Colchis

• 1. Introduction

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  Colchis, the ancient Georgian polity that Greek poets called a land of gold, sits at the eastern edge of the Black Sea in what is now western Georgia. Between 70 and 300 languages were spoken in the single city of Dioscourias alone, according to Greek and Roman sources. That single detail raises an immediate question: what kind of place produces that kind of diversity? What was Colchis, really, beneath the mythological glitter that Greeks draped over it? The answers reach back past Jason and the Golden Fleece, past Medea, past the Argonauts, into Assyrian cuneiform tablets and Bronze Age smelting fires. Colchis turns out to be one of the earliest recognizable Georgian state formations, a land whose actual history is at least as strange as its mythology.

• 2. Land and Climate

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  Near Batumi, annual rainfall reaches 4,000 mm, which is the absolute maximum for continental western Eurasia. That extraordinary moisture shaped a landscape of temperate rainforests, coastal wetlands, and subalpine meadows layered between mountain ranges. To the north, the southwestern slopes of the Greater Caucasus formed a natural wall. To the east, the Likhi Range linked the Greater and Lesser Caucasus and marked Colchis off from the neighboring Kingdom of Iberia. The central Colchis Plain stretched between Sukhumi and Kobuleti, most of it at less than 20 meters above sea level.

  The biodiversity that this wet, sheltered geography produced is striking. Colchis holds an unusually high proportion of Neogene and Palaeogene relict plants and animals, survivors from ancient geological eras with their closest relatives in distant parts of the world. Five species of rhododendron and other evergreen shrubs, wingnuts, the Caucasian salamander, the Caucasian parsley frog, eight endemic lizard species from the genus Darevskia, the Caucasus adder known as Vipera kaznakovi, Robert's snow vole, and endemic cave shrimp all call this region home. The Colchian plain also gave the world the pheasant: Colchian pheasants were exported to Rome, where they became a symbol of excess condemned by Roman moralists.

• 3. Who Were the Colchians

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  Herodotus described the Colchians as dark-skinned and woolly-haired and called them Egyptians, claiming they shared with the Ancient Egyptians and Ethiopians the practice of circumcision, which he argued they inherited from remnants of the army of Pharaoh Sesostris, identified with Senusret III. He wrote: "the Colchians and Egyptians and Ethiopians are the only nations that have from the first practised circumcision." Modern historians have widely rejected this account; no Egyptian army ever reached the Caucasus, a region shielded by powerful states including Urartu, Hittia, Assyria, and Mitanni.

  The prevailing modern view is that the Colchians were primarily early Zan-speaking tribes, the linguistic ancestors of the modern Laz and Mingrelian peoples. David Marshall Lang placed them in the Caucasus by the Middle Bronze Age and identified them as one of the most important elements in the modern Georgian nation. Donald Rayfield, however, notes that the ethnic makeup of the region is "obscure," pointing out that Kartvelian names are conspicuously absent from the few personal names found in Colchian burials, replaced instead by Greek, Anatolian, Iranian, and possibly Abkhaz names. The Colchian population, in other words, was likely more mixed than any single origin story captures. Chief among the tribes inhabiting the region were the Machelones, Heniochi, Lazi, Chalybes, Tibareni, Mossynoeci, Macrones, Moschi, Apsilae, Abasgoi, Coraxi, and Soani, among many others.

• 4. Bronze Age Roots

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  The Colchian Late Bronze Age, spanning roughly the fifteenth to the eighth century BC, produced sophisticated metalworking that distinguishes it from surrounding cultures. Artisans developed significant skill in the smelting and casting of metals, producing farming implements of considerable refinement. The eastern Black Sea region as a whole was home to the well-developed Bronze Age culture known as the Colchian culture, related to the neighboring Koban culture, that emerged toward the Middle Bronze Age. In at least some parts of Colchis, urbanization was well advanced by the end of the second millennium BC.

  The earliest written name for the place appears in Urartian records as Qulha, and in the 8th-century Greek poet Eumelus of Corinth as Kolchida. The Urartian kings conquered it in 744 or 743 BC before their own empire fell to the Neo-Assyrian Empire. Historian Askold Ivanchik concluded that, based on cuneiform texts and archaeological data, Qulha must have existed as an independent, flourishing state during the second half of the eighth century BC, but likely did not survive beyond the end of that century. The connection between Colchis and the Assyrian record runs even earlier: Giorgi Melikishvili and Donald Rayfield argue that Colchis and its kings appear in inscriptions about Tiglath-Pileser I, who reigned from 1114 to 1076 BC, where the text references 23 kings of Nairi aided by 60 others near the shores of what the Assyrians called the Upper Sea, identified as the Black Sea.

• 5. Resources, Trade, and Slavery

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  Millet was the main staple crop of Colchis; wheat grew in certain regions and was also imported by sea. Local wines were produced alongside imports from overseas. The Colchian plain supported substantial cattle and horse farming, with the name of the river Phasis associated specifically with fine horses. Ancient Greek and Roman sources described Colchis as a land rich with gold, iron, timber, and honey, and it exported these resources primarily to Hellenic city-states.

  Colchis provided slaves as a tribute to the Achaemenid Empire, and Colchian slaves are also attested in ancient Greece. The tribes of southern Colchis, the Macrones, Moschi, and Marres, were incorporated into the Achaemenid Empire as its 19th satrapy. Northern tribes submitted, according to Donald Rayfield, voluntarily, and were required to send the Achaemenid court 100 girls and 100 boys every five years, though it remains unclear whether these were Colchians or persons obtained through war or purchase from other peoples. The influence of the vast Achaemenid Empire and its wide commercial networks accelerated the socio-economic development of Colchian society, even as the people of Colchis eventually overthrew Achaemenid authority and formed an independent state.

• 6. Mythological Colchis

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  From the fifth century BC onward, Colchis was identified in Greek tradition as Aea, the mythical home of King Aeetes, his daughter Medea, and the Golden Fleece. In Greek mythology, King Aeetes hung the Golden Fleece in the sacred grove of the war god Ares until Jason and the Argonauts seized it. Aeetes was described as the son of the sun-god Helios and the Oceanid Perseis, making him the brother of Circe and Pasiphae; Medea, Chalciope, and Absyrtus were his children. Apollonius of Rhodes named Aea as the main city of this mythological world in his Argonautica.

  Colchis was also the land where the mythological Prometheus was punished. The gods chained him to a mountain while an eagle ate at his liver, his crime having been the revelation of fire to humanity. The city of Kutaisi, ancient Cyta or Cutatisium, was considered the traditional birthplace of Medea; the geographer Scylax disagreed, assigning that distinction to the town of Mala or Male. Colchis was further identified as a possible homeland of the Amazons, who were also said to be of Scythian origin. The scholar Levan Gordeziani has noted that the Greeks may have applied the name Colchis to a different region than the Urartians had, and that the Greeks themselves distinguished between "Aia-Colchis" and "the land of Colchis" in ways that complicate any simple equation of myth and geography.

• 7. Roman Entanglement

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  Mithridates VI, king of Pontus, quelled an uprising in Colchis in 83 BC and gave the region to his son Mithridates, who was soon executed after being suspected of plotting against his father. During the Third Mithridatic War, Mithridates VI made another son, Machares, king of both Bosporus and Colchis, though that reign proved brief. When Mithridates VI was defeated in 65 BC, Pompey occupied Colchis, captured the local chief Olthaces, and installed Aristarchus as dynast, a tenure that lasted from 63 to 47 BC.

  Pharnaces II, son of Mithridates, later exploited Julius Caesar's entanglement in Egypt to reduce Colchis along with Armenia and part of Cappadocia, defeating Caesar's general Gnaeus Domitius Calvinus. His success was short-lived. Colchis passed under Polemon I and then, after Polemon's death in 8 BC, to his second wife Pythodorida of Pontus. Emperor Nero induced Polemon II of Pontus to abdicate, after which both Pontus and Colchis were absorbed first into the Province of Galatia in 63 AD and later into Cappadocia in 81 AD. In 69 AD, the people of Pontus and Colchis under a leader named Anicetus staged a major uprising against Rome; it ended unsuccessfully. Arrian, sent by Hadrian to tour the region around 130-131 AD, described a turbulent picture of shifting tribal powers, noting that the Laz controlled most of coastal Colchis while tribes like the Sanigs and Abasgoi escaped Roman jurisdiction entirely.

• 8. Legacy and Georgian Identity

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  Cyril Toumanoff, a scholar of Caucasian studies, wrote that Colchis can be justly regarded not as a proto-Georgian but as a Georgian, specifically West Georgian, kingdom, and that Georgian social history properly begins there. Colchis, together with the eastern Kingdom of Iberia, contributed significantly to the development of the Kingdom of Georgia and the Georgian nation. Ronald Grigor Suny identifies the Colchians as among the early Kartvelian-speaking tribes whose descendants became modern Georgians, with a political and cultural continuity traceable through later Georgian states.

  The smallest physical trace of that state, the Colchian coins, provides the most direct documentary evidence. The oldest of these coins date to the middle of the sixth century BC. A later reassessment revealed that some early examples actually represent production from an Achaemenid satrapy rather than an independent Colchian mint. One of the few identifiable rulers is Akes, known as Basileus Aku, who issued coins bearing his own name at the end of the fourth century BC. By the first century BC, the successor polity Lazica, known in Georgian as Egrisi, had taken shape; it became a vassal of Rome in 66 BC following Pompey's Caucasian campaign, carrying forward a political tradition that traces its earliest roots to the Bronze Age settlements on the eastern shore of the Black Sea.