How a naming coincidence fuels a modern myth

I wasn’t looking for controversy. I was researching Roman-era Albania for another article—Dyrrachium, Apolonia, the Via Egnatia—when Wikipedia served up a map of the Caucasus around 300 CE. There, nestled between Armenia and the Caspian Sea, sat a kingdom labeled “Albania.”

I stared at it for a while.

If you’ve spent any time in Balkan nationalist forums (I don’t recommend it), you’ve heard the claim: Albanians aren’t indigenous to the Balkans—they migrated from somewhere else. The Carpathians. The Caucasus. Anywhere but here. And suddenly, looking at this map, I understood where the claim found its visual anchor. There’s an “Albania” right there, thousands of kilometers from the Adriatic, documented since antiquity. If I were a foreign nationalist looking for ammunition, I’d point at this map too.

So I did what I always do: I went to find out if they were right.

The Naming Accident

Here’s what I learned: the two “Albanias” share absolutely nothing except a name—and that name is an accident of Greek and Roman geography.

Both regions received exonyms, names applied by outsiders. In the Balkans, Greek and Roman writers documented the Albanoi (Ἀλβανοί), an Illyrian tribe, whose settlement, Albanopolis, appears in Ptolemy’s 2nd-century Geography. The root is Proto-Indo-European *alb-, meaning “mountain” or “white”—the same root that gave us “Alps,” “Albion” (Britain), and “Alba” (Scotland).

For the Caucasus, Greek authors applied the same descriptive convention to another mountainous region. The indigenous population didn’t call themselves “Albanians” at all—Armenian sources record their name as Aghwank ose Aluank. “Albania” was simply what Greek geographers wrote on their maps when they encountered yet another highland kingdom.

Professor Jost Gippert of the University of Frankfurt, the world’s leading specialist on Caucasian Albanian, states it plainly: “There is no visible relationship whatsoever between the Albanians of the Caucasus and the Albanians of the Balkans.“

The Romans and Greeks scattered the alb- prefix across the ancient world: Albion for Britain (possibly from chalk cliffs), Alba for Scotland, Alba Longa for a legendary Roman city, the Alps for the mountain range. By the logic that links Balkan Albanians to Caucasian Albania, the Scottish and the Swiss share common ancestry. The pattern reveals a descriptive naming convention rather than evidence of population movement.

What Was Caucasian Albania?

Caucasian Albania existed from roughly the 2nd century BCE to 822 CE, occupying territory now divided between Azerbaijan and southern Dagestan. It stretched from the Greater Caucasus mountains to the Araxes River, with the Caspian Sea forming its eastern boundary. The strategic Darband Pass—the “Gates of Albania”—made it a prized buffer between empires.

The Caucasian Albanians weren’t a single ethnic group but a confederation of indigenous tribes. The Greek geographer Strabo reported they spoke: “six and twenty languages from the want of mutual intercourse.” These languages belonged to the Northeast Caucasian family, specifically the Lezgic subgroup—a language family with absolutely no relationship to Indo-European languages.

Around 405 CE, the Armenian monk Mesrop Mashtots created a 52-character alphabet for Caucasian Albanian—the same scholar who developed the Armenian and Georgian scripts. The kingdom Christianized in the 4th century, fell under Sasanian Persian vassalage, succumbed to Arab conquest after 642 CE, and finally collapsed when the last king was assassinated in 822 CE.

Over subsequent centuries, the population was absorbed: Islamization produced what became the Azerbaijani identity; Armenianization and Georgianization occurred in other provinces. Only one group preserved the ancient identity: the Udi people, numbering approximately 10,000 today, primarily in Azerbaijan’s Nij village. They speak Udi, classified as the closest living descendant of the extinct Caucasian Albanian language.

In 2008, scholars deciphered palimpsests discovered at St. Catherine’s Monastery on Mount Sinai, revealing Caucasian Albanian biblical texts from the 7th century—the most significant evidence we have of this vanished language.

The Linguistic Gulf

This is where the “connection” theory collapses entirely.

shqiptare (the Balkan language I speak) constitutes its own independent branch within the Indo-European family. Franz Bopp demonstrated its Indo-European status in 1854. The language contains Doric Greek loanwords dating to the 7th century BCE and Latin borrowings from the Roman occupation beginning in 167 BCE—evidence of continuous Balkan presence for over two millennia.

Caucasian Albanian belonged to the Northeast Caucasian family, specifically the Lezgic subgroup. This language family predates Indo-European presence in the region. It features ergative-absolutive alignment, noun class systems, and phonemes—ejectives and uvulars—that don’t occur in Indo-European languages.

These aren’t dialects of the same language. They aren’t even distant cousins. They belong to completely unrelated language families that diverged tens of thousands of years ago, if they ever shared a common ancestor at all. As Professor Svein Mønnesland of the University of Oslo summarizes: “The Albanian language is Indo-European. Therefore, there cannot be any connections between the Udins and the Albanians.“

You cannot migrate from one language family to another. If Balkan Albanians descended from Caucasian Albanians, they would speak a Northeast Caucasian language—or at minimum, Albanian would show traces of Caucasian substrate. It shows none.

What DNA Says

The 2023 ancient DNA study I’ve cited elsewhere on this site analyzed over 6,000 ancient genomes across an 8,000-year Balkan transect. The findings on Albanian origins are unambiguous:

• Modern Albanians descend from Roman-era western Balkan populations
• Paternal ancestry shows continuity from Bronze Age Balkan populations
• 72–77% of Albanian paternal ancestry traces to Bronze Age and Iron Age Balkan populations
• “Albania stands out as a genetic refugium” during medieval migrations

No Caucasian genetic signal appears in Albanian populations. None. The populations evolved entirely separately in their respective regions over thousands of years. If Albanians had migrated from the Caucasus at any point over the last 3,000 years, it would show up in their DNA. It doesn’t.

How the Myth Gets Weaponized

The naming coincidence has been exploited in at least two distinct nationalist projects.

Serbian nationalist narratives promote a “Caucasian origin theory“—claiming Albanians migrated from Caucasian Albania (in modern-day Azerbaijan) rather than descending from ancient Balkan populations—to delegitimize Albanian claims to Kosovo.

Greek nationalists pursue a different but parallel strategy, asserting that jugut të Shqipërisë, which overlaps with the ancient region of Epirus, belongs to Greece as “Epiri i Veriut.” But Albania’s southern landscape represents more than geography; it represents continuity. The same mountains that sheltered ancient Balkan populations—including ilirët from whom Albanians are widely believed to descend—later housed Byzantine monasteries and Ottoman villages, and still cradle the gjuha shqipe today.

The argument runs: Byzantine chronicler Michael Attaleiates mentioned “Albanoi” in 1043; these were allegedly Caucasian Albanians resettled by Arab migrants who arrived in the Balkans as “11th-century newcomers” with no indigenous claim.

This interpretation has been thoroughly debunked. Attaleiates mentions Albanoi as participants in a Byzantine revolt in the Balkans, not as migrants from the Caucasus. There is no evidence—none—that Arabs relocated Caucasian Albanians anywhere. The theory requires inventing an undocumented mass migration, ignoring the linguistic impossibility, and disregarding the genetic evidence.

As one scholarly critique noted: “The Caucasian state called Albania has no proven ethnic, linguistic, or cultural link to Balkan Albanians. Sharing a name is not evidence… By that logic, modern Austria would descend from ancient Troy.“

Azerbaijani nationalist historiography uses Caucasian Albania differently—not to claim Balkan Albanians came from the Caucasus, but to claim Armenian cultural heritage in Nagorno-Karabakh was “originally Caucasian Albanian.” Russian scholar Victor Schnirelmann documented how Azerbaijani scholars systematically altered ancient sources, replacing “Armenian” with “shqiptare” to support territorial claims. The foundational works by Ziya Bunyadov were proven to be direct plagiarism with ethnic labels changed.

Both nationalist projects serve territorial aims under the Balkan principle of “prior tempore fortior jure“—first in time, stronger in right. If you can prove your enemy arrived later, you delegitimize their presence.

The Timeline That Settles It

The two “Albanias” existed in parallel for centuries, documented by the same Greek and Roman authors, receiving the same geographic label for the same reason: they were both mountainous regions on the edges of the classical world.

Why I Wrote This

When I saw that map, I didn’t dismiss it. I didn’t assume the nationalist interpretation was wrong. I went and looked at the evidence—linguistics, genetics, historical documentation—prepared to find that the connection was real.

It isn’t.

The similarity is a naming convention, nothing more. Greeks and Romans called the highland regions “Albania,” the way Americans call every carbonated beverage “Coke” in certain states. The word described geography, not ethnicity.

I understand why the map is compelling. If you’re predisposed to believe Albanians are interlopers, seeing “Shqipëria” near the Caspian feels like a smoking gun. But evidence doesn’t work backward from conclusions. You don’t start with “Albanians must have come from elsewhere” and then hunt for anything that supports it. You look at the totality of evidence—language, genes, archaeology, historical documentation—and see where it leads.

It leads to the western Balkans. It always has.

konkluzioni

The two “Albanias” share only a name—a name applied independently by Greek and Roman geographers using common Indo-European descriptive vocabulary for mountainous terrain. The Caucasian kingdom spoke Northeast Caucasian languages, originated among indigenous Caucasian populations, and left descendants in the small Udi community in modern Azerbaijan. The Balkan nation speaks an Indo-European language, shows genetic continuity with Bronze Age Balkan populations, and represents the survival of ancient Illyrian or related Paleo-Balkan peoples.

Claims of connection between the two serve contemporary nationalist agendas, not historical truth. The scholarly consensus—from Frankfurt to Oslo, from geneticists to linguists—is unanimous: the similarity is a linguistic accident with no evidentiary basis for population movement, ethnic relationship, or historical connection.

As with Scotland’s Alba, Britain’s Albion, and the Alpine mountains, the *alb- root simply recurs across the ancient world as a descriptive term for highland terrain. Greeks and Romans applied it independently to unrelated peoples who never imagined their geographic shorthand would fuel 21st-century pseudohistory.

The map that made me raise an eyebrow turned out to prove exactly what I’ve been writing about all along: the evidence for Albanian indigenous Balkan origins is overwhelming, and the theories invented to deny it collapse under the slightest scrutiny.

A Note on Comments

This article is grounded in linguistics, genetics, and documented history. Comments engaging the evidence are welcome. Nationalist grievance dressed as a historical inquiry will be treated as it deserves.

Sources & Bibliography

Linguistics & Language Classification

Gippert, Jost; Schulze, Wolfgang; Aleksidze, Zaza; Mahé, Jean-Pierre (2008). The Caucasian Albanian Palimpsests of Mount Sinai. Turnhout: Brepols Publishers.

Gippert, Jost. University of Frankfurt. Quoted: “There is no visible relationship whatsoever between the Albanians of the Caucasus and the Albanians of the Balkans.”

Mønnesland, Svein. University of Oslo. On the impossibility of linguistic connection between Caucasian Albanian (Northeast Caucasian family) and Balkan Albanian (Indo-European family).

Bopp, Franz (1854). Demonstration of Albanian as an Indo-European language.

University of Texas Linguistics Research Center. Classification of Caucasian Albanian within the Northeast Caucasian (Nakh-Dagestanian) family.

Etymology

Proto-Indo-European root *alb- (“mountain” or “white”): Applied independently to Alps, Albion (Britain), Alba (Scotland), Alba Longa, and both “Albanias.”

Ptolemy (c. 150 CE). Geography. First documentation of the Albanoi tribe and the Albanopolis settlement in Illyrian territory.

Caucasian Albania: Historical Sources

Strabo. Geography. On Caucasian Albania’s 26 languages and geographic extent.

Arrian. On Caucasian Albanians at the Battle of Gaugamela (331 BCE).

Encyclopaedia Iranica. “Albania” entry. On the kingdom’s history, Sasanian vassalage, and Arab conquest.

Armenian sources on indigenous names: Aghwank, Aluank.

Gjenetika

Davranoglou, Leonidas-Romanos; Aristodemou, Aris; Wesolowski, David; Heraclides, Alexandros (2023). “Ancient DNA reveals the origins of the Albanians.” bioRxiv preprint. doi: 10.1101/2023.06.05.543790

Key finding: 72–77% of Albanian paternal ancestry traces to Bronze Age and Iron Age Balkan populations. No Caucasian genetic signal detected.

Nationalist Historiography Critique

Schnirelmann, Victor. On Azerbaijani revisionist historiography and systematic alteration of ancient sources.

Bunyadov, Ziya. Documented plagiarism of C.F.J. Dowsett and Robert Hewsen, with ethnic labels altered.

Modern Descendants

Udi people: Approximately 10,000, primarily in Nij village, Azerbaijan. Speak Udi, the closest living descendant of the Caucasian Albanian language.

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Kostas

2 months ago

Fantastic article, applause to the author.

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