The Caucasus

The Greek name of the range, Kaúkasos, the wall of mountains between the Black Sea and the Caspian that marked the northern edge of the Greek world. It was the most mythologically charged mountain the Greeks knew: to a Caucasian crag Zeus chained Prometheus for stealing fire, and beyond it lay Colchis, the goal of the Argonauts and the home of Medea. Herodotus describes its many tribes; Strabo, drawing on Pompey’s campaigns, gives the fullest account.

The name had a strange mobility. When Alexander’s army crossed the great mountains of the northeast, his geographers, fitting the unknown to the known, called the Hindu Kush the Kaúkasos Indikós, the “Indian Caucasus,” and transferred Prometheus’s crag a thousand miles east, founding an Alexandria beneath it. So Kaúkasos became less a fixed place than a name for the world’s edge, attached to whatever great barrier stood at the limit of the explored. The original range kept the name, but a copy of it traveled to the gates of India.

The Latin name of the range, Caucasus, taken from the Greek; for Rome it was the far northeastern frontier of the known world, the mountains beyond Armenia where Pompey’s legions had marched and where the myths of Prometheus and the Argonauts were set. Pliny inherits the Greek geography, including the confusion of the true Caucasus with its Indian namesake.

Through Latin the name passed into the European languages as both a geographical term and a literary one, the mountains of Prometheus’s punishment. The Arabs would later know the real range as al-Qabq and fold it into the legend of Mount Qāf, the range that encircles the earth, a mythic role not far from the Greek sense of the Caucasus as the boundary of the world. From Aeschylus to the Arab geographers, the mountain wall kept its character as the edge of things.

The Arabic name of the Caucasus, al-Qabq (also Qabkh), the mountain wall on the northern frontier of the Islamic world, beyond Armenia and Azerbaijan. Al-Masʿūdī, who took a particular interest in the region, marvels at the multitude of its peoples and languages, calling it the “mountain of tongues,” a country where every valley spoke its own speech, an observation the modern Caucasus still bears out.

al-Qabq is the range under its own near-eastern name, distinct from the Greek Kaúkasos, though Arabic learning knew the classical name too. The Arab geographers also drew the Caucasus into cosmic myth, associating the great northern barrier with Mount Qāf, the emerald range said to ring the edge of the world, a role that echoes, independently, the Greek sense of the Caucasus as the limit of the known earth. The same mountains that bounded the Greek world bounded the Islamic one, and both made of them the wall at the end of things.