Colchis

Colchis, known in Georgian tradition as Egrisi, was a polity on the eastern coast of the Black Sea, centred in what is now western Georgia and including Abkhazia. Its people, the Colchians, are generally regarded as early Zan-speaking tribes ancestral to the modern Laz and Mingrelians, and scholars have described Colchis as the earliest Georgian formation. Greek myth made it the destination of the Argonauts and the home of Medea and the Golden Fleece. The land was famous for gold, iron, timber and honey, which were exported to Greek city-states, and Greek and Roman sources report great linguistic diversity, with dozens or even hundreds of languages said to be spoken in Dioscourias alone. Colchis covered the later Georgian provinces of Samegrelo, Imereti, Guria, Adjara, Svaneti and Racha, as well as parts of modern Russia and Turkey. It was later absorbed into the kingdom of Pontus and then became the Roman and Byzantine province of Lazica.