Azerbaijan in Antiquity

Azerbaijan in Antiquity

Scholars consider Azerbaijan to include "the land populated today by the Azerbaijan Turks, the people who inhabit the region stretching from the northern slopes of the Caucuses Mountains along the Caspian Sea to the Iranian plateau". Azerbaijan is among the areas of earliest human settlement, with evidence of human habitation since the Palaeolithic age. Settlements engaging in agriculture and livestock-raising were widely distributed about this area in the seventh and sixth millennia BC. Rock paintings in Gobustan near are dated by scholars to the XIII millennia BC.
The well-known Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdal, who made special trips to in 1979 and 1994 to study these rock paintings, believes that the shores of the Caspian Sea were the cradle of a civilization that then spread over water, southward and northward. Heyerdal found support for his hypothesis not only in the Gobustan petroglyphs of reed boats, remarkably similar to those depicted centuries later by the Vikings on the walls of caves in Norway, but also in sagas written down in the middle ages. The Gobustan rock paintings of boats surmounted by an image of the sun also attest irrefutably to the ties between the early settlements of Azerbaijan and the Sumero/Akkadian civilization of Mesopotamia, whose cultural legacy includes very similar depictions.
In the end of IV millennium BC and the early years of the III millennium BC, signs appear of the emergence of the first class societies, with a proto-urban civilization and embryonic state structures. It is at this time that the tribal alliances were formed of the Aratta, the Gutians and the Lullubites. According to Sumerian cuneiform sources, the first State to arise on the territory of historical Azerbaijan was the state of Aratta, which came into being in the first half of the third millennium BC in the area to the south and south-east of Lake Urmia. From about 2300 BC, the second State of ancient Azerbaijan sprang up in the area south of Lake Urmia - the state of Lullubum. The Gutian state was formed later in the second half of the third millennium BC in the area west and south-west of Lake Urmia. In 2175 BC, the Gutians conquered Sumer and Akkad and ruled over them for the next 100 years.
The ancient states of Azerbaijan, which maintained political, economic and cultural ties with Sumer and Akkad and formed part of the wider civilization of Mesopotamia, were governed by dynasties of Turkic descent. The Turkophone peoples that have inhabited the area of Azerbaijan since ancient times were fire-worshippers and adherents of one of the world's oldest religions - Zoroastrianism. Over the period from the mid ninth to the seventh centuries BC, the Mannaean kingdom held sway in the area of Lake Urmia. The Cimmerian-Scythian-Saka kingdom flourished in the seventh and sixth centuries BC in the south-west of Azerbaijan. In the mid-sixth century B.C the Mannean kingdom was overthrown.
A vital role was played in Azerbaijani history by the kingdom of Atropaten, which came into existence in the southern part of the country in the 520s BC and which was heavily influenced by Hellenism.
The Caucasian Albanian state was created in the north of Azerbaijan in the end of IV and the early years of III millennium BC, with the river Araz as its southern frontier. This state successfully held out against the constant aggression of Armenia, later to be destroyed by the Romans in 66 BC. The people of Albania included a number of different nationalities, most of which spoke Turkic languages. Christianity was adopted in Albania in since 313. The territory of Albania also included the mountainous part of Karabakh, which was known at that time as Artsakh.
Over the period from the first to the fourth centuries, when the entire Caucasus area was under the Roman yoke, Albania remained the only independent state and with its political independence came a flowering of Albanian learning, language and literature. This same period say the growing strength and influence of the autocephalous Albanian Catholicosate and of the Albanian Church in general, which was independent of other Christian churches and even propagated Christianity among the north Caucasian and Turkophone peoples.