The Problem of Ethnic-linguistic Relationship between Georgians and Basques from the Point of View of Spanish Authors

Abstract

The problem of ethnic and linguistic kinship of Georgians and Basques has been a subject of considerable interest since ancient times. Starting from the sixth century BC, Greek and Roman chroniclers have expressed very significant opinions regarding this problem. According to many of them, Iberians and Georgians living in the Pyrenees, or the Iberian Peninsula are ethnically and linguistically related people. As for the Georgian chroniclers and writers, the interest in the mentioned problem has been manifested in their thinking since the 8th-9th centuries. According to many of them, the Basque language has a lot in common with Georgian and Caucasian languages in terms of its structure and grammatical categories. The mentioned circumstance essentially determined the fact that the research of the mentioned problem became not only the subject of research of Georgian, Basque, and Spanish scientists, but also one of the main directions of the study of scholars of other nationalities. In this paper, several particularly interesting works are briefly analyzed from this point of view, the authors of which express very important opinions regarding the ethnic and linguistic kinship of Georgians and Spaniards, in particular Basques. These authors are Ruben Mendoza, Francisco López Seivané and Martina Mintegui Bilbao. They emphasize their ethnic and linguistic kinship based on the analysis of the linguistic and socio-ethnographic relationships of the mentioned peoples. As can be clearly seen from the thinking of the named authors, many representatives of Basque and Spanish scholars clearly support the ethnic and linguistic kinship of Georgians and Basques and actively try to find arguments confirming this.