Was the prehistoric man an Azeri nationalist?: Mobilized prehistory and nation-building in Azerbaijan

ABSTRACT

Gobustan, a prehistoric site 60 km south of Baku, has an impressive collection of rock carvings from different prehistoric eras. Near the site, a national museum presents the prehistoric findings in a narrative that connects them with modern-day Azerbaijan, calling the hunter–gatherer tribes that lived in Gobustan ‘our ancient Azerbaijani ancestors’. While many nation-building projects dig deep into the past, reconstruct it, claim ancient civilizations as their own and sometimes even invent historical narratives that never happened, the Gobustan Museum and the narrative it implies (that prehistoric people living in 15,000 BCE were Azerbaijanis) seems like ‘overkill’, an exaggerated effort to connect the past and the present. The data from the museum points to a larger story: the construction of national identity and collective memory in post-Soviet Azerbaijan. This paper presents some of the author’s anthropological field research findings in the museum and explains why the narrative of ‘ancientness’ is so essential in post-Soviet Azerbaijan.

KEYWORDS:

• Azerbaijan
• Armenia
• Nagorno-Karabakh
• USSR
• post-Soviet
• nationalism
• national identity
• collective memory
• archaeology
• museum studies

Introduction

How do new states define themselves and construct their ‘national identity’? How is history used to create a national narrative, a collective memory? Why is the past often used as part of nation-building, and how is it narrated and reconstructed? What are the methods by which national identity and national narrative are told? These broad questions have been investigated and written upon extensively (for classic works on collective memories, see, e.g., Halbwachs 1992; Nora 1996; Lowenthal 1985). Though there are many similarities between most nation-building projects, specific case studies can provide a unique view into the specifics of a country or a region and how it constructs its national identity in its early, formative years (e.g., Zerubavel 1995; Davis 2005; Hayden 1996). While some regions and states are well-researched, nation-building in the Caucasus – and Azerbaijan specifically – is relatively under-studied. Though geopolitically located in an area with many dormant and active conflicts, the Caucasus receives less academic focus than other conflict zones such as the Middle East or the Balkans. Even when the conflicts in the Caucasus are academically researched, the focus is usually on politics, elites and historical events (e.g., Suny 1993a; Altstadt 1992; Swietochowski 1995; 2004; Bölükbaşı 2013). Anthropological accounts of what Caucasian populations think and believe, their historical narratives, collective memories, and the different discourses regarding their national identities are less common (e.g., Wistrand 2011; Militz and Schurr 2006; Dudwick 1994). This article helps fill this void and assist in creating a better understanding of national identity in one post-Soviet Caucasian republic: Azerbaijan. While focusing on a specific site of memory construction – a museum of prehistory – it tells a larger story: the construction of national identity and collective memory in post-Soviet Azerbaijan.

As with other post-Soviet and post-Yugoslav republics created or recreated in the 1990s, post-Soviet Azerbaijan was quickly catapulted into independence. Though Azerbaijani nationalism was over a century old at the time of independence, the relatively brief transition to independence made it a fascinating experiment in what can be framed as ‘nation-building on the go’. Azerbaijan had to quickly invent a unifying narrative, not from scratch, but without much previous nation-building experience. Though Azerbaijan was independent briefly between 1918 and 1920, its independence in the 1990s can be seen as a new phenomenon. Unlike the Baltic States, which could claim they have ‘regained’ their independence after half a century of Russian occupation, Azerbaijan’s territory was part of larger empires in the previous centuries – Safavid Iran, Tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union.

While Azerbaijan confronts problems similar to those of other new nation-states, it also faces unique geopolitical challenges. Unlike the Central Asian republics, Azerbaijan is the only Muslim state in Transcaucasia. Its two Transcaucasian neighbours, Armenia and Georgia, are Christian nations claiming deep roots in the Caucasus, including glorious empires bearing their names in antiquity and the Middle Ages. One of these states, Armenia, is at war with Azerbaijan over a contested territory: Nagorno Karabakh. This region was taken from Azerbaijan in the first years of its independence and was only recently partially ‘returned’ to Azerbaijan after a war in 2021 (Welt and Bowen 2021; Broers 2019; De Waal 2013). Furthermore, Azerbaijan was established as a secular republic but borders radical Sunni insurgencies in the north (Dagestan) and a dominant Shiʽi theocracy in the south (Iran) (Swietochowski 2002; Cornell 2006). Though similar to other post-Soviet states, nation-building in Azerbaijan is also quite different due to its unique circumstances.

The case study: the museum at Gobustan

This research project attempts to shed light on Azerbaijani nation-building, focusing on how post-Soviet Azerbaijan constructs its ancient past. There are many ways to examine Azerbaijan’s narrative of its past, such as looking into its history schoolbooks, government publications, political speeches, documentaries on Azeri television, etc. This paper, however, focuses on one particular site of memory construction: the museum of prehistory at Gobustan. The museum is located next to a prehistoric site 60 km south of Baku. The site has an impressive collection of rock carvings from different prehistoric eras (dated, on average, around 15,000 BCE). This research project is not about the prehistoric remains themselves but about the meaning these remains have for the people in the museum: its staff and visitors.

Though the museum claims it is about prehistory and the area (Gobustan), this research suggests otherwise. The museum, it is argued in this paper, deals not only with the prehistory of Azerbaijan but also with identity building in the present-day republic. And though it presents archaeological findings from Gobustan, this paper will argue that it also deals with a remote territory: the (then fully occupied) region of Nagorno Karabakh. This paper will focus on the museum in Gobustan as a case study to better understand how some Azeris perceive their ancient past and how they connect it with the present.

The question addressed in this paper is why so many Azerbaijanis, elites and non-elites, claim the prehistoric people who lived in Gobustan as their direct ancestors. While many nation-building projects dig deep into the past, reconstruct it, claim ancient civilizations as their own, and sometimes even invent historical narratives that never happened (Smith 2003, 190–217), the Gobustan museum and the narrative it implies (that prehistoric people living around 15,000 BCE were Azeris) seem like ‘overkill’, a hyperbolic effort to connect the past and the present. Azerbaijan could have easily claimed medieval states and empires, for example, the Saljuq Empire or the Aqquyunlus, as their ‘glorious ancestors’. Why are those kingdoms not ‘sufficient’ for Azerbaijani national identity as a source of pride and legitimacy? Why would post-Soviet Azerbaijan need to invest so heavily in inculcating such a narrative of a ‘prehistoric’ past, and why do people, including very educated ones, buy into it?

Based on the literature on Soviet and post-Soviet Azeri nation-building, this paper suggests that the narrative of antiquity in Azerbaijan is exaggerated, incorporating prehistoric tribesmen in Gobustan as ‘proto-Azerbaijanis’ due to: (1) Azerbaijan’s intellectual relics, mainly regarding how nations’ histories were thought of during Soviet times; and (2) its contemporary challenges, mainly the struggle with Armenia over Nagorno Karabakh. The museum in Gobustan, this paper argues, is there to prove that Azerbaijanis are the indigenous people in the land, while the Armenians are people who migrated later on. Therefore, based on Soviet relics of primordialist thinking and theories of ethnogenesis, Karabakh does not belong to Armenia but to Azerbaijan.

Research methodology

In 2013, I lived in Azerbaijan for a month and visited the museum and the reserve 15 times. Visits lasted, on average, six hours and included different types of material collection: in-depth interviews and participant observations. I have joined a few tours with visitors who allowed me to join and received two private tours with museum guides.

Much of the data in this paper are from interviews. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with about 40 visitors – before, during and after visiting the museum. The interviewees were from different social strata: some were educated visitors from Baku (two interviewees had doctorates), and some were from rural or urban working-class backgrounds. Some interviews were conducted with more than one person, for example, married couples or families visiting the museum together. All the interviewees were informed about my research project and orally consented to be interviewed and quoted. Two unique ‘group interviews’ were conducted with schoolchildren, with the consent of their teachers.

The most extended in-depth interviews were conducted with the museum staff. Long one-on-one discussions were held with almost all the museum guides (who were primarily young students from Baku). I also interviewed two archaeologists employed in the Gobustan reserve and Dr Malahat Farajova, the museum director.

To overcome biases that stem from interviews and ethnographic research and to understand how the Azeri elite sees Gobustan, a large part of this research project’s data is textual: mainly books published by Azeri academics. To better understand the popular sentiments and non-elite discourses, this research also uses textual sources written by ‘regular’ people: the museum visitor logs from the mid-1980s to 2013. Though most of these texts are short and anonymous, reading what visitors wrote after visiting the museum and the site assisted this research in mapping and analysing the more simplified public discourses.

Theoretical background

Nationalism–constructivism versus primordialism

The concepts of nation and nationalism have been defined in different ways. A line in the sand between two disparate views on nationalism is drawn between primordialism and constructivism. One argument, broadly classified as ‘primordialism’, is that nations develop naturally as real organic groups (e.g., Smith 1986); the other approach (constructivism) suggests that they are imagined or constructed projects (e.g., Hobsbawm 2012; Anderson 1983; Gellner 1983).

Ideas stemming from a constructivist paradigm are more prevalent in the West when analysing nationalism, especially in contemporary academic literature. However, as this research will illustrate, in Azerbaijan, primordialism is the hegemonic paradigm for defining and interpreting the history of a nation or an ethnic group. Most of the Azerbaijanis interviewed for this research or whose work was surveyed could be described as primordialists: people who believe that (1) individuals have a single ethnic identity and (2) this identity is fixed in the present and the future (Chandra 2001). This paper argues that the Azerbaijani primordialist approach to their nation’s history is part of the intellectual context of the claim that the prehistoric tribesmen in Gobustan were Azerbaijanis.

Nationally mobilized academic knowledge – the case of archaeology

The data from the museum in Gobustan can be an example of how the academic discipline of archaeology is used to promote nationalistic goals. Azerbaijan is not unique in doing so – academic disciplines such as archaeology and history have been used and abused by nationalists in the last few centuries. This practice was so common that until a few decades ago it went on nearly unnoticed by the academic community. These disciplines were considered neutral and scientific, and very little attention was given to how they were used to promote political claims and contemporary goals. However, postmodern critiques challenged the claim of the objectivity of these disciplines. In recent decades, the connection between ancient history, archaeology and nationalism has been studied intensively (for a summary of the prominent academic works and central debates on this matter, see Shnirelman 2014).

In the case of archaeology, Bruce Trigger’s work in the 1980s (Trigger 1984, 1989) was one of the starting points of a discussion on how archaeology is used and misused for nationalist purposes. His initial claim was that archaeology is not a neutral ‘science’ but a field affected by nationalist discourse. The primary function of nationalistic archaeology, he argues, like nationalistic history of which it is generally regarded as an extension, is to bolster the pride and morale of nations or ethnic groups. In a later theoretical article, Kohl (1998) took Trigger’s argument further and demonstrated how archaeological remains could be manipulated for nationalist purposes. A common nationalist reading of the past, he argues, is an ancestral one. Such a reading of archaeology can provide ‘evidence’ for an autochthonous development of a group firmly rooted in the national territory. Kohl warns that extreme nationalist archaeology could be dangerous. Archaeology can be mobilized not just for ‘strengthening a group’s pride and identity’, as Trigger demonstrates, but it can even become a justification for genocide, ethnic cleansing and other atrocities. Extreme case studies illustrating the dangers of the misuse of archaeology can be seen in Díaz-Andreu and Champion (1996), who include chapters on archaeological practices in Franco’s Spain, Hitler’s Germany, Mao’s China, Milosevic’s Yugoslavia and Stalin’s Soviet Union. Regarding the latter case study (on the USSR’s misuse of archaeology), see also a recent paper on how the deportation of the Nakh people from the North Caucasus was ‘scientifically’ justified (Shnirelman 2023).

Archaeology is particularly used and misused by nationalists in conflict areas when two groups contest a territory. One group in conflict can use archaeology to ‘prove’ that they were in the disputed territory before their adversaries. Why would that be so important? Horowitz (1985, 201–204) argues that group legitimacy within a territory, a concept linked to ownership, is the moral basis of ethnic claims and justifications. This argument, in the context of ethnic struggle over the same land, is based not only on current ownership but on indigenous claims – the proof that your group is the native group in the territory. Contested territories, therefore, produce battles of narratives between nations and ethnic groups, in which archaeology is often mobilized (e.g., Kohl 2012). The Caucasus, Azerbaijan’s neighborhood, is an example of an archaeological battleground, as Kohl (1993, 1998) shows. Kohl describes the collapse of the Soviet Union and the establishment of new – or renewed – nation-states as having a catalysing effect on an archaeological race in the post-Soviet world. This archaeological race was fuelled not necessarily by academic interests but by nationalism and the struggle for legitimacy by different ethnic groups.

The archaeological remains at Gobustan are not located in an area contested by another state – they are far both from the Armenian border and from the contested territory of Karabakh. However, this paper will argue that the museum at Gobustan and the narrative it offers the visitors have much to do with the Azerbaijani claim to Karabakh, even if Karabakh is distant from Gobustan. Azerbaijanis, this paper will demonstrate, are using archaeological findings from Gobustan to prove their indigeneity in the land and to claim that they are the original inhabitants of the land – including Nagorno Karabakh – long before the Armenians came and settled there.

Historical background: Azerbaijani nationalism and the ‘Problems’ of its antiquity

This section will examine why a nation’s ‘antiquity’ is considered of such great importance in the Caucasus and Azerbaijan in particular. Though antiquity is important in most nation-states, the Azerbaijani appropriation of prehistorical tribes is puzzling. The construction of collective memory in Azerbaijan and the need to ‘nationalize’ its ancient past (and even its prehistory) has, this section will show, intellectual roots in Azerbaijan’s more recent past.

Though the Republic of Azerbaijan is a new country, Azerbaijani nationalism and the search for its national identity have deep roots and have gone through different upheavals in the last two centuries. This short section will focus on three periods from the greater timeline of Azerbaijan’s history, which are crucial for contextualizing the findings from Gobustan. The first period to be discussed, of pan-Turkic national agitation under Tsarist Russia, will explain how Azerbaijanis saw their national identity and roots, and many continue to do so – as Turkic people from Oghuz tribes. The second period, Stalin’s delimitation policy, will help explain post-Soviet Azerbaijan’s need to look deeper into the past for its ancient roots and why its Turkic national identity was no longer sufficient. The third period, the Nagorno Karabakh war, will help explain why Azerbaijani antiquity is so important vis-à-vis the Armenians in the battle for Karabakh and why, even claiming to be descendants of kingdoms from antiquity, such as Albania and Atropatena, was not enough anymore.

Pan-Turkism in Russian Azerbaijan

In the mid-nineteenth century, local Azeri intelligentsia, educated in Russia, were exposed to new philosophical ideas brought to Baku and other large cities in Azerbaijan in Indigenous secular literature and Western writing. This intelligentsia was ideologically close to Tsarist Russia and the West and the ideas of enlightenment and education. But as in other parts of the world in the mid-nineteenth century, such as Eastern and Central Europe, these ‘enlightened’ ideas of secular and rational ‘progress’ were challenged by romantic thinkers who stressed the nation’s uniqueness. Some Azeri nationalists were promoting local ‘Azeri’ nationalism, and some focused on the Persian-Shi’i ancestry of Azerbaijanis (Atabaki 2006; Swietochowski 1995, 17–61). However, pan-Turkism, an idea that was invented and developed by the Crimean Tatar Ismail Gasprinsky by the end of the nineteenth century and later promoted in the Eastern Caucasus and the Ottoman Empire at the dawn of the twentieth century, was gaining popularity in Azerbaijan (Landau 1995). Azeri pan-Turkists saw themselves connected to other Turkic people in the empire, and some demanded cultural autonomy or even separation from Russia (Bölükbaşı 2013, 20–29). No matter what their political ambitions were, Azeri pan-Turkists could agree upon one fundamental issue: Azerbaijanis are ethnically Turkic people, and their ancestors arrived from Central Asia with the Oghuz migrations (Shnirelman 2001, 93).

Soviet Azerbaijan and Stalin’s delimitation policy

In the 1920–30s, under Lenin and Stalin, the Soviet Union had an official national delimitation policy (korenizatsiia), which contributed to the building of nationalist and cultural ethnic identities among some of its non-Russian citizens (Slezkine 1994; Hirsch 2005; Marshall 2010). Some of its ethnic minorities were not only autonomous but strengthened by what Martin (2001) calls ‘the affirmative action empire’ – an invasive, centralized and violent state policy that tries to systematically build and strengthen its non-Russian nations. According to Martin, the USSR strengthened and sometimes stamped clear ethnonational identities on populations lacking them. Azerbaijanis, especially in large cities, did not lack national identity. However, it was based on a historical narrative that did not fit the Soviet Union’s criteria and, therefore, needed to be revised. It was (1) pan-Turkic, an ideology the USSR wished to eradicate; and (2) based its identity on non-indigenous ancestors – the Oghuz tribes, which migrated from Central Asia in the Middle Ages.

The Soviet Union was specifically focused on buttressing nationalism in its Muslim and Turkic regions (Tatarstan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, etc.) as an alternative to pan-Islamism and pan-Turkism, two ideologies that could lead to a unified front against the Kremlin. The historical narratives of each Soviet state were rewritten and retold as a unique nation – historically disconnected, ethnically and linguistically distinct from other Turkic or Muslim countries (for case studies, see Laruelle 2008; Baldauf 1993). According to the USSR’s revised historical discourse, these non-Russian nations all shared a long-time friendship with their Russian neighbours and the Tsarist regime until they peacefully incorporated into the Russian Empire (Tillett 1969). Any mention of pan-Turkism within the context of a Soviet state’s national identity was met with massive aggression by the regime (Bennigsen 1975).

Azerbaijani national identity in the early Soviet period, which was based on a historical myth of being descendants of Oghuz tribes, was problematic not only because of the pan-Turkic implications. The problem was also that the Oghuz were migrant tribes from Central Asia – meaning they were latecomers to the Caucasus and, therefore, not the land’s indigenous people. The importance of a nation’s indigeneity has to do with Soviet ethnological and historical ideas of what a nation is and which nations deserve autonomy in the USSR. In the 1930s, during the high stages of the Soviet nation-building process, there was a change in the USSR. The Soviet discourse of what a nation is shifted from a constructivist approach, claiming nations were modern constructs that emerged as a consequence of capitalism, to a primordial, essentialist conception of national identity (Martin 2000). An ethnic group that claimed cultural and political autonomy needed to demonstrate the legitimacy of its claims based mainly on the criteria of homeland and language. An ethnic group that could prove that their origins were deeper in the land and that their language was unique was considered the legitimate group to claim the land as ‘their own’ (Shnirelman 1996). Behind this policy were Soviet primordialist ideas of what a ‘nation’ – or, in its earlier form, an ‘ethnos’ – is: a unified, fixed group that did not undergo major changes throughout history. A ‘real ethnos’, one that deserves autonomy according to Soviet thinking, had a unique language, dress, cuisine, and other cultural traditions that persisted over long periods. It also had to have a history in the land and an ethnogenesis – a moment in history in which they became a ‘nation’ and continued to be one until the contemporary era (Shnirelman 1998). The Soviets considered archaeology and historical research a means of determining the ‘fixedness’ and the story of the ethnos. They also saw a direct cultural and genetic link between ancient cultures that were uncovered in archaeological digs and present-day cultures (Kohl 1998).

Since Azerbaijani national identity did not fit the Soviet requirement (being neither unique – but part of the greater Turkic world, nor indigenous – but rather descendants of migrating tribes), the narrative of Azeri origins had to be changed. Azerbaijani historians in the Soviet period rewrote their history and claimed to be descendants not of Turkic tribes but of indigenous, local nations. Soviet Azerbaijani historians ‘nationalized’ ancient kingdoms in the region, such as Atropatena and Caucasian Albania, as ‘early Azerbaijani kingdoms’ (Shnirelman 1995). The new Azerbaijani historiography denounced the ancestral connection to the Oghuz Turks. It claimed that the Turkic invasions had little influence on the already existing Azerbaijani ‘ethnos’ in the Caucasus, which was a local and unique ethnos (Astourian 1994).

The war with Armenia and Azeri nationalism in independent Azerbaijan

The break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991 led to widespread confusion of existing identifications in Soviet successor states (Brubaker 1996). Like other post-Soviet states, Azerbaijani national identity and official historiography changed throughout the 1990s. However, it is agreed in the literature that the ongoing conflict with Armenia over Nagorno Karabakh was the cornerstone of the development of political nation-building in the country (e.g., Tokluoglu 2005; Bölükbaşı 2013). The conflict over Nagorno-Karabkah strengthened an extreme ethnonational identity in both Azerbaijan and Armenia (Gellner 1994; Suny 1993b, 102–126). After 1992, liberal and inclusive interpretations of nationalism disappeared from public discourse in both countries. In the new nation-states, the ethno-genetic mythologies and the radical interpretation of an ethnic nation-state as a state of the ethnic nationality alone became an integral part of public discourse, media, and school curricula (Shnirelman 2003).

Though there were several different views on the question of the Azerbaijani people’s ancestors in the late Soviet period, which developed side by side, post-Soviet national identity in Azerbaijan was initially tied to ethnicity, race and language and was pan-Turkic in its nature. One of post-Soviet Azerbaijan’s first presidents, Abulfaz Elchibey, who ruled between 1992 and 1993, is considered the most pan-Turkic leader to have led a former Soviet Republic (Hyman 1997; Hunter 2001; Tabachnik 2019). Later in the 1990s, under President Heydar Aliyev, the focus of Azerbaijan’s national identity shifted from ethnicity to the ancientness and sanctity of Azerbaijan’s territory as the Azerbaijani people’s homeland. The shift from an ethnic (pan-Turkic) identity to a territorial one is explained in the literature as a response to growing separatist sentiments among some of Azerbaijan’s non-Turkic minorities, who refused to assimilate into a pan-Turkic state but could somehow accept a more broad, inclusive ‘Azerbaijani’ national identity (Tabachnik 2019; Tokluoglu 2011). Azerbaijan’s transformation was not unique: similar formations of territorial (rather than ethnic) identities have been noted in the literature on other post-Soviet states (Surucu 2002; Kolossov 1999). However, the territorial aspect of Azeri national identity posed a problem vis-à-vis Nagorno Karabakh, whose population was majority Armenian. Some Azerbaijani historians ‘solved’ this problem by claiming the Armenian population was transferred to Karabakh during the nineteenth century, while other historians claimed that the Christian population in Karabakh are not Armenians but rather ‘Armenified Caucasian Azeris’ (De Waal 2013, 153). The latter claim was based on an Azeri nationalist claim to ancestral ties with Caucasian Albania, an early medieval kingdom that both Azerbaijanis and Armenians claim as part of their past (Shnirelman 1995; Dudwick 1990; Kohl and Tsetskhladze 1995).

However, as with the myth of Oghuz ancestry in the Soviet period, the Azeri claim to be the ancestors of Caucasian Albanians also had to be revised during the 1990s. The Karabakh war escalated a battle of historical narratives that had started already in the last decades of the Soviet Union, in which both sides claimed that they were the original inhabitants of Karabakh. Local Azeri and Armenian historians were part of the effort to make these irredentist claims more ‘scientific’ (Altstadt 1994, 106). The historians revised and rewrote their ancient histories to prove that they were the earliest people in the land, especially regarding the already contested region of Karabakh – each side going further back in history and claiming a more ancient kingdom or tribe as its ancestors (Shnirelman 2001, 149–197). In this battle for the past, Azerbaijan’s claim to be the ancestors of Caucasian Albania was insufficient, as Armenian historians claimed that Armenians are ancestors of even earlier kingdoms.

Interviews and fieldwork in Gobustan

In this section, I will present and discuss some of the data collected in the museum at Gobustan. The data were organized into different themes/questions upon which the main argument of this paper is constructed – that the museum of Gobustan is not about prehistory but about proving the antiquity and the long-term Azerbaijani presence in their land: 1) what are the Azeris claiming about the past?; 2) how do they prove their claims?; and 3) why do they feel the need to do so?

Blood ties – claiming that the prehistoric people of Gobustan are ‘Our Ancient Azeri Ancestors’

The main focus of this research was the claim that Gobustanis are the ancestors of modern Azerbaijanis. Though there were a few dissident voices and variations on the ancestry theme, most of my interviewees and the written texts that were examined agree on the fundamental notion that the prehistoric Gobustanis were the ancestors of contemporary Azerbaijanis. Some Azeris even suggested Gobustanis were simply ‘Azeris’.

In subsequent sections, I will discuss how this ancestry narrative is supported and its implications. This section will present some evidence demonstrating that Azeris (museum staff, visitors and also Azeri intellectuals) see the prehistoric Gobustanis as their ancestors, and the variations on how this is expressed.

In almost all the interviews conducted, Azeri visitors to the museum touched upon the ancestral ties between the prehistoric tribes and themselves. Sometimes, this was in response to a question I asked regarding the matter (such data could be affected by research bias since I encouraged them to talk about it), but often they brought up the subject themselves. For example, in an interview with an Azeri couple, I asked the man which room in the museum affected him the most. He answered that it was the room with a hologram of a (prehistoric) man carving with a stone. When asked why, he simply replied: ‘Because he’s an Azeri!’ Similarly, in an interview with two Azeris from the province of Nakhchivan, one of them told me: ‘We are proud that Azerbaijan has such petroglyphs. It proves that Azerbaijani people have a culture and ancient roots.’ His friend agreed and added: ‘These petroglyphs show that our people were very devoted to this land and this place. These are our forefathers. They carved these rock carvings for future generations.’

This narrative of Azeris having Gobustani ancestry is not merely a popular discourse or an example of ‘banal nationalism’ (Billig 1995; Militz and Schurr 2016) but also appears in books by Azeri elites, such as, historians and archaeologists (Aliyev 2007, 73–74; Cəfərzadə 1999, 15). For example, the Azeri archaeologist Dr Əsədulla Cəfərov claims that ‘scientific research concluded that they [the prehistoric Gobustanis] are the great-grandfathers of modern Azerbaijanis’ (Cəfərov 2008, 433). Similarly, books written by Dr Jafargulu Rustamov, the previous museum and reserve director, openly claim the prehistoric dwellers of Gobustan were the ancestors of Azeris, or even simply ‘Azeris’:

All these (evidence) show that the Gobustan petroglyphs in this area […] were created by the ancient inhabitants of these places, the ancestors of the Azerbaijani people, and they watched over their grandchildren for millennia. (Rustamov 1993, 12)

Greater Azerbaijan reveals itself in archaeological material […] let’s review from an artistic point of view one of the scenes showing that creators of the Gobustan culture of on-rock drawing were Azeris. (Rustamov 2006, 37)

In addition, the museum’s visitor logs contain many references to the blood ties between prehistoric Gobustanis and contemporary Azeris. Many of these entries demonstrate a discourse of certainty that Gobustanis were their ancient ancestors. One visitor wrote, for example, that in his visit to the museum, he saw his great-grandfathers; another wrote that he saw ‘Azerbaijani people’s history’ and ‘got in contact with our forefathers’ past’. Another visitor simply wrote: ‘I’m proud to be a Gobustani!’

The ancestry narrative was particularly prominent in tours with schoolchildren. When I spoke to children visiting the site, they often connected personally to the Gobustani tribesmen and referred to them as ulu babalarımız (our ancestors/forefathers). This feeling Azeri children had towards the prehistoric Gobustanis was not a coincidence. In tours for children I joined, the museum guides and schoolteachers focused less on the petroglyphs and more on connecting the children to their ‘ancestors’.

An interesting event occurred during a tour of young school children, demonstrating the museum guides’ view on the importance of the ancestry narrative and its transmission to Azeri children. During the tour, the children were making ‘monkey’ noises and laughing near the doll figure of a prehistoric shaman. When I asked the guide (Fira) why they were doing that, she answered:

They are laughing about the (figure of the) shaman, saying ‘He’s our grandfather’. and making funny noises, as if he’s not civilized. It happens a lot in tours of children. When children come with their parents, they tell them to respect their ancestors. They say: ‘Look, you must understand, these are our ancestors. We didn’t come here in the Middle Ages; we were here all the time!’ but when children come without their parents, they allow themselves to laugh and make jokes.

This explanation was insightful. It demonstrates the different layers and dynamics of visitors of different ages. The guides and parents want the children to love their ancestors and feel connected due to a political need: to show that Azeris are indigenous to the land. The children, however, do not care about the political implications. For them, the cavemen were purely ‘funny’. According to Fira, the elders (museum staff, parents, and teachers) are responsible for ensuring the kids feel connected to their ancestors.

Fira is not the only guide who advocates the idea of Gobustanis as ancestors of contemporary Azerbaijanis – all the guides who were interviewed – do so. Especially on guided tours for locals, museum guides frequently used the word biz (we) rather than onlar (they) to describe the prehistoric Gobustani people. For example, one of the museum guides explained to an Azeri couple about prehistoric burial rituals in Gobustan that ‘in the past, we used to bury our dead at home’.

However, it is important to state that not all interviewees had the same opinion on the issue of heritage. Some visitors to the museum didn’t believe that Gobustanis were related to contemporary Azeris at all. While all the museum personnel and most of its visitors were Azerbaijani citizens, an interesting distinction could be made between the ethnic Azerbaijanis and the ethnic Russian or other ethnic minority visitors, who seemed to buy less into the ancestry narrative. They discussed Gobustan as part of the ‘world heritage’ rather than Azerbaijani. Mixed couples that were interviewed – Azeri and non-Azeri – exemplified this gap, one of them usually referring to the petroglyphs as part of Azeri history and the other (the non-Azeri) – as world history, the history of humanity.

To summarize this subsection, many Azerbaijanis (elite and regular citizens) see the stone carvings in Gobustan as their ethno-national heritage and the prehistoric Gobustani tribesmen as their direct ancestors. The following section examines how Azeris prove their Gobustani ancestry.

A ‘proof’ of ancestry: cultural links between Gobustanis and modern Azeris

How do Azerbaijanis prove the ancestry narrative? Usually, unless specifically asked, the interviewees provided no evidence. When I did ask for proof, some Azerbaijanis were surprised I doubted their ancestral connections to the prehistoric Gobustanis. Some suggested that the mere presence of the archaeological site in Azerbaijan was enough to prove the ancestral connection. Others discussed ‘scientific’ methods of proof, such as ‘anthropological’ skull measurements of skeletons dug up in the vicinity. However, most of the data collected (textual and oral) pointed to cultural similarities between Gobustanis and modern Azeris. The cultural similarities were often framed as proof of a connection between the ancient and contemporary communities.

A central recurring theme connecting the two cultures was one specific petroglyph: a rock carving portraying people holding hands, perhaps dancing, found in one of the caves at Gobustan.¹ Many interviewees referred to the carving by the anachronistic term ‘Yalli dancers’. Yalli is a traditional dance typical in eastern Anatolia and Azerbaijan. Though having Kurdish and Armenian origins, Yalli dances have been co-opted by post-Soviet Azeris as a marker of a distinct Azerbaijani national culture (Militz and Schurr 2016). The theme of the ‘Yalli dance’ petroglyph appears in a museum exhibit that shows a photo of the petroglyph and, next to it – a video of a contemporary Azeri folk group dancing Yalli. The accompanying text in the museum signage is: ‘Several prehistoric petroglyphs of Gobustan depict people engaged in a reminiscent of the old Azerbaijani folk danced called Yalli. It is possible it was danced before a hunt in order to secure its success.’

Referring to the petroglyph of the dancers as a ‘Yalli dance’ appears in other academic works published in Azerbaijan (i.e., Cəfərzadə 1999, 9, 80, 86; Aliyev 2007, 74; Yusifova and Verdiyeva 2022). For example, Dr Jafargulu Rustamov, the previous museum director, wrote in his book on Gobustan that ‘the same dance performed today on the stage of the Azerbaijan State Philharmonic [Yalli], was first danced by our forefathers in the Stone Age […]’ (Rustamov 2006, 51).

The reference to the petroglyph as ‘Yalli dancing’ appears not only in books and signage. It is a narrative repeatedly transmitted in all of the guided tours I joined, and it is stressed especially in tours catering to Azeris, who are familiar with the dance. For example, here’s an explanation a museum guide gave three Azeri visitors who kindly allowed me to join their tour:

[…] These are dancers – similar to contemporary Yalli that we dance in weddings. […] We have never forgotten our past. Azerbaijan is getting globalized, but we still dance the traditional dances like in the past […].

Joining tours with schoolchildren allowed me to see how the cultural connections between the prehistoric Gobustanis and themselves are understood through their somewhat naïve eyes. Interviews with children often referred to Gobustanis as their ancient relatives/ancestors. In one tour with children, they told me they felt that the Gobustanis were their ancient relatives/ancestors, and I asked them why they felt that way. One answered: ‘We have the Yalli dance, and they also had. […] We dance Yalli too.’ Another child told me: ‘We are like them because they are very kind people, and we’re also very kind […].’ Another replied: ‘They have a family, and we have one too.’ Other answers included: ‘They dance and we dance too. They are friendly and we’re friendly too’; ‘We all used to pray to fire before Islam, and today, in Novruz, we also jump over fire. This is our connection with them’; ‘We like to draw and they too – we draw on paper, they draw on stone’; and ‘It’s very cold here, that’s why they made fires, to warm up. We do the same too.’

My questions perhaps instigated the children’s naïve examples of cultural connections between them and the prehistoric tribesmen. But the children’s passion, their affection towards the prehistoric Gobustanis, and the fact they all saw them as their relatives – demonstrate the discourse they were, most likely, exposed to at school.²

Naturally, the interviewed adults provided different examples of cultural connections between them and the Gobustani tribes. Most Azeri adults stressed the petroglyph of the ‘Yalli’ dance as a cultural link between the past and the present. At the same time, the museum staff provided other cultural ties between the rock carvings and contemporary Azerbaijani culture.³ A book written by the current museum and reserve director, Dr Malahat Farajova, contains such cultural connections. For example, she connects a rock carving of the sun and a popular children’s game played in Azerbaijan (kos-kosa). In another passage, she creates a link between rock carvings of an ox and a deer and a contemporary Azeri dance, Maral Oynu (Farajova 2009, 173). The museum director’s predecessor, Dr Rustamov, goes even further than Dr Farajova, claiming that the prehistoric Gobustanis were playing traditional Azerbaijani games: ‘The pits and plates on the rocks, holes for binding animals, small areas for playing ancient Azerbaijani games such as ev köçdü or mərə mərə’ (Rustamov 2006, 37; for a similar narrative, see Cəfərov 2008, 397–398).

After demonstrating the cultural connections Azeris make between Gobustan and present-day Azerbaijan, the next section will examine why this linkage between the prehistoric hunter–gatherers and contemporary Azerbaijanis is so crucial for Azeris.

Gobustan (and Azikh cave) as proof of Azeri ‘ancientness’ and continuity on the land

Why are the Azerbaijanis so keen on discussing their ancestral connection to the prehistoric Gobustanis and sometimes doing their utmost to prove it, using cultural similarities? This section will argue that the narrative of Gobustanis as ancestors is seen as proof of the ‘ancientness’ of Azeris and their continuity on the land.

Surprisingly, the proof of Azerbaijani antiquity the museum presents to its visitors is not based only on the 15th–20th millennium BCE petroglyphs found at Gobustan – it goes even further into the past. The museum’s first displayed text is not about Gobustan at all, but about a Neanderthal woman’s jaw found in Azikh Cave. Though the text on the jaw is relatively ‘dry’ and academic, tours in the museum give this scientific information about the jaw in Azikh Cave a nationalist flavour. Every tour I joined began with the jaw from Azikh Cave, which the guides stressed is located in Nagorno-Karabakh. An example is this explanation from my first private tour:

The history of Azerbaijan started 1.5 million years ago in Azikh Cave. The first people of Azerbaijan were from Nagorno-Karabakh. You know Karabakh, right? [I answered ‘yes’] It’s a historical area of Azerbaijan. 700,000 refugees came from Karabakh. In addition, there were 300,000 Armenians there – all together – one million people lived in Karabakh.

The Neanderthal woman’s jaw is not just presented as a scientific artefact; it has political implications for many museum staff and guests. Though the jaw is not even of a homo sapiens, for many of the Azeris who were interviewed and whose writings I read, it implies that Azeris are ancient people and indigenous to the land. Azeri antiquity suggests they have been in this land, including Karabakh, since the beginning of humanity. This belief appears in several inscriptions in the museum guestbook. One visitor wrote, for example: ‘When we were here, we have traveled to ancient periods of Azerbaijan’s history. The presentation of the 20-year-old woman’s jaw and other historical tools proves Azerbaijani people have a very ancient history and a special lifeline.’

Azeri intellectual elites share the narrative of Azikh Cave and Gobustan as proof of Azeri roots in their land (i.e., Cəfərov 2008, 397–398). For example, in his books about Gobustan, the former reserve and museum director, Rustamov (1993, 2006), provides the readers with his version of the ancientness and continuity thesis. In the introduction to his 1993 book in Azeri, he explained that the book ‘will provide information about the monuments of Gobustan, which show the world that we are a very ancient nation with ancient historical roots and ancient culture’ (Rustamov 1993, 4). Later in the same book, he wrote: ‘Remember that you are the oldest nation in the area you call the Turkic world. To prove what I said, study our material remains and archaeological materials that were discovered through excavations, and study and write our history not by hearsay but by listening to those materials. Then everything will fall into place, and you will see who your great grandfathers were and be proud of them’ (Rustamov 1993, 37).

In another book, Rustamov provides a complete thesis of the origins of Azerbaijani people, starting with the jaw at Azikh Cave, moving on to Gobustan, and then explaining how the Azeri nation was ‘formed’:

From the findings in Azikh Cave, we can see that Azerbaijan is one of the first places humans came from […] Gobustan is the historical center of Azerbaijani culture; it is a ‘mirror’ that reflects the history and its trend of development from 15–20 thousand years ago. […] From anthropological skeleton-measuring researches, we can see that the ancient Gobustanis are the forefathers of modern Azerbaijanis. Later, they accepted the name ‘Azers’ or ‘Asers’, and the Azerbaijanis were created by the mix of the Athropatenians, Midians and the Albanians, the most ancient nations in the region. (Rustamov 2006, 86–89)

When asked why it is so crucial for them to prove the ancientness of the Azeri people, some interviewees (most of them – educated museum staff) explained it has to do with Armenia and the battle struggle over Nagorno Karabakh. For example, in an interview conducted with Dr Rustamov’s wife, herself an archaeologist who worked in Gobustan reserve during Soviet times, she claimed that the jaw in Azikh cave and the carvings in Gobustan were both answers to Armenian claims that Azerbaijanis are latecomers in the land. Similarly, a younger museum guide explained how the findings in Gobustan disprove ‘Armenian propaganda’. She explained to me that:

Many scientists say that this tribe (Gobustan) is not ours. In Armenia, they say it’s their tribe, that the Azeris came from Persia, and they have no connection to Gobustan. This is why parents bring their children here – it’s important to show them that these were their ancestors.

These are just a few examples of a systematic discourse (i.e., Guliyeva 2012; Bayramzadeh and Kazımı 2020). This discourse is not transmitted only in the museum but also by other Azeri institutions. In the official sixth-grade history textbook, for example, 12-year-old school children are requested to write an essay entitled ‘Our national and moral values: Azikh cave under Armenian occupation’ (Əliyev et al. 2017, 13).

Tying Azikh and Gobustan to Armenia and Karabakh is not anecdotal. I argue that the conflict with Armenia is the primary context in which the museum and the narrative of ancestry it implies should be understood, and perhaps even the main reason the old Soviet museum was rebuilt from scratch (2010–11).⁴

The museum in Gobustan seeks to counter Armenian claims of indigeneity and to argue that Azerbaijanis are the indigenous people of the land. Armenian nationalists indeed claim that Azerbaijanis are descendants of Turkic tribes and, therefore, newcomers to the Caucasus, while Armenians are the indigenous nation (Suny 1993b). The new museum in Gobustan serves a political purpose – to prove the Armenians wrong and propagate that it was the Azerbaijanis who were the first people in the land.

Conclusions

This paper contribute to understanding (1) post-Soviet Azerbaijani construction of national identity and collective memory; and more broadly (2) nation-building in the post-Soviet world and conflict-stricken regions.

As the findings show, many Azeris visiting and working in the museum seem to agree, and even take for granted, that the 15 millennium BCE tribesmen of Gobustan were their ancestors. Not all agree on this – ethnic minorities, for example, seem to buy less into the ancestry narrative. However, most of the data collected at Gobustan imply that the ancestry narrative is very prominent among the Azeri visitors, museum staff, and Azeri intellectual elites. This paper also demonstrated the main ‘proof’ Azeris refer to, to support their Gobustani ancestry: so-called cultural links and similarities between Gobustanis and present-day Azeris. Interestingly, most Azeris did not feel obliged to prove the claim that they descended from Gobustani tribesmen – the mere location of the prehistorical sight inside Azerbaijan’s border was sufficient to claim ancestry.

Based on the literature on post-Soviet nationalism, the ancestry narrative and the relative certainty in it, can be attributed to (1) Soviet intellectual relics and (2) the ongoing conflict with Armenia over Karabakh. Regarding intellectual relics, Azerbaijanis seem to hold on to a primordialist thinking about their past. The Soviet version of primordialist historiography, the concept of an ethnic group’s birth story and its cultural and genetic continuity (ethnogenesis) – seem to prevail in post-Soviet Azerbaijan.

The data seem to agree with the analysis of scholars such as Suny (1993b), Shnirelman (1996) and Astourian (1994), who demonstrate how Azerbaijanis, like citizens of some of the other post-Soviet republics, still think of their history through Soviet paradigms. In addition to these Soviet intellectual relics, the conflict over Karabakh intensified the need for Azerbaijanis to prove their antiquity. Since Azeris and Armenians think predominantly through a primordial framework, this conflict led to a battle to establish which of the two nations came earlier in the land. The museum at Gobustan could be seen as part of the Azeri attempt to ‘prove’ that they are the indigenous people in the ground, and Armenians immigrated later. This battle for indigeneity, although exaggerated in the case of the museum of Gobustan, fits Horowitz’s (1985, 201–204) theory about groups in conflict and the battle for legitimacy over disputed territory and the many case studies on mobilized archaeology in conflict regions. The extreme extent of digging into the past could be a unique Caucasian phenomenon – part of what Shnirelman (2001, 149–197) calls ‘the clash of myths’ in the Caucasus, where historians and archaeologists go further and further to the past to prove that their nation is more ancient than their adversary’s.

Eight years after the research was conducted, a bloody war erupted between Azerbaijan and Armenia. I followed the news on different media outlets and felt that foreign reporters and commentators struggled to understand why even the most liberal and progressive Azerbaijanis were so passionate about Karabakh. While Azerbaijan is not the only irredentist country that wishes to one day retrieve its lost territories (Ambrosio 2001), nor the only country with a territorial national identity (i.e., Capello 2019; Batuman 2010; Kolossov 1999), Azerbaijani nationalism, I believe, is unique in its ‘obsession’ about Karabakh. I decided to publish this article after the 2021 war to shed light on what makes Azeri nationalism unique. If academic knowledge can help prevent future wars – I am not sure. However, this is my modest contribution to help understand post-Soviet Azerbaijan and its ‘national psyche’ a bit better.

Acknowledgements

I thank the Gobustan Museum staff for making this research possible, in particular Dr Malahat Farajova, museum director, and the guides Rovshan, Fira, Aslan, Rahman and Turkan, who helped me understand what Gobustan means to them as Azeris. I also thank Professor John Woods, Dr Chen Bram and Dr Turkay Gasimova for advising me and reviewing earlier versions of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the University of Potsdam and Tel Aviv University.

Notes

1 For the drawing, see https://www.azernews.az/nation/198423.html (last accessed May 2023).

2 While the official Azeri history schoolbook is ‘scientific’in its discourse on Gobustan (Əliyev et al. 2017, 18–21), some museum guides told me that there is quite a lot of emphasis on connecting schoolchildren to Gobustan in classrooms. Furthermore, the guides said that school trips to Gobustan and its museum are very common, even from remote areas in Azerbaijan.

3 For example, one guide compared some of the petroglyphs with findings from other Turkic countries such as Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, which he sees as proof that ‘proto-Turks’ (in his words) inhabited not only Azerbaijan but also other Turkic lands.

4 According to older museum guides and Dr Farajova, the museum director, the old Soviet museum was too scientific, focused only on archaeology and overall uninspiring. It was ‘boring’, according to one of the guides who worked in both museums, and did not connect its visitors (especially the children) to the Gobustani dwellers.