Dvals

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The Dvals were an old people in the Caucasus, their lands lying on both sides of the central Greater Caucasus mountains, somewhere between the Darial and Mamison gorges. This historic territory mostly covers today’s South Ossetia, a breakaway region of Georgia and part of North Ossetia-Alania, Russian Federation, as well as some neighboring lands in Georgia’s historic regions of Racha and Khevi.

The name of the Dvals (Georgian: დვალნი, Dvalni) comes from the old Georgian annals, their land called Dvaletia (დვალეთი. Dvalet`i) after them. Although the real ethnic identity of the Dvals remains obscure, they are hypothesized to have spoken a language related to the Nakh group. The Dvals are sometimes tentatively linked to the Talae, Valae or Ualae of Pliny the Elder and Ptolemy who placed them in Sarmatia Asiatica. Christianity began to spread among the Dvals in the mid-6th century, under Georgian influence. They were regarded as vassals of the Georgian crown and paid a tribute, while the Georgian kings fortified their fortresses and mountain passes securing the strategic “Dvaletian road”. When the Mongols destroyed, in the 13th-14th centuries, the Alanian kingdom in the Northern Caucasus, the Ossetians migrated towards and over the Caucasus mountains, forming in part of Dvaletia their community called Tualläg. The Dvals (known to the Ossetians as Tualta) were pushed sothward and, as a result, the process of their assimilation within the Georgians and Ossetians accelerated and was completed by the early 18th century. The term Dvaleti(a), retaining only a geographic meaning, then narrowed to refer solely to the area around the Kudaro valley in the west (modern-day Java district). Their ethnonym may have survived as the surname Dvali, occasionally encountered in Georgia.

The most prominent Dvals were, perhaps, the 11th-13th calligraphers – John, Michael, Stephen, and George – who worked at various Georgian Orthodox monasteries abroad, chiefly in Jerusalem and at the Mount Athos, and created several fine examples of old Georgian manuscripts, e.g. The Months and The Vitae of St Basil (John the Dval, circa 1055), and the so-called Labechini Gospels (George the Dval, 13th century).

The Orthodox church venerates also the memory of St Nicholas of Dvaletia, a Dval or Ossetian monk from the Georgian monastery at Jerusalem, who was martyred, on October 19, 1314, at the order of Amir Denghiz for having preached Christianity [1].

[edit] See also

• History of Georgia

[edit] References

• Gamrekeli V. N., The Dvals and Dvaletia in the 1st to 15th centuries A.D., Tbilisi, 1961 (A monograph in Russian)
• Tekhov B. V., Studies in old history and archaeology of South Ossetia, Tbilisi, 1971 (A momograph in Russian)
• Vaneev Z., Selected works on the history of the Ossetian people, Tskhinvali, 1989 (A monograph in Russian)
• Graham Smith, Edward A Allworth, Vivien A Law, Annette Bohr, Andrew Wilson, Nation-Building in the Post-Soviet Borderlands: The Politics of National Identities, Cambridge University Press (September 10, 1998), ISBN 0-521-59968-7, page 60