ABSTRACT
The anthropological origin of Georgians is obscure. Georgians first appear in written history in the twelfth century bce. Their language does not belong to any of the world’s major language groups but to a group of its own, called Iberian-Caucasian or Kartvelian (meaning Georgian in the Georgian language). Linguistically and anthropologically, Georgians have no broader group of “relatives” perhaps except for the Basques. Unlike most of the region’s ancient cultures, the ancient agricultural Georgians were not overrun and assimilated by the nomadic Indo-Europeans, Semites, or Turkic tribes—ancestors to the bulk of the Eurasia’s present population. This authentic cultural core has expressed itself stubbornly up to the present.
