[6] On the southern side, the Lesser Caucasus includes the Javakheti Plateau and the Armenian highlands, part of which is in Turkey.

The Greater Caucasus mountain range in the north is mostly shared by Russia and Georgia as well as the northernmost parts of Azerbaijan.

The Lesser Caucasus mountain range in the south is occupied by several independent states, mostly by Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, but also extends to parts of northeastern Turkey, and northern Iran.

[14]In the Tale of Past Years (1113 AD), it is stated that Old East Slavic Кавкасийскыѣ горы (Kavkasijskyě gory) came from Ancient Greek Καύκασος (Kaúkasos),[15] which, according to M. A. Yuyukin, is a compound word that can be interpreted as the 'mountain of the seagull(s)' (καύ-: καύαξ, καύηξ, -ηκος, κήξ, κηϋξ 'a kind of seagull' + the reconstructed *κάσος 'mountain' or 'rock' richly attested both in place and personal names).

[17][18] According to German philologists Otto Schrader and Alfons A. Nehring, the Ancient Greek word Καύκασος (Kaukasos) is connected to Gothic hauhs 'high' as well as Lithuanian kaũkas 'hillock' and kaukarà 'hill, top', Russian куча 'heap'.

[22] The Transcaucasus region and Dagestan were the furthest points of Parthian and later Sasanian expansions, with areas to the north of the Greater Caucasus range practically impregnable.

The mythological Mount Qaf, the world's highest mountain that ancient Iranian lore shrouded in mystery, was said to be situated in this region.

[23] The term resurfaced in Iranian tradition later on in a variant form when Ferdowsi, in his Shahnameh, referred to the Caucasus mountains as Kōh-i Kāf.

[23] "The earliest etymon" of the name Caucasus comes from Kaz-kaz, the Hittite designation of the "inhabitants of the southern coast of the Black Sea".

The watershed along the Greater Caucasus range is considered by some sources to be the dividing line between Europe and Southwest Asia.

Located on the peripheries of Turkey, Iran, and Russia, the region has been an arena for political, military, religious, and cultural rivalries and expansionism for centuries.

In 1991, early Hominini fossils dating back 1.8 million years were found at the Dmanisi archaeological site in Georgia.

[32] The site yields the earliest unequivocal evidence for the presence of early humans outside the African continent;[33] and the Dmanisi skulls are the five oldest hominins ever found outside Africa.

The Romans first arrived in the region in the 1st century BC with the annexation of the kingdom of Colchis, which was later turned into the province of Lazicum.

[36] In the 10th century, the Alans (proto-Ossetians)[37] founded the Kingdom of Alania, that flourished in the Northern Caucasus, roughly in the location of latter-day Circassia and modern North Ossetia–Alania, until its destruction by the Mongol invasion in 1238–39.

[38] In the 12th century, the Georgian king David the Builder drove the Muslims out of the Caucasus and made the Kingdom of Georgia a strong regional power.

[39] In the ensuing years after these gains, the Russians took the remaining part of the Southern Caucasus, comprising western Georgia, through several wars from the Ottoman Empire.

In the aftermath of the Caucasian Wars, the Russian military perpetrated an ethnic cleansing of Circassians, expelling this indigenous population from its homeland.

[46] In the 1940s, around 480,000 Chechens and Ingush, 120,000 Karachay–Balkars and Meskhetian Turks, thousands of Kalmyks, and 200,000 Kurds in Nakchivan and Caucasus Germans were deported en masse to Central Asia and Siberia by the Soviet security apparatus.

[citation needed] The Roman poet Ovid placed the Caucasus in Scythia and depicted it as a cold and stony mountain which was the abode of personified hunger.

The Greek hero Jason sailed to the west coast of the Caucasus in pursuit of the Golden Fleece, and there met Medea, a daughter of King Aeëtes of Colchis.

[49] This tradition has been preserved orally—necessitated by the fact that for most of the languages involved, there was no alphabet until the early twentieth century—and only began to be written down in the late nineteenth century.

These sagas include such figures as Satanaya, the mother of the Narts, Sosruquo a shape changer and trickster, Tlepsh a blacksmith god, and Batradz, a mighty hero.

[55] In these stories, the giant is almost always a shepherd,[56] and he is variously a one-eyed rock-throwing cannibal, who lives in a cave (the exit of which is often blocked by a stone), kills the hero's companions, is blinded by a hot stake, and whose flock of animals is stolen by the hero and his men, all motifs which (along with still others) are also found in the Polyphemus story.

[68] Its wildlife includes Persian leopards, brown bears, wolves, bison, marals, golden eagles and hooded crows.

[70] The region has a high level of endemism and several relict animals and plants, the fact reflecting the presence of refugial forests, which survived the Ice Age in the Caucasus Mountains.

[71][72] The area has multiple representatives of disjunct relict groups of plants with the closest relatives in Eastern Asia, southern Europe, and even North America.