- "The World as known to the Hebrews", a map from the Historical Textbook and Atlas of Biblical Geography by Coleman (1854) locates Meshech together with Gog and Magog in the southern Caucasus.
Moschians — a powerful tribal union located in the southern mountainous region of Colchis (in modern Adjara). They are identified with the Tibareni, Mushki, and Meskhi. The Mushki (Hebrew Meshech or, better, Moshech) are mentioned by Urartian and ancient Hebrew sources in Asia Minor, west of the Cilician Taurus, and by Assyrian sources — also in the valley of the upper Euphrates and in the region between the lower course of the Aratsani River and the Sasun Mountains.
Hecataeus of Miletus (c. 550–476 BC) writes about the Moschi as "Colchians" who lived next to the Matieni (Hurrians). According to Herodotus, the armament of the Moschi resembled that of the Tibareni, Macrones, Mossynoeci, and Amardi: they wore wooden headdresses, had shields and short spears with long tips. All these tribes were part of the 19th satrapy of the Achaemenid Empire, located in the southeast of the Pontus Euxinus, i.e., the Black Sea, and bounded on the south by the high Armenian Highlands. Strabo places the Moschi in two locations. The first was approximately on the territory of modern Abkhazia, on the eastern coast of the Black Sea, which corresponds to the statement of Stephanus of Byzantium, who quoted Hellanicus. The second, "Moschike" (Moschikê), where the temple of Leucothea was located, once famous for its wealth but plundered by Pharnaces II and Mithridates VI, was divided between the Colchians, Armenians, and Iberians (cf. Pomponius Mela, III. 5.4; Pliny the Elder VI.4.). These latter Moschi probably corresponded to the inhabitants of Meskheti. Procopius of Caesarea calls the local inhabitants Meschoi and considers them subjects of the Iberians, professing Christianity like the Iberians themselves. Pliny the Elder in the 1st century AD mentions the tribe of the Moscheni in the south of Armenia (in his time, Greater Armenia extended south, west, and east from the modern borders of Armenia to the Mediterranean Sea and bordered Cappadocia). In Byzantine historiography, the name "Moschi" (Moschoi) was equivalent to the name of the ancestors of the "Cappadocians" (Eusebius), whose capital was the city of Mazaca (later Caesarea Mazaca, now Kayseri).
The movement of one of the major haplogroups for the Western Caucasus according to "Theorized origins of G2a2b1a. Kandell 2009": [G2a2b1] -> [Iraqi Kurds, Armenians, Eastern Turkey] -> [Eastern Anatolian group, Hurrians, Lake Van area] -> [Urartu] -> [Moschi / Meskhi] -> [Transcaucasia before Greek colonizations of 650 BC] [haplogroup names have been changed to their current classification]
VARIANT NAMES: Russian. Moski, Moskheny, Meskhi, Moshikiki, Mushki, Latin. Moschi, Mosci, Moscheni, Greek. Μοσχοι, Μεσχοι, Μοσχικαι.
Sources:
Ethnogenesis of the Abkhazians. D.A. Arshba, 2015