Rutuls - History and Cultural Relations

The early history of the Rutuls is bound up with that of Caucasian Albania, within whose territory the people of Daghestan, including the Rutuls, were subsumed under the general name "country of the Gels" (with a hard G). After Albania was conquered by Iran, the Rutuls and other Daghestani peoples formed a sovereign state. The local chronicle Akhtï Nameh contains an eighth-century account of the united forces "of the Emirs of Tars, Rutul, Jinikh, and Rufuk" setting out against the Khazars. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries there are reports of attacks by Rutuls, along with Turks and Laks, against the neighboring Tsakhurs and Lezgins. In the sixteenth century Rutul was ruled by a khan and begs (nobles) and maintained diplomatic relations with the governments of the neighboring countries. At the same time there was a Rutul mahal (free society, a kind of microrepublic) that politically united a sizable number of the Rutuls. In 1812 the Rutuls, together with other free Samurian societies, were annexed to Russia and formed a Rutul-chay association that united eighteen Rutul settlements and became part of the so-called Samur Province. Since the 1860s, after the end of the Caucasus Wars, the territory of the Rutuls was governed by a naib (a Muslim ruler belonging to a Sufi sect) who was appointed from the begs and subordinated to the chief of the Samur District.