The Kaska (also Kaška, later Tabalian Kasku[1] and Gasga[2]) were a loosely affiliated Bronze Age non-Indo-European[3] tribal people, who spoke the unclassified Kaskian language and lived in mountainous East Pontic Anatolia, known from Hittite sources.
[citation needed] The Kaska first appear in the Hittite prayer inscriptions that date from the reign of Hantili II, c. 1450 BC, and make references to their movement into the ruins of the holy city of Nerik.
"[7] His successor Arnuwanda I composed a prayer for the gods to return Nerik to the empire; he also mentioned Kammama and Zalpuwa as cities which he claimed had been Hittite but which were now under the Kaskas.
In the Amarna letters, Amenhotep III wrote to the Arzawan king Tarhunta-Radu that the "country Hattusa" was obliterated, and further asked for Arzawa to send him some of these Kaska people of whom he had heard.
When the Kaska were not raiding or serving as mercenaries, they raised pigs and wove linen,[9] leaving scarcely any imprint on the permanent landscape.
[11] In the time of ailing Arnuwanda II (around 1323 BC), the Hittites worried that the Kaskas from Ishupitta within the kingdom to Kammama without might take advantage of the plague in Hatti.
Muwatalli stopped enlisting Kaska as troops; he moved his capital to Tarhuntassa to the south; and he appointed his brother, the future Hattusili III, as governor over the northern marches.
The Assyrian king Tiglath-Pileser I recorded late in the 12th century BC that the Kaska (whom he referred to as "Apishlu") and their Mushki and Urumu (Urumeans) allies were active in what had been the Hatti heartland.
[citation needed] Repulsed by the Assyrians, a subdivision of the Kaska might have passed north-eastwards to the Caucasus, where they probably blended with the Proto-Colchian or Zan autochthons, forming a polity which was known as the Kolkha to the Urartians and later as the Colchis to the Greeks.