At the foot of the Great Caucasus
1, Gods, humans, stones ; 2, Letters, sciences, history
91 études caucasiennes par Jean-Pierre MAHÉ, publiées initialement entre 1980 et 2023, ici traduites en anglais.
Volume I
After the baptism of King Trdat the pagan gods of Armenia did not just suddenly disappear. Once, they had appeared as Greek statues or in the Iranian style; from this time they continued to roam the countryside in the guise of prophets or saints.
Church laws were always written down, but customary laws remained oral until the 12th century. Then did the fable, daughter of the proverb, become a literary genre. It taught a more accommodating wisdom. Family customs are still alive and are silently passed down from generation to generation.
In a country where archives perished during invasions, the stones bear witness. Oracles of the gods, tax exemptions and donations give a voice to prelates and princes, to bereaved families, and to the humblest subjects of the countryside.
Volume II
Why, of the three Christian alphabets in the Caucasus—Armenian, Georgian and Albanian—did only the Albanian alphabet fall into disuse less than two centuries after its creation? As a result of the Persian occupation, the Albanian-speaking provinces to the north bank of the Kura were submerged by the Armenian-speaking provinces to the south. In 1990, the identification and deciphering of Albanian palimpsests from the Sinai revived research into Caucasian palaeography and codicology.
From the Middle Ages to modern times, the inevitable “betrayal” of translators—“Traduttore, traditore” (“to translate is to betray”) as the Italian expression puts it—breathed into the works translated from Greek and Syriac an autonomous life that gave them offspring as numerous and unexpected as the posterity of Abraham. Filled with the spirit of the Bible, Armenia and Georgia developed their own self-representation, rooted both in the millennial soil of oral traditions and in the Christian theology of salvation.
Confronted with the West, the Caucasians quickly moved from amazement to imitation, and from imitation to retort and replication.
