Ep. 7 — Fifteen Centuries of Silence: The Circassian Language and How It Refused to Die

Burn every book a nation owns and you can erase it. Unless that nation keeps nothing in books. The Circassians wrote for two thousand years, and then stopped, writing not a single line from the 4th century CE until the 19th. The language survived anyway, carried in the mouth, house to house, generation to generation.This episode traces Adyghabze across seven stages, from the Nart sagas of the fourth millennium BCE through pictorial writing to the syllabic script that linked Sukhumi and Maikop under a single language by 1300 BCE, a system the Austrian scholar Irko argued reached the Phoenician coast. We unpack what a syllabic language actually does to meaning. Thamada, the word for an elected leader, opens into Tha (god) and ad (tool): the instrument of God, a theology folded inside a job title.Then the Caucasus as the Mountain of Tongues. Strabo counts seventy languages in the Black Sea trading town of Dioscurias. Pliny raises it to three hundred and notes the Romans working through a hundred and thirty interpreters. We follow the scholarship, from Güldenstädt, Klaproth, Dumézil, Yakovlev and Marr, down to Turchaninov decoding a Maikop slab written in Phoenician characters in the Abazgo-Circassian tongue, and Mészáros finding Ubykh and Hittite grammar so aligned he called them one language.And we confront how counting was weaponized: Russian administrators reclassifying every dialect as a separate national language, handing each its own local administration, feeding tribal division. Divide and rule, applied to grammar. We close on Naghmoka Shura Bakmirza, who in 1840 sat down to give a spoken language its alphabet back, and on the dialects that didn't make it: Mokhosh, Jana, and the Abkhaz tongues no one speaks today.Support the show