John
>
> You might consider the book Waffen der Bronzezeit aus Ost-Georgien
> by Konstantin Picchelauri. You will find that the area of Colchis was a
> rich metalworking culture with close contacts with the area of Iranian
> Marlik, Amlash, Talish, Azerbaijan and early Urartu.
Last evening I re-read a reference I have to the artifacts of the Trialeti
barrow finds and the bronze-working cultures. It is clear from this that
these archaeological discoveries were not as early as I had recalled.
I was out by a good 500 years. Rather than latish 2nd millennium 1300-
1200 BCE, they are contemporary with Early Iron Age 900-750 BCE
and so, as you say contemporary with early Urartu.
The reference is in a book called 'The People of the Hills' by Charles
Burney and David Marshall Lang, publ. by Weidenfeld & Nicholson (1971).
Do you know this work? My hard-backed copy was obtained second-hand
about 6-7 years ago. Burney is the archaeologist; Lang is a historian and
linguist. The book has a number of black and white plates, but, unfortun-
ately, these do not always relate very closely to the text, and there are no
supplementary line drawings as in 'The Georgians',so that for the non-
specialist like myself the same section of text needs to be re-read several
times before one gets the gist of the explanation.
There is a good description of the Cimmerian invasions there also. I have
certainly always understood the Cimmerians to be Iranian; whether they are
distinct from , or merely another branch of the Scyths (Sakas) is debateable.
I am sure that it was the off-shoots of these two groups who moved into
Eastern Europe who interacted with the pre-Slavonic cultures, in whose langu-
ages there are many traces of contact with Iranians. Some would argue that
this occurred much later, and that the Sarmatians were the Iranians in question.
Geoff