TO MOST outsiders Georgian history is a closed book. Indeed for English-speakers there are practically no books at all. Georgia mostly features on the edges of other peoples’ histories. Xenophon, describing Greek mercenaries’ attempts to get home in 400BC, wrote the first description of it. Books about the Soviet Union highlight Georgia’s role as a rebellious captive and as the birthplace of Josef Stalin, its most infamous son. A flurry of recent accounts describe the brief, disastrous war with Russia in 2008. Now Donald Rayfield of the University of London and Stephen Jones of Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts have written ambitious and comprehensive histories of a complex country.

The authors are among a handful of foreigners to have mastered Georgian. Part of the small and ancient Kartvelian language family, it is related to no others, though some have fancifully claimed a distant cousinhood with Basque. Its roots are as obscure as the origins of those who speak it. Mr Rayfield starts around 1100BC, with the first mention in an Assyrian source of the “Mushki”. The first Georgian king, Parnavaz, was born in 326BC.

The scope of Georgian history may be a humbling shock for those who thought the country appeared on the map only when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. But the reader needs to take a deep breath, for the next 200 pages could be mistaken at times for a stray appendix from J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings”. The tersely told stories involve hundreds of unknown but like-sounding people and places which appear and disappear in quick succession. The beheadings, castrations, sodomisations, rapes and eye-gougings—a local speciality—that dot the pages are jolting. But a little more in the way of analogies, signposts, interpretation and characterisation would have lightened the mixture.

The most cheerful pages concern Georgia’s golden age—around 1212 at the height of Queen Tamar’s reign. The country has never since been bigger, stronger or safer, stretching 800 miles (1,288km) from what is now Trabzon in Turkey to the shores of the Caspian sea. Georgia’s fortunes depend on the weakness or goodwill of its much larger neighbours: Russia to the north, Persia to the south-east, Turkey to the west. Mr Rayfield’s powerful theme is of brief periods of prosperity and security, ended by invasion, conquest, looting and despoliation. Georgians have had to get used to rule by outsiders: they often outwit them. Kremlin rule began with mass murder and ruinous economic planning, but in later decades Georgia was one of the most prosperous and enjoyable places to live in the Soviet Union. It was a similar story in the 19th century under Russian imperial rule.(Economist)

翻译：

大多数非格鲁吉亚人对格鲁吉亚的历史一无所知。实际上基本没有一本关于格鲁吉亚历史的书籍是用英语写的。大多数情况下，格鲁吉亚只能在别国历史的边边角角里看到。公元前400年，描述希腊雇佣兵为回家而努力的色诺芬第一次提到了格鲁吉亚。关于苏联的史书将格鲁吉亚要么视为叛逆的俘虏，要么视为其最罪名昭著的国民约瑟夫·斯大林的诞生地。最近出版的一系列书描述了格鲁吉亚与俄罗斯在2008年展开的那场灾难性的短暂战争。现在，伦敦大学的Donald Rayfield和马萨诸塞州曼荷莲女子学院的Stephen Jones为读者描绘出这个复杂的国家恢弘而又全面的历史。

这两名作者是少数几个掌握格鲁吉亚语的外国人。尽管有些人异想天开地宣称格鲁吉亚语和巴斯克语许久之前同系一源，但其实格鲁吉亚语是卡特维利语族的一个古老的小分支，和其他语言都不相关。格鲁吉亚语的起源和格鲁吉亚人的起源一样湮灭在历史的尘埃中。Rayfield从公元前1100年左右开始写起，亚叙的史书在那时第一次提到“Mushki”。第一个格鲁吉亚国王Parnavaz诞生于公元前326年。

对于那些认为格鲁吉亚在1991年苏联解体时才出现在地图上的人来说，格鲁吉亚历史的源远流长可能是个令人羞愧的发现。但是读者需要深呼吸一下，因为之后的200页有时候会被人误以为是J.R.R.托尔金所著的《指环王》丢失的附录。一个个用词简练的故事里有着成百上千个不知名却听起来都很像的人物和地点，这些名字快速地出现，又快速地消失。在这部分，不时出现的砍头、阉割、鸡奸、强奸和挖眼情节让人看得触目惊心。如果多点类比、线索、解释和特征描述将会使这部分读起来不那么沉重。

在该书中，读起来最让人心情愉快的部分与格鲁吉亚的黄金时代有关—格鲁吉亚的黄金时代在1212年左右塔玛皇后执政时期达到顶峰。那时的格鲁吉亚的疆域最大、国力最强、局势最稳。其疆域绵延800英里(1288公里)，从现在位于土耳其的特拉布宗一直到里海的海岸。只有在那些比格鲁吉亚大得多的邻国处于衰弱时期，或者对格鲁吉亚态度友好时，格鲁吉亚才得以繁荣。这些邻国有北部的俄罗斯，东南部的波斯以及西部的土耳其。在Rayfield宏大的著作中，格鲁吉亚每次短暂的繁荣和稳定后都是列强的侵略和肆意抢劫。格鲁吉亚人不得不习惯于被外国人统治：但他们常常比统治者更聪明。苏联占领格鲁吉亚初期展开大屠杀和毁灭性的计划经济，但在随后的几十年里格鲁吉亚是苏联最繁荣最适宜居住的地方。19世纪格鲁吉亚被俄国君王统治时也是相似的情形。