Snow-shimmer mountains between the Black and Caspian seas
The Caucasus is the mountainous land bridge between the Black and Caspian seas, taking in southern Russia, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan. Pliny the Elder claimed its name came from a Scythian word meaning shimmering with snow, and its crest is often treated as a border between Europe and Asia.
The Greater Caucasus range in the north is shared mainly by Russia and Georgia, while the Lesser Caucasus lies across southern Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan. Mount Elbrus, at 5,642 metres, rises in the western part of the northern slope and is counted as Europe's highest peak by those who draw the continental line along the watershed. Others place that line at the Kuma-Manych Depression further north.
More than 50 ethnic groups live in the region, speaking languages from at least three families found nowhere else, alongside Indo-European tongues such as Armenian and Ossetian and Turkic ones such as Azerbaijani; Russian serves as a common language in the north. Georgia is mostly Orthodox, Armenia belongs to its own Apostolic church, and Azerbaijan is Shia Muslim. Abkhazia and South Ossetia claim independence but are widely regarded as parts of Georgia.
Fossils found at Dmanisi in Georgia in 1991, about 1.8 million years old, are the earliest clear evidence of early humans outside Africa. The Kura–Araxes culture spread across a vast area from about 4000 to 2000 BC. Assyria's borders reached the mountains under Ashurbanipal, and Persian empires from the Medes to the Sassanids ruled the area for centuries. Armenia became the first nation to adopt Christianity as its state religion, in 301.
Other writers offered their own derivations: Isidore of Seville, around 625, said the name meant white, and a Russian chronicle of 1113 linked it to Greek. In the tenth century the Alans founded the Kingdom of Alania on the northern slopes, which lasted until the Mongols destroyed it in 1238–39. Georgia's David the Builder drove out Muslim rulers in the twelfth century, and Queen Tamar's armies later beat back the Seljuks. Ottomans, Turco-Mongols and Iran followed as conquerors.
Source: Caucasus
