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'Tabal' (Bib. 'Tubal', Gk. 'Τιβαρηνοί' 'Tibarenoi', Lat. 'Tibareni', 'Thobeles' in Josephus) was a Luwian speaking Neo-Hittite kingdom of South Central Anatolia, forming after the collapse of the Hittite Empire and surviving into Roman times.
Some scholars associate them with the Meshechs (Meshekhs/Mosokhs, ''Moschoi'' in Greek). According to the archaeologist Kurt Bittel (''Hattusha, the Kingdom of the Hittites'' 1970: pp. 133 f), they first appeared after the collapse of the Hittite Empire.
The Assyrian king Shalmaneser III records that he received gifts from their 24 kings in 837 BC and the following year. A century later, their king Burutash is mentioned in an inscription of king Tiglath-Pileser III. They have left a number of inscriptions from the 9th-8th centuries BC in hieroglyphic-Luwian in the Turkish villages of Çalapverdi and Alişar.
The Georgian historian Ivane Javakhishvili considered Tabal, Tubal, Jabal and Jubal to be ancient Georgian tribal designations, and argued that they spoke a non-Indo-European language.
They and other related tribes, the ''Chalybes'' (Khalib/Khaldi) and the Mossynoeci (''Mossynoikoi'' in Greek), are sometimes considered the founders of metallurgy. These three tribes still neighbored each other, along the Black Sea coast of Anatolia (ancient Pontus), as late as in Roman times (the tribes were known in Latin as ''Tibareni'', ''Chalybes'', and ''Mossynoeci''/''Mosynoeci'').
On the evidence of Hecataeus, Herodotus, Xenophon, Strabo and others, the tribe of the Tibareni (''Tibarenoi'' in Greek) lived in the north of the territory of Tabal.

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Bibliography

★ Ivane Javakhishvili. ''Historical-Ethnological problems of Georgia, the Caucasus and the Near East''. Tbilisi, 1950, pp. 130-135 (in Georgian)

★ Simon Janashia. ''Works'', vol. III. Tbilisi, 1959, pp. 2-74 (in Georgian)

★ Nana Khazaradze. ''The Ethnopolitical entities of Eastern Asia Minor in the first half of the 1st millennium BC''. Tbilisi, 1978, pp. 3-139 (in Georgian, Russian and English)