Criticism and bibliography. Reviews Makhachkala: Publishing house. "Epoch". 2004. 149 p. As you know, the Republic of Dagestan is a Muslim region. According to statistics, every second mosque operating in Russia is located in Dagestan. However, in the medieval period of its history, Dagestan was predominantly Christian. The Christian kingdom was Caucasian Albania, which included the lands of Southern Dagestan. Christian was the medieval Avar kingdom of Sarir, whose center was in Khunzakh. In the period of its heyday, Sarir included, according to the well-known Byzantinist D. Obolensky, in the "Byzantine Commonwealth of Nations" - a union of Eastern Christian countries, patronized by the Byzantine Empire. Sarir had even closer ties with Georgia: it is no coincidence that the first inscriptions in the Avar language were made in the Georgian script. Subsequently, the Avars were Islamized, and it seems that the Avars ' commitment to monotheistic values is largely due to the long-term, more than a thousand-year existence of world monotheistic religions on the Avar land. The book under review is devoted to a very interesting and relatively little-researched period in the history of medieval Russia. Based on a thorough analysis of numerous literary and material sources, primarily archaeological, collected by more than one generation of researchers of Dagestan, it successfully fills an important gap in the study of the history of this region. The first chapter of the book is devoted to the political history of the early Medieval Accident (VII-XII centuries) and the penetration of Christianity there. P. I. Tahnaeva first gives a historical and geographical description of the Accident in the early Middle Ages, defines the geographical boundaries of the kingdom of Sarir, which included the main Avar lands. The author rightly notes that "the modern geography of Avar settlement (Dzharo-Belokany, Salatavia) and historical geography do not coincide geographically; a significant t ... Read more