ABSTRACT
The recensions of the Book, with various amendments and additions to the original text of 1626, have been analysed in detail by Spasski in his printed edition of 1840, and recently, by the Soviet scholar K. I. Serbina. The latter believes that the sections on the Don and the lower Volga, including the pages devoted to the Caucasus, were edited by Prince Grigori Sunchelevich Cherkasski, the paramount chieftain of the Pyatigorsk Cherkesses and, at the same time, a distinguished and efficient administrator in the hierarchy of the Muscovite state. He died about 1672; and the seventh recension of the Book was completed round 1680. I
Prince Wakhusht Bagration was a natural son of King Wakhtang VI of Kartli (reigned 1711-14 and 1719-23). Composed during the third decade of the eighteenth century, his
work is the earliest detailed source for the study of the historical topography of Georgia and the central Caucasus. It is only available to western scholars in the rare edition of M.-F. Brosset, Description geographique de la Georgie, Georgian text with interleaved French translation (St Petersburg, 1842), and in the equally rare Russian rendering by M. G. Janashvili in ZKO, kn. XXIV, vyp. 5 (TifUs, 1904). In 1956 the Georgian scholar, L. 1. Maruashvili, published an all too brief study: Vakhusht Bagrationi: his predecessors and contemporaries. Three years earlier he had presented the results of his analysis of Wakhusht in a paper read in Russian before the Section of the History of Geographical Knowledge of the Moscow Branch of the USSR Geographical Society, and printed in Voprosy Istorii, Vol. 31, 1953. A slightly abbreviated English translation is given below (pp. 574-86). The footnotes are mine [WEDAJ. Wakhusht's geographical and cartographical works (descriptive scheme)
A list ofWakhusht's works relating to geography can be set out as follows:
3. Later series of geographical maps of the same territory dating to 1742-3.1
4. Georgian translation of a Russian edition of world geography, carried out in 1752, with the addition of 27 maps. The translation is free: some parts of the original text are summarized whilst, on the other hand, the descriptions of Turkey and Persia are supplemented with additional material by the translator.
