Scythians

• 1. Introduction

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  The Scythians were an ancient Eastern Iranic people who, for nearly six centuries, dominated the vast grasslands stretching from what is now Ukraine to southern Russia. They arrived on the Pontic Steppe during the 9th to 8th centuries BC, having migrated out of Central Asia, and they did not simply wander in. They conquered, they traded, they raided empires, and they buried their dead beneath mounds so richly furnished that grave robbers were still plundering them in the 18th and 19th centuries. By the time more than 85% of their known burial mounds had been pillaged, an entire civilization had already vanished into the steppe grass. Who were these people? How did nomads from Siberia end up influencing the politics of Assyria, the art of Athens, and the mythology of medieval Ireland? And what finally brought them down after centuries of invincibility?

• 2. Out of Central Asia

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  Gold pieces recovered from the 8th century BC Aržan-1 kurgan reveal that the early Scythians already possessed sophisticated goldsmithing skills before they ever set foot on the Pontic Steppe. They originated in the steppes of either present-day eastern Kazakhstan or the Altai-Sayan region of Siberia, and they moved west not by choice but by force. The Massagetae, a powerful nomadic Iranic tribe closely related to the Scythians, or possibly another Central Asian people called the Issedones, expelled them from their homelands. This pushed the early Scythians across the Araxes river and into the Caspian and Ciscaucasian Steppes. Archaeologically, the migration corresponds to a westward movement of a population originating from Tuva in southern Siberia in the late 9th century BC. They reached Ciscaucasia sometime between roughly 750 and 700 BC, following the same path earlier taken by the Chernogorovka-Novocherkassk complex of proto-Scythian nomads. When they arrived, the Caspian Steppe was occupied by the Cimmerians, an Iranic people who shared a common language and culture with the Scythians and are archaeologically indistinguishable from them. The Cimmerians had already been there since the 10th century BC. They left for West Asia, possibly under Scythian pressure, though they arrived there about 40 years before the Scythians and evidence of direct conflict between the two groups is thin. The remaining Cimmerians were absorbed into Scythian society, a process made easier by their similar ethnic backgrounds. The Scythians then settled the Ciscaucasian Steppe, concentrated in the valley of the Kuban river, and established what would become the center of their kingdom until around 600 BC. They extracted tribute from the native Koban and Maeotian populations: agricultural goods, clay and bronze items, weapons, and horse equipment. By the time their early Ciscaucasian culture was fully formed, it showed links not only to Cimmerian traditions but also to the older Bronze Age Timber Grave culture of the north Pontic region, visible in funerary rituals, ceramics, and horse gear.

• 3. West Asian Entanglements

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  Around 700 BC, the Scythians crossed the Caucasus Mountains and became active in West Asia, settling in eastern Transcaucasia and the northwest Iranian plateau, in territory corresponding to present-day Azerbaijan. Akkadian sources from Mesopotamia named this region the "land of the Scythians," māt Iškuzaya. The first known Scythian king on record, Išpakāya, was killed in the conflicts surrounding the reign of the Neo-Assyrian king Esarhaddon. His successor Bartatua proved more politically astute. By 672 BC, Bartatua had negotiated a marriage to Esarhaddon's eldest daughter, Šērūʾa-ēṭirat, binding Scythia to Assyria as a vassal state. It was during this period in West Asia, specifically the 7th and 6th centuries BC, that Scythian warriors encountered iron smelting and forging for the first time. Until the late 8th century BC, the Scythians were still a Bronze Age society. Contact with Assyrian-influenced states changed that rapidly. They borrowed war chariots, scale armour, and iron weapons. They absorbed West Asian artistic conventions, the concept of the divine origin of royal power, and even imported West Asian horses back to Ciscaucasia. Within their religion, the goddess Artimpasa and the Snake-Legged Goddess took on clear Mesopotamian and Syro-Canaanite influences. Bartatua's son Madyes, born of the Assyrian princess Šērūʾa-ēṭirat, succeeded him and pushed Scythian power in West Asia to its peak. Around 635 BC, with Neo-Assyrian approval, Madyes conquered Urartu, entered Central Anatolia, and defeated the Cimmerians alongside the Lydians. The Scythian kingdom's reach at that moment extended from the Halys river in Anatolia in the west to the Caspian Sea in the east, and from Transcaucasia in the north to the northern borders of the Neo-Assyrian Empire in the south. Then, in 625 BC, the Median king Cyaxares invited the Scythian leaders to a feast and assassinated them all. That single event ended Scythian hegemony in West Asia. The Scythians still raided the Levant as late as sometime between 626 and 616 BC, reaching as far as Palestine and the borders of Egypt, where the pharaoh Psamtik I turned them back with gifts. They supported the Medo-Babylonian destruction of Nineveh in 612 BC and the final end of the Neo-Assyrian Empire at Harran in 610 BC. But rising Median power forced them north, back toward the steppe. The transformation West Asia wrought on Scythian culture, their art, religion, material goods, military technology, and social hierarchy, traveled with them.

• 4. The Pontic Kingdom and Greek Trade

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  Pontic Steppe Scythians first encountered Greek settlers from Miletus on the Scythian-ruled northern Black Sea coast around 625 BC. The relationship that developed from that meeting would reshape both cultures. The Scythian aristocracy bought luxury goods from Greek traders, especially wine and the vessels used to mix and drink it, and used these imports as grave goods. Greek craftsmen produced gold and electrum items specifically for Scythian customers. After Scythian involvement in West Asia wound down in the 620s BC, ties with the Greek colonies deepened. Greek colonies, including those founded by settlers from Miletus, Corinth, Phocaea, and Megara, were established on the fertile, fish-rich north Black Sea coast from around 600 BC. The importance of these colonies grew dramatically after the Achaemenid Empire conquered Egypt in 525 BC, depriving the Greek states of Egyptian grain. Athens responded by establishing well-defended colonies near existing settlements: Nymphaion near Pantikapaion, Athenaion near Theodosia, and Stratokleia near Phanagoreia. The Scythian kingdom developed an elaborate economic system built around this grain trade. Settled populations in the forest steppe produced grain as tribute to the Scythian aristocracy, which was then shipped via the Borysthenēs and Hypanis rivers to the Greek port cities. During the 4th century BC, sedentarised Scythian farmers sold up to 16,000 tonnes of grain to Pantikapaion, which sold it on to Athens. This trade was significant enough that the Athenian orator Demosthenes maintained personal commercial ties in the Bosporan kingdom, receiving a gift of 1,000 medimnoi of wheat per year from its rulers. Demosthenes himself had a Scythian maternal grandmother, a fact his political opponents Dinarchus and Aeschines used against him in racist attacks. The Scythian economy also ran on slaves. Greek cities bought Scythian slaves but did not capture them directly; they depended on Scythian rulers to supply them. Athens purchased one group of Scythian slaves who formed an organisation of public slaves used as an urban police force. In exchange for slaves, the Scythians received wine, fabrics, vessels, decorations of precious metals, bronze items, and black burnished pottery. The island of Chios, notably, produced wine specifically destined for the Scythian market. Scythian coins struck in Greek cities bore images of ears of grain.

• 5. Society, Art, and Animal Style

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  Scythian society was structured around kinship, with clan groups forming the base of both community and political organisation. Clan elders held enough power to depose kings. By the 5th to 4th centuries BC, the population was formally stratified into five class groups: the aristocracy, very wealthy commoners, moderately wealthy commoners, the peasantry, and the poor. The Scythian aristocracy owned landed estates large enough that it sometimes took a whole day to ride around them, and they used the whip as their symbol of rule. Their burials typically included between 3 and 11 human sacrifices and were filled with luxury grave goods: gold jewellery, silver and gold objects, fine Greek-made metalwork, vessels, and gold-plated weapons. Free commoners owned enough property, usually a pair of oxen to pull a cart, that the Greeks called them oktapodes. Serfs belonged to the poorest native populations and owned neither cattle nor wagons. Stablemen and farmers came from the serf class. Scythian society was patriarchal, though women of the upper classes were free to ride horses. Among the more nomadic tribes, a distinct tradition of women warriors existed; the arrival of Sauromatian immigrants in the late 6th century BC had introduced new social norms including female fighters, which scholars including David Anthony have linked to the Greek myths about Amazons. At the center of all Scythian material culture stood the horse and the "Scythian triad": distinctive weapons, horse harnesses, and objects decorated in the Animal Style art. Early Scythian designs showed Chinese influence; the "cruciform tubes" used to fix strap-crossings were first created by Shang artisans. The metallurgical workshops producing Scythian weapons and horse equipment were located in the forest steppe, and the Scythians introduced iron working from West Asia to the Bronze Age peoples of the Pontic Steppe. The sage Anacharsis, brother of the then-king Sauaios, traveled to Greece in the 6th century BC. He earned such respect as a philosopher that he was granted Athenian citizenship, became a favourite figure of the Cynics, and was eventually included among the Seven Sages of Greece, serving as a kind of personalised emblem of the wisdom that Greeks both attributed to and romanticised in the Scythians.

• 6. The Reign of Ateas and Collapse

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  Between roughly the 360s and 339 BC, the Scythians were ruled by their most famous king, Ateas, whose reign overlapped with the explosive growth of Macedonia under Philip II. Ateas expanded Scythian authority south of the Istros river, battled the Thracian Triballi and the Dacian Histriani, and may even have struck coins at Byzantion. He initially allied with Philip II against the Histriani, but the alliance collapsed. In 339 BC, the two kingdoms fought a battle at the estuary of the Istros, where Ateas was killed. The Scythian kingdom did not immediately unravel. The capital at Kamianka continued to prosper and burials from that time remained lavishly furnished. But the defeat opened the door to a cascade of pressures. In 331 or 330 BC, Alexander the Great's general Zopyrion campaigned against the Scythians; although his army was defeated, the attack accelerated the decline of Pontic Olbia. Celts and other western peoples began moving into former Scythian territories. In 309 BC, the Scythian king Agaros intervened in the Bosporan Civil War, providing 20,000 infantrymen and 10,000 cavalrymen to support Satyros II. Satyros was defeated and killed. By the early 3rd century BC, the Scythian kingdom faced interlocking crises: competition from Ptolemaic Egypt had cut into the grain trade that sustained the Scythian aristocracy; climatic changes and overgrazed pastures were degrading the steppe economy; and the Sarmatians, specifically the Roxolani tribe, were seizing Scythian pastures from the east. The Scythian capital of Kamianka was abandoned. By 280 BC, Sarmatians had reached as far as Chersonesus. Most native and Greek settlements on the north shore of the Black Sea were destroyed over the course of the 270s to 260s BC. The surviving Scythians retreated to two regions both called "Little Scythia." The first was the Tauric Chersonese, with its capital at Scythian Neapolis. The second lay in the northeast of Thrace, in territory corresponding to present-day Dobruja. In the 1st century BC, the king Mithridates VI Eupator of Pontus destroyed both of these last Scythian refuges. The Scythians continued to exist as an independent people into the 2nd century AD, fully sedentary and increasingly intermarrying with the Tauri and Sarmatians. Their permanent settlements in Crimea and the lower Borysthenēs were destroyed around 200 AD by Gothic invasions. The Huns delivered the final blow in the 4th century AD, and by the 5th century the Scythians had been fully absorbed into the Migration Period populations that swept through the Pontic Steppe.

• 7. Legacy and Myth

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  Hesiod's Catalogue of Women is the earliest surviving mention of the Scythians in ancient Greek literature, calling them the "mare-milking Scythians" and the "milk-drinkers who have wagons for houses." From that early reference, Greek and later Roman writing built an increasingly elaborate mythology around the Scythians. By the 5th century BC, the image of the Scythian had become the archetypal stereotype for barbarians in Athens. Ancient Greek authors portrayed the Scythians as heavy drinkers and linked them to Thracians as representatives of "savagery," while associating the Persians with "refined civilisation." The 4th century BC historian Ephorus of Cyme classified the Scythians as one of the "four great barbarian peoples" of the known world, alongside the Celts, Persians, and Libyans. Strabo of Amasia idealised the Scythians as simple, honest, freedom-loving nomads corrupted by Greek luxury. The philosopher-sage Anacharsis was reinvented across centuries as the quintessential "noble savage." In the Middle Ages, Bede invented a Scythian origin for the Picts in his Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, drawing on a coincidental resemblance between the Latin name for the Irish, Scotti, and the word Scythia. The Irish mythological text Lebor Gabála Érenn extended this further, weaving the supposed Scythian ancestors of the Irish into a story involving Egypt, Moses, and a figure named Goídel Glas, eponym of the Gaelic people. Hungarian scholars of the early modern period claimed Scythian descent for the Hungarians, casting the ancient nomads as "noble savages" who had defended Christian civilisation from the East. In Russia, in 1718, the tsar Peter I issued decrees ordering the collection of ancient objects for what became the Scythian gold collection of the Saint Petersburg State Hermitage Museum. The looting was so thorough that by 1764, most Scythian tombs in the Russian Empire had been sacked. By the 20th century, more than 85% of excavated Scythian kurgans had already been pillaged. In 1918, the poet Aleksandr Blok published his famous poem Skify, depicting Russia as a barrier between Europe and Asia, drawing on the same Scythian imagery to make a charged political argument about Russian identity. The Scythian languages left one living trace: the western Scythian dialect group survived into the medieval Alanic language and eventually gave rise to modern Ossetian, still spoken today in the Caucasus.