Chiefly a pastoral people they tended, on foot or on horseback, their numerous herds in the luxuriant meadows of the modern Shirvan; their few tilled fields were still cultivated with the old wooden plough without iron share.

Coined money was unknown, and they did not count beyond a hundred.

Each of their tribes, twenty-six in all, had its own chief and spoke its distinct dialect.

Far superior in number to the Iberians, the Albanians could not at all cope with them in bravery.

The mode of fighting was on the whole the same with both nations; they fought chiefly with arrows and light javelins, which they frequently after the Indian fashion discharged from their lurking-places in the woods behind the trunks of trees, or hurled down from the tops of trees on the foe; the Albanians had also numerous horsemen partly mailed after the Medo-Armenian manner with heavy cuirasses and greaves.
Both nations lived on their lands and pastures in a complete independence preserved from time immemorial.