Despite the ongoing debates over the borders of Europe, most of the scholars tend to consider the region to be the south-eastern angle of Europe. Transcaucasus has borders with Turkey and Iran in the South and Russia in the North and is surrounded with Black Sea from the West and Caspian Sea from the East. Nagorno Karabakh (in Armenian--Artsakh) is a mixture of the Russian word Nagorno, which means mountainous, and the Turkish-Persian word Karabakh, which means black garden. It is an ancient Armenian land located in the northeastern part of the Armenia plateau. The relief of Karabakh includes mountains and valleys, extending from the northwest, including the mountains to the east of Lake Sevan (in Armenia) to the southeast, reaching the Arax River on the border of Iran. Historically, the geographic area of Nagorno Karabakh was 12,000-13,000 square kilometers. Its nature is multifarious and very beautiful.
However, the three nations speak totally different languages. Azerbaijani belongs to the Turkic group of the Altay linguistic family, Georgian is one of the Caucasian languages, while Armenian constitutes a separate tongue within the Indo-European family. The Azeris are Muslim, the overwhelming majority of which is Shiite, although there are few Sunnis in the North. The Armenians and Georgians are Orthodox with their religious centers in Echmiadzin and Tbilisi. In the same time, Transcaucasus immediate neighbours, Iran and Turkey, are also Muslim countries. Russia, the only Northern neighbour of Transcaucasia is Christian country. .
First settlers in Transcaucasus were appeared more than fifty thousands years ago and the first colonies in this region dated from the fifth millennium B.C. In recent study of ancient times (Suny, 1996) this region was homeland for humans since the early Stone Age. However, an asserted political unite in Transcaucasus was dated in the post-Hittite period at the end of the second millennium B.
