This month's featured country: Georgia
Total Area: 69,700 km² (121st) or 26,912 sq mi
Capital: Tbilisi Population: 4,661,473 (117th)
Languages Spoken: Georgian-3,901,380 (official); Mingrelian-500,000; Abkhaz-101,000; Osetin-100,000; Urum-97,746; Kurdish (Northern)-40,000; Judeo-Georgian-20,000; Svan-15,000; Bats-3,420; Assyrian Neo-Aramaic-3,000; Laz-2,000; Bohtan Neo-Aramaic-1,000
Information taken from http://www.wikipedia.org, http://www.ethnologue.com
About Georgia
Georgia is a country with an ancient history. It lies in the Caucasus. Archeological finds and written sources found in almost all corners of the land clearly testify to the ancient origin of the Georgian people. The earliest find is a mandible of a primitive man (2,5 mln 700 thousand years) found under the medieval site of the ancient settlement of Dmanisi.
Antiquity is Georgia’s great resources. Stone, Bronze and Iron Age settlements pepper the landscape. The marvelous discovery of “Colchis gold” in the ancient area by the Black Sea, is now on display in Tbilisi’s National Museum.
The Georgian Language
The Georgian alphabet also has an ancient history. It belongs to one of the 14 ancient alphabets of the world and is distinguished by its originality.
Georgian is not an Indo-European language, nor is it Semitic or Touranian (Turkic). It belongs to the Caucasian language group, which encompasses approximately 80 languages spread to the north and south of the Caucasus Mountains.
Having undergone complicated evolutional changes, the Georgian written language has reached us as a language in which the spelling is almost purely phonetic, i.e. it is written exactly as it is spoken, and so its spelling is very simple. The style of the tracing of the letters in Georgian is ornamental.
The Georgian manuscript tradition focuses on both ecclesiastic and secular subjects, including all areas of inquiry that were of interest to the medieval mind: theology, philosophy, philology, linguistics, history, law, art, astrology, medicine etc.
The oldest manuscripts have survived in the form of palimpsests, with erased earlier writings that are still faintly legible beneath later works. From the fifth to the eighth centuries these offer passages from the Old and New Testament as well as stories of the Apostles, collected liturgical and homiletic works, and apocryphal works.
Georgian religious literature offers all the genres familiar from the literature of the Greek Orthodox church: translations of and commentaries on scripture, homilies taking up the words of the Fathers of the Church, religious offices, lives of the saints, treatises on monasticism, and collections of hymns. Besides these texts, Georgian religious literature contains many historical works written without Greek models, of which the oldest is The Martyrdom of the St. Queen Shushanik, by Jakob Tsurtaveli (476-483).
International interest in ancient and medieval Georgian texts is great, and the circle of Kartvelologists – scholars studying Georgian culture – quite large. This is not only because of the new interest in Georgia itself, it because Georgian texts offer information regarding aspects of the Byzantine Christian world that have otherwise disappeared, thus offering a double significance for the world of scholarship.
Besides, the Georgian language is an attractive challenge even for a non-linguist to learn and master.
Dr. T. Gamrekeli
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