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What is clearer is that the name survives in Kartvelian as the name of Georgian subgroup the მესხი Mesxi, their region მესხეთი Mesxeti, and ultimately was the origin of the ancient capital of Iberia, მცხეთა Mtskheta, along the banks of the Mtkvari and Aragvi rivers.

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Reposted by Katuwestākos Göransson

This illustrates the difficulty of trying to pin down whether the 𒆳𒈬𒍑𒆠 Muški of Assyrian records were the same people as the Μόσχοι/Moschi of later Greek and Roman authors: Phrygian? Armenian? Kartvelian? Perhaps they represented fusion of all three -- or none of these.

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As an analogy: after the Fall of the Western Roman Empire, a Germanic tribe named 'Saxon' ended up migrating variously to Britain, eastern Germany, Poland and other places, and in many bordering countries their name became the generic term for all Germanic speakers, Saxon or not.

Reposted by Katuwestākos Göransson

So perhaps this word appearing in different places reflects movement of an ancient people (Proto-Armenians?) from western Anatolia to the east. But it's also possible we're dealing here with a semantically shifting term to different peoples & places, with no fixed meaning.

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If so, then maybe the Muški were Phrygians of west-central Anatolia? But hold on: Herodotus says the Armenians were 'colonists of the Phrygians', and geographer Strabo later placed the Μόσχοι in the eastern Pontic borderlands of Georgia and Armenia.

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It is unclear precisely what ethnicity these people belonged to. In the 8th c, a different Assyrian record uses this same word to refer to a King Mita of the Muški, whom scholars usually identify as King Midas of Phrygia, a historical figure who entered Greek lore for his wealth:

Reposted by Katuwestākos Göransson

But who were these *Mosxi people? This is a much trickier problem. The earliest mention of the 𒆳𒈬𒍑𒆠 Muški people occurs in a record of King Tiglath-Pileser I of Assyria (r. 1114-1076 BCE), who fought an army of 20k invading upper Mesopotamia, at the end of the Bronze Age:

Octagonal cylinder documenting Tiglath-Pileser I's war with the Mushki and other peoples

Reposted by Katuwestākos Göransson

Fähnrich argues this tribal name in turn comes from Georgian-Zan through umlaut. A number of Georgian roots with *o shift to /e/ if *i follows. Thus Palaeo-Georgian *Mesx- actually goes back to Georgian-Zan *Mosx-, which is precisely what was attested by Strabo as Μόσχοι.

Reposted by Katuwestākos Göransson

There was also a prosodic feature of early Kartvelian at work here: when genitives were added, that shifted the stress to the right, and deleted the previous vowel(s) -- hence Georgian's huge consonant clusters. Thus: *Mésxe- >> *Mesxé-ta- > *Msxé-ta- > Mcxé-ta-

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So what happened in the case of several Georgian city names is that the head noun was lost, while the genitive (in Old Georgian, -is(a) was singular, -ta plural) was kept, along with its extra cases.

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Reposted by Katuwestākos Göransson

This kind of noun phrase agreement is common in Old Georgian _Suffixaufnahme_ but unusual across languages: the genitive must bear both its own case plus the case of its head noun, and since genitives could have their own genitives, you might end up with multiple case stacking.

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The name of Mtskheta reflects an unusual feature of many Georgian place names: an ossified genitival form elided from an earlier phrase 'city of X' through genitival agreement: *Mcxe-ta-y kalak-i Mesx-GEN.PL-NOM.SG city-NOM.SG 'city of the Mesxians'

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The toponym is first mentioned in Georgian texts in the Martyrdom of St Eustathius of Mtskheta from ca. 575: მოვიდა იგი ქალაქად მცხეთად და ისწავლებოდა ჴელსა მეჴამლეობისასა '[Eustathius] came to the city of Mtskheta and studied how to become a cobbler.'

Reposted by Katuwestākos Göransson