Gumba, G. D. 'Once Again on the Eastern Border of Abkhazia in the Early Middle Ages', in Abkhazology: Archaeology. History. Ethnology, issue X. Sukhum: AbIGI, Dom Pechati, 2016, pp. 54 to 61.

Where did early mediaeval Abkhazia actually end? Guram Gumba returns to a long-running argument among Caucasus historians, reconciling the seemingly contradictory testimony of the Armenian Ashkharatsuyts with the Byzantine historians Procopius and Agathias to trace how the kingdom's eastern border moved from the Rioni in the fifth century to the Chorokh by the eighth.

For a century outsiders arrived in Abkhazia, found Black villagers on the Kodor and announced a discovery. Each generation read them differently. The villagers spoke Abkhaz, farmed, and said their ancestors came from somewhere in Africa they could not name.

A traveller came into Adzyubzha, twenty-two versts from Sukhum on the bank of the Kodor, and stopped to look. Wooden huts roofed with reeds stood against a wall of green forest. Children were playing on the ground. A woman walked past with a load on her head. Everyone in sight was Black and dressed in white against the sun, and he wrote afterwards that the place resembled nothing so much as a picture of an African village.

Edited by Georgy Anchabadze, Marina Pagava, Ia Tutashvili and Georgy Maisuradze

Tbilisi, 2021

Chapter 1. Political Questions

The Abkhaz People's Council

Pages 9 to 75

The violent clashes that erupted in Sukhum on 15–16 July 1989 marked a decisive turning point in modern Abkhaz history. Although the immediate dispute centred on the proposed establishment of a Tbilisi State University branch, the confrontation reflected deeper political, demographic and national tensions that had intensified during the final years of the Soviet Union.

This article traces the developments that preceded the violence, including the rise of competing national movements, the Lykhny Appeal, the crisis surrounding Abkhaz State University and the growing polarisation of Georgian and Abkhaz society. Drawing on eyewitness testimony, published accounts and documentary material, it examines why those July days later came to be remembered as a prelude to the 1992–93 Georgian–Abkhaz war.

In this 1965 ethnographic essay, the distinguished Abkhazian historian and ethnographer Shalva Inal-Ipa (1916 to 1995) traces the maritime traditions of the Abkhazians through archaeology, historical sources, language, folklore, toponymy and religious belief. He presents seafaring as a significant, though often overlooked, part of Abkhazian economic and cultural life.

In the economic and cultural life of the Abkhazians, an indigenous coastal people, the sea and seafaring have been of great importance since ancient times.¹

At the Neolithic settlement of Kistrik, massive wedges and a large number of stone chisels have been discovered. These were evidently used to fashion primitive boats.