GEORGIAN LITERATURE. The earliest extant Georg ian literature dates from soon after the conversion of Georgia by St. Nino, early in the 4th century, and the oldest mss. known are biblical, liturgical and hagiological; all of great value. They show a stage of linguistic development, a wealth of words and grammatical forms which prove that the language must already have had an ancient literary history. There were early trans lators of the Greek classical authors, and one of these says, in a preface, that he has endeavoured to give so exact a rendering of the text that he has converted philosophical terms syllable by syllable, a method which has endowed Georgia, from the 12th century, with a metaphysical terminology of great exactitude. The folk-lore (cf. vol. i. of the Grimm library, London, 1894) is of deep interest for comparative purposes, and its views of the under-world may throw light on the religions of Egypt and Assyria. One folk-tale, Et'heriani, in prose and verse, the theme of which has been used for a successful opera in our own day, evidently assumed a literary form before the Christian era, and there is reason to believe that this may also be the case with the cycle of poems about Tariel, the hero of the greatest masterpiece of Georgian literature, attributed to Shot'ha Rust'haveli, an epic of over I,so° rhyming quatrains written in the reign of Queen T'hamar (I . This has been rendered into English prose (The Man in the Panther's Skin, a Romantic Epic, Roy. Asiat.
Soc., 1911), and it gives Georgia a high place in the literature of the world. The T'hamarian age has also left us a large number of odes of great rhythmic variety, full of allusions to Greek and oriental writers, and translations or adaptations of foreign works, such as the Story of the Loves of Vis and Ramin (Visramiani, Eng. trans. published by Roy. Asiat. Soc., 1914), a romance of ancient Persia. Persian influence in Georgian literature was strong in the 17th century, and among the poets may be mentioned King T'heimuraz I. (lyrics and translations). In the i8th century a revival of nationalism was aided by the founding of a printing press at Tiflis, where, in 1712, King Vakhtang VI. published, with an elaborate commentary, the work of Rust'haveli; he also piled a Code of Laws in which the ancient customary laws are of special interest. Of this period also are compilations on the tory and geography of Georgia (by Prince Vakhusht), both texts with a vast amount of other ter, published and translated by M. F. Brosset, by far the est, as he was the first, of ern students of the literature. A great name is that of Prince han Orbeliani who in 1714 was Georgian envoy at Versailles. He kept a diary of his travels in Europe (partial French and Latin trans. in Journ. Asiat., Paris, 1832 and , and among his published works are a valuable dictionary of the language (Tiflis, 1884), and a rhymed translation of parts of the Persian Anvar-i-Suhaili. His Book of Wisdom and Lies (Eng.
trans., 1894) is, after Rust'haveli, the most popular of Georgian books ; in the form of interwoven apologues it highly recommends a sporting and Spartan education. In the early part of the 19th cen tury the influence of Europe grew, and in the lyrics of A. Chav chavadze (1786-1846) and N. Barat'hashvili (1816-46) there is a Byronic strain, but G. Erist 'havi the first dramatist and founder of the national theatre, who translated poems of Petrarch, Schiller, Mickiewicz and others, had a steadying effect. The oppres sion of an alien rule (Russia, since 18o i) inspired the patriotic verse of G. Orbeliani (1801-23) and Ilia Chavchavadze (1837-1907), who was the greatest Georgian of his generation in all branches of literature and public life. Acaci Tseret'heli (1840--I 9 I 5) was the popular lyric poet of the century. I. Machabeli and D. Qiphiani translated Shakespeare into Geor gian.