CAUCASIA AND ITS PEOPLES 47 



of one hundred and thirty interpreters to conduct 

 affairs, Herodotus, the father of all history, shows us 

 that in his day the frosty Caucasus columned a land 

 of many tribes. " It contains," he wrote, " many and 

 various nations, living mostly on the fruits of wild 

 trees." 



Strabo, in a later age, mentioned seventy distinct 

 races, all speaking different languages, who might be 

 met with in Diossyreas, the Soukoum-Kaleh of to-day, 

 and described the fierce and warlike Scans, the Suane- 

 tians of our own time. He wrote, too, of the poisoned 

 arrows and the skin shoes, spiked beneath the soles, 

 which enabled the savage wearers to negotiate the 

 glaciers and passes, and told us of the troglodytes 

 who dwelt in excavated holes. 



These subterranean dwellings, dating from the age 

 of savagery, are to be found in many parts of the 

 Caucasus. Here and there, as at Gori, the cliff tun- 

 nellings display a keen sense of the beautiful. But for 

 the most part the typical troglodyte home is a roughly 

 hewn den. 



The Georgian race, descendants of the ancient 

 Iberians, are still, as they ever were, the aristocrats 

 of the Caucasus, and until the Russian occupation 

 held the dominant place. The more one studies them 

 the more one is imbued with the certainty that this 

 people of mysterious antecedents, this race, older, 

 ethnologists declare, than the Egyptian, stands on an 

 entirely different plane of civilization and understand- 

 ing from any other dotted about the Caucasus. Their 

 Golden Age was in the twelfth century, during 



