Sapirs/Savirs/Suvars in the History of Caucasus

In this article, the ancient and early middle-ages history of Saspirs/Savirs/Suvars is analyzed for the fi rst time on the basis of source materials and publications by leading researchers. Those tribes occupied a noticeable place in the history of Caucasus. They were fi rst fi xed in the 5th century B.C. as part of Persian Empire. As Herodotus wrote in his “History”, Darius I, the king of the Persian Achaemenid Empire (522–486 B.C.), divided the Persian Empire into 20 provinces (satraps). Having established those regions, he appointed rules therein and fi xed tributes by tribe. Persepolis was the capital of the country. The Matiens, the Saspirs, and the Alarodies lived in the 18th province. Approximately in the fi rst half of the 3rd century B.C., Apollonicon of Rhodes wrote about Sapirs/Sapeirs (Σάπειρες) which had “lived for a long time close to the Behir and Bezier tribes. This refers to the lands to the south of the Chorokh River. The Behirs lived in the area between Trebizond and Pontus. Claudius Ptolemy fi xed the Savirs in the form of Σαύαϱοι in the Caucasus below the Aorses and the Pagirites in the fi rst half of the 2nd century. Therefore the researches are right to say that the Savirs and the Barsils appeared in the North Causes as early as “before the Hun time”. The historian
V.D. Dimitriev agreed with the opinion of Claudius Ptolemy regarding the presence of the Savirs groups in the North Causasus in the 2nd century and thought that the Chuvash ancestors had come there “in the 2nd and the 3rd centuries”.
The Greek seminarian Aelius Herodian wrote about the tribes σάπεϱ/σάπειϱ. Ammian Marcellinus fi xed the presence of the Sapirs (Sapires) in the years of 361–362. Therefore the researchers of the history of Caucasus subscribed to the
opinion that the Savirs/Sabirs had started to enter the steppe zone and the piedmont-plane zone of the North Caucasus no later than in the fi rst centuries A.D. The Suvars moved to the Volga region in the second half of the 8th century.