On the Titulature of the Abkhazian Kings, by Ermolay Adzhindzhal

In 2014 the late Sukhum historian Ermolay Adzhindzhal published an expanded version of his paper on how Byzantine, Persian, Armenian and Azerbaijani sources styled the kings of Abkhazia between the eighth and thirteenth centuries. He argues that Georgian historiography rewrote that record. AbkhazWorld publishes the complete booklet in English, with an introduction and notes.

Editor’s introduction

Ermolay Adzhindzhal’s essay on the titles of the Abkhazian kings is one move in a long argument between Sukhum and Tbilisi over the history of the mediaeval Kingdom of Abkhazia. We publish it complete, as a document of that argument.

The dispute it answers is partly personal. In 1996 Adzhindzhal published a short booklet, From the History of Abkhazian Statehood. On 20 February 1998 the Georgian historian N. Yu. Lomouri replied with a full-page article, footnotes included, in the Tbilisi newspaper Svobodnaya Gruziya, under the title ‘Yet Another Example of the Most Egregious Distortion of History’. G. D. Gumba, in the foreword below, calls it a lampoon. The present essay is Adzhindzhal’s reply. He read the first version as a paper at the Abkhazian Institute of Humanitarian Research on 27 April 2011, published an abridged text in the Institute’s proceedings in 2012, and issued this expanded edition in Sukhum in 2014.

The second target is Zurab Papaskiri, whose 538-page Abkhazia: History without Falsification was published in Tbilisi in 2009 under the imprint of the Sukhum State University, a Georgian institution that has operated in Tbilisi since the war of 1992 and 1993, and of the Abkhazian Organisation of the All-Georgian Historical Society. Adzhindzhal places the book at the end of a line that runs back to Pavle Ingorokva’s Giorgi Merchule (1954), which reclassified the ancient Abasgians and Apsilians as Georgian tribes and presented the modern Abkhaz as later arrivals. Much of the essay is a reply to Ingorokva.

The essay is polemical, and it does not pretend otherwise. Its central observation is sound: from the early eleventh century to the thirteenth, the kings of the united realm were styled first of all ‘King of the Abkhaz’, and Byzantine, Arabic, Persian and Armenian writers called their kingdom by that name. Other parts rest on unpublished or second-hand material that the author and his reviewer both describe as awaiting verification. We have translated the text as he wrote it. Misprints are corrected; everything else stands, including readings we consider mistaken. Those points are set out in the translator’s notes at the end.

International Centre of Caucasologists Ermolay Adzhindzhal. On the Titulature of the Abkhazian Kings.

Sukhum: Dom Pechati, 2014. 32 pp. g/r 978-5-16-05014.

This essay examines the titulature of the Abkhazian kings of the early Middle Ages. It draws on a good many written primary sources hitherto unknown in the scholarly literature of Abkhaz studies on the period.

The full essay in PDF can be downloaded by clicking here (434 KB)

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