History of Ancient Georgia: Classical and Late Antiquity

This book "History of Ancient Georgia" written by a widely recognized Georgian scientist Giorgi Melikishvili covers the fundamental issues of the ancient history of Georgia. It presents a picture of the social structure and the social layers of the Kartli (Iberia) population; the book studies and analyzes the political and social institutions. A complex analysis of the history of ancient Georgia based on different sources: archaeological findings, linguistic data, Assyrian, Urartian, Graeco-Roman, Armenian, and Georgian medieval chronicles together with texts and original linguistic and methodological observations have been used. They have allowed the creation of new prospects in Kartvelological and Caucasiological studies and helped to reconstruct the history of ancient Georgia, the picture of the formation of the ancient political entities of Diauehi, Colchis and the first united Kartvelian state. The reader can notice the influence of Soviet ideology: however, the book remains a standard work in the field even today. It is significant that even where the methodological basis and the questions have changed substantially in today's science (for example, the understanding of ethnos, ethnogenesis, and some other issues), we cannot ignore the material and argumentation brought by the great scholar, Professor Melikishvili. Moreover, the general understanding of the history of ancient Georgia, its periodization, and the list of primary sources is still the same as set by this work. The editors hope that this fundamental work on the history of Georgia will attract specialists and interested readers.