On this Wikipedia the language links are georgian spice mix the top of the page across from the article title. This article is about the Caucasian ethnic group. Caucasian ethnic group native to Georgia and the South Caucasus. Thereafter and throughout the early modern period, Georgians became politically fractured and were dominated by the Ottoman Empire and successive dynasties of Iran.

The Georgian nation was formed out of a diverse set of geographic subgroups, each with its characteristic traditions, manners, dialects and, in the case of Svans and Mingrelians, own regional languages. Saint George popular among the Georgians, whether pagan or Christian. The term “Georgians” is derived from the country of Georgia. In the past, lore-based theories were given by the medieval French traveller Jacques de Vitry, who explained the name’s origin by the popularity of St. Most historians and scholars of Georgia as well as anthropologists, archaeologists, and linguists tend to agree that the ancestors of modern Georgians inhabited the southern Caucasus and northern Anatolia since the Neolithic period. The Georgian people in antiquity have been known to the ancient Greeks and Romans as Colchians and Iberians. According to the renowned scholar of the Caucasian studies Cyril Toumanoff, the Moschians also were one of the early proto-Georgian tribes which were integrated into the first early Georgian state of Iberia.

Diauehi in Assyrian sources and Taochi in Greek lived in the northeastern part of Anatolia. This ancient tribe is considered by many scholars as ancestors of the Georgians. Colchians in the ancient western Georgian polity of Colchis were another proto-Georgian tribe. They are first mentioned in the Assyrian annals of Tiglath-Pileser I and in the annals of Urartian king Sarduri II, and also included western Georgian tribe of the Meskhetians.

Iberians, also known as Tiberians or Tiberanians, lived in the eastern Georgian kingdom of Iberia. Both Colchians and Iberians played an important role in the ethnic and cultural formation of the modern Georgian nation. It would seem natural to seek the beginnings of Georgian social history in Colchis, the earliest Georgian formation. Georgian language is written in its own unique alphabet since the 5th century. Georgian is the primary language for Georgians of all provenance, including those who speak other Kartvelian languages: Svans, Mingrelians and the Laz. All of these languages comprise the Kartvelian language family along with the related language of the Laz people, which has speakers in both Turkey and Georgia.