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What the ancients knew about the fortress of mountains between the Black and Caspian Seas was that it was home to many peoples and impossible to reach. Herodotus heard from the Persians that “many and all manner of nations dwell in the Caucasus,” most of whom he claimed lived on wild shrubs. Five centuries later, the geographer Strabo attempted to catalogue some of these curious tribes, among them a mounted army of women warriors called the Amazons, and Pliny the Elder noted that the Romans had needed 130 interpreters to speak the linguae francae in Dioscurias, the city on the Black Sea coast to which upland clans descended to do business. 

But the first person to penetrate the Caucasus and report back in reliable detail on its bewildering diversity was a tenth-century Arab historian and geographer named Abu al-Hasan Ali ibn al-Hussain al-Mas’udi. He also coined its most enduring nickname: Jabal al-Alsun, or the Mountain of Tongues.

In the Caucasus, al-Mas’udi found “seventy-two nations, and every nation has its own king and language which differs from the others.” The inhabitants of these discrete tide pools of humanity followed no major world religion, wrote no histories, kowtowed to no great power, and were often unknown even to their neighbors 

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Photograph by Thomas Dworzak

ISSUE:  Spring 2019
Can a nationalist movement from the internet save the world’s most scattered people? 

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Click the link below for the article:

https://www.vqronline.org/reporting-articles/2019/03/mountain-tongues

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