Hunno-Bulgars in Georgia: A Proposal of Correction in the Georgian Chronicle History of King Vaxt’ang Gorgasali
Hunno-Bulgars in Georgia: A Proposal of Correction in the Georgian Chronicle History of King Vaxt’ang Gorgasali

Summary/Abstract: The Huns proved they had passions for the south of the Caucasus from the very beginning, and we are informed that Attila had serious plans to invade Persia. Armenian sources reveal some secrets of the Hun diplomacy, which had contacts with the Armenian princelings then under the Sassanian supremacy before the year 450. A part of the Armenians rebelled against the Persians, on the ground of religious liberation, but they were late to call for Hunnic help, and their operations ended in catastrophe (450–451). Nevertheless, the Huns came and devastated northern parts of Persia to take revenge. A Georgian chronicle asserts that the “Ossetes” coming from the Caspian Gates attacked Georgia in 450, and the latter responded to them six years later by crossing the Darial Pass. Those accounts should be reconstructed. This paper suggests that the Ossetes mentioned in the History of King Vaxt’ang Gorgasali are indeed Huns, or more truly, the Bulgars under Hun domination, and sheds a light upon the early days of the “Hunno-Bulgar” polity, that was shaped in the Northern Caucasus just after the demise of Attila in 453, and also upon the ethnogenesis of the Proto-Bulgars.

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