It is a bold historian who writes a history of the Caucasus, as events of the past week have made all too clear. The region may not be much bigger than England and Wales, but its history involves three unrelated indigenous groups of people – the Abkhaz and Circassians in the north-west, the Chechens, Ingush and Dagestanis in the north-east, the Kartvelians (Georgians, Mingrelians and Svans) in the south – and representatives of many Eurasian groups (Iranian, Turkic, Armenian, Semitic, Russian) who have settled there over the past 2,000 years.

Some forty mutually unintelligible languages, of which a handful are established literary languages and several others have only a precarious recent literary status, are spoken. Worse for anyone trying to present a coherent narrative, these disparate peoples have very different histories, and only two, the Georgians and Armenians (some would add the Azeris), have a history of statehood consistent enough to be retold as one would retell the history of a West European country. Worst of all, the frequent ravages of invaders, from Arabs in the seventh century, Mongols in the thirteenth, Iranians in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries and Russians over the past 300 years, have not only destroyed and driven out whole states and peoples, but burnt the records of their very existence. Even the year of death and the place of burial of the greatest of Caucasian monarchs, the Georgian Queen Tamar, is uncertain. Historians of the Caucasus have on the one hand to have at their command an immeasurable range of expertise, from archaeology to the folklore of dozens of different languages, and on the other the imagination and verve to bridge the gaps in chronology and in any other verifiable sources. It is a task that would daunt even the teams that produce the Cambridge Histories of, say, Russia or India.