The first to mention the Apsils was the well known Roman historian Pliny the Elder, who died while attempting to save people during the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE.

In 137 CE they were described by the Roman official, legate, Flavius Arrian, who visited, on behalf of Emperor Hadrian, the military base at Sebastopolis. The Apsils at that time lived to the north of the Laz and had a “king” named Julian, who had received the insignia of royal authority from Emperor Trajan, who ruled from 98 to 117 CE.

The Misimians entered the historical record in the sixth century CE in connection with their uprising against the Byzantines. Had this event not occurred, we would know nothing about them.

The Misimians formed part of the Apsilian union. They inhabited the foothill and mountainous zones, occupying the territory between the Kodor and Ingur rivers. To the west, they bordered the Apsilians in the area of Apsilia’s principal fortress, Tsibili. To the east, the boundary with the Laz passed near the Misimian fortress of Bukhlon (modern Pakhulan) on the Ingur. Both the cause of the revolt and the events themselves are vividly described by the Byzantine historian Agathias, who continued the narrative of Procopius.

Naala Kaslandzia
A historian specialising in mediaeval Abkhazia. She graduated with distinction from Abkhaz State University and has served at both the Dmitri Gulia Abkhaz Institute for Humanitarian Studies and Abkhaz State University, where she is currently Associate Professor. She defended her candidate thesis in 2017 and her doctoral dissertation in 2024 on the women of the ruling elite of the Abkhazian Kingdom. A laureate of the Georgi Dzidzaria State Prize in Science, she is the author of more than forty-five scholarly publications.

Abkhazian Institute for Humanitarian Studies named after D. I. Gulia,
Apsuattsaara / Abkhazovedenie: Archaeology, History, Ethnology, vol. XI.
Sukhum: AbIGI, 2018, pp. 41–48.

‘The surge of interest in the “woman in history”, observed in contemporary medieval studies, is partly due to the growing prominence of social-cultural history, historical anthropology and the “history of mentalities”, which open up new horizons for perceiving and understanding the human person’.[1]

Mediaeval authors paid little attention to their female contemporaries. Women who were deemed worthy of mention in written sources generally appeared only in connection with significant political events. Naturally, such references concerned women of the highest social rank.

Ruslan Aguazhba is an Abkhaz historian and publicist known for his research on the Abkhaz diaspora and the modern history of Abkhazia. He graduated from the Maxim Gorky Literary Institute in Moscow and later served in the Soviet Navy. From 1975 he worked in the Abkhaz State Museum and subsequently as a researcher at the Dmitri Gulia Abkhaz Institute for Humanities, specialising in source studies and the nineteenth–twentieth century history of Abkhazia, with a particular focus on the Abkhaz diaspora in Türkiye, Syria, Jordan, and Europe. Aguazhba played an active role in the national liberation movement and was involved in the activities of the organisation Aidgylara, established in 1988. He is the author and co-author of several works on Abkhaz history, diaspora studies, and folklore.