Re: Caucasus Geography.

If you look at a relief map of the area, you'll see that the west end
of the Caucasus is very difficult to traverse. I has about no coastal
plain, nor natural passes. For much of the route it is a massif that
comes directly down to the Black Sea. Image it in the 8th century bc:
little more than a disjointed collection of wooded mountain footpaths
stretching almost from the Kerch Strait to the Georgian plain.
Imagine tens of thousands of men on horseback making this trip,
strung out behind each other mostly in a single column. It would take
weeks. They and their horses would starve. The mountain peoples would
finish them off. Look at what the Germans did to Varus in the
Teutoberg forest. How about Hannibal crossing the Alps? Imagine him
trying to traverse the Alps for hundreds of miles. He went over one
difficult pass. The Caucasus includes one similar pass in the middle.
The east end is not easy, either, but it is also basically one pass
around the end and your in Azerbaijan. The Cimmerians knew which way
to go. If they lived on the lower Don or in the Kuban, they would
have known that there was no road for them to take around the west
end. They would have known that their horses would starve to death
before they made it out of the forested mountains. I don't know about
you, but I would ride off into Rumania or Poland before I went south.

I think Herodotus imagined the west end of the Caucasus as being more
like Greece and not as mountainous and wooded as it was/is. To him,
the east end may as well as been on the far side of the moon as far
as his knowledge of the geography went.

I'm not aware of a single migration or military expedition around the
west end, so I doubt the Cimmerians did it.

--- In cybalist@..., markodegard@... wrote:
> --- In cybalist@..., "Glen Gordon" <glengordon01@...> wrote:
> >
> > >[Herodotus] never visited the eastern Black Sea coast and did
not
> know how
> > >treacherous that could be for any campaign or migration.
> >
> > Actually, just an interjection concerning the logic of the above
> > statement. I know some things about Europe. I've never gone to
> > Europe and so my knowledge of Europe might be fuzzy... but I know
> > some things about Europe. This is because my knowledge is
> second-hand,
> > given to me by others who *have* gone to or who live in Europe.
> > So, clearly Herodotus doesn't have to visit the eastern Black Sea
> > coast to know about that area as long as he has contacts that
> > *have* gone there and know what it's about. How can one prove
> > that he didn't have contacts?
>
> I've been to Europe 4 times, but did not get that much geography
out
> of the trip. Most of what I know is from books.
>
> As for Caucasian geography, my knowledge is very fuzzy. I can
locate
> Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia instantly on a world map, but ask
me
> about all those other Caucasian places and I go fuzzy. I gather
> Chechnya is North Caucasus. Dagestan faces the Caspian north of
> Azerbaijan. These places, the peoples living there, and all those
> languages they speak are little known to Americans, and when you do
> learn something, you only get confused. It's a jumble.
>
> The Caucasus themselves run from the Kerch Strait across from the
> Crimea essentially to Baku, in Azerbaijan, on the Caspian,
> approximately on a NW to SE slant. The mountains seem to be quite
> steep: you don't normally go up the hill to the top and down, but
> rather, you go around and around. There are nice flat strips along
the
> coast of the Black and Caspian Seas but these are easily controlled
> from the heights just beyond them. In other words, if locals want
to
> obstruct your travel, they can don so very easily, and very
cheaply.
> Hostile armies would have a hard and bloody time getting thru here.
>
> The rivers are obscure to us in the West. The Kuban looks like a
ditch
> at the base of the North Caucasus, draining straight into the
Black.
> Draining to the Caspian in the N. Caucasus are the Kuma and Terek,
two
> rivers no one's heard of here in the West. The Rioni is in Georgia,
> and presumably this is where Jason met Medea. In Azerbaijan, on the
> other side from Georgia, is the Kur. The big river seems to be the
> Aras/Ara, which flows along the border of Iran and Armenia, into
the
> Caspian.
>
> This is about all I know. I have no idea of what the exact route
the
> Cimmerians would have been; does anyone? As for Armenia, the
obvious
> approach is via the Aras, tho' this looks awfully defensible by
local
> yokels. I confess to being very vague about exactly what the
borders
> of Urartu were, or what those of historic Greater Armenia were.
>
> I have no idea of how variable the terrain is. Some of it is
downright
> impossible, impassable except to knowledgeable locals on narrow
> trails. The rest of it seems to be pretty bad, made almost nice in
> modern times only by the application of lotsa dynamite.
>
> Can anyone add anything else that would be useful?