In a broad sense Kartvelology embraces study of Georgian culture, history and all fields of the humanities: linguistics, literary criticism, art, archaeology, folklore, ethnography, source study.    Georgia, Sakartvelo, successor to ancient Colchis and Iberia, lies at the boundary of Europe and Asia, east of the Black Sea, in the southwestern part of the Caucasus.     The Kingdom of Kartli – referred to in Classical sources as Iberia – emerged at the turn of the 4th-3rd cent. B.C., approximately on the territory of modern Georgia. The recorded history of the country dates from that time.    The Kingdom of Georgia lost its independence at the beginning of the 19th century. Since 1991 the country has acquired independence and been recognized by all the states of the world as the Republic of Georgia. Today too it continues to serve as a geographical, economic and cultural bridge between East and West.  Scholarly study of Kartvelian problems commenced in Europe in the 17th century. The French scholar Marie Brosset, the German scholar Arthur Leist, the English brother and sister Wardrops, and others laid the foundation for this activity, contributing to the West's broader familiarity with Kartvelology. Today, too, foreign Kartvelologists make a significant contribution to the study of Kartvelian problems and form a circle of staunch friends of our nation, supporting Georgia both in hard and joyous times.    Over the last decades the interest of the humanities in the key points of Kartvelology has been increasing, viz. in the problems of Georgian ethnogenesis, medieval Georgia in the context of cultural and political relations with Western and Eastern countries; the originality of the Georgian parent language and its relation to the families of Indo-European and Semitic languages; Georgian mythos and the Georgian-Caucasian world in Classical mythology; direct or typological relations of the rich Georgian literary culture to Byzantine and Eastern literature, to the European Renaissance thought, and Modern European and Russian literature, etc.    Get interested in Kartvelology! It will give you an access to an intriguing world unknown to European civilization.