@Anba_len I don't know! I'm very happy to talk about anything from the very basics upwards, I just don't really know what sorts of things will interest people...

@JubalBarca Hmm... since I know very little it’s hard to ask at all. I would ask what parts interest you most to garnish initial interest so I can get enthusiastic about that and learn more through you as well as autonomously!! If it’s history maybe a particular development or concept in it that is really different from us now!

@Anba_len Well, basically I've got two rough "pitches" for the period I study.

Serious one: Medieval Georgia was a fascinating cultural melting-pot. It became one of the most powerful states in its region until the Mongol conquests, squaring the circle between being trying to represent itself as stridently Orthodox and culturally projecting whilst in fact relying on a great deal of ethnic mixing & diversity (as well as reaching its greatest height under a female ruler).

@Anba_len

Or equally/alternatively: Georgia should be a nerd paradise. This place has some of the largest cave settlements ever built, they have ridiculous cool elf-writing, hobbit levels of calories in cooking (cheesebread is their national dish), and really cool mythology that's not well known outside the region. :)

@JubalBarca Hooked on the part talking about a female ruler, mythology and elf writing. Mythology seems like a fun start! A good introduction to their society too!! I know embarrassingly little about Georgia, but your passion is contagious!!

@Anba_len Yeah, Queen Tamar was pretty cool :) The Knight in Panther Skin is the main medieval literary work, if you ever find a copy. I want to make an audio of it but haven't ever had time.

Here's some mkhedruli (literally "knight's letters"), the modern Georgian script, which was invented in the 11th-12th centuries: it's got 27 consonants and 5 vowels, and it's SUPER pretty and elfy and cool. I can read/transliterate the script OK now but I'm still very ropey on the language itself.

@JubalBarca it looks really cute!! So round and pretty!! It’s what’s used in Georgia right now as well? Is it like the alphabet then where each characters stands for one consonant or vowel? Though the alphabet with its 26 characters makes me think Georgia has a lot I would have never heard of or would need practice to pronounce!

@Anba_len Yes - there are some entirely new letters ("ts" for example is its own letter), and some subtle distinctions we don't have, like aspirated/unaspirated t. One of the plus sides is that this means that the language is quite phonetic; there isn't much in the way of words where you really can't work out the pronunciation from the spelling.

And yes, mkhedruli is still used today; there are 2 older scripts, one of which was still used for coins in the period I study as it's easier to carve.

@JubalBarca Oh this reminds me of Japanese actually where it works nearly the other way around. They have a limited amount of ways to pronounce things, so their scripture is adapted to that! And of course I suppose there is a visa versa influence as well wherein even foreign words get Japanesefied because otherwise they can be expressive in their scripture! This is interesting. Oh, like how they used Roman numbers on buildings a lot because it’s easier to carve out than say Arabic?

@JubalBarca You’re studying the language?! Are you Georgian or by heritage from Georgia by any chance? I’m mighty interested in how you ended up in this lore haha. It seems like such a specific interest to have!

@Anba_len Nope, I'm from eastern England and as far as I know my background doesn't stretch outside the British isles in the last century or so... I just like finding out about obscure things, I guess. And found that I couldn't find much in the way of good books to read once I'd stumbled across Georgian stuff, so here I am doing my PhD and trying to write one!

@JubalBarca To go to this length is remarkable though!! Your PhD even ha that’s the longest “woops I guess I got interested in something” I’ve ever heard of haha. But I think I understand, you sort of tumble in and everything you learn is connected to another boost of interesting something. It doesn’t end does it! What is your PhD called then if it’s not intrusive to ask of course.

@JubalBarca FEMALE LEADER DIVERSITY PITCH IS THE CLEAR WINNER THANK YOU PLEASE TO BE CREATING I AM SUPER CURIOUS TO LEARN MORE.

@eleanor I need to start a blog sometime to explain this better, but yes - basically, the late 12th century Georgian court seems to have had chroniclers writing about how super Orthodox and traditional and Georgian everything was whilst the country was being run by... a definitely more mixed bunch of people than that would imply.

@eleanor From the top down - Tamar, the first ruling queen of Georgia, who is given the title mep'e, usually translated as "king", but the word for "queen" translates as "queen consort" and Georgian doesn't have grammatical gender so they just shrugged and decided it was going to have to be a generic word for monarch from now on.

@eleanor We know there must have been some resistance to Tamar running everything (and all accounts agree she was Very Much In Charge), partly because the chronicles go on a lot about the clergy pressuring her to marry (she did, the breakup resulted in a civil war, and she got her own choice of husband the second time), and also from a surviving epic court poem of the period which keeps dropping unsubtle "women can be good rulers too, again for the people at the back" lines at various points.

@eleanor I think my favourite such line is the elderly king in the poem deciding to give his daughter the throne with the words "a lion's cubs are lions all". :)

That poem was probably commissioned by Tamar's second husband, David Soslan. He was an Ossetian prince, and the only other mention of Ossetians in the chronicles of Tamar's reign is approx: "things were so good even the Ossetians weren't stealing anything" which may give an idea of how they were seen by the Georgians in general.

@eleanor Then we come to the Amirsp'asalari, the commander of Georgia's armies, Zakaria Mkhargrdzeli. His family were pretty dominant in court in this period - his brother Ivane was also a senior minister - and neither of them were Orthodox Christians, both were ethnically and religiously Armenian, which leads to some awkward explanations from chroniclers. They were just also really effective generals.

@eleanor Tamar was also apparently happy to have Muslim vassals and courtiers (one thing I'm investigating is *how* "vassal" some of those client rulers were in practice), and her first husband was Russian, and there were certainly Greeks at her court (notably the "Megakomnenoi", relatives of hers & claimants to the Byzantine Imperial throne), so basically every ethnicity in the region was somewhere in the mix.

@eleanor Anyway, sorry, that was a bit of a thread, but yes, I almost feel sorry for the poor guys who had to go and sit and work out how they could somehow write the victories of these people up as a great Orthodox Christian triumph (which they dutifully did their best to do!) There's probably a bunch I'm forgetting since it's half past eleven, but yes, there's a lot of interesting stuff going on there :)

@JubalBarca That was fascinating please yet make that a blog post! If you don't want to start a blog go post that to medium or one of the blockchain social media sites or something! I want to link all my friends to this fascinating history! One of my friends is writing a book about Sigrid the Haughty (famous for killing a bunch of Norse princes) and would LOVE to know more about Tamar!! Or you can guest post on my blog. Seriously fascinating though!

@omniadisce @JubalBarca Maps! Post images of maps with some hashtags.

@mpjgregoire @omniadisce I'll hopefully be able to do that not too far into the future - I've been working on a mapping system that's built into my database and is already putting out some nice basic scatter-maps with links attached. I need to do a ton more data entry before it'll say much that's particularly interesting though, alas...

@virtuosew So, right now I'm building a mapping system to provide dynamically-generated comparisons & maps of what's going on in the chronicle sources for my period. From my preliminary work, I think they may well show the late 12th century Georgian state to be rather more territorially restricted than a lot of historians' maps indicate, which would bring some interesting new questions about how & if they projected power beyond the areas they controlled.

@JubalBarca So you are mapping things like letters, charters & treaties, and using that to get a sense of the spheres of influence of the rulers?

@virtuosew I'm mainly mapping events and links between people and places expressed in the main court chronicles at the moment. Later in the project, I want to add charter & archaeological evidence where possible.

@virtuosew And yes, coin sites could be part of that, but given coins were often treated legal tender well beyond the reigns in which they were issued there's only so much you can tell from coin sites about the sorts of questions I'm looking at. As far as numismatics goes, the iconography on coins of the period is probably more interesting for my work.

@JubalBarca It's fascinating to see what can now be deduced from small finds like coins, when once they seem not to have been seen as very interesting!

@virtuosew Yes, I was lucky to have had a fantastic numismatist (Maria Vrij) at Birmingham when I was doing my masters' there, who's now a good friend of mine and who I got to help out with some exhibition work and stuff :)

@JubalBarca That must have given you all sorts of new things to learn about! I remember writing an exhibition label about an embroidery, and looking at it later and realising it didn't answer anything that someone not me would be likely to ask! It's so hard to write for a non-specialist when you are one!

@virtuosew Yes - it's a real art to get things across in a way that's concise enough for a museum format and still catches people's imaginations! It's something I'd like to get more experience of in the future. I'd like to get more teaching experience too... my workload is very programming heavy at the moment!

@JubalBarca Maybe you could try using the format of toots to practice that sort of thing? Maybe about particularly iconic items from 12th century Georgia?

@virtuosew Yeah, this is the point at which I wish I was more of an archaeologist... my archaeology colleagues have so much more pretty stuff to showcase! I'll hopefully be getting further with developing my mapping systems in the next month or so which should make for some more visual stuff though :)

@JubalBarca Yes, written materials sometimes have marginalia or seals, but seals are very hard to photograph, and a densely-written medieval text probably won't get a random person's pulse racing.
And yet, what it contains can be completely astonishing!

@JubalBarca Maybe you could start with what got you interested in what your're doing now. After all, what ignited your interest will probably do the same for someone else!

@JubalBarca Would mapping findspots of coins of the period also feed into that?

@dominicduffin1 Well, certainly I can discuss that as it applies to my area, though it's worth noting that modern political traditions in the Caucasus, whilst occasionally harking back to medieval antecedents rhetorically, have generally lacked continuity from the period I study thanks to the region spending a lot of its history being messed around by one neighbouring large power or another.

@JubalBarca I'd likely be more interested in the political traditions of the area before those large powers interfered - so that would probably fit in quite well?

@dominicduffin1 The Caucasus doesn't really have a "before" per se, that's the thing. Bigger powers were muscling on the region since antiquity (Persia, Alexander, Rome, Muslim conquests, Byzantines, Mongols, Ottomans, Russian Empire), so native political traditions have merged a lot of those influences & often involved client rulership etc. The period I study (ca 1120s-1220s) was a pretty independent period, but it's exceptional (and important to modern Georgians) for that reason.

@JubalBarca I see, so the traditions of the region are kind of generated from the traditions of large powers through the ages. What would interest me is whether there was any period when independent Caucasian political traditions manged to develop, and what these traditions were.

@dominicduffin1 Well, I think I'd say it's just rather more complex than a simple "native" to "non-native" dichotomy - there are very much political traditions in the Caucasus, and often very varied/localised ones (not least because the fractured landscape allows for that), but they've often developed as, or including, response mechanisms to the wider political situations around them.

@KeaW Yes, post-doctoral research work is very hard to find nowadays (and pay/conditions have worsened too). I guess my strategy has just been to try and find a niche of my own where there are very few other people, but we'll see how that goes after my PhD! I think digital humanities are an area with growing interest, you're right, so hopefully that will help.