page_title: Mushki
section_title: Biblical Meshech
hierarchical_section_title: Mushki / Biblical Meshech
caption_attribution_description: English: The World as known to the Hebrews. A map from Historical Textbook and Atlas of Biblical Geography (1854) by Lyman Coleman
context_page_description: The Mushki were an Iron Age people of Anatolia who appear in sources from Assyria but not from the Hittites. Several authors have connected them with the Moschoi of Greek sources and the Georgian tribe of the Meskhi. Josephus Flavius identified the Moschoi with the Biblical Meshech. Two different groups are called Muški in Assyrian sources, one from the 12th to the 9th centuries BCE near the confluence of the Arsanias and the Euphrates and the other from the 8th to the 7th centuries BCE in Cappadocia and Cilicia. Earlier Assyrian sources clearly identify the Western Mushki with the Phrygians, but later Greek sources then distinguish between the Phrygians and the Moschoi.
  Identification of the Eastern Mushki with the Western Mushki is uncertain, but it is possible that at least some of the Eastern Mushki migrated to Cilicia in the 10th to the 8th centuries BCE. Although almost nothing is known about what language the Eastern or Western Mushki spoke, they have been variously identified as being speakers of a Phrygian, Armenian, Anatolian, or Georgian language.
context_section_description: Josephus Flavius identified the  Cappadocian Moschoi with the Biblical Japhetic tribe descended from Meshech in his writings on the Genealogy of the Nations in Genesis 10, while Hippolytus of Rome connected Meshech with Illyrians.   Meshech is named with  Tubal as a principality of the prince of Gog and Magog in Ezekiel 38:2 and 39:1.
caption: "The World as known to the Hebrews", a  map from the Historical Textbook and Atlas of Biblical Geography  by Coleman (1854) locates the Mesech together with Gog and Magog in the southern Caucasus.
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