Ep. 2 — Before the Name: The Ancient Peoples of the North Caucasus

Long before anyone said the word Circassian, the North Caucasus was crowded with peoples whose names survive only in Greek and Roman geography: the Maeotae, the Zikh, the Sanigoi, the Abasgi, the Kerkets, the Ants. In this episode we trace each of these ancient groups, where they lived, what the Greeks wrote about them, and how their names quietly echo into modern Circassian family names, tribes, and even a traditional drink still served today. We follow the Kuban and the Terek, read the maps of Ptolemy and Pliny, and arrive at the Nart nation, the people whose legends stretch from the Don River to the Black Sea. This is the deep foundation layer: the North Caucasus as a living museum of ancient peoples.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Long before the word Circassian existed, ancient Greeks were writing about eight fierce tribal groups on the Black Sea coast. Some so feared as pirates, a Roman poet wrote verses warning sailors about them.

SPEAKER_00 0:13

Last episode, we covered the six theories on where the Circassians came from. Today we go deeper, the actual tribes who lived there since the dawn of history the Miyat, the Zik, the mysterious ant nation.

SPEAKER_01 0:27

This is the Circassian Encyclopedia, an ongoing series digging into that history, episode by episode, based on the work of Dr. M. K. Mamsur Bassage. I'm Satanay.

SPEAKER_00 0:38

I'm Aslan. Let's find out who they really were. You know, it's funny, when we look at an ancient map, it usually feels incredibly fixed. You see these solid, confident lines drawn by Greek or Roman cartographers.

SPEAKER_01 0:54

Right. It's very much uh here is the empire and here is the sea.

SPEAKER_00 0:58

Exactly. And then way out on the fringes, they usually just draw a sea monster or write something vague like, you know, here be barbarians and just call it a day.

SPEAKER_01 1:07

Aaron Powell Yeah. And it creates this profound illusion of complete knowledge. We naturally assume those blank spaces on the map were actually blank, or at the very least, just chaotic, unstructured wilderness filled with disorganized people.

SPEAKER_00 1:23

Aaron Powell But then you zoom in on one of those blurry edges, specifically the Caucasus. And for those of you listening who might not have a map in front of you right now, we are talking about that incredibly rugged, mountainous strip of land between the Black and Caspian seas.

SPEAKER_01 1:36

It's a fascinating area.

SPEAKER_00 1:37

Aaron Powell It really is. And when you look closely, suddenly that blank space isn't blank at all. It is just teeming with life, complex alliances, and deep historical mysteries.

SPEAKER_01 1:47

I mean, it is arguably the ultimate historical blind spot for Western empires, yet it served as the crucible for some of the most uh fascinating cultural evolutions in human history.

SPEAKER_00 1:58

Aaron Powell And that is exactly our mission for you on this deep dive. We are going to cut through millennia of historical fog to explore the ancient indigenous peoples of the Caucasus. We're specifically tracking the roots of the Circassian Nation, going all the way back to the dawn of history.

SPEAKER_01 2:15

Aaron Powell It is quite the journey.

SPEAKER_00 2:16

Oh, absolutely. And I want to say right up front, at the very start of our journey, that this entire deep dives is built upon the incredibly meticulous research from the historical Encyclopedia of the Circassian Nation by Dr. M. K. Mamzer. Dr. Mamzer essentially hands us a high-powered magnifying glass to examine this ancient map.

SPEAKER_01 2:35

Aaron Powell And what we find when we look through that glass, well, it completely shatters the old Roman and Greek assumptions of a barbarian fringe. Right. We are talking about synthesizing documents from ancient Greek, Roman, and Byzantine historians, people who left behind this uh scattered trail of breadcrumbs detailing the tribes of this region from 4,000 BC all the way to the first century AD.

SPEAKER_00 2:58

That is a massive timeline.

SPEAKER_01 2:59

It is. Our goal today is to understand how roughly ten ancient ethnic groups fractured, survived, and evolved into the 28 distinct nationalities that populate the highly complex Caucasus region you see on modern maps today.

SPEAKER_00 3:14

And just as a quick warning for you, this is not going to be a dry, dusty textbook history lesson. By the time we're done, we're going to encounter ancient Olympic champions, terrifying pirates who literally wrote the book on asymmetrical naval warfare and hidden linguistic codes.

SPEAKER_01 3:28

The linguistics part is just incredible.

SPEAKER_00 3:30

It really operates as a masterclass in how extreme geography and a fierce independence forge human identity over thousands of years. So, okay, let's unpack this. To understand how this region worked, we have to start with the foundational Western block of Circassian tribes, right? The massive alliance known as the Mut Confederation.

SPEAKER_01 3:48

Yeah, and to give you a sense of the sheer scale of the timeline we're dealing with, historians confirm that the M descended from the Kassite lineage who appeared in the Caucasus as far back as 6000 BC. Wow.

SPEAKER_00 4:01

6000 BC.

SPEAKER_01 4:02

Right. They eventually formed part of the Sumerian Union, dominating the region for centuries. But the Midas era specifically, their golden age, I guess you could say, extended from around 540 BC until the third century AB.

SPEAKER_00 4:17

And when we say confederation, we are not talking about a handful of families wandering the mountains. According to historians like Ismail Barcock and Etik Namotok and Dr. Mamzer's source material, we are looking at twenty five specific tribes within this one massive alliance.

SPEAKER_01 4:32

It was huge.

SPEAKER_00 4:33

Yeah, the best analogy that came to mind for you, the listener, to visualize this is to think of it like the ancient equivalent of the European Union.

SPEAKER_01 4:40

That is actually a highly functional way to look at the power dynamics at play, because they were not a monolith.

SPEAKER_00 4:45

Not at all. You had this massive umbrella coalition, but underneath it, the individual tribes had wildly different foreign policies. If you're listening to this in the US or Europe, imagine if your local state or country traded peacefully with a powerful neighbor.

SPEAKER_01 5:02

But the state right next door to you is sending out pirate ships.

SPEAKER_00 5:05

Exactly, sending pirates to attack that exact same neighbor. That's how beautifully fractured this confederation was. Some of the Mia tribes completely aligned themselves with a bosporous Greek state, acting like close trade partners, while others in the exact same confederation remained fiercely, aggressively independent.

SPEAKER_01 5:23

They maintained their distinct identities while operating within this broader network. And the diversity of behavior among these 25 tribes was staggering. You have to remember, the Caucasus is a land of isolated valleys and steep mountains, which, you know, breeds hyperlocal cultures.

SPEAKER_00 5:39

Which brings us to the Sin tribe. The Greeks actually recorded that the Sin people used to travel and compete in the ancient Greek Olympic Games.

SPEAKER_01 5:46

Which is amazing in itself.

SPEAKER_00 5:47

And they didn't just show up for the participation trophy, they won first place. They were thoroughly integrated into Greek cultural events, yet they fiercely maintained their Circassian national character.

SPEAKER_01 5:58

They served as diplomats in the arena, basically. But then right next door, geographically, you look at a tribe like the Danbar, they were entirely independent in their rule. Their capital was a place called Fetz, which translates in Circassian to the Black Town.

SPEAKER_00 6:13

Oh, that sounds imposing.

SPEAKER_01 6:15

It was. They were a massive, formidable presence along the Black Sea coast.

SPEAKER_00 6:20

Aaron Powell, we also can't forget the Thetes. They were so politically central to this ancient EU of the Caucasus that the overall ruler's official title was literally King of Almut and the group of Sindh and Thaites.

SPEAKER_01 6:30

Right.

SPEAKER_00 6:31

That is a serious branding move.

SPEAKER_01 6:37

And this raises an important question, right? Because it highlights one of the great frustrations of studying this period. We know the titles, we know the Olympic victories, but despite the Greeks trading with them and sharing borders, the ancient Greek historians had massive historical blind spots.

SPEAKER_00 6:53

Oh, definitely.

SPEAKER_01 6:54

Out of all the accounts from Herodotus, Ptolemy, Pliny, none of them recorded whether the Mio Confederation shared a single common language or had multiple languages. They completely failed to investigate the nature of their governance, their economic systems, or, you know, their deep religious beliefs.

SPEAKER_00 7:12

Aaron Powell See, I have to push back a little bit on blaming the Greeks here. To be fair to them, if you are an ancient Greek merchant just sailing across the Black Sea to buy grain, or if you're just writing down the winners of a foot race, why would you care about their local Senate?

SPEAKER_01 7:26

That's a fair point.

SPEAKER_00 7:27

Isn't it completely normal to just ignore a trading partner's internal politics as long as the grain shipments arrive on time?

SPEAKER_01 7:34

You're not wrong about the transactional nature of ancient empires. The Greeks viewed them purely through a lens of utility like can we trade with them or do we have to fight them? But as a historian, it is a tragedy of omission.

SPEAKER_00 7:47

Yeah, that makes sense.

SPEAKER_01 7:48

By treating them just as trade partners or noble savages at the Olympics, the Greeks fail to document the actual mechanisms of one of the most complex societies of the ancient world. It means that to understand how these people actually lived and governed themselves, we really can't rely on Greek historical records at all. We have to look for clues elsewhere. We have to look at the linguistic fossils they left behind.

SPEAKER_00 8:12

And here's what gets really interesting. Because the source material points us toward the very words these ancient people used to name themselves. And when you crack open those words, it decodes their entire societal structure.

SPEAKER_01 8:24

It does. To do this, we have to look past the Met to their undeniable ancestors, the nation known as the Nart or the Ant. They are the foundational nation from which the peoples of the North Caucasus originated, dating back potentially to the Stone Age.

SPEAKER_00 8:38

Aaron Powell And the linguistic math here, uh it just blew my mind. When you break down the word Nart phonetically in the ancient Circassian language, the R is just a marker for identification. The core of the word is N and T.

SPEAKER_01 8:52

Right.

SPEAKER_00 8:53

N translates to mother, and T translates to to give.

SPEAKER_01 8:57

Aaron Ross Powell So N plus T literally translates to gift of the mother.

SPEAKER_00 9:01

Gift of the mother. Now I love a good poetic translation, but I have to play devil's advocate for the listener here. People love to find patterns in ancient words. How do we know this isn't just a linguistic coincidence?

SPEAKER_01 9:12

Aaron Powell It's a good question.

SPEAKER_00 9:13

Like how do we leap from their name kind of sounds like mother to definitively claiming they had a matriarchal society worshiping a mother goddess?

SPEAKER_01 9:22

Aaron Powell It's the right kind of skepticism to have. But we know it isn't a coincidence because this wasn't just some abstract spiritual concept. It was baked into their physical survival, their geography, and the daily objects they used to stay alive. And those remnants survive today. For instance, the region in Western Kuban is still called Natquaj, which translates to the land of the Narts. Even more tellingly, look at their agriculture. The word for corn, the literal sustenance that kept them from starving, is natif, meaning the corn of the Narts.

SPEAKER_00 9:55

Oh wow. So they were naming the physical earth and their literal food after this mother goddess concept.

SPEAKER_01 10:00

Exactly. They considered themselves, their land, and their harvest as direct gifts from the great mother goddess of fertility and abundance. It is definitive proof that their foundational societal structure was completely matriarchal. Power, lineage, property, and reverence all flowed through the mother.

SPEAKER_00 10:17

That is fascinating.

SPEAKER_01 10:18

The society was built entirely around the creation of life and agricultural abundance.

SPEAKER_00 10:22

But that structure didn't last forever. And this is where the language acts like a time-lapse photograph of a massive societal revolution, because the name of the people changed.

SPEAKER_01 10:32

Yes. Over the centuries, the matriarchal system collapsed entirely and was replaced by a patriarchal one. And they didn't just change their inheritance laws, they permanently changed their national name to reflect this new reality. The names Nart and Ant were replaced by Adiga.

SPEAKER_00 10:49

And the breakdown of Adiga is just as literal as the Nart. Ad means father, and Yiga means his or belonging to him. So the entire population rebranded themselves from the gift of the mother to the people of the father.

SPEAKER_01 11:03

You see it mirrored in the Eastern Caucasus as well. The people there were known as the Galvani Dagastani. If you strip away the suffixes, the root word is dig, which also corresponds to father. So Dagestan translates literally to the land of the father.

SPEAKER_00 11:17

I am fascinated by this, but I have to ask the obvious question. WI-Y, you don't just wake up one Tuesday after thousands of years of worshiping the mother goddess of fertility and decide to upend your entire society, strip women of power, and rename your entire civilization the people of the father.

SPEAKER_01 11:33

No, you definitely don't.

SPEAKER_00 11:35

What was the actual mechanism that forced that shift?

SPEAKER_01 11:37

It comes down to the brutal mechanics of survival. For a long time, their primary concern was agriculture, right? The fertility of the land, which aligns with the mother goddess. But as the centuries passed, the Caucasus became a hyper-contested choke point.

SPEAKER_00 11:53

Oh, because of its location.

SPEAKER_01 11:55

Yes. You had the Greeks pushing in from the sea, the Romans eventually following, and constant pressure from nomadic empires on the steppes.

SPEAKER_00 12:02

So it shifted from a society focused on growing food to a society focused on not getting conquered.

SPEAKER_01 12:09

Precisely. Upheaval and constant external warfare necessitate a militarized defense. In the context of the ancient world, that meant a shift toward a warrior-centric patriarchal power structure. Centralized military leadership became the defining feature of survival rather than agricultural fertility.

SPEAKER_00 12:27

That makes a lot of sense. Which actually brings us to the coast of the Black Sea. Because while they were dealing with these massive societal shifts from matriarchies to patriarchies inland, out on the water, their day-to-day interactions with the outside world were anything but quiet and philosophical.

SPEAKER_01 12:56

Very true.

SPEAKER_00 12:57

I found a story in Dr. Mamzer's notes about the Kirkit tribe, and I have to share it because it is simultaneously bizarre and hilarious.

SPEAKER_01 13:04

The maritime tribes had a very different set of rules.

SPEAKER_00 13:07

To put it mildly. So if anyone on a boat showed incompetence at steering like, if they made a bad turn or fumbled the rebing, every single worker in the maritime field would line up, take turns, and spit in their face.

SPEAKER_01 13:28

It sounds incredibly absurd and, you know, degrading to a modern ear, but you have to look at the mechanism behind the ritual. The Black Sea is notoriously treacherous. Sudden storms can capsize a vessel in minutes. Incompetence on a ship doesn't just mean a bad day at the office, it means the ship goes down and everyone drowns.

SPEAKER_00 13:47

So this isn't just ancient bullying. Social shaming was literally a mechanism for collective survival. You either learn to steer the boat perfectly, or you were utterly ostracized by the entire community because you were a walking death sentence to anyone who sailed with you.

SPEAKER_01 14:02

Exactly. That intense, unforgiving maritime discipline bred incredibly formidable cultures. You had the Henoch tribe, whose name wonderfully translates to the white-eyed dog.

SPEAKER_00 14:14

Great name.

SPEAKER_01 14:15

Yeah. They took that discipline and became expert horse tamers who built colonies all the way in Anatolia. But then you had tribes like the Akin, who applied that maritime mastery to something far more aggressive. The pirates. The pirates. But uh we have to be careful with that word. The ancient Greek and Roman writers described the Achaeans and their neighbors as terrifying, highly organized maritime predators.

SPEAKER_00 14:37

And the specific tactics they used are brilliant. They didn't use massive lumbering galleys like the Romans did. They built these small, lightning fast boats called Comoroi. A Comoroi only held about 25 to 30 people.

SPEAKER_01 14:51

Very agile.

SPEAKER_00 14:52

Right. And they used them to launch sudden, devastating raids across the Black Sea that completely terrorized the Greek and Roman fleets. The source material actually quotes the Roman poet Ovid. Ovid was exiled to the Black Sea region by the Emperor Augustus, and he was absolutely terrified of these Circassian raiding parties.

SPEAKER_01 15:11

Oh, I'm sure.

SPEAKER_00 15:12

He wrote that the dread of seeing one of these ships was like facing Scylla and Charybdis, the mythical sea monsters that swallow entire oceans.

SPEAKER_01 15:20

Think about the psychological impact of that. A sophisticated Roman poet is comparing real human sailors to mythical monsters. But this is where we have to reframe the narrative. Oh so the Greeks and Romans called it piracy because it disrupted their imperial shipping lanes. But if you look at it from the perspective of the Caucasian tribes, this was asymmetric warfare.

SPEAKER_00 15:40

So they were basically guerrilla fighters on the water.

SPEAKER_01 15:42

Yes. They didn't have the resources to build a massive standing imperial navy to fight Rome or the Bosborn Greeks head on, so they used their mastery of the local environment, those fast Camaroy boats, and that intense spit-in-your-face maritime discipline to defend their autonomy. It was a bold, highly organized naval resistance against encroaching superpowers.

SPEAKER_00 16:05

But while all this dramatic maritime warfare, Greek trade, and spitting rituals were happening on the coast, what was going on deep in the mountains? Because, as we established earlier, the Greeks essentially ignored the inland tribes. They couldn't easily sail up a mountain, so they just didn't write about them.

SPEAKER_01 16:21

Which is a massive historical oversight. The eastern and central Caucasian groups were incredibly important, but they developed entirely differently because of their geography. Right. The coastal tribes used the sea for defense and trade, but the inland tribes used the sheer vertical terrain of the mountains as natural fortresses. Dr. Mamzer's research really brings these inland players back into the light.

SPEAKER_00 16:43

And the names of these ancient tribes are going to sound very familiar to anyone who follows modern geopolitics. You have the Nokchi, for instance.

SPEAKER_01 16:52

Yes. Most people today know the Nokchi by their modern name, the Chechens.

SPEAKER_00 16:56

Right. And they weren't building pirate ships, obviously. They were holding down the eastern part of the region, divided by the Sunza River. They were mastering the mountain passes.

SPEAKER_01 17:05

Exactly. The mountains isolate you, but they also protect you, and the terrain forces you to specialize. You also had the Evars or Andals and the Lesgans. Take the Loc tribe, for example. The source notes they lived near the Caspian Sea in a remarkably tough, unforgiving geographical spot.

SPEAKER_00 17:24

Right. If you live in a rocky gorge, you can't exactly plant a massive field of corn to honor the mother goddess. So how did they survive?

SPEAKER_01 17:31

Because they couldn't rely on massive agriculture, they turned to what the mountains did, offer minerals and raw materials. The Lac became incredibly rich in industry. They became the craftsmen, the metalworkers, the builders of the region.

SPEAKER_00 17:43

Oh, that makes perfect sense.

SPEAKER_01 17:45

Yeah, they treated manufactured goods for the food they couldn't grow. It's a perfect example of how the harsh geography of the Caucasus didn't just isolate these tribes, it acted as a catalyst for intense specialization and resilience.

SPEAKER_00 17:59

Even the Romans eventually had to acknowledge how tough these inland groups were. The source mentions the Lesgenes, an inland tribe so ancient and entrenched that the famous Roman commander Pompeii the Great, the guy who fought Julius Caesar, actually had to write about them in his military memoirs.

SPEAKER_01 18:16

Because they were such a formidable presence during his campaigns.

SPEAKER_00 18:19

Exactly. The Romans thought they were walking into a blank space on the map, only to find highly specialized, industrialized, and fiercely independent mountain fortresses.

SPEAKER_01 18:28

It was definitely a rude awakening for them.

SPEAKER_00 18:30

So what does this all mean for you, the listener? We've just explored a massive web of ancient peoples. We've talked about the Meat Unconfederation acting like an ancient EU. We've decoded the linguistic shift from the matriarchal Narc to the Patriarchal Adaiga. We've sailed with the Kirket on the Black Sea and climbed into the mountains with the Nookshi and Lapricate. If you're trying to comprehend this massive puzzle, how do you make sense of it all today?

SPEAKER_01 18:54

If we connect this to the bigger picture, the most crucial takeaway is understanding the legacy of that survival. Those ten or so ancient ethnic groups we've been discussing, they didn't just vanish into the fog of history. Right. The Roman maps may have labeled them a barbarian fringe, but they were a resilient, adaptive core. Over millennia, as empires rose and fell, and particularly after the intense pressures of the later Russian occupation pushed them further into the mountains, those foundational groups fractured.

SPEAKER_00 19:25

They adapted.

SPEAKER_01 19:26

Yes. They adapted to their specific valleys and coastlines, and they evolved. They expanded from those ancient roots into the twenty-eight distinct nationalities that make up the vibrant, highly complex Caucasus region on our modern maps today.

SPEAKER_00 19:41

It really is a profound testament to how extreme geography and a fierce burning desire for independence can forge an incredibly diverse region. We started this deep dive looking at a blurry, vague ancient map, and thanks to Dr. Mamzer's research, we've watched it come into sharp focus.

SPEAKER_01 19:59

It's amazing what the details reveal.

SPEAKER_00 20:01

Yeah, from the twenty-five tribes of the Miyap making diplomatic deals with the Greeks to the inland tribes holding down the mountain passes.

SPEAKER_01 20:08

They were never just a blank space. They were a dynamic civilization that left their fingerprints on everything from Olympic records to the very structure of the words they spoke.

SPEAKER_00 20:17

Which brings me to a final thought for you to mull over as we wrap up this deep dive. We spent a lot of time talking about how the massive earth-shattering shift from matriarchal society to patriarchal military rule was literally permanently encoded into their name Atiga, the people of the Father. It's crazy to think about knowing that it makes you look at our own modern world a little differently. Look at the modern titles, the nation names, the corporate acronyms, and the political labels we use every single day. What hidden social hierarchies and silent power shifts are we silently encoding into our own modern vocabulary right now, just waiting for future historians to decode 2,000 years from now?

SPEAKER_01 20:53

It really makes you realize that language is never just neutral, it's an active historical record of who holds the power.

SPEAKER_00 20:59

It really is. Thank you for joining us on this journey into the Caucasus. Keep questioning a map and keep listening to the words. We'll see you on the next deep dive. And that's where we leave it for today. But the story is a lot bigger than one episode.

SPEAKER_01 21:14

This show is an ongoing series, episode by episode, working through the Circassian Encyclopedia and shedding light on parts of this history most people never get to hear.

SPEAKER_00 21:23

So if this pulled you in, go deeper. Head to profmkmamsur.com. That's P-R-O-F M K M A-M-S-E-R.com for the full encyclopedia and everything behind today's episode.

SPEAKER_01 21:38

And if you're enjoying the show, follow us wherever you're listening, drop a rating, and send this episode to one person who needs to hear this history.

SPEAKER_00 21:46

This has been the Circassian Encyclopedia.

SPEAKER_01 21:49

I'm Satanay.

SPEAKER_00 21:50

And I'm Aslan. We'll see you next time.