The Diversity of the Chechen culture: from ... - unesdoc - Unesco

the name of Sharmatai or Sharmatoi, which
meant ‘plainland people’.
“The ethnicon Harimat also
divides in two — the above-mentioned
-mat and hari-, ‘guard’, from ha, ‘sentry’,
with the adjectival suffix -ri. To all
appearances, the tribe received its
name due to its specific functions. The
name of the Chechen mountain village
Khoi has the same meaning, ‘watchmen’
or ‘sentries’. Similarly, other Sarmatian
ethnicons with the root -mat- also
receive an explanation proceeding from
the Vainakh language. Vainakh languages
also have compounds which include the
root -mat- and designate locations and
communities.”
Many Caucasian historians
insisted that Vainakh tribes living in
the area from the Andian Range to the
Daryal Gorge in the beginning of the
Christian era and the early mediaevality
were known as Durdzuk. As things really
were, “Durdzuk” was the Georgian name
for a small number of the Vainakh, who
lived high in the mountains in the upper
reaches of the Argun, Assa and Armkhi
rivers. This is especially clear in Vakhushti
Bagrationi’s Geography of Georgia. The
regions of Durdzuketi and Kisteti were
geographically far closer to Georgia than
to the basic Nakh-populated territory, and
were always within the orbit of Georgian
foreign and domestic policies.
The Ovs, mentioned in mediaeval
Georgian sources, had no direct bearing
on the present-day ethnicon “Osset”. It is
merely the Georgian for Alanians, which
later passed (by sheer coincidence, which
is often the case in history) to the ethnic
community formed as the indigenous
Nakh population merged with the Iranian.
The Iranian and Turkic languages were
ousting the Nakh in the Central Caucasus
for a long time. Persian rulers had to
place garrisons in the Daryal and other
Caucasian gorges since the 4 th century
A.D. to guard mountain passes and
protect the northern border of Persia
from bellicose mountain tribes and their
allies. That was when Iranian speakers
began to infiltrate the Caucasian milieu in
a process that finished after the invasion
of Tamerlane 70 .
The Cuman, or Polovtsi, also
moved to the mountain gorges of the
Northwest Caucasus from Caucasian
foothills, fleeing from the advancing
Mongols and later Tamerlane, to merge
with Alanians, who might, at that time,
include the Turkic-speaking Savir, ousted
by Huns from the plains. The Karachai
and Balkar appeared as the result. These
ethnic entities preserved material and
cultural unity with the Nakh and retained
the Caucasioni anthropological look,
though accepting the Turkic language.
Catacomb tombs were considered
the basic and, in fact, the only ethnic
determinant of the Alanian as a nomadic
Iranian-speaking tribe that migrated to
the Caucasian foothills at the start of the
Christian era from the Volga country and
the South Urals.
However, catacombs accounted
for only a small portion of the tombs
of Sarmatian tribes in the Volga-Don
interfluve and the South Urals. More
than that, their catacombs did not
chronologically precede North Caucasian
catacombs but appeared later, as
funeral utensils testify. Most probably,
Sarmatians of the Volga-Don interfluve
accepted the custom of catacomb burial
in the 2 nd and 3 rd centuries A.D. under the
70 Osset ethnogenetic traditions date no earlier than
the 17 th century.
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