Kaskians

"Kashki" redirects here. For the village in Iran, see Kashki, Iran.

The Kaska (also Kaška, later Tabalian Kasku[1] and Gasga[2]) were a loosely affiliated Bronze Age non-Indo-European[3] tribal people, who spoke the unclassified Kaskian language and lived in mountainous East Pontic Anatolia, known from Hittite sources.[4] They lived in the mountainous region between the core Hittite region in eastern Anatolia and the Black Sea, and are cited as the reason that the later Hittite Empire never extended northward to that area. They are sometimes identified with the Caucones known from Greek records.

  1. ^ š is the conventional rendering of /s/ sound in Hittite; an unrelated Kaska in cuneiform texts found at Kirkuk, in Hurrian written in Akkadian cuneiform, apparently referred to the first cutting of a moiety of the grain, which a debtor might not remove from a harvested field in the temporary possession of a creditor: E. A. Speiser, "New Kirkuk Documents Relating to Security Transactions" Journal of the American Oriental Society 52.4 (December 1932:350-367), esp. pp 362ff. Also, Kašku was the name of a moon god in Hattic, which was spoken at the site of their first known conquest, at Nerik. This Hattic ethnonym need not reflect the language or self-identification of the Kaska themselves.
  2. ^ I. E. S. Edwards, C. J. Gadd, N. G. L. Hammond, E. Sollberger, The Cambridge Ancient History Cambridge University press, 1973 p. 660
  3. ^ Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture p.29 (1997) https://archive.org/details/EncyclopediaOfIndoEuropeanCulture/page/n63/mode/2up?q=Kaskians
  4. ^ "Although attested historically, the Kaska are virtually unknown archaeologically," Roger Matthews has observed, "Landscapes of Terror and Control: Imperial Impacts in Paphlagonia" Near Eastern Archaeology 67.4 (December 2004:200-211) esp. pp202f.