The Colchians

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High in the gorges above the western Georgian lowland, where the snowmelt of the Caucasus comes down white and cold over auriferous gravel, a herder would peg a shaggy sheepskin into the current, wool upward, and leave it. The stream ran gray with rock-flour and, invisibly, with gold — particles too fine to see, worn out of the mountain’s quartz and carried down in suspension. After days in the water the fleece was lifted, heavy and stinking, and hung to dry; the coarse wool had combed the metal out of the flow, and when the skin was beaten or burned the gold came off it in a bright residue. It was not a marvel. It was a technique, and it was still being practiced in these mountains when European travelers wrote it down in the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. The people who first worked the gold this way are the ones the Greeks met at the eastern edge of their world and called the Colchians.

The people behind two names

The Colchians reach the record from two directions that do not quite meet. To the Greek sailors who beat their way up the eastern Black Sea coast, they were the people of a country: the warm, sodden basin of the river the Greeks called the Phasis — the modern Rioni — spreading across what is now western Georgia between the wall of the high mountains and the sea. That country the Greeks named Colchis, and into it their poets wrote a king descended from the sun, a fleece of gold in a sacred grove, and the princess Medea. The country and the myth are treated in their own entries. What concerns us here is the people themselves — the metalworkers, gold-washers, coiners, and city-builders whose real world lay beneath the story.

To the archaeologist the Colchians are the bearers of the “Colchian culture,” a Bronze- and Iron-Age culture of the western Georgian lowlands and adjacent foothills, reaching south along the Black Sea coast into what is now Turkey. Its sequence is long and well preserved. A Proto-Colchian phase runs from roughly 2700 to 1600 BCE, and an Early or Ancient Colchian phase from about 1600 down to 700 or 600 BCE, the whole span legible at sites such as Pichori near the mouth of the Inguri, whose deposits hold the entire Colchian sequence from the third millennium into the last centuries BCE. This was never the culture of scattered bands. It was a settled, metal-rich society of drained river-valley villages that farmed millet on the wet plain and grazed the foothills, and whose craftsmen worked bronze with a confidence and a grammar of ornament all their own.

To the linguist and the historian the Colchians are Kartvelians. Ronald Suny and others place them among the early Kartvelian-speaking tribes of the western Caucasus — more precisely the Zan-speaking ancestors of the modern Laz and Mingrelians, who remain today speakers of Kartvelian tongues cousin to Georgian. This is the fact that most changes how the people should be read. The Colchians are not a vanished exotic race but the deep ancestry of living Georgians; their descendants still farm the same lowland and still fish the same coast. The past tense belongs to the ancient Colchians, but the family line runs unbroken into the present.

One caution has to be set down at the start, because a single Greek label has caused two thousand years of confusion. The classical geographers gave the name Iberia to the eastern Georgian kingdom of Kartli, the neighbor of Colchis beyond the mountains — the Caucasian Iberians, centered on Mtskheta. These Caucasian Iberians, and the Colchians beside them, have nothing whatever to do with the Iberians of the Spanish peninsula. The shared name is a coincidence of Greek geography and nothing more; no migration, no kinship, no common origin joins the two. They are simply two ends of the known world that a Greek tongue happened to name alike.

It is worth adding what the Colchians were not, because the earliest sustained account of them as a people is also the least reliable. Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BCE at a great distance, argued that the Colchians were of Egyptian stock — descendants, he reasoned, of soldiers left behind by the conquering pharaoh Sesostris. His evidence was a string of resemblances: that the Colchians, the Egyptians, and the Ethiopians alone practiced circumcision from the first; that the Colchians were dark-skinned and woolly-haired, worked linen in the Egyptian manner, and shared a way of life. Modern historians reject the claim entirely, since no Egyptian army ever reached the Caucasus and the linguistic evidence places the Colchians firmly among the Kartvelians. It survives only as a specimen of early Greek ethnographic reasoning — a guess built from surface likenesses — never as a finding to be endorsed.

Masters of metal and the earth’s gold

Within their own world the Colchians were, above everything, workers of metal. The archaeological signature of the culture is a repertoire of finely made bronze objects, produced in centers along the Chorokhi basin and in the highland districts of Abkhazia, Racha, and Lechkhumi, and traded across the whole region. Its most distinctive products are axes worked with incised geometric and zoomorphic ornament — the running spirals, the stylized animals — together with hoes, sheet-metal belts, animal-shaped pendants, and elaborately decorated pins. The style is exact and its own; it shares forms with the contemporaneous Koban culture of the north-central Caucasus without being reducible to it. The Colchian axe in particular travels — its distinctive silhouette and its incised bands turn up across the western Caucasus, the mark of a workshop tradition whose products were wanted well beyond the valleys that made them. By the eighth and seventh centuries BCE the same valleys had taken up iron with the same fluency, smelting it in quantity while bronze passed increasingly into jewelry and ornament. A society that could move from one metal to the next without losing its hand is a society of real craft tradition, not of chance discovery, and the ore-rich foothills of the western range gave it the raw material to keep the tradition fed for two millennia.

Colchian-culture bronze metalwork in the Simon Janashia Museum of Georgia, Tbilisi — the axes, implements, and cast ornament that were the signature of the culture. Interfase, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

Their fame, though, was gold, and here the myth and the documentary record fuse into a single fact. Strabo, in the early Roman period, preserved the detail that gives the legend its likeliest root: in the mountain torrents of Colchis, he wrote, gold carried down by the streams was gathered by the local people in perforated troughs and in fleecy skins set into the running water. Appian described the same practice more vividly still — the Caucasus streams, he says, carry gold dust so fine as to be invisible, and the inhabitants trap it by laying shaggy sheepskins in the current, so that the wool combs out the particles the eye cannot catch. This is the real technique behind the Golden Fleece: a sheepskin, set in a gold-bearing stream, that comes up gilded.

The Enguri river in the Svaneti highlands of western Georgia — one of the gold-bearing mountain torrents in which sheepskins were set to comb out placer gold, the practice behind the Golden Fleece. Aleksey Muhranoff, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

Modern geology has borne the ancient reports out. Between 2002 and 2010 a field investigation of the Svaneti highlands led by Avtandil Okrostsvaridze of Ilia State University confirmed that gold particles and river placers are still present in the mountain streams of the former Colchis, in quantities enough to call the district, in the researchers’ phrase, a country rich in this noble metal. Their study of the mythical ‘gold sands’ of the ancient Colchis Kingdom and the ‘Golden Fleece’ phenomena tied the fleece directly to the sheepskin method of recovering placer gold — a method the geologists watched being remembered in the same highland valleys where the Svans still keep their tower-villages, and which European travelers to Georgia had recorded as a living craft from the seventeenth century down to the nineteenth. The claim that the Fleece encodes a genuine Colchian gold-washing practice is now the standard euhemeristic reading among historians of the region: the country’s actual wealth, mistaken or remade by the Greek imagination into a single marvelous object.

The gold was not only washed but worked. The graves of the Colchian elite have yielded jewelry of a make no other land produced — hammered diadems, temple-pendants, necklaces built up bead by bead in granulation so fine it reads as texture rather than ornament, animal-headed clasps and openwork ornaments. This was the output of a settled school of goldsmiths, and at Vani, the temple-city that was the heart of golden Colchis, the excavators found the physical proof of it: a goldsmith’s workshop on the hill, with tools, unfinished pieces, and slag beside a cult place. The people the Greeks sailed toward for a fleece of gold were a people who genuinely made objects of gold worth crossing a difficult sea to reach.

The world of the votives and the graves

What the Colchians believed is harder to recover than what they made, and it must be approached at the archaeologist’s and the folklorist’s distance rather than reconstructed into a creed. So far as the burials and votives allow, their religion centered on nature and on fertility. From the settlements and shrines come clay animal figurines and bronze anthropomorphic statuettes in poses of adoration, hands raised; from the richest interments — often those of women — come grave-goods of a density that marks a society ordering its dead by rank, accompanied in some cases by the sacrifice of animals such as the horse and the dog. The precise deities of pre-Christian Colchis remain contested. They are reconstructed only obliquely, from the grave-goods and from far later Georgian folklore, and no honest account can name the pantheon with confidence. What the material will support is modest and worth stating plainly: a concern with the fertility of the land and the herd, a sense that the dead of high rank went into the ground provisioned and attended, and a repertoire of small votive figures — the raised-armed statuette, the clay beast — through which the living addressed powers the objects name for us only by gesture.

By the Hellenistic age the picture grows a little clearer, because the Colchian religious world had begun to interweave with the Greek one it traded with. At Vani, the finds show the cult of Apollo and of Dionysos taking their place among the local rites — the Dionysos in particular an apt guest, for the wine-country of Colchis has a claim to be among the oldest wine-making lands on earth. The wealth of the graves, the drinking-cups and the ritual figures, the temples that once stood above the burials: all of it describes worship in which the feast, the libation, and the offering were bound together. What it does not describe is a system that can be set out as doctrine. The Colchians left their gods in their objects, and the objects keep their own counsel.

The outsized afterlife

The Colchians left a mark on the imagination out of all proportion to their size. To the Greeks they became the setting of one of the founding myths of the Mediterranean world — the land of King Aeetes, son of the sun, and of his daughter Medea, the Colchian princess whose sorcery is a tale of its own, and of the Fleece itself, told most fully in the Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes. That poem is read here as a myth-source and not as a chronicle; the voyage of Jason and the Argonauts belongs to the mythic entries, and its historical kernel is the plain one already given — the real fleece-and-torrent gold-washing of the mountain streams. The Colchians did not tell this story about themselves. It was told about them, from across the sea, and it has outlived every kingdom that ever ruled their coast.

Their political afterlife ran through the great powers of antiquity in turn. The country passed under Achaemenid overlordship, and Herodotus records a tribute of one hundred boys and one hundred girls sent to the Persian court every five years — though whether the people rendering it were Colchians proper or their neighbors is uncertain, and the detail is best held loosely. Along the coast, Greek emporia knit Colchis into the whole Black Sea world: Phasis at the mouth of the great river, on the site of the modern Poti, and Dioscurias further north, beneath modern Sukhumi, a port so cosmopolitan that the ancients claimed dozens of languages were spoken in its market. From the sixth century BCE the Colchians struck their own silver coinage, the so-called Colchian tetri, bearing an archaic female head on the obverse and a bull’s head on the reverse; it is found in abundance across western Georgia and is, for the historian, among the surest signs that Colchis was a state with an economy of its own and not merely a name in a poem.

Rome arrived with Pompey’s campaign of 65 BCE, in the course of the war against Mithridates of Pontus. After the conquest the region was reorganized under client rulers, among them Aristarchus, whom Pompey set over Colchis in 63 BCE and whose own coinage shows him ruling into the late 50s or later, until about 47 BCE. He was styled a dynast rather than a king, and his drachms are one of the few contemporary voices the period has left. In time the old Colchian world gave way to the kingdom of Lazica — Egrisi in Georgian — of the Laz, who are the Colchians’ direct descendants: the same people, on the same coast, under a new name. The line that Herodotus tried to trace to Egypt runs in fact straight down through Lazica to the Laz and Mingrelians of the present day.

The last chapter of the Colchian story is the modern recovery of the people behind the myth, and it is largely a Georgian achievement. Systematic excavation at Vani — the sanctuary-and-burial city that was the political and religious heart of golden Colchis from the eighth to the first century BCE — began in 1947 under Nino Khoshtaria, Georgia’s first woman archaeologist, who directed the work until 1963. It was carried to its great scale from 1966 under Otar Lortkipanidze, whose long campaign defined the site’s phasing and whose finds of Colchian goldwork have since traveled the world in exhibitions on the golden graves of ancient Vani, from the Getty Villa to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art. The gold that the Greeks turned into a fleece hanging in a grove now hangs in museum cases, cataloged and dated, under the names of the Georgian scholars who dug it out of the hills their ancestors had washed for it. The myth crossed the sea first and lasted longest; the people it was about were here all along, and their descendants are here still.

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