68 Orientalism and Empirenewly colonized regions and represented a “new epoch of civic life”
in the borderlands.^62
A preoccupation with antiquity informed the interests of scholars
in the region. Their obsession with antiquity and the process of col-
lecting and ordering it amounted to a familiar colonial and “Oriental-
ist” vision of a dormant and degraded land long after its fall from
grace, although their vision possessed a uniquely Russian and impe-
rial flavour. Scholars in St Petersburg and Tbilisi, for example, were
extremely excited about an archaeological find in 1868 near the
Cossack settlement of Khada-Finskaia in Kuban oblast. The find in-
cluded gold and silver buttons, belts, remnants of clothing, jewellery,
silver utensils, and dishes. General Bartolomei concluded that the in-
scriptions were similar to those of fifteenth-century Byzantine
churches. Scholars in St Petersburg struggled with Radde of the
Caucasus Museum for control of what they referred to as the “so-
called ‘Classical’ materials.”^63 One of the stated goals of the Archaeo-
logical Commission, formulated in an early 1859 document signed by
Count Adlerberg, was the collection and analysis of “folk [narodnyi]
[materials], as well as other monuments of antiquity.”^64 The deeply
disturbing nature of this vision should be readily apparent. The com-
mission collected and displayed “folk” life through archaeological
excavation, just a few years after the virtually entire destruction of
contemporary “folk” life among the Adygei. Scholarship legitimated
the recent colonial conquest by portraying the present as suspect and
locating true culture in the past.
A set of assumptions about a glorious past that might be rescued
by colonial rule motivated numerous scholarly projects on the region.
The work of Berzhe and the study of archaeology by definition sug-
gested that some greater truth lay buried underneath the bothersome
accumulation of more historically recent sediment. “Nowhere else, it
seems, has there been so strikingly preserved the traces of deep antiq-
uity,” claimed the Georgian scholar Dimitri Bakradze.^65 Were the
mountains hiding “fragments of a prehistoric European race?” won-
dered Petr K. Uslar.^66 The region was of great interest to all the princi-
pal peoples of the ancient world, emphasized Bakradze, Uslar, and
many others. The geographical diversity and the location between
Europe and Asia, wrote Bakradze, made the North Caucasus the
home of “numerous special peoples [narodnostei], for which it has
been called the ‘anthill of peoples.›^67 Uslar argued for a long and in-
digenous ethnohistory in the region, and he surveyed Greek and
Roman myths and travelogues to illustrate the antiquity of peoples.^68
To the minds of Orientalist scholars in particular, the rescue of this
antiquity alone justified the Russian colonial project, and the