Beyond the world familiar to the Greeks, restless nomads crisscrossed a landscape of immense emptiness. Expert horse riders, the men and women spent their lives astride tough ponies and nourished their babies with mare’s milk. They perfected their deadly aim by shooting at turquoise gems embedded in high rocky crags. They dipped their arrows in the venom of steppe vipers, scalped their foes, and drank from the gilded skulls of their enemies and ancestors. Under the influence of intoxicating clouds of burning hemp, they buried dead companions with their favorite horses and fabulous golden treasures under earthen mounds scattered across the featureless steppes. In Far Scythia, nomadic prospectors braved the desert wilderness to reach secret gold sands guarded by fantastic beaked monsters called griffins. Men and women wore trousers and tattooed themselves with strange designs and stags with towering antlers. The peoples of Scythia were wide-ranging: traversing vast seas of grass and sand, trekking over forbidding mountain passes, and crossing frozen straits. From time to time, waves of these aggressive mounted archers advanced inexorably westward, only to recede back into the steppes.
Evidence exists for all of these attributes ascribed to steppe nomads in Greek literature and art (with the exceptions of target practice with embedded gems and the use of poisoned arrows).1 For the Greeks, who mostly farmed small plots or lived in towns, the idea of a boundless,
MAP 2.1. Nomadic cultures, Eurasia to China. Map © Michele Angel.
Uncultivated sweep of land inhabited by wild “Scythians” was an intimidating notion, arousing respect laced with shivers of anxiety. The earliest Greek vision of “Scythia” emerged from travelers’ tales; curious rumors; folklore from Thrace, the Black Sea, and beyond; traders’ gossip; and dimly understood facts and garbled descriptions.
“Scythia” was a fluid term in antiquity. For the Greeks, “Scythia” stood for an extensive cultural zone of a great many loosely connected nomadic and seminomadic ethnic and language groups that ranged over the great swath of territory extending from Thrace (another fluid geographic term in antiquity), the Black Sea, and northern Anatolia across the Caucasus Mountains to the Caspian Sea and eastward to Central and Inner Asia (it is more than four thousand miles from Thrace to the Great Wall of China). “The Greeks call them Scythians,” wrote Herodotus; the Persians called them Saka (Chinese names included Xiongnu, Yuezhi, Xianbei, and Sai). “Although each people has a separate name of its own,” remarked the geographer Strabo, the Scythians, Massagetae, Saka, and other nomadic tribes “are given the general name of Scythians.” Pliny named twenty of the “countless tribes of Scythia.” As Gocha Tsetskhladze, a historian of Scythia, points out, “We call them Scythians because the Greeks did.” There are more restrictive modern descriptions for “Scythians” based on ethnographic, geographic,
And linguistic parameters, but the terms Scythia and Scythians, the names used by the ancient Greeks, are convenient catchall terms to refer to the diverse yet culturally similar nomadic and seminomadic groups of Eurasia to western China. Modern historians and archaeologists use “Scythian” to refer to the vast territory characterized in antiquity by the horse-centered nomad warrior lifestyle marked by similar warfare and weapons, artistic motifs, gender relations, burial practices, and other cultural features.2
Scythia’s forests, grassy steppes, desert oases, and mountains were home to a multitude of individual tribes with their own names, histories, customs, and dialects but sharing a migratory life centered on horses, archery, hunting, herding, trading, raiding, and guerrilla-style warfare. Endless journeys over waterless prairies, invasions, plunder, wars, alliances, agreements, quarrels, more wars: “such is the life of nomads,” commented Strabo. Lucian of Samosata (Syria) concurred: “Scythians live in a state of perpetual warfare, now invading, now receding, now contending for pasturage or booty.” Going by myriad names, waxing and waning in population over the centuries, continually on the move, the Scythian nomads, as described in ancient texts, had a history “inseparable from that of the nomadic and semi-nomadic tribes of the Eurasian steppes.” Their common material culture, the “Scythian Triad” of distinctive weapons, horses, and artistic “animal-style” motifs, is evident in archaeological artifacts in burials from the Carpathian Mountains to northern China. Grave goods demonstrate far-reaching trade among these groups.3
Not all of these peoples wandered the ocean of grass under infinite skies, however. By the fifth century BC, seminomadic clans known as the “Royal Scythians” had come to reside in wagons or settlements clustered around the northeastern Black Sea-Don area, taking up agriculture and trade, facilitating exchange between Greece and points along the Silk Routes to Asia. It was mainly through the coastal trading colonies that the Greeks first came to hear of the many different tribes of greater Scythia.
No aspect of Scythian culture unsettled the Greeks more than the status of women. Hellenes expected strict division of male and female roles.4 But among nomadic people, girls and boys wore the same practical clothing and learned to ride and shoot together. In small hunting and raiding groups where everyone was a stakeholder and each was
Expected to contribute to survival in an unforgiving environment, this way of life made good sense. It meant that a girl could challenge a boy in a race or archery contest, and a woman could ride her horse to hunt or care for herds alone, with other women, or with men. Women were as able as men to skirmish with enemies and defend their tribe from attackers. Self-sufficient women were valued and could achieve high status and renown. It is easy to see how these commonsense, routine features of nomad life could lead outsiders like the Greeks—who kept females dependent on males—to glamorize steppe women as mythic Amazons. The opportunity for an especially strong, ambitious woman to head women-only or mixed-sex raiding parties or even armies was exaggerated in Greek myths into a kind of war of the sexes, pitting powerful Amazon queens against great Greek heroes.
World History
