient Near Eastern and Greek sources under various names. In the process, they might have partially absorbed or displaced their neighbors such as the peoples related or ancestral to the Northwest and Northeast Caucasian-speakers.

Much discussion relates to the identity of a number of ethnic and geographic names deployed by the Hittite, Assyrian, Urartian, and Greek sources in eastern Anatolia and southwestern fringes of the Caucasus. Attempts at locating many of these entities archaeologically or their identification as ancestral to later, better attested peoples—whether based on phonetic similarities in names or purported geographic location—have been inconclusive and controversial. These are, for example, the Kaska, Mushki, Daiaeni, and Diauehi of the Near Eastern records and the Saspeires, Chalybes, and Mossynoeci of the early Greek histories. The exact role these groups played in the Georgian ethnogenesis and whether, in doing so, they were Kartvelian-speaking, is debated.

Iron Age
The Iron Age in the South Caucasus is defined as an archaeological period from c. 1200 to 300 BC. Many of the Early Iron Age (c. 1200–800 BC) archaeological forms and traditions were directly continuous with the preceding Late Bronze Age counterparts, dominated by a number of large settlements, burial grounds, and sanctuaries, advanced bronze metallurgy, appearance of iron metal-working, and evidence of intensified agriculture, including horse-breeding.[+Sagona] Links with the cultures of the Middle East and Eurasian steppe are evidenced by archaeology, but the mechanism of cultural exchange is frequently unclear and speculative.

Middle Eastern connections
During the Bronze and early Iron Ages, the whole region of the Caucasus was a scene of demographic, cultural, and military movements over many centuries. These phenomena were responsible for ever renewed contacts with the northern Eurasian and Middle Eastern peoples. In the early Iron Age, especially strong were the ties of the South Caucasus with the Hurrian and Hittite cultures. The Hurrians spoke a language related—according to the likes as Diakonoff and Starostin as well as Melikishvili—to the Northeastern Caucasian phylum. Their original homeland is uncertain and has been placed either in the Kura–Araxes culture zone in the South Caucasus or in eastern Anatolia. Around 1500 BC, the Hurrian tribes in southeast Anatolia and northern Syria consolidated under the dynasty of Mitanni and came into conflict with the Hittites, an Indo-European tribe, who had dominated central Anatolia since c. 1650 BC. At some point, the influence of Mitanni may have reached the South Caucasus. Mitannian-type cylinder seals, glass beads, and scarabs have been found in tombs in the Saphar-Kharaba burial ground on the Tsalka Plateau.

Around 1300 BC, Mitanni fell under the double pressure of the Hittites and the Assyrians, who then fell to disputing between them the dominance of the Mediterranean north-east. The Hittite empire collapsed around 1190 BC from the onslaught of the mysterious Sea Peoples, Indo-Europeans such as the Phrygians, and the Kaska. The political vacuum thus left in Anatolia was quickly filled by the Phrygians in the west and the Assyrians in the east. This, in turn, gave rise to a new series of conflicts and migrations, which, among others, involved the Anatolian groups of Mushki, Tabal, and Kaska.

The Mushki appeared in the Assyrian records as crossing the Upper Euphrates c. 1165 BC. In addition to this "eastern" group of the Mushki, the 8th-century BC Assyrian sources knew the other group with the same name, which corresponded to the Indo-European Phrygians, advancing into eastern Anatolia from the west. The identity of the Mushki and the nature of their association with the Phrygians and Kartvelians are debated. + (Toumanoff, Diakonoff, Lordkipanidze, Kavtaradze)

The "eastern" Mushki were identified by the likes as Melikishvili, Cavaignac, Khazaradze, Lang, and Toumanoff with the Moschi attested by the ancient Greek authors in the southeastern Black Sea area and, eventually, with the Georgian tribal designation, Meskhi. According to Melikishvili, they were a Georgian-speaking group, which, once detached from the Proto-Georgian-Zan unity and settled down in northeastern Anatolia, came under strong influence of the Hittite culture.

Diakonoff regarded phonetic similarities between the names of Mushki and Moschi unconvincing and considered the "eastern" Mushki an Indo-European, proto-Armenian tribe, related to and sharing their name with the "western" Mushki, that is, the Phrygian migrants from the Balkans. He, further, suggested that certain Kartvelian tribes could have been named Moschi because of political or cultural influence wielded upon them by their Indo-European neighbors. The third hypothesis identifies the Mushki as an Indo-European, non-Armenian group which played a role in the early history of both the Armenian and Georgian peoples.

Tabal was a region in southern Anatolia, which neighbored the Mushki and was subjected to Assyria. A hypothesis identifying the latter-day Tibareni, a tribe known to the Greek sources in the Pontus region in the 5th century BC, and the Iberians, an eastern Georgian people, as descending from the displaced people of Tabal was popularized in the 20th-century Georgian scholarship by I. Javakhishvili and accepted by Toumanoff, but was treated with caution by Melikishvili, who, however, did not rule out the presence of some Kartvelian elements in Tabal, and rejected by Diakonoff, who regarded Tabal as an Indo-European Luwian-speaking region, a notion shared by most modern scholars.

The Kaska, a group probably related to the Hattians, the early non-Indo-European population of central Anatolia, appeared in the Hittite records of the mid-14th century as threatening the Hittite capital from the Black Sea areas north of it. After the Hittite collapse, their southward advance was rolled back by the Assyrians. As a result, some of the Kaska were displaced north-eastward to the southwestern Caucasus, to parts of the larger region subsequently known as Colchis. On account of the similarity in sound between the name of Kaska and that of the Circassians, the Kaska have been assumed to have spoken a language related to the Northwest Caucasian phylum. An alternative hypothesis makes the Kaska a western Kartvelian people. According to Melikishvili and Diakonoff, the term Kaska was a collective term applied by the Hittites to the mountainous tribes of northern Anatolia. Melikishvili further assumed that it encompassed, in addition to the proto-Northwest Caucasians, a Kartvelian element. A group closely linked in the Assyrian accounts to the Kaska was the Apeshlaians, whose name resembles that of the latter-day Abkhaz, a Northwest Caucasian-speaking people.

According to Diakonoff, the 13th-century BC conflicts in Anatolia, especially, the advance of the Phrygian tribes occasioned countermovement of the Kartvelian groups from their bases in the South Caucasus into the southeastern Black Sea areas and northeastern Anatolia, where they supplanted the Kaska. Diakonoff identified these Kartvelian tribes with the Halizones of the Homeric poems, Halitu of the Urartians, and Chaldaei of Xenophon.

Whatever was their earlier abode, by the beginning of the 12th century BC, the Kartvelian tribes appear to have been centered in the northern foots of the Pontic Alps and the Coruh valley, where they neighbored the possibly Northwestern and Northeastern Caucasian-speaking groups, such as the Kaska and Hurrians. When the Assyrians began their northward expansion close to this region, in the lands known to them as Nairi at the end of the 12th century, they encountered an important kingdom or confederation of tribes, Daiaeni, later known as Diauehi to the Urartians and Taochi to the Greeks. The Assyrian inscriptions record two victorious campaigns of the Assyrian kings against Daiaeni, one, led by Tiglath-Pileser I in 1112 BC, and the other, by Shalmaneser III, several centuries later, in 845 BC.

Daiaeni/Diauehi was located north of modern-day Erzurum in northeastern Turkey and extended into the Coruh valley. The linguistic affinity of this polity is not completely clear. According to Melikishvili, its toponymy and onomastics betray the Hurrian affinities, but the confederation might have also included Kartvelian groups centered in the Coruh valley.

In the early decades of the 8th century BC, the South Caucasian communities were affected by military expansionism of the kingdom of Urartu, whose ruling elite spoke a language related to the Hurrian. Emerging in a fertile valley near the eastern coast of Lake Van, Urartu expanded into the Ararat Plain and Lake Sevan region and also carried their conquests northward, where two of the kings of Urartu—Menua (810–785 BC) and Argishti I (785–763 BC)—inflicted defeats on the kings of Diauehi, who had to surrender several cities and to provide tribute in gold and silver.

Early Iron Age
Local Caucasian Late Bronze–Early Iron Age communities were non-urban, non-state societies with strong social differentiation, ruled by warrior elites. Archaeological record of this period does not show signs of the presence of any major power able to control extensive areas in the South Caucasus. The ancient Near Eastern sources make reference to some ethnic and political entities in eastern Anatolia, but no reliable information is given regarding the lands further north and east, that is, those belonging to the present-day countries of the South Caucasus.

The geographically closest great political powers were Mitanni—the result of consolidation of the Hurrian-speaking tribes in southeast Anatolia and northern Syria under an Indo-Aryan elite around 1500 BC—and the Hittites, an Indo-European people, who had dominated central Anatolia since around 1650 BC. At some point, the influence of Mitanni may have reached the South Caucasus. Mitannian-type cylinder seals have been found in tombs on the Sapar-Kharaba burial ground on the Tsalka Plateau in Georgia's south.

By around 1190 BC, both the Mitannian and Hittite empires had vanished and the political vacuum thus left in Anatolia was quickly filled by the Phrygians in the west and the Assyrians in the east. This was accompanied by a series of conflicts and movements, which, among others, involved the Anatolian groups of Mushki and Kaska, the former appearing in Assyrian texts around 1165 BC and the latter already known from the Hittite records of the mid-14th century BC. The linguistic affiliation of the Mushki—whether they were proto-Kartvelian, proto-Armenian, or bearers of an otherwise unknown Indo-European idiom—as well as the nature of their association with the Phrygians is disputed. It is also unclear whether the Kaska were an ethnic group of the proto-Northwest Caucasian or proto-Kartvelian affinities, or, rather, a collective term applied by the Hittites to diverse groups of people in northern Anatolia.

Middle Iron Age: Urartu
In the early decades of the 8th century BC, the South Caucasian communities were affected by military expansionism of the kingdom of Urartu, whose ruling elite spoke a language related to Hurrian. Emerging in a fertile valley near the eastern shores of Lake Van, Urartu expanded into the regions around Lake Urmia, Lake Sevan, and the headwaters of the Euphrates. The northernmost Urartian inscriptions at Ortakent near Hanak in northern Turkey and Ganlidja near Gyumri in northern Armenia suggest that the Urartians went as far north as the modern border between Turkey and Georgia, but there is no archaeological evidence that this region was ever directly annexed by them.

The Urartian conquests brought, for the first time in history, eastern Anatolia and the southernmost Caucasus under a single imperial authority. Tribute levied by the kings of Urartu on the defeated enemies and their control of strategic routes must have had considerable implications for local economies, but Urartu exerted little tangible influence upon the lands that would become Georgia. Several archaeological objects found in Georgia have been tentatively attributed to the cultural or diplomatic interaction of local communities with Urartu, such as a piece of a bronze belt from a gravestone in Khirsa and bronze shield facing from Melaani, both in Kakheti,. Architectural features of several Iron Age shrines such as those of Katnalis-Khevi and Meli-Gele in eastern Georgia and Etsera and Goradziri in highland western Georgia are surmised by Tsetskhladze to be suggestive of the migration of a group of Urartians or a people bearing the Urartian culture.

Urartu's main adversaries on its northernmost periphery were Diuaehi and Qulha, both known from the Urartian annals. Kings of Urartu—Menua (810–785 BC) and Argishti I (785–763 BC)—inflicted defeats on the kings of Diauehi, who had to surrender several cities and to provide tribute in gold and silver. Toponymic reconstructions suggest that Diauehi was located in the region north of modem Erzurum in northeastern Turkey, extending into the Coruh river valley. There is no scholarly consensus whether Diauehi was Hurrian, Kartvelian, Indo-European, or a mixture thereof. Most modern scholars, with the exception of Charles A. Burney, identify Diauehi with the Daiaeni of the Assyrians—a target of campaigns by Tiglath-Pileser I in 1112 BC and, several centuries later, by Shalmaneser III in 845 BC.[More sources]

The elimination of Diauehi as a political force of importance brought its northern neighbor, Qulha, into a direct contact with Urartu. Two ensuing conflicts are documented in the inscriptions of Sarduri II of Urartu (764–735 BC). They took place in the 740s and resulted in the Urartian pillage of the district of Husalhi in one campaign and sack of Ildamusha, a "royal city" of Qulha, in the other. The spoils taken from Qulha included cattle, sheep and horses, and people. In the second campaign, a sort of iron ring or stamp—commemorative of Sarduri's victory—was also made in the country, the only mention of an iron object in the Urartian records.

Qulha is equated in modern scholarship with the Colchis of ancient Greek authors, which stretched from the Black Sea coastline to the lower reaches of the Coruh. The mainland territory of Colchis, with which the Urartians became acquainted, is identified with a district at the headwaters of the Kura, known to the medieval Georgians and Armenians, respectively, as Kola and Kogh. Levan Gordeziani suggests that Diauehi and Qulha may have been partially overlapping entities.

The Urartian sources mention more lands and tribes located north of the Urartian heartland, such as Uiteruḫi, Luša, Kaţarza, and Zabaha. In the view of Melikishvili and Diakonoff, they may have been Kartvelian-speaking, just as their neighbor Qulha.

Middle Iron Age: Nomads
Between the 8th and 6th centuries BC, many principal Late Bronze Age–Early Iron Age sites in eastern Georgia, especially on the left bank of the Kura, came to a decline or ceased to exist, several of them bearing traces of violent destruction and fire. For example, the number of burials at Samtavro decreased sharply in the 6th century and became almost completely absent in the 5th and 4th centuries BC. Similarly, life came to a stall at the Treligorebi settlement and would not reemerge in full until the late Hellenistic period. A similar fate befell a dense settlement system in the Iori-Alazani region in Kakheti: most of these sites were destroyed and abandoned in the 7th century BC, never to be reoccupied. [more sources needed] Traces of fire can also be identified in destruction layers at many settlements of the Colchian culture in western Georgia, mostly located to the north of the Rioni and dated to the end of the 7th and the beginning of the 6th centuries BC. Archaeological material from the Colchian culture region dated to the early and middle 6th century BC is scanty.

This period of archaeological deterioration is roughly contemporaneous with the appearance, in the ancient Middle Eastern and Greek sources, of the Cimmerians and Scythians—nomadic peoples from the Eurasian Steppe—who were highly skilled in horsemanship and archery. The ancient literary traditions combined with finds of several archaeological objects have been interpreted as suggesting the passage of the steppe nomadic raiders through the South Caucasus. The Cimmerians should have passed, scholars such as Melikishvili and Diakonoff suggest, western Georgia along the Black Sea coastline and overrun Qulha, before their first recorded appearance in the Assyrian intelligence reports as successfully fighting the Urartian army in their base of Gamir in 714 BC. This could have occasioned, in Melikishvili's view, a shift of the Colchian ethnopolitical center farther north, into the Rioni valley.

Scythian and Scythian-type objects such as battle weapons and elements of horse fittings have been retrieved from grave sites along the South Caucasian pass roads, for example, Kulanurkhva in Abkhazia and Dvani and Samtavro in Shida Kartli. Several socketed bronze arrowheads have been found in destruction deposits in eastern Georgia, such as at Melaani, Mochrili Gora, Tsiskaraant Gora, and Usakhelo Gora in Kakheti and Khovle Gora in Shida Kartli. Such arrowheads were introduced by the Eurasian nomads and became widespread in the ancient Middle East and were also used by the region's other peoples such as the Medes.

Late Iron Age
From the early 6th century on, the expansion of the Achaemenid empire and Greek settlement on the eastern Black Sea coastline positioned the territory of Georgia on a dynamic periphery of the Iranian and Hellenic civilizations.[Braund]

The arrival of Greek colonists to the eastern Black Sea coast introduced a unique element in the sociopolitical fabric of Colchis. For the ancient Greeks, Colchis was a distant land of a mythological fame, a destination of the Argonaut expedition. It is in the Argonautic context that the name Colchis first appears in the 8th-century BC Greek poetry, namely, a work attributed to Eumelus of Corinth.

The western Georgian sites begin to boast a great number of Greek pottery in the middle of the 6th century BC. According to the Greek literary sources—the earliest being pseudo-Scylax—the initial Hellenic settlement came from Miletus to Phasis at the mouth of the Rioni, in the center of Colchis, followed by Dioscurias and Gyenos, near modern Sukhumi and Ochamchire, respectively. Archaeology revealed three more sites that bear traces of Greek presence—at Pichvnari, Tsikhisdziri, and the Batumi fortress in modern Adjara in southwestern Georgia. These settlements were limited to the coastline and river estuaries. There is an ongoing dispute in modern scholarship as to whether these colonies were self-sustained independent polities or small commercial settlements near local urban centers dependent on the trade between Colchis and Greece.

Colchis possessed advanced technology and the process of urbanization on the coastline had been underway by the time of Greek arrival, but it is not as yet entirely clear as to what kind of polity Colchis was at that time. Scholarly opinions diverge on whether Colchis was a centralized and powerful kingdom as suggested by the Greek legends or a politically fragmented region. Classical sources deploy multiple names of local tribes and groups. Colchian was an umbrella term applied by the Greeks to a number of different tribes. Archaeological evidence indicates a degree of sociocultural homogeneity, exemplified by a widespread Colchian log-cabin—also known from the description by the 1st-century BC Roman author Vitruvius—and archaeological artifacts such as typical elongated Colchian axes and pottery with characteristic wavy lines and chevrons. At the same time, there are considerable regional variations within the Colchis material culture.

Penetration of the Hellenic culture in Colchis is evidenced by grave-goods in coastal Colchis as well as at far-inland sites such as Itkhvisi. The Greek practice of placing Charon's obol in the mouth of the dead became widespread in Colchis in the 6th and 5th centuries BC. Burials at the Pichvnari site near the Choloki estuary are a vivid example of the interaction and amalgamation of Colchian and Greek cultures. Some 15 km south along the coastline, the Tsikhisdziri site has yielded the 5th-century BC inhumations in amphorae, set down into levels of earlier dune-settlement. The Greek cultural impact is also illustrated by the earliest known specimens of the local Colchian coinage, silver drachms, produced and widely used in the region from the middle of the 5th century BC to the 3rd century BC.

By the beginning of 5th century BC, the South Caucasus had come within the sphere of the Achaemenid empire, but there is no unequivocal literary evidence that any part of Georgia was formally integrated into it. According to the 5th-century BC Greek historian Herodotus, the Persian power extended as far north as the Caucasus mountains, but the territory of present-day Georgia does not correspond to any of the Achaemenid administrative provinces catalogued by the Greek historian or listed in the Old Persian inscriptions. The Colchians are claimed by Herodotus to have had a special position: they were required to furnish a four-yearly tribute in the form of one hundred boys and as many girls. As Bruno Jacobs suggests in his reconstruction of the Achaemenid administrative network, Colchis could have formed a short-lived administrative sub-unit within the province of Armina from the Scythian campaign of Darius I (513/512 BC) until after Xerxes's failed invasion of Greece (480–479 BC), in which Colchian soldiers are reported by Herodotus to have taken part. Of the adjoining peoples mentioned by Herodotus, the Saspeires—between the Colchians and the Medes—belonged to the 18th Persian province together with the Matienians and the Alarodians, while the Pontic tribes of Moschi, Tibareni, Macrones, Mossynoeci, and Mares were included in the 19th province.

Archaeological record of the 5th-century BC Colchis is that of stability and development. Profiting from its location, Colchis prospered, assimilating traditions and practices from Greece, Iran, and the Eurasian Steppe. The Colchian hinterland began to flourish alongside the coastal area, illustrated by the extensively excavated sites of Vani and Sairkhe, seats of local elites which dominated a stratified social hierarchy. The Colchian burials contain extensive and rich inventories, such as gold jewelry, silver and bronze personal ornaments, and local and imported pottery. Items such as gold bracelets with clear eastern influences and high-quality silverware found at Vani and Sairkhe, may have been purchased as luxury items or may have come to Colchis as diplomatic gifts from Persia. Two capitals unearthed at Sairkhe may point to the Achaemenid architectural influence and a bilingual Greco-Aramaic monogram on a 5th-century BC kylix from the same site suggests that the Colchian elites might have been familiar with Aramaic, the language of administration in the Achaemenid state.

A rare glimpse in the southwestern fringes of Colchis is afforded by Xenophon, who led his 10,000 Greek mercenaries on a retreat march through Anatolia to the Black Sea in 400 BC. Xenophon encountered and described in his Anabasis several tribes populating the highlands around the Greek maritime city of Trapezus, such as the Colchi, Tibareni, Chalybes, Drilae, Mossynoeci, Macrones, Phasiani, and Taochi. Entrenched in their fortified settlements, they were mostly hostile to Xenophon's Greeks and frequently at war with each other. Archaeologically, little is known about them. It is difficult to determine whether these groups shared a material culture with Colchis proper and whether Xenophon's descriptions can be generalized to the population of lowland Colchis.

From around 350 BC to about 250 BC, there were marked changes in material culture of Colchis, particularly its hinterland, as evidenced at Vani. In this phase there was substantial new building in stone, such as a circuit wall. In addition, the traditional Colchian pottery was replaced by new forms, especially, pear-shaped and red-painted ware familiar in eastern Georgia. Also, burial in storage-jars became commonplace in the Colchian hinterland around the same time as in eastern Georgia, but not on the coast of the Black Sea. Further, Greek influence became more pronounced as illustrated by the appearance of Sinopian roof tiles and their local imitations as well as Greek inscriptions from Vani and Eshera, dated to the 4th century BC. Similar developments are observed at the sites such as Chaladidi, Ergeta, and Namarnu. The coastal sites, exemplified by Pichvnari, continue to exhibit the cultural symbiosis of Greek and Colchian communities during this period of time. Stable prosperity seems to have lasted on the coastline longer than in central Colchis where relative decline became apparent in the middle of the 3rd century BC. Rich burials disappeared as did many local settlements. Growing insecurity is indicated by extensive new fortifications around principal settlement sites. This could have been connected to a general regional upheaval in Hellenistic Anatolia as well as to encroachments from eastern Georgia, which was experiencing state-formation and expansion at that time. The eastern Georgian cultural traits, including pottery and burial customs, are prominent at the renewed settlement at Sairkhe, an inland Colchian site.

There is no literary evidence as to whether the territory of eastern Georgia, or Iberia as it was subsequently known to the Greco-Roman authors of Classical antiquity, was immediately part of the Achaemenid empire. The existence of an Achaemenid client entity in or near present-day Georgia and populated by the Kartvelian elements is hinted by a reference to Arian Kartli, that is, Aryan or Iranian Kartli, a "kingdom" which appears in the early medieval Georgian chronicles as preceding Alexander the Great's conquests. The meaning, identity, and location of this entity remains unresolved in modern scholarship.

Compared with the preceding period, archaeological remains of the Achaemenid period in eastern Georgia are not numerous and chronology is not always clear. Evidence of the Iranian influence in eastern Georgia is exemplified by various aspects of material culture, such as precious metal phialai and rhyta from the Akhalgori and Kazbegi hoards; features of local pottery, such as pairs of animal handles; fragments of the early Hellenistic stone relief sculptures from Samadlo, depicting a hunting scene; a bull-protome capital from Tsikhiagora, and capitals decorated in relief with lotus leaves from Dedoplis Mindori, Shiomghvime, and Sarkine. Achaemenid impulses are also evident in architectural features of the sanctuaries unearthed at Samadlo and Tsikhiagora. The most graphic evidence is the remains of a massive building, built of regular mud bricks and furnished with bell-shaped column bases, discovered at Gumbati, in Kakheti's Alazani plain, and dated to the 5th or 4th century BC. This structure, as well as the similar complexes of Sari Tepe and Qaracamirli in Azerbaijan and Benjamin in Armenia, is closely related to palace models from the Achaemenid imperial centers and may indicate the Achaemenid political presence in the region. The associated pottery at some of these sites includes Iranian-type vessels, which are reproduction in pottery of metal prototypes. Since the 6th or early 5th century BC reddish hard-fired pottery—comparable to the "Triangle Ware" of northwest Iran—replaced traditional greyish, low-fired earthenware.

Achaemenid cultural influence is also evident in southern Georgia, where the assemblages of the 6th to the 2nd centuries BC from a multi-layer settlement and necropolis in Atsquri contain numerous Achaemenid-type objects, such as jewelry. Atsquri has also yielded imported Greek pottery, which might have reached the area through a trade route from Colchis. The impact of Achaemenid tastes and style seems to have been limited to the local aristocracy. Vernacular architecture of eastern Georgia remained largely unaffected by the contemporaneous cultural trends and adhered to local traditions, stemming from the Late Bronze Age–Early Iron Age cultures. Residential buildings of the 8th–3rd centuries BC were modest private houses with pisé in Kakheti or rubble walls in Kartli, often limited to a single multi-functional room. Notably, no remains that can be connected with the Achaemenid arts have been found in or around Mtskheta, which would become the political center of Iberia in the Hellenistic period.

The Achaemenid-influenced forms of material culture lingered on in parts of eastern Georgia even after the demise of the empire, eventually blending with local and Hellenistic traditions. This puts Georgia in contrast to most parts of the former empire, including Persia, where the Achaemenid legacy in arts and architecture became largely imperceptible after Alexander's conquests. The archaeological evidence at local power centers in Georgia, such as Sairkhe, Tsikhiagora, and Samadlo, shows a continuity in monumental architecture, toreutics, and ceramics. Only Gumbati seems to have been abandoned in the late 4th century BC.

From the late 4th century BC on, a highly homogeneous material culture gradually developed throughout eastern Georgia. This culture had some connections with the Achaemenid-era prototypes, but local elements were prevailing and Hellenistic influence grew stronger. Burial grounds were dominated by stone cists. At the same time, pithos-burials also appeared. There is evidence of widespread and active building activity in eastern Georgia, more consistently from the mid-2nd century BC on. New flourishing centers emerged in addition to the still extant older complexes in what Otar Lordkipanidze has described as an "urbanistic explosion". Some of the important sites illustrative of the process have been explored at Uplistsikhe, Urbnisi, Kavtiskhevi, Samadlo-Nastagisi, Tsikhiagora, and Dedoplis Gora-Dedoplis Mindori. They no longer remained isolated from their surroundings; many bridges and fortifications were constructed, a testimony to conscious efforts at state-building.

These developments reflect consolidation of the eastern Georgian communities and their eventual coalescence into a new kingdom, natively known as Kartli and referred to as Iberia by the Greeks. In the meantime, the arrival of Alexander the Great's forces in Southwest Asia brought about the collapse of Achaemenid power in 330 BC. Although the Caucasus was never breached by the Macedonian army, the emergence of native kingship in Iberia is presented by the medieval Georgian historical tradition—probably inspired by Pseudo-Callisthenes—as a direct consequence of Alexander's conquests. In the light of totality of literary and archaeological evidence, the creation of Iberian monarchy in the early 3rd century BC is accepted in modern mainstream scholarship. Opponents, such as Burkhard Meißner, relegate the formation of the kingdom to the middle of the 2nd century BC.

Qulha
The elimination of Diauehi as a political force of importance brought its northern neighbor, Qulha into direct contact with Urartu. A series of ensuing conflicts are documented in the inscriptions of Sarduri II of Urartu (764–735 BC). In one of these, the Urartians conquered Husalhi, a district of Qulha probably annexed from Diauehi. In another inscription, Sarduri boasts to have sacked Ildamušā, a royal city of Qulḫa, in 744 or 743 BC.

The territory of Qulha stretched from the Black Sea coastline to the lower reaches of the Coruh. The ancient Greeks referred to the region as Colchis and knew it as a country of a mythological fame: a gold-rich realm of the king Aeëtes and princess-sorceress Medea, abode of the Golden Fleece, and destination of the Argonaut expedition, which was placed by the Greek literary tradition one generation earlier than the taking of Troy. It is in the Argonautic context that the name Colchis first appears in a work attributed to Eumelus of Corinth. The Greek term "Colchis" was a fluid concept, including, in the broad sense, a nearly triangular region, extended from the vicinity of Trapezus to the Greater Caucasus mountains and bathed by the Black Sea.

It is not as yet entirely clear as to what kind of polity Colchis was at that time. The Greek legends suggest a highly centralized and prosperous kingdom. On the other hand, the Urartian sources report the existence of a number of "kings". Archaeological evidence suggest both a degree of sociocultural integration and significant variation within the Colchis archaeological horizon. An array of tribal names is recorded in Colchis by the latter-day Greek sources. The Colchians proper of the Urartian times were probably in the process of ethnic and linguistic differentiation, still speaking the Proto-Kartvelian or Proto-Georgian-Zan language.

Beyond Diauehi and Qulha, the Urartian inscriptions refer to a great number of lands and tribes located north of the Urartian heartland. Some of the Urartian ethno-territorial names can be identified with those of the later Classical and medieval Georgian sources; for example, Uiteruḫi may correspond to the Byzeres of Scylax and Odzrkhe of the Georgians; Luša can be, according to P. Ushakov and G. Melikishvili, a reference to the Lazi; Kaţarza is the Cholarzene of the Greeks and Klarjeti of the Georgians, and Zabaha appears as the Georgian Javakheti.

Legacy of Urartu
As a result of the Urartian conquests, for the first time in history, eastern Anatolia and parts of the South Caucasus became under a single imperial authority. Tribute levied by the kings of Urartu on the defeated enemies and their control of strategic routes must have had considerable implications for local economies. However, Urartu exerted little direct influence upon the lands that would become Georgia.

Several Urartian objects have been found in a destroyed grave in southern Georgia. The Caucasian bronze belts and weapons demonstrate an impact of Urartian designs. The use of chariots and horse fittings also appear to have been introduced under the influence of Urartu. Furthermore, architectural features of several Iron Age shrines such as those of Katnalis-Khevi and Meli-Gele in eastern Georgia and Etsera and Goradziri in highland western Georgia are surmised by Tsetskhladze to have been suggestive of the migration of a group of Urartians or a people bearing the Urartian culture.

Despite the historical links, little of the Urartian language can be traced in Kartvelian. The only notable term, q'ira, found in Georgian idioms that have to do with upending, may be related to the Urartian qi(u)ra, "ground". Word sounds in unclear refrain of a Georgian harvest song, ivri-arali, tari-arali, ari-arali, have been proposed by A. Svanidze to be an Urartian invocation to the god of fruitfulness: "Lord Arale, mightly Arale, give, o Arale."

By the early 6th century BC, the weakened Urartian monarchy had crumbled. Its core territory became dominated by the Armenians, the result of amalgamation of Anatolian Indo-European groups with the Urartians and Hurrian elements. Further to the north, part of the Urartians, Melikishvili conjectured, were assimilated by the neighboring eastern Kartvelian groups—based in the upper reaches of the Chorokhi—who borrowed Urartian words that found their way into the Georgian language.

Cimmerian and Scythian invasions
In the 8th and 7th centuries BC, the Caucasus and the Near East were exposed to violent raids by the Eurasian nomads, such as the Cimmerians and Scythians, who were the first to introduce the tactics of massive warfare on horseback. The Cimmerians, coming from the steppes north of the Black Sea, invaded the South Caucasus in the 730s and, according to Diakonoff, established their first base south of the Greater Caucasus, mentioned as Gamir(ra) in the Assyrian intelligence reports, in the Kura valley in modern Georgia. Mirjo Salvini, on the contrary, locates this entity, south or southeast of Lake Urmia. A Cimmerian tribal name appears to have survived in the name of the province of Trialeti in south-central Georgia. As they rode south, the Cimmerians overran Qulha and then inflicted a heavy defeat on the Urartians in 714 BC. As suggested by Melikishvili, around 676 BC, the Cimmerians aided Rusa II of Urartu in destruction of the kingdom of Phrygia or Mushki, which also included a Kartvelian element, by that time being under strong Hittite cultural influence. As a result, this Kartvelian tribe were displaced northeastward, in the Chorokhi valley, where they were later described as Moschi, “a Colchian tribe”, by Hecataeus of Miletus. Their continued movement in this direction might have been reflected in the Georgian names of the province of Samtskhe in south Georgia and the town of Mtskheta in eastern Georgia.

At the beginning of the 7th century BC, the Cimmerians were followed by the new nomadic horsemen, the Scythians, this time moving through the mountainous passes of eastern Caucasus. They established their base in the territory of modern Azerbaijan and carried their raids as far as Urartu and the northeastern Assyrian possessions.

The penetration of the Cimmerians and Scythians into the South Caucasus is attested by the archaeological data. Several settlement of the 8th and 7th centuries on the territory of Georgia bear the traces of destruction in fire. A number of burial grounds and settlements both in the country's east and west, have yielded Scythian or Scythian-type objects such as battle weapons and elements of horse fittings. Several socketed bronze arrowheads, typically used by Eurasian nomads, have been found in the destruction deposits, such as on the site of Tsiskaraant-Gora in Kakheti, eastern Georgia. These violent events are followed by a lacuna in the archaeological record of eastern Georgia, where life does not reemerge in full until the early Hellenistic period. A particularly large concentration of Scythian objects, found in Abkhazia, suggests that some Scythian groups established their long-term presence in the South Caucasus.

Evidence of Achaemenid presence
After the demise of Urartu and a spell of ascendancy of the Iranic Medes, the former Urartian territory was conquered, c. 550, by the Achaemenid dynasty of Persia and is mentioned as Armina in the Behistun Inscription of King Darius I (r. 522–486 BC). The name "Armina", derived from the Armenians, may have been applied by the Achaemenid government to the area of the South Caucasus as a whole.

There is no direct literary evidence that any part of Georgia was formally integrated into the Achaemenid empire and scholarly opinions diverge on this question. According to the 5th-century BC Greek historian Herodotus, the Persian power extended as far north as the Caucasus mountains, but the territory of present-day Georgia does not correspond to any of the Persian administrative provinces catalogued by the Greek historian. The Colchians, mostly located in present-day western Georgia, are claimed by Herodotus to have had a special position: they—and their neighbors as far as the Caucasus mountains—were required to furnish a five-yearly tribute in the form of one hundred boys and as many girls. As Bruno Jacobs suggests in his reconstruction of the Achaemenid administrative network, Colchis could have formed a short-lived administrative sub-unit within Armina from the Scythian campaign of Darius I (513/512 BC) until after Xerxes's failed invasion of Greece (480–479 BC), in which Colchian soldiers are reported by Herodotus to have taken part.

Of the adjoining peoples mentioned by Herodotus, the Saspeires—between the Colchians and the Medes, and belonging to the 18th Persian province together with the Matienians and the Alarodians—as well as the Pontic tribes of Moschi, Tibareni, Macrones, Mossynoeci, and Mares in the 19th province were possibly "proto-Georgian" subdivisions located in what is now northeastern Turkey.

Literary evidence is even more unclear as to whether the territory of eastern Georgia, or Iberia as it was subsequently known to the Greco-Roman authors of Classical antiquity, was immediately part of the Achaemenid empire. On the strength of archaeological evidence, Otar Lordkipanidze concedes that Kakheti, the easternmost region of Georgia, may have belonged to the Persian state, but not the territory north of the Kura. Iulon Gagoshidze, on the other hand, argues that the territory of modern Georgia as a whole was a dependency of the Achaemenid empire. The existence of an Achaemenid client entity in or near present-day Georgia and populated by the Kartvelian elements is hinted by a reference to Arian Kartli, that is, Aryan or Iranian Kartli, a "kingdom" which appears in the early medieval Georgian chronicles as preceding Alexander the Great's conquests. The meaning, identity, and location of this entity is disputed in modern scholarship.

Archaeology
Archaeological evidence of the Iranian influence on the cultures of Georgia of the Achaemenid and post-Achaemenid era is ample. This may reflect the impact of the Achaemenid empire as well as of the Iranic nomads of the Eurasian Steppe.

In this regard, archaeological record of western Georgia is notable for the presence of items such as gold bracelets with clear eastern influences and high-quality jewelry and silverware found in the rich graves at Vani and Sairkhe, which may have come to Colchis as luxurious diplomatic gifts from Persia. Two capitals unearthed at Sairkhe may point to the Achaemenid architectural influence and a bilingual Greco-Aramaic monogram on a 5th-century BC kylix from the same site suggests the Colchian elites might have been familiar with Aramaic, the language of administration in the Achaemenid state.

Archaeological evidence of the Iranian influence in eastern Georgia is exemplified by various aspects of material culture, such as precious metal phialai and rhyta from the Akhalgori and Kazbegi hoards; features of local pottery, such as pairs of animal handles; and fragments of the early Hellenistic stone relief sculptures from Samadlo, depicting a hunting scene. The most graphic evidence is an Achaemenid-type palace, built of regular mud bricks and furnished with bell-shaped column bases, discovered at Gumbati, in Kakheti's Alazani plain, and dated to the 5th or 4th century BC. This massive structure, as well as the similar complex of Qaracamirli some 60 km south, just across the border in the present-day Republic of Azerbaijan, is closely related to models from the imperial center.

Other examples of Iranian-type designs from eastern Georgia include a bull-protome capital from Tsikhiagora and capitals decorated in relief with lotus leaves from Dedoplis Mindori, Shiomghvime, and Sarkine. Possibly fire-worshiping temples have been unearthed at several sites, such as Samadlo and Dedoplis Mindori. The complex excavated at Tsikhiagora yielded tower-type fortifications reminiscent of both Urartian and Achaemenid practices. The Achaemenid-influenced architectural canons seem to have lingered on in eastern Georgia, eventually blending with local and Hellenistic traditions.

Colchis
At approximately the same time, Colchis began to recover from the disastrous nomadic invasions. The nucleus of a new Colchian polity, however, appears to have moved northward, between the mouth of the Coruh and that of the Rioni. A level of political consolidation within this new union is unclear and did not apparently include the southern Colchian tribes catalogued by Herodotus as parts of Achaemenid satrapy XIX.

''In Herodotus's account, the Colchians proper were not part of the Achaemenid provincial system, but they—and their neighbors as far as the Caucasus mountains—were required to furnish a quinquennial tribute in the form of one hundred boys and as many girls. Herodotus, further, lists the Colchian soldiers in the ranks of the Persian king Xerxes during his expedition to Greece.''

During the 7th or 6th century BC, the arrival of Greek colonists to the eastern Black Sea coast introduced a unique element in the sociopolitical fabric of Colchis. The western Georgian sites begin to boast a great number of Greek objects in the mid-6th century BC. The initial Greek settlement came from Miletus to Phasis at the mouth of the Rioni, in the center of Colchis, followed by a chain of settlements, limited to the coastline and river estuaries, such as Dioscurias and Gyenos, possibly near modern Sukhumi and Ochamchire, respectively. There is an ongoing dispute in modern scholarship as to whether these colonies were self-sustained independent polities or small commercial settlements near local urban centers dependent on the trade between Colchis and Greece.

Profiting from its location, Colchis prospered, assimilating traditions and practices from Greece, Persia, and the Eurasian steppe. Archaeological data from western Georgia provides evidence of impact of the Achaemenid empire on the culture of Colchis. Artifacts from the sites on Georgia's southwestern coastline such as Pichvnari and Tsikhisdziri indicate interaction and amalgamation of Colchian and Greek cultures. An extensive necropolis at the Pichvnari site near the Choloki estuary contains burials, earliest dating from the 5th century BC, which are at once both Colchian and Greek in their repertoire. Some 15 km south along the coastline, the Tsikhisdziri site has yielded the 5th-century BC inhumations in amphorae, set down into levels of earlier dune-settlement. Excavations at Pichvnari and at Dablagomi, close to Vani, have revealed the earliest known specimens of the local Colchian coinage, silver hemidrachms, dating from the middle of the 5th century BC and bearing the impact of Milesian culture.

The most extensively studied site in the Colchian heartland, around Vani in Imereti, appears to have been a seat of the local elite which dominated a stratified social hierarchy. Burials at Vani contained extensive and rich inventories, such as gold jewelry, silver and bronze personal ornaments, and local and imported pottery.

''Impact of the Achaemenid empire on the culture of Colchis are illustrated by items such as gold bracelets with clear eastern influences and high-quality silverware found in the rich graves at Vani and Sairkhe, in western Georgia, which may have come to Colchis as luxurious diplomatic gifts from Persia. Two capitals unearthed at Sairkhe indicate the Achaemenid architectural influence and a bilingual Greco-Aramaic monogram on a 5th-century BC kylix from Sairkhe suggests the Colchian elites might have been familiar with Aramaic, the language of administration in the Achaemenid state. ''

Iberia
''Literary evidence is unclear as to whether the territory of eastern Georgia, or Iberia as it was subsequently known to the Classical authors, was immediately part of the Achaemenid empire. The existence of an Achaemenid client entity in or near present-day Georgia and populated by the Kartvelian elements is suggested by a reference to Arian Kartli, that is, Aryan or Iranian Kartli, a "kingdom" which appears in the early medieval Georgian annals as preceding Alexander the Great's conquests. The meaning, identity, and location of this entity is disputed in modern scholarship.''

''Archaeological evidence of the Iranian influence in eastern Georgia is ample. An Achaemenid-type palace, built of regular mud bricks and furnished with bell-shaped column bases, was discovered at Gumbati, in Kakheti's Alazani plain, and dated to the 5th or 4th century BC. This massive structure, as well as the similar complex of Qaracamirli some 60 km south, just across the border in the present-day Republic of Azerbaijan, is closely related to models from the imperial center.''

''Other examples of Achaemenid designs from eastern Georgia include a bull-protome capital from Tsikhiagora and capitals decorated in relief with lotus leaves from Dedoplis Mindori, Shiomghvime, and Sarkine. Fire-worshiping temples have been unearthed at several sites, such as Samadlo and Dedoplis Mindori. The complex excavated at Tsikhiagora yielded tower-type fortifications reminiscent of both Urartian and Achaemenid practices. Ancient Iranian influences are also observed in other aspects of material culture, such as precious metal phialai and rhyta from the Akhalgori and Kazbegi hoards, local imitations of the Achaemenid pottery, as well as fragments of the early Hellenistic stone relief sculptures from Samadlo, depicting a hunting scene.''

After the Achaemenids
In 401 BC, when the Greek commander Xenophon marched through Anatolia to the Black Sea, he found the Colchians and other neighboring tribes freed from the Achaemenid overlordship. While leading his force of 10,000 Greek mercenaries into retreat after fighting on the losing side in the Achaemenid civil war, Xenophon encountered and described in his Anabasis several tribes populating the south-eastern Black Sea littoral and northeastern Anatolia such as the Tibareni, Chalybes, Drilae, Mossynoeci, Macrones, Phasiani, and Taochi. Entrenched in their fortified settlements, they were mostly hostile to Xenophon's Greeks and frequently at war with each other. Archaeologically, little is known about them. The Colchians proper, on the eastern Black Sea, continued to be ruled by a disperse aristocracy, referred to as skeptuchoi, "sceptre-bearers", in an account by the Greek author Strabo.

The arrival of Alexander the Great's forces in Southwest Asia and the subsequent collapse of Achaemenid power ushered a new era in the history of the South Caucasus. By 316 BC, the formerly Achaemenid Armenia was reconstituted as a Macedonian dependency, ruled by the Orontid monarchy. To the north of it, in the beginning of the 3rd century BC, the eastern Georgian communities coalesced into a new kingdom, natively known as Kartli and referred to as Iberia by the Greeks.

Although the Caucasus was never breached by the Macedonian army, the emergence of native kingship in Iberia is presented by the Georgian historical tradition as a direct consequence of Alexander's conquests. The memory of this momentous event has reached us in a much late, an 8th-century Georgian chronicle, but, in the light of totality of literary and archaeological evidence, the creation of Iberian monarchy in the early Hellenistic period is accepted in modern scholarship.

The spread of Hellenism did not result in complete erosion of the Persian cultural influence. In the words of Cyril Toumanoff, the nascent Iberian state combined "its basic 'Iranianism,' acquired during the Achaemenian phase, with Hellenism to which as a vassal of the Seleucid emperors it was now exposed."

More

 * (Also)
 * - Chapter 16. Beyond European boundaries: Neanderthals in the Caucasus.
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To be started

 * Paleolithic Caucasus
 * Mesolithic Caucasus
 * Neolithic Caucasus
 * Chalcolithic Caucasus
 * Bronze Age Caucasus
 * Iron Age Caucasus
 * Umm Dabaghiyah-Sotto culture
 * Chaﬀ-Faced Ware culture
 * Sioni culture
 * Darkveti grotto
 * Early kurgan cultures of the South Caucasus
 * Lchashen–Tsitelgori culture
 * Samtavro culture
 * Iori–Alazani culture
 * Kaiakent-Khorochoi culture
 * Origin of the Georgians
 * Qulha
 * Etiuni
 * Sos Höyük
 * Büyüktepe Höyük / Büyük Güllücek = Sinoria of Strabo
 * History of archaeology in the Caucasus
 * Jruchula cave
 * Ortvale Klde
 * Dzudzuana cave
 * Bondi cave
 * Kotias Klde
 * Mount Chikiani
 * Shulaveris Gora
 * Imiris Gora
 * Arukhlo
 * Khramis Didi Gora
 * Gadachrili Gora
 * Bavra-Ablari
 * Berikldeebi
 * Tsopi
 * Kavtiskhevi
 * Chobareti
 * Kvatskhelebi
 * Amiranis Gora
 * Aradetis Orgora
 * Tsikhiagora
 * Jinisi
 * Martqopi culture
 * Bedeni culture
 * Treligorebi
 * Sajoge
 * Shilda
 * Meligele
 * Melaani
 * Sapar-Kharaba cemetery
 * Pichori
 * Tsiskaraant Gora
 * Kulanurkhva
 * Dvani
 * Gyenos
 * Dioscurias
 * Batumis Tsikhe
 * Itkhvisi
 * Sarkine archeological site
 * Samadlo/Nastakisi
 * Gumbati palace
 * Saaklemo
 * Kazbegi Hoard
 * Qanchaeti
 * Tsintsqaro
 * Takhtisdziri
 * Akhalgori Hoard
 * Sairkhe
 * Mtisdziri
 * Dedoplis Gora

To be revised/expanded

 * Prehistoric Caucasus
 * Shulaveri-Shomu culture
 * Leyla-Tepe culture
 * Kura–Araxes culture
 * Trialeti culture
 * Khojaly–Gadabay culture
 * Talish-Mugan culture
 * Koban culture
 * Colchian culture
 * Cimmerians
 * Mushki
 * Tabal
 * Urartu
 * Diauehi
 * Tsaghkahovit

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