Eighth century Scythians arrive in territory between Black Sea and Caspian Sea and expand into west Asia, where they have contacts with Assyrians.
Seventh century Medes drive Scythians into Europe. c. 513 Scythians repel army out of Pontus in Asia Minor. fourth century Sarmatians arrive on Scythian territory. second century Scythians displaced or absorbed by Sarmatians.
Was Skudat, thought to mean archers, evolved into Saka or Sacae among the Persians; the Chinese knew them as Sai.) One of these groups, who migrated to lands controlled by Cimmerians north of the Black Sea in Ukraine as early as the eighth century B. C.E., were known to the Greeks, such as the historian Herodotus of the fifth century B. C.E., as Skythai. Their homeland was known as Scythia. The Romans later applied the name Scythians to the Germanic GOTHS, who absorbed steppe peoples among their tribes.
LANGUAGE
The Scythians spoke an iranian language, part of the indo-iranian family (the eastern branch of Indo-European). They and the Sarmatians, who spoke a related language, have been referred to as European iranians.
HISTORY
In the eighth century B. C.E. there occurred on the Eurasian steppe a domino effect as people dislodged other peoples. According to Chinese accounts a group of steppe pastoralists from Mongolia (the Hsiung-Nu, who may have been ancestors of the Huns of the first millennium C. E.), impelled to leave by severe drought, tried to enter China but were repulsed. Near Eastern and Greek accounts from the same period tell of the Massagetae, perhaps dislodged by the Hsiung-Nu, who moved into what was Scythian territory around the Aral Sea. The Scythians also migrated in this period, entering Cimmerian territory to the west. After some 30 years of warfare the Scythians defeated the Cimmerians, absorbing some and driving others across the Caucasus Mountains into Asia.
Scythian and Cimmerian warriors were known to have fought against the Assyrian king Sargon ii soon afterward. He is reported to have been killed in combat with them in 705 B. C.E. Assyrian accounts also tell of the marriage in about 674 b. c.e. of an Assyrian princess to the king of the As-ku-za (Scythians), Bartatua. Several decades later this group, possibly in alliance with the Assyrians, destroyed the kingdom of Urartu in eastern Asia Minor and annexed the kingdom of Media in present-day northwestern iran and beyond along the eastern Mediterranean.
In the seventh century b. c.e. the Medes drove the Scythians out of Asia back north of the Caucasus Mountains. In about 513 b. c.e. Darius I of the Persians launched a campaign against the Scythians living in Ukraine, but his forces were repelled.
In the fifth century b. c.e. the royal family of Scythia first intermarried with Greeks. By the fourth century b. c.e. Kamenka, a fortified settlement on the Dnieper River, became the center of the Scythian kingdom, ruled by Ateas. The Crimea was also a focal point of their civilization. Ateas was killed in a battle against the Macedonians under King Philip II in 339 b. c.e.
From the fourth to the second century B. C.E. the Sarmatians, also Iranian speaking, became competitors in the region, originally occupying territory east of the Don before making inroads westward. The Scythians were eventually absorbed by the Sarmatians; some among the Royal Scyth, the Scythian ruling class, constituted one of their tribes. In the late second century b. c.e. Palakus, who was the last Scythian ruler known to history, battled Mithridates VI Eupator (Mithridates the Great), the king of Pontus in Asia Minor, on behalf of the Sarmatians.
The Parthians, who created a kingdom in present-day northeastern Iran from the third century b. c.e. to the third century c. e. and whose empire expanded into additional territory by the first century b. c.e., may have been of Scythian stock. They too were famous as horsemen and archers.
CULTURE
Economy
Although originally a pastoralist (nomadic) people who lived by herding, some of whom had taken up raiding, the Scythians became farmers and traders, trading grain to Greek cities. They are also known for introducing the chicken to Europe. Burials and hoards of steppe elites demonstrate the enormous range of their exchange networks. Grave goods could include furs from the Arctic—in one case used to edge a Persian carpet—bronze and iron weapons of the Caucasians, and commodities from China including silk. One grave contained cheetah fur and coriander from the Near East. Metal hoards contained metalwork from Greece, Persia, Celtic lands, and India.
Government and Society New Metal, New Elites The Scythian conquest of the great swathe of territory north of the Black Sea benefited from the shift from bronze to iron use in eastern Europe that took place sometime around the turn of the second and first millennia b. c.e. This shift in metal use had profound social consequences. For thousands of years reliance on bronze had been made possible by trade routes that carried both tin and copper, usually from widely different regions, which could be alloyed into bronze. The elites who controlled these routes and thus the supply of tin and copper emerged for the most part early in the Bronze Age and retained their control over many generations, never moving far from their established trade routes. Bronzesmiths were dependent on the chiefs, who alone could supply them. Societies stabilized around such small-scale chiefdoms in which social stratification was not great and, because status was inherited, there was little need for personal ostentation. Pottery from the Bronze Age found in eastern Europe shows considerable regional differences in shape and ornamentation, used as a means of ethnic identification for peoples who never strayed far from their tribal homeland.
The adoption of iron, the ore of which was much more readily available over a wide region, broke these age-old social ties in a process of detribalization, as artisans became independent of their local chiefs and the sources of wealth were more widely distributed. This trend fostered the emergence of new, mobile elites whose control of wealth was no longer dependent on place but rather on their prowess as warriors who could force their control on artisans and farmers. Pottery became plainer as the locus of ethnic identity shifted from place to the human body, both in life— with the development of styles of dress and jewelry—and in death—using increasingly more ostentatious burial rites and grave goods. As in all warrior elite societies successful warriors gathered followers around them by bestowing on them booty from raids. The more followers, the more powerful and successful these warriors-cum-chiefs would become in an ever increasing feedback loop.
In the region that was to be under domination by the Scythians the social changes caused by the adoption of iron created a fertile field of operations for mobile warrior elites; not only indigenous groups exploited this opportunity but incomers from the eastern steppes.
Steppe Pastoralists and Their Elites For millennia nomads in the vast steppe lands of central Asia had lived in a symbiosis with more sedentary groups in adjacent forest and mountain areas, trading horses, livestock, and milk products for metals, wood and other forest products, and agricultural produce. Even on the steppes nomads engaged in a certain amount of agriculture in sheltered river valleys. Meanwhile the supreme skill in horseback riding of the herders gave those among them with a bent for warfare a mobility that allowed raiding far afield, outside the home territory. Rather than trading for them, warrior bands tended to take commodities they wanted from sedentary populations, often in the form of tribute in exchange for protection against other warrior groups. In this way Scythian society became dominated by rich warrior elites and finally kings. Herodotus believed that the name Scythian itself derived from the name of a king, perhaps founder of the ruling dynasty.
The Scythians had a class of chieftains known as Royal Scyths (known from their elaborate graves). One Royal Scyth was sovereign, his authority inherited. Farmers, who grew wheat for sale, formed a class of their own.
Arrival of Scythians in the Caucasus and Eastern Europe The archaeologically identified Srubnaya-Khvalynsk culture of the Caucasus has been identified with the Scythians. Around 700 B. C.E. burials of a completely different type from those made earlier appeared in cemeteries in Nagorno-Karabakh, featuring rich grave goods and bodies of sacrificed retainers of a different physical type from the deceased. Farther west in eastern and central Europe Scythian-style burials from this time have been found. The Hungarian plain seems to have attracted Scythians for its resemblance to the steppe. Burials have been found in Transylvania and Poland.
Real Scythians versus Scythian-Type Elites The
Artifacts in Europe west of the Caucasus are often called “Scythian-type” since there is disagreement as to whether they belonged to “real Scythians” from the steppe or to natives who had taken up a Scythian lifestyle. Scythian horses traded to Europe by the mid-first millennium B. C.E. could have fostered the emergence of local warrior bands. New iron sources had been found around this time in the Transylvanian Alps, and warrior burials that have been found in the southern Carpathian piedmont near important routeways to the iron mines show signs of being those of local people who had adopted the Scythian lifestyle. Pottery found in the graves has affinities to earlier pottery cultures in the region; the graves also contained Scythian-style weapons (including a copy of a Scythian-style sword) and horse accoutrements. The cultural group here (the Ferigile-Birsesti culture) engaged in clearance of upland pastures for summer grazing as well as in mining.
Ancient sources such as Herodotus shed little light on the question of “real” versus “imitation” Scythians, because their tendency was to identify all steppe nomads as Scythians. Greeks thought of Scythia as a discrete tract of land, sandwiched between Thrace on the west and the Sea of Azov on the east. Because Herodotus believed in a theory of geographical symmetry, he thought the mouth of the Danube, the western limit of Scythia, must be due north of the Nile delta and thus much farther east than it really is. This idea caused him to shrink the area of Scythia and to believe that Thrace was much larger than it was. Thus some of the peoples he called Thracian because of their location may actually have been Scythian or have lived under Scythian rule.
Herodotus on Scythian Society Herodotus did try to distinguish among different groups of Scythians. He mentions a group called Agathysae who lived in Transylvania, saying they were an indeterminate mix of Thracian and Scythian. He also tells us that Thracians and Scythians, including their elites, intermarried. This, with the cultural similarities between elite burials in Scythia and Thrace, seems to document a warrior elite ethnicity that transcended geographical and socioeconomic differences. (Thracians were not nomads as the Scythians were.) The mobile elites of Scythia and Thrace may have had closer relations with one another than with other social entities in their respective territories. Such other entities probably included tribal groupings of agriculturalists—herders and farmers—and “service” ethnic groups consisting of “guilds” of craftsmen and traders.
One of the crafts that Herodotus mentions was the making of drinking cups from skulls; elsewhere he reports that Scythians sawed off the skull top of their worst enemies and had it gilded inside. There may be some relation between this practice and another, that of warriors’ making sworn agreements with one another by drinking from a bowl of wine into which they had let some of their own blood— a form of “blood brotherhood.”
Herodotus’s picture of Scythian government is a complex one, and he mentions administrative districts, showing that Scythian control of their territory exceeded a loose alliance of elite groups. The importance of the Royal Scyths implies a fairly tight central control of matters in Scythian territory.
Contacts with Greeks From the seventh century B. C.E. Greek traders opened up trade in the Black Sea region chiefly for grain and slaves in exchange for wine and olive oil. As in the case of the Celts and Germanics contact with Mediterranean civilization had a profound effect on the Scythian elites who became rich beyond anything they had known before. As did the Hallstatt Celts, the Scythians quickly developed a great enthusiasm for wine, which, however did not replace the cannabis they used. Herodotus says that they did not water their wine (the Greek practice) and often were drunk, a state that probably much eroded their warrior prowess in both the short and the long term as they fell out of condition and practice in the exacting skills of cavalry warfare. Luxuries from the Mediterranean must have tempted many to settle into a more sedentary life. The resounding defeat of Ateus by Philip of Macedon (whose military machine was the most powerful in the Mediterranean world at this time, however) may attest to the dwindling of the Scythians’ war capacities. By the next century the Scythian elite had lost control of the steppe to a new martial elite, the Sarmatians, and their power was centered on their capital of Neapolis in the Crimea.
Amazons, Enarees, and Gender Roles There is ambiguous evidence as to the role of women among the Scythians. In nomadic societies the status of women tends to be low because the nomadic lifeway, in which agriculture, often the women’s province in subsistence societies, is little practiced, puts them at a disadvantage. The constant travel of nomads makes child rearing difficult and places women in a position of total reliance on men for protection. However, there is both textual and archaeological evidence of women among the Scythians (albeit a minority) who enjoyed a fairly high status.
The textual evidence consists of the famous Amazons, whose name is from the Greek a-mazos (without a breast), from their alleged custom of arresting the development of one breast to facilitate using the bow. Although the Amazons are featured in Greek myth, Herodotus, when he traveled in the Black Sea region, heard tales of actual women who had been warriors and war leaders.
A significant number of burials of warrior women have indeed been found, some with evidence of battle wounds. In the Scythian region west of the Don 40 such burials had been found by the late 1990s, some in conjunction with royal grave mounds, and in the region Herodotus called Sauromatia, east of the Don, some 20 percent of excavated warrior burials from the fifth and fourth centuries b. c.e. were of women.
Herodotus connects the Amazons, whom the Scythians called Oiorpata, “man-slayers,” with the Sauromatians, who he says were a mixture of Scythians and Amazons and spoke Scythian. Herodotus’s Sauromatians seem to be distinct from the Sarmatians who later displaced the Scythians from the western steppe (and for whom there is no evidence of warrior women). Herodotus says that Sauromatian women had to kill three of their enemy before they were allowed to marry. The appearance of warrior women in Scythian society appears to be a late phenomenon, judging by the age of burials, and may have been a reaction of some sort to the great change in Scythian society brought about by contact with Greek civilization, or, on the other hand, by social changes set in motion among indigenous peoples in the Black Sea region by the arrival of the Scythians. Such a change would be unlikely for the “real” Scythians from the steppe, among whom male dominance was already great when they arrived in the Black Sea region. The Sauromatians, however, might have been indigenous people, among whom there was relative gender equality, which led some women to become warriors.
On the other side of the coin Herodotus also writes of gender reversal among Scythian men. A class of Scythians called Enarees were, he says, “androgynes”—“men-women” who suffered from the “female sickness.” Although the Scythians themselves said that this ailment was inflicted on the Enarees by a goddess whose temple Scythian warriors had once pillaged, Herodotus, following a theory of Hippocrates, believed that jolting from constant riding and wearing of trousers was to blame. It is known that jolting and constriction of the genitals can cause erectile dysfunction and that trousers can raise the temperature of the testes, causing infertility. The affliction affected elite Scythians who did the most riding. The Enarees wore women’s clothes and did women’s work, claiming to have lost their manhood.
They also, however, became seers who practiced divination, a circumstance that points to a quite different motivation for becoming an Enaree. Peoples across central Eurasia have practiced shamanism from earliest times, and a feature of shamanism in some societies was that male shamans dressed and behaved in all ways as women. In the recent past shamans of a number of Siberian nomadic tribes were mostly or all women, and people in these tribes theorized that men who felt called to become shamans took on the identity of women in the hope of either being as successful as the women shamans or protecting themselves from impotence.
Scythian warriors were freemen who were provided with food and clothing and earned booty through victory. Scythians who arrived in the Caucasus quickly adopted the superior Caucasian weapon types, double-curved bow and bronze trefoil-shaped (trilobate) arrows capable of piercing armor, iron sword (called an akinakes sword type with butterfly-shaped pommel), and heavy iron spears. After the Scythians were established in Europe warriors typically wore Greek-style bronze helmets and chain-mail jerkins and carried a Persian-style sword. Some groups were also known to use
Scythians crafted this leopard, perhaps the centerpiece of a shield, in the seventh to sixth century b. c.e. (Drawing by Patti Erway)
Battle-axes. Each warrior had at least one horse; the wealthy owned large herds.
Herodotus wrote that the Scythians kept the scalps of their enemies for use as napkins, which were hung on the bridle rein, or even as cloaks. This use may have had the purpose of demonstrating one’s prowess as a warrior, as the more scalps a warrior had the more highly he was esteemed by his fellows.
Dwellings and Architecture
The Scythians lived in tents for which they made felt rugs.
Clothing
The Scythians against whom Darius I of Persia campaigned were called by the Persians “pointed hat Scythians.” Articles of clothing were decorated with embroidery and applique; some had attached small gold-embossed plaques.
Personal Habits
The Scythians, as did other steppe peoples, practiced cranial deformation, elongating the head of newborns through hand pressure and bandages.
Transportation
The Scythians, who had a highly developed horse culture, were known to use saddles, unlike the Sarmatians, who reportedly rode bareback.
Technology and Art
The Scythians worked in silver, bronze, iron, electrum (a natural alloy of gold and silver), wood, leather, bone, and applique felts (for wall hangings). They produced elaborate gold-work, including gold figures representing recumbent stags (known as Animal Art), measuring some 12 inches, perhaps used as ornaments on shields. They also crafted jewelry, along with trapping for tents, wagons, and horses. Their artwork fused the styles of varying cultures of Asia and Europe. The Animal Art style grew out of the Scythians’ adoption of Near Eastern metalworking techniques and motifs (such as the winged lion-griffin).
Religion
Funeral Rites and Burials The Scythians practiced funeral rites that seem to have been common throughout the Eurasian steppes and were practiced in later centuries by Huns, Mongols, and others. Herodotus mentions the custom of gashing arms, forehead, and nose in honor of the deceased, and the immolation and burial of servants and horses around the corpse.
Herodotus described in dramatic detail the funeral rites of a Scythian king. The king’s body was stuffed and waxed and taken on a procession around his vast territories. Returning to the burial place, he was buried with his courtiers, who had been strangled, and the grave was covered with a large mound. A year later 50 more of his retainers were strangled and their horses killed. The bodies of these were stuffed and mounted in a circle around the mound. The funeral rites included the use of cannabis for purification; the deceased’s relatives inhaled the fumes of seeds thrown on hot stones in small hemp tents.
Archaeology has confirmed and supplemented this picture of Scythian funeral rites. The greatest concentration of burial mounds has been found in the Lower Dnieper valley. Excavation has shown that they had been made in a conical shape with steep sides of extremely compacted earth to foil robbers, covered with turves of grass, perhaps symbolizing an entire world covered with grasslands where the dead could ride freely forever. one mound excavated in the northern Caucasus contained one layer with the skeletons of 360 horses, and many more, along with skeletons of masses of donkeys, sheep, and cattle, in higher layers that had probably been buried later, as Herodotus recounts.
Evidence for stuffing of bodies, which seems to have been a custom in many regions of the steppe, is from burials in the Altai Mountains in southern Siberia. Bodies were freeze-dried in the permafrost, their intact skin showing elaborate tattoos and signs of skillful taxidermy with removal of muscle and other tissue. (The muscle might have been ritually eaten, as Herodotus records of the Issedones.) They were stuffed with many of the herbs Herodotus mentions. one grave contained a fur bag with cannabis seed, a censer filled with stones, and the frame of an inhalation tent.
Enarees The Enarees, Scythian shamans, practiced divination using the bark of a lime tree. They split the bark into three parts and somehow achieved their prophetic visions through braiding and unbraiding the pieces of bark.
Although originally a nomadic people, the Scythians, as did other steppe peoples over the following centuries, developed a localized European empire with permanent settlements and sophisticated artwork.
Further Reading
David Braund, ed. Scythians and Greeks: Cultural Interaction in Scythia, Athens, and the Early Roman Empire (Devon, U. K.: University of Exeter Press, 2004).
E. V. Cernenko. The Scythians 700-300 bc. Men-at-Arms series (Oxford: Osprey, 1983).
William Robert Holcomb. Cimmerian and Scythian Invasions into Western Asia (Miami, Fla.: Miami University Press, 1973).
Ellen D. Reeder. Scythian Gold (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1999).
Tamara Talbot Rice. The Scythians (London: Thames & Hudson, 1957).
Renate Rolle. The World of the Scythians (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).
Michael J. Vickers. Scythian and Thracian Antiquities (Oxford: Asmoleum Museum, 2003).
Peter S. Wells. Beyond Celts, Germans, and Scythians: Archaeology and Identity in Iron Age Europe (London: Duckworth, 2001).
World History
