The Chechens, historically also known as Kisti and Durdzuks, are a Northeast Caucasian ethnic group of the Nakh peoples native to the North Caucasus. They are the largest ethnic group in the region and refer to themselves as Nokhchiy. The vast majority of Chechens are Muslims and live in Chechnya, an autonomous republic within the Russian Federation.
The North Caucasus region has been invaded numerous times throughout history. Its isolated terrain and the strategic value outsiders have placed on the areas settled by Chechens has contributed much to the Chechen community ethos and helped shape its national character.
Chechen society is largely egalitarian and organized around tribal autonomous local clans, called teips, informally organized into loose confederations called tukkhums.
According to popular tradition, the Russian term Chechency (Чеченцы) comes from central Chechnya, which had several important villages and towns named after the word Chechen. These places include Chechan, Nana-Checha ('Mother Checha') and Yokkh Chechen ('Greater Chechena'). The name Chechen occurs in Russian sources in the late 16th century as "Chachana", which is mentioned as a land owned by the Chechen prince Shikh Murza. Its etymology is of Nakh origin and derives from the word che ('inside') attached to the suffix -cha(n); the word Chechen can thus be translated as 'inside territory'. The villages and towns named Chechan were always situated in the Chechen plains (Chechan-are) located in contemporary central Chechnya.
The name "Chechens" is an exoethnonym that entered the Georgian and Western European ethnonymic tradition through the Russian language in the 18th century.
From the middle of the 19th century to the first years of the Soviet state, some researchers grouped all Chechens and Ingush under the name "Chechens". In modern scholarship, another term is used for this community: the Vainakh.
Although Chechan (Chechen) was a term used by Chechens to denote a certain geographic area (central Chechnya), Chechens called themselves Nakhchiy (highland dialects) or Nokhchiy (lowland dialects). The oldest mention of Nakhchiy occurred in 1310 by the Georgian Patriarch Cyril Donauri, who mentions the 'People of Nakhche' among Tushetians, Avars and many other Northeast Caucasian nations. The term Nakhchiy has also been connected to the city Nakhchivan and the nation of Nakhchamatyan (mentioned as one of the peoples of Sarmatia in the 7th-century Armenian work Ashkharhatsuyts) by many Soviet and modern historians, although the historian N. Volkova considers the latter connection unlikely and states that the term Nakhchmatyan could have been mistaken for the Iaxamatae, a tribe of Sarmatia mentioned in Ptolemy's Geography, who have no connection to the Chechen people. Chechen manuscripts in Arabic from the early 1820s do mention a certain Nakhchuvan (near modern-day Kağızman, Turkey) as the homeland of all Nakhchiy. The etymology of the term Nakhchiy can also be understood as a compound formed with nakh ('people') attached to chö ('territory, room').
The Chechens are mainly inhabitants of Chechnya. There are also significant Chechen populations in other subdivisions of Russia, especially in Aukh (part of modern-day Dagestan), Ingushetia and Moscow.
Outside Russia, countries with significant diaspora populations are Kazakhstan, Turkey and Arab states (especially Jordan and Iraq). Those in Turkey, Iraq, and Jordan are mainly descendants of families who had to leave Chechnya during the Caucasus War, which led to the annexation of Chechnya by the Russian Empire in 1859, and the forcible transfer of Chechens from Terek Oblast to the Ottoman Empire in 1865. Those in Kazakhstan originate from the ethnic cleansing of the entire population carried out by Joseph Stalin and Lavrentiy Beria in 1944. Tens of thousands of Chechen refugees settled in the European Union and elsewhere as the result of the recent Chechen Wars, especially in the wave of emigration to the West after 2002.
The Chechens are one of the Nakh peoples, who have lived in the highlands of the North Caucasus region since prehistory. There is archeological evidence of historical continuity dating back to 3000 B.C. as well as evidence pointing to their ancestors' migration from the Fertile Crescent c. 10,000–8,000 B.C.
The discussion of their origins is intertwined with the discussion of the mysterious origins of Nakh peoples as a whole. The only three surviving Nakh peoples are Chechens, Ingush and Bats, but they are thought by some scholars to be the remnants of what was once a larger family of peoples.
They are thought to be descended from the original settlers of the Caucasus (North and/or South).
Ancestors of the modern Chechens and Ingush were known as Durdzuks. According to The Georgian Chronicles, before his death, Targamos [Togarmah] divided the country amongst his sons, with Kavkasos [Caucas] receiving the Central Caucasus. Kavkasos engendered the Chechen tribes, and his descendant, Durdzuk, who took up residence in a mountainous region, later called "Dzurdzuketia" after him, established a strong state in the fourth and third centuries BC. Among the Chechen teips, the teip Zurzakoy, consonant with the ethnonym Dzurdzuk, lives in the Itum-Kale region of Chechnya.
Georgian historian Giorgi Melikishvili posited that although there was evidence of Nakh settlement in the Southern Caucasus areas, this did not rule out the possibility that they also lived in the North Caucasus.
The state of Durdzuketi has been recorded since the 4th century BC. The Armenian Chronicles mention that the Durdzuks defeated the Scythians and became a significant power in the region in the first millennium BC.
The Vainakh in the east had an affinity with Georgia, while the Malkh Kingdom of the west looked to the new Greek kingdom of Bosporus on the Black Sea coast (though it may have also had relations with Georgia). According to legend, Adermalkh, chief of the Malkh state, married the daughter of the Bosporan king in 480 BCE. Malkhi is one of the Chechen tukkhums.
During the Middle Ages, the lowland of Chechnya was dominated by the Khazars and then the Alans. Local culture was also subject to Georgian influence and some Chechens converted to Eastern Orthodox Christianity. With a presence dating back to the 14th century, Islam gradually spread among the Chechens, although the Chechens' own pagan religion was still strong until the 19th century. Society was organised along feudal lines. Chechnya was devastated by the Mongol invasions of the 13th century and those of Tamerlane in the 14th. The Mongol invasions are well known in Chechen folktales which are often connected with military reports of Alan-Dzurdzuk wars against the Mongols.
According to the missionary Giovanni da Pian del Carpine, a part of the Alans had successfully resisted a Mongol siege on a mountain for 12 years: