History of Chechnya

The history of Chechnya may refer to the history of the Chechens, of their land Chechnya, or of the land of Ichkeria.

Chechen society has traditionally been organized around many autonomous local clans, called taips. The traditional Chechen saying goes that the members of Chechen society, like its taips, are (ideally) "free and equal like wolves".

Jaimoukha notes in his book Chechens that sadly, "Vainakh history is perhaps the most poorly studied of the peoples of the North Caucasus. Much research effort was expended upon the Russo-Circassian war, most falsified at that." There was once a library of Chechen history scripts, written in Chechen (and possibly some in Georgian) using Arabic and Georgian script; however, this was destroyed by Stalin and wiped from record (see - 1944 Deportation; Aardakh).

The first known settlement of what is now Chechnya is thought to have occurred around 12500 BCE, in mountain-cave settlements, whose inhabitants used basic tools, fire, and animal hides. Traces of human settlement go back to 40000 BCE with cave paintings and artifacts around Lake Kezanoi.

The ancestors of the Nakh peoples are thought to have populated the Central Caucasus around 10000–8000 BCE. This colonization is thought by many (including E. Veidenbaum, who cites similarities with later structures to propose continuity) to represent the whole Eastern Caucasian language family, though this is not universally agreed upon. The proto-language that is thought to be the ancestor of all Eastern Caucasian (“Alarodian”) languages, in fact, has words for concepts such as the wheel (which is first found in the Central Caucasus around 4000–3000 BCE), so it is thought that the region had intimate links to the Fertile Crescent (many scholars supporting the thesis that the Eastern Caucasians originally came from the Northern Fertile Crescent, and backing this up with linguistic affinities of the Urartian and Hurrian language to the Northeast Caucasus). Johanna Nichols has suggested that the ancestors of Eastern Caucasians had been involved in the birth of civilization in the Fertile Crescent. Definitely, at the time the proto-language split, the people had all these concepts very early on.

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