Colchis, land of the Golden Fleece, was a real kingdom rich in gold
Greek myth sent Jason and the Argonauts to Colchis on the Black Sea to steal the Golden Fleece, and Medea was said to be born there. The place was real: a kingdom in what is now western Georgia, famed for gold, iron, timber and honey, and a contender for the earliest Georgian state.
The Colchians were probably early Zan-speaking tribes, ancestors of today's Mingrelians and Laz, settled in the Caucasus by the Middle Bronze Age. Their Late Bronze Age, from the fifteenth to the eighth century BC, produced skilled metal smelting and casting, and some districts were already urbanising by the end of the second millennium BC. Historians such as Cyril Toumanoff and Ronald Grigor Suny treat Colchis, alongside the eastern kingdom of Iberia, as a root of the later Georgian nation, although Donald Rayfield notes that graves there bear Greek, Anatolian and Iranian names rather than Kartvelian ones.
The name probably descends from Qulha, a land whose defeat the Urartian king Sarduri II recorded on a stele in the mid-eighth century BC, though where exactly Qulha lay is disputed. Some scholars also read an Assyrian inscription of Tiglath-Pileser I, boasting of conquests as far as the Upper Sea, as an early mention. In Greek writing, Aeschylus and Pindar are the first to use Kolchis for a region. Classical authors claimed that somewhere between 70 and 300 languages could be heard in the port of Dioscurias alone, now Sukhumi.
The landscape is unusual. The low Colchis Plain lies mostly under 20 metres above sea level, and near Batumi rain reaches 4,000 mm a year, the most anywhere in continental western Eurasia. Temperate rainforest shelters relict species whose nearest relatives live far away, among them several rhododendrons, the Caucasian salamander and eight endemic lizards.
Farmers grew millet as their staple, raised horses on the plain and imported salt, which the interior lacked. Colchian pheasants became a Roman luxury, and moralists singled them out as a symbol of excess. Less gloriously, Colchis also sent slaves as tribute to Persia's Achaemenid kings.
Source: Colchis
