History of the Caucasian Albanians

The History of the Caucasian Albanians by Movses Dasxuranci (a.k.a. Moses Kałankatuaçi; tr. C.J.F. Dowsett,Oxford, 1961)

Written in Armenian around 1000 A.D., this book relates the history from about 600 A.D. of a vanished people who spoke an exotic and now-extinct language. It's not quite as exotic as that, however -- the Albanians were very closely associated with the Armenians, and the book is basically a version of early Armenian history.

This isn't the most obscure book I've ever looked at. That would probably be Cosmas Indicopleustes' Cosmography, a sixth-century Greek work which purports to show that the Earth is oblong rather than spherical.1 Neither book is a lot of  fun in the strict sense of the word, but if you poke around Movses' book, you will be transported to post-Roman, pre-Muslim world which is Christian but neither Western nor exotically Eastern – a world in which almost everything seems to have been put into the wrong pigeonhole.

So "Albania" in this book does not mean the Albania of today, but instead the present-day Azerbaijan.  The Romans were careless about names, putting Albanias, Iberias (once the name of Caucasian Georgia), Galicias, and Gauls here, there and everywhere -- Galicias and Gauls were located in in Turkey, France, Wales, Poland, Belgium and Spain. 

But history did take its revenge. For Movses the "Romans" are the Byzantine Greeks in Constantinople -- despised Chalcedonian heretics like today's Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox Christians. It's the Albanians, Armenians and (up to a certain point) Georgians who are "Orthodox" -- meaning Monophysite.2  The Western Europe of the Dark Ages, and the Pope, are not even factors here – Movses' chronicle begins two centuries before Charlemagne, at a time when many  Franks were still pagan and the pagan Anglo-Saxons were just getting settled in Britain. (But while there are no Catholics as we know them in this book, there is a Catholikos – a high-ranking Monophysite churchman).

Because of their enmity to the Romans (Greeks), at the beginning of the book the Albanians and Armenians are usually allied to the Persians, who were still Zoroastrian or "Magians".  Soon enough, however, the Persians were overwhelmed by the Arab Muslims, who are called Tajiks -- a word which now refers to Central Asians of Persian language and culture, notably (but not only) in Tajikistan.  (The word "Arab", in turn, almost always refers to nomad bandits or Bedouins in Gibbs' translation of Ibn Battuta.  Ibn Battuta himself was a Berber, though he wrote in Arabic, but this is probably not the reason he used the term thie way he did -- only recently, under the influence of Western nationalism,  have the Arabic-speaking peoples begun to call themselves "Arabs", rather than simply identifying themselves by religion and place of birth or residence.)

Foreign cultures appear in Movses' book in a marvelously garbled form.  Muhammed was a "diabolical and ferocious archer who dwelt in the desert.  One day Satan, assuming the shape of a wild deer, led him to meet a false Arian hermit by the name of Bahira..... Bahira began to teach him from the Old and New Testaments after the manner of Arius, who held that the Son of God was a created thing, and commanded him to tell the barbarous Tajiks what he had learned from him, his foul teacher.... The gullible and erring Tajik tribe summoned a great assembly, went into the arid, demon-haunted desert, and welcomed the diabolically inspired Muhammed into their midst." Muhammed is also revealed to be an adulterous lecher, a very old trope indeed.

Elsewhere Movses tells a garbled story merging the Iliad and the Aeneid: there are 2,000 Trojan horses instead of one, and the story ends with the founding of Rome by descendants of returning Greeks who had been  blown off-course to Italy, and stranded there when the captive Trojan women burned their ships. (Movses also seems to accept the Iliad as a holy book of the Christian Romans / Greeks, on a par with the Bible.)

The most interesting parts of this book are probably the tactful descriptions of the pagans – the devil-worshiping "thumb-cutters" and the Turkish Khazars.  The Khazars: "bestial, gold-loving tribes of hairy men.... an ugly, insolent, broadfaced, eyelashless mob in the shape of women with flowing hair....demented in their satanically deluded  tree-worshipping errors in accordance with their northern dull-witted stupidity, addicted to their fictitious and deceptive religion....There we observed them on their couches like rows of heavily laden camels.  Each had a bowl full of the flesh of unclean animals, and dishes containing salt water into which they dipped their food, and brimming silver cups and beakers chased with gold which had been taken from the plunder from Tiflis.  They also had drinking horns and gourd-shaped utensils from which they lapped their broth and similar greasy, congealed, unwashed abominations. Two or three of them to one cup, they greedily and bestially poured neat wine into their insatiable bellies which had the appearance of bloated goatskins..... Possessing completely anarchical minds, they stumble into every sort of error, beating drums and whistling over corpses, inflicting bloody sabre and dagger cuts on their cheeks and limbs, and engaging naked in sword fights – oh hellish sight! – at the graves, man against man and troop against troop, all stripped for battle..... They danced their dances with obscene acts, sunk in benighted filth and deprived of the sight of the light of the creator.... They were also incontinent sexually, and in accordance with their heathen, barbarous customs they married their father's wife, shared one wife between two brothers, and married several women."

In defiance of the retreating Khazar qagan, at one point  the Georgians "fetched a huge pumpkin upon which they drew an image of the king of the Honk', a cubit broad and a cubit long.  In place of his eyelashes which no one could see they drew a jot; the region of his beard they left ignominiously naked, and they made the nostrils a span wide with a number of hairs under them in the form of a mustache so that all might recognize him. This they brought and placed upon the wall opposite them, and showing it to the armies, they called out 'Behold the Emperor, your King! Turn and worship him for it is Jebu Qagan!'" (But this terrible insult only made the Huns' revenge that much fiercer in the following year.)

As for the thumb-cutters (seemingly an indigenous Caucasian pagan cult): "The devil appears in human form and orders three ceremonies to be held, each one comprising three men; these are not to be wounded or slain, but while still alive are to have the skin and thumb of the right hand removed and drawn with the skin over the chest to the little finger of the left hand; the little finger is then to be cut and broken off inside the skin. The same is to be done with the feet while the victim is still alive, and then he is to be slain and flayed, arranged and placed in a basket.  When the time for the wicked service arrives, a folding iron chair is set up, the feet of which  are in the shape of human feet, and which many of us saw brought here.  A valuable garment is placed on this chair, and when the devil comes, he dons this garment, sits in the chair, and taking a weapon, he examines the skin of the man together with the fingers..... A saddled and harnessed horse is held ready, and mounting the horse, he gallops it to a standstill; then he becomes invisible and disappears.  This he repeats every year."

Eventually, the Khazars (also called Huns, or "Honk'" in Armenian) were converted to Christianity.  The thumb-cutters were killed after an unsuccessful attempt at reforming them.  Later still the Khazars were to make quite a stir by converting again, to Judaism this time.3

People who enjoyed the stories of the thumb-cutters and the Khazars will probably also enjoy Ibn Fadlan's ninth-century description of a Rus' human sacrifice and orgy among the Volga Bulgars.  The Rus' were ancestors of the Russians but were probably mostly Scandinavian at the time when Ibn Fadlan observed them. (Marius Canard,  Miscellanea Orientalia, Variorum, 1973, XI: "La relation de la voyage d'Ibn Fadlan chez les Bulgares de la Volga.")

Some of this piece is derived from long off-topic comments I made at Language Hat.

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