Environmental Setting

Today the spine of the Great Caucasus Range forms the international border between the Russian Federation to the north and the newly established independent states of Georgia and Azerbaijan to the south; still farther south lies the landlocked Republic of Armenia with its borders north and east with Georgia and Azerbaijan and to the south with Turkey and Iran (Map 3.11.1). The political geography of the Caucasus has, of course, changed greatly over the millennia, but it has also always reflected the tremendous ethnic and linguistic diversity for which the area is renowned. The Great Caucasus Range represents an imposing physical barrier that impedes movements across it, creating relatively well-defined cultural differences, as well as commonalities, among the numerous peoples of the northern Caucasus and those of the southern Caucasus (or, in Russian, Transcaucasia). In other words, the Great Caucasus Range, which extends roughly 1200 km northwest to southeast between the Black and Caspian Seas, forms a distinct geographic boundary between the western Eurasian steppes of southern Russia to the north and the highland plateaus of Anatolia and Iran to the south.

The entire Caucasus region, which encompasses an area of about 440,000 sq km, contains extremely diverse environments, particularly marked by altitudinal differences, ranging from the perennial glaciers to countless steep and well-protected mountain valleys, to open volcanic highland plateaus, to broader plains, and even to subtropical depressions such as the Colchidean Plain of western Georgia bordering the Black Sea. Such environmental diversity partially explains the area’s long-established diversity manifest in its numerous peoples, speaking distinct, mutually incomprehensible languages. Nevertheless, this human cultural diversity is above all the product of a long history of movements of peoples into the Caucasus who then zealously defended the separate valleys and environmental zones that they had entered and occupied.