Special Topics
Two worlds Nurida Ateshi keeps returning to
Within her wider scholarship, two subjects run like threads through Nurida Ateshi’s work: the armed women of Caucasian antiquity, and the Baku-born writer Kurban Said. Both have been the subject of her own years-long research.
Antiquity · Archaeology
The Caucasian Amazons
Were the warrior women of legend only a myth — or do the graves of the Caucasus say otherwise?
Ancient Greek writers placed the Amazons — a people of warrior women — again and again near the Caucasus and the Black Sea; Herodotus linked them to the Sauromatians, ancestors of the Sarmatians. For a long time this was read as pure legend.
Modern archaeology changed the picture: graves of women buried with bows, arrows and horses were found in steppe kurgans. Nurida Ateshi carried this research into the Caucasus itself, documenting and identifying — on the basis of archaeological finds — armed women in Late Bronze and Early Iron Age graves, and petroglyphs of warrior women.
This work is gathered in the book “Kafkas amazonları” (AMEA, 2011) and in numerous scholarly articles; she is herself known as the “Caucasian Amazon”. You can download her Amazon books as PDFs below.
Amazon books (PDF)
Literature · Biography
Essad Bey / Kurban Said
One of the most enigmatic literary figures from Baku — and Nurida Ateshi’s years of archival research.
Born Lev Nussimbaum in 1905 in oil-boom Baku, he converted to Islam and took the name Mohammed Essad Bey. Under that name he wrote non-fiction in German; under a second pen name, Kurban Said, appeared the novel “Ali and Nino” (Vienna, 1937). He died in Positano, Italy, in 1942.
The authorship of “Ali and Nino” is debated: some scholars identify Kurban Said with Essad Bey, while others point to the writer Yusif Vazir Chamanzaminli.
Between 2005 and 2011 Nurida Ateshi gathered Essad Bey’s archival papers from Germany, Austria, France, Italy, Switzerland and Georgia and published many for the first time; this research came together in the book “Essad Bey, secrets of the century” (Nurlan, Baku 2007).
These pages will grow with essays, sources and images as the research develops.
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Open to lectures, collaborations and media on the Caucasian Amazons and the world of Kurban Said.