Scythia
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Scythia comprised an area in Eurasia inhabited in ancient times by a group of nomadic people speaking Iranian languages and known as the Scythians or Scyths. The location and extent of Scythia varied over time, from the Altay Mountains region where Mongolia, China, Russia, and Kazakhstan come together, across southern Ukraine to the lower Danube river area, Bulgaria and Georgia. The Chinese knew the Saka (Asian Scythians) as Sai (Chinese character: 塞, Old Sinitic *sək).
The Scythians first appear in Assyrian annals as Ishkuzai, reported as pouring in from the north some time around 700 BC and settling in Ascania and modern Azerbaijan as far as to the southeast of Lake Urmia. The Scythians possibly formed a branch of the Gimirru mentioned in Assyrian annals at approximately the same time (Ivančik), even though the ancient Greek historian Herodotus of Halicarnassus describes the Kimmerioi or Cimmerians as a distinct tribe, the autochthonous population of the northern Black Sea coast, which the Scythians had expelled (Hist. 4.11-12).
The most significant Scythian tribes mentioned in the Greek sources resided in the steppe between the Dnieper and Don rivers.
Archaeological remains of the Scythians include elaborate tombs containing gold, silk, horses and human sacrifices. Mummification techniques and permafrost have aided in the relative preservation of some remains.
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Scythian language
Some scholars ascribe certain "Runic" inscriptions found in Eastern Europe and Central Asia to the Scythians, but apart from that no Scythian texts survive; however, the personal names found in the contemporary Greek literary and epigraphic texts suggest that the language of the Scythians and the Sarmatians (who spoke a dialect of Scythian according to Herodotus, Hist. 4.117) has strong similarities to well-attested Eastern Iranian dialects such as Sogdian and Modern Ossetic.
Contemporaries also commonly referred to the subject peoples in the periphery steppes as "Scythians", but that does not necessarily mean that they spoke Iranian languages as did the Scythians proper. Priscus, the Byzantine emissary to Attila, referred to Attila's followers repeatedly as "Scythians"; some of the Huns may have had Scythian ancestry.
Etymology
According to Herodotus (Hist. 4.6), the Scythians called themselves Skolotoi. The Greek Skythēs probably reflects an older rendering of the very same name, *Skuδa- (whereas Herodotus transcribes the unfamiliar Template:IPA as Λ; -toi represents the North-east Iranian plural ending -ta). The word originally means "shooter, archer", and it ultimately derived from the Proto-Indo-European root *skeud- "to shoot, throw" (compare English shoot).
The Sogdians' name for themselves, Swγδ, probably represents the same name (*Skuδa > *Suγuδa with an anaptyctic vowel). The name also occurs in Assyrian in the form Aškuzai or Iškuzai "Scythian". This name may have provided the source of biblical Hebrew Ashkenaz (original *אשכנז ’škuz got misspelled as אשכוז ’šknz), later a Jewish name of the Germanic areas of Central Europe and hence a self-descriptor of the Central European Jews who lived there among the Ashkenazim (Germans).
Polish and Ukrainian folk songs call the steppe people Sokoli which may come from Skolotoi.Template:Citeneeded
The Old Persians used another name for the Scythians, namely Saka, which perhaps derived from the Iranian verbal root sak- "to go, to roam", i.e. "wanderer, nomad".
Reference:
- Oswald Szemerényi, Four old Iranian ethnic names: Scythian - Skudra - Sogdian - Saka (Sitzungsberichte der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften 371), Wien 1980 = Scripta minora, vol. 4, pp. 2051-2093.
Scythian society
The Scythians formed a loose network of nomadic tribes of equestrian herdsmen and raiders. They invaded many areas in the steppes of Eurasia, including areas in present-day Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, southern Ukraine and southern Russia. Ruled by small numbers of closely-allied élites, Scythians had a reputation for their archers, and many gained employment as mercenaries.
Scythian élites had kurgan tombs: high barrows heaped over chamber-tombs of larch-wood — a deciduous conifer that may have had special significance as a tree of life-renewal, for it stands bare in winter. Burials at Pazyryk in the Altay Mountains have included some spectacularly preserved Scythians of the "Pazyryk culture" — including the "Ice Maiden" of the 5th century BC.
Scythian women dressed in much the same fashion as the men, and at times fought alongside them in battle. A Pazyryk burial found in the 1990s confirms this. It contained the skeletons of a man and a woman, each with weapons, arrowheads, and an axe. "The woman was dressed exactly like a man. This shows that certain women, probably young and unmarried, could be warriors, literally Amazons. It didn't offend the principles of nomadic society", according to one of the archaeologists interviewed for the 1998 NOVA documentary "The Ice Mummies".
Scythian warrior-women have become popular contenders for the honour of having inspired the Greek myths of the Amazons. The work of Jeannine Davis-Kimball (Secrets of the Dead August 4, 2004) provides archaeological and genetic evidence that the Sarmatians may have provided the source of the Greek tales.
As far as we know, the Scythians had no writing system. Until recent archaeological developments, most of our information about them came from the Greeks. The Ziwiye hoard, a treasure of gold and silver metalwork and ivory found near the town of Sakiz south of Lake Urmia and dated to between 680 and 625 BC, includes objects with Scythian "animal style" features. One silver dish from this find bears some inscriptions, as yet undeciphered and so possibly a form of Scythian writing.
Homer called the Scythians "the mare-milkers". Herodotus described them in detail: their costume consisted of padded and quilted leather trousers tucked into boots, and open tunics. They rode with no stirrups or saddles, just saddlecloths. Herodotus reports that Scythians used cannabis, both to weave their clothing and to cleanse themselves in its smoke (Hist. 4.73-75); the use of cannabis in funeral rituals has been confirmed by archaeology. The Scythian philosopher Anacharsis visited Athens in the 6th century BC and became a legendary sage. Scythians were also known for their usage of barbed and poisoned arrows of several types, a nomadic life centered around horses — "fed from horse-blood" according to Herodotus — and skill in guerrilla warfare. The Scythians are thought to have been the first to tame the horse and use it in combat as well.
History
Overview
To date, no widely accepted explanation exists for the origin of the Scythians, nor how they migrated to the Caucasus and Ukraine; but many scholars conjecture that they migrated westward from Central Asia between 800 BC and 600 BC.
Herodotus gives the name of the land where the Scythians originated as Gerrhos. They would prepare their dead and travel with them long distances to bring them for burial in Gerrhos.
Assyrian records, the first to mention the Iskuzai, date from around the end of the 8th century BC. Herodotus even confirms that their king Partatua had an alliance with Assyria, and that Mannai recognized him. In 653 BC, Partatua's son Madius (Madyes), at the request of Ashurbanipal of Assyria, defeated the king of the Medes, Phraortes (Kshathrita), assuming control over the Medes until 625 BC. By the end of his reign, he had led the Scythians and the Cimmerians (apparently close relatives) on a pillaging spree, overrunning and plundering Assyria, Anatolia, Northern Syria, Phoenicia, Damascus, and Philistia. They plundered the Temple of Venus in Ashkelon, and Jeremiah 4:7-13 mentions them as "a destroyer of nations… [whose] chariots shall be as the whirlwind."
After 625, however, the Scythians left the Median Empire — historians debate whether they did so voluntarily, or suffered expulsion. At any rate, following the Mede sack of Assur in 614 BC, they had to switch sides and ally themselves with the Medes. They comprised part of the force that sacked Nineveh 612 BC. Some time afterwards, the Scythians returned to the steppes.
In 512 BC, when king Darius the Great of Persia attacked the Scythians, he apparently reached them by crossing the Danube. Herodotus relates that as nomads, the Scythians succeeded in frustrating the designs of the Persian army by letting them march through the entire country without an engagement. According to Herodotus, Darius in this manner reached as far as the Volga river.
During the 5th to 3rd centuries BC the Scythians evidently prospered. When Herodotus wrote his Histories in the 5th century BC, Greeks distinguished a 'Greater Scythia' that extended a 20-day ride from the Danube River in the west, across the steppes of today's Ukraine to the lower Don basin, from 'Scythia Minor'. The Don, then known as Tanaïs, has served as a major trading route ever since. The Scythians apparently obtained their wealth from their control over the slave trade from the north to Greece, through the Greek Black Sea colonial ports. They also grew grain, and shipped wheat, flocks, and cheese to Greece.
The Crimean Scythians created a kingdom extending from the lower Dnieper to the Crimea. Their capital city, Scythian Neapol, existed on the outskirts of modern Simferopol. (The Goths destroyed it much later, in the 5th century AD.)
In the southeasternmost corner of the plains, north of the woods of Thrace, Philip II of Macedon settled Macedonian trading towns along routes as far north as the Danube during the 330s BC (Fox 1973). Greek craftsmen from the colonies north of the Black Sea made spectacular Scythian gold ornaments (see below), applying Greek realism to depict Scythian motifs of lions, antlered reindeer and gryphons. Hellenic-Scythian contact focused on the Hellenistic cities and small kingdoms of the Cimmerian Bosporus and of the Crimea.
Shortly after 300 BC, the Celts seem to have displaced the Scythians from the Balkans, while in south Russia a kindred tribe, the Sarmatians, gradually overwhelmed them.
Scythians in Classical sources
In the 1st century BCE, the Greek geographer Strabo gives an extensive description of eastern Scythians, whom he located in northeastern Asia beyond Bactria and Sogdiana:
He goes on describing the names of the various tribes among the Scythians, probably making an amalgam with some of the tribes of eastern Central Asia (such as the Tochari):
- "Now the greater part of the Scythians, beginning at the Caspian Sea, are called Dahae, but those who are situated more to the east than these are named Massagetae and Sacae, whereas all the rest are given the general name of Scythians, though each people is given a separate name of its own. They are all for the most part nomads.
- But the best known of the nomads are those who took away Bactriana from the Greeks (i.e. Greco-Bactrians), I mean the Asii, Pasiani, Tochari, and Sacarauli, who originally came from the country on the other side of the Jaxartes River that adjoins that of the Sacae and the Sogdiani and was occupied by the Sacae.
- And as for the Däae, some of them are called Aparni, some Xanthii, and some Pissuri. Now of these the Aparni are situated closest to Hyrcania and the part of the sea that borders on it, but the remainder extend even as far as the country that stretches parallel to Aria." (Strabo, Geography, 11.8.1)
Scythians in the Bible
The people mentioned briefly as "Ashkenaz" — perhaps as a result of a long-ago Hebrew alphabet misreading: אשכנז instead of the correct אשכוז (= Ashkūz), in Genesis x. 3 and I Chronicles i. 6 — trace back through Gomer to Noah's third son, Japheth. The Book of Jeremiah li. 27, 28, mentions Ashkenaz in connection with the kingdoms of Ararat and Minni (in the Taurus Mountains), together with the Medes — and portrays them all as hostile to Babylon. In the Middle Ages Jewish communities revived the name Ashkenaz to mean first the Teutons, then the Ashkenazi Jews. Biblical connections with Scythians rest on a number of assumptions.
Putative Scythian peoples
Although the Scythians had allegedly disappeared in the 1st century BC, Eastern Romans continued to speak conventionally of "Scythians" to designate mounted Eurasian nomadic barbarians in general: in 448 AD two mounted "Scythians" led the emissary Priscus to Attila's encampment in Pannonia. The Byzantines in this case carefully distinguished the Scythians from the Goths and Huns who also followed Attila.
The Sarmatians, the Alans, and finally the Ossetes counted as Scythians in the broadest sense of the word — as speakers of Northeast Iranian languages — but nevertheless remain distinct from the Scythians proper. The Ossetes, the only Iranian people presently resident in Europe, call their country Ironiston or Iron, though North Ossetia now officially has the designation Alania. They speak an North-Eastern Iranian language, Ossetic, whose more widely-spoken dialect, Iron or Ironig (i.e. Iranian), preserves some similarities with the Gathic Avestan language, another Iranian language of the Eastern branch. At the same time, it has a number of words remarkably similar to their modern German equivalents, such as THAU (tauen, to thaw, as snow) and GAU (district, region).
Traditions of the Turkic Kazakhs and Yakuts (who call themselves "Sakha"); the Marathas of India; the Picts; the Gaels; the Hungarians; Serbs and Croats (among others) also include mention of Scythian origins.
One cannot say with certainty that all of those variously referred to as Scythians or Saka spoke Iranian languages, or that they were genetically related to the stock of Iranian's original speakers. They may have only had an Iranian speaking elite, and the mother tongues of the peoples they dominated might have been Proto-Germanic, Proto-Slavic, Indo-Aryan, and/or even Tocharian (this could explain the presence of Tocharian in the east). See Non-Indo-European roots of Germanic languages and Mathematical approaches to comparative linguistics.
- See Fox, Robin Lane, 1973. Alexander the Great. ISBN 0-14-008878-4.
The genetic argument
Genetic research in modern populations reveals that the same paternal Y chromosome haplogroup (R1a) represents a genetic lineage currently found in central, western and south Asia, and in Slavic populations of Europe. The simplest explanation of this distribution involves this Y-chromosome mutation originating in people of the kurgan-building culture of traditional Scythia (see link).
However haplogroups H, J2, R1b and L also appear in populations of Iran, Pakistan, Central Asia and India, and the idea that R1a1 originates from Kurgan Culture remains questionable, since haplogroups I and E appear completely absent in India (although common in Europe, particularly in Ukraine).
"Pazyryk culture"
- For further information see Pazyryk.
Some of the first Bronze Age Scythian burials documented by a modern archaeologist includes the kurgans at Pazyryk in the Ulagan district of the Altay Republic, south of Novosibirsk in the Altay Mountains of southern Siberia. The name Pazyryk culture was attached to the finds: five large burial mounds and several smaller ones between 1925 and 1949, one opened in 1947 by Russian archeologist Sergei Rudenko. The burial mounds concealed chambers of larch logs covered over by large cairns of boulders and stones.
Pazyryk culture flourished between the 7th and 3rd centuries BC in a mountain fastness known as territory belonging to a group of Scythians who may have called themselves Sacae. It formed the seat of the larger of two related Scythian groups.
All the things a Scythian might use or need in this life went into the tomb as grave goods for use in the next. Among the rich or powerful, horses were sacrificed and buried with them. With the ordinary Pazyryks were only ordinary utensils, but in one, among other treasures was found the famous Pazyryk Carpet, the oldest surviving wool pile oriental rug. Rudenko summed up the cultural context at one point:
- All that is known to us at the present time about the culture of the population of the High Altay, who have left behind them the large cairns, permits us to refer them to the Scythian period, and the Pazyryk group in particular to the fifth century BC. This is supported by radiocarbon dating.
In the Soviet climate of 'science' used as propaganda, Rudenko could not stress the cultural similarities between Pazyryk and the Scythians from the Kuban and lower Dnieper Valley in European Russia. Even in modern times, the obvious blond hair and white skin on the frozen "Ice Maiden" and other burials do not get a mention in the Nova segment devoted to these burials. That the ancient culture he studied was quite likely the ethnic stock ancestral to many nomadic tribes of today, including modern Altaic peoples, Kirgiz, and Kazakhs, has become a source of considerable pride today for the Altay Republic.
Scythian Gelonus (modern Bel'sk near Poltava)
Herodotus tells about an enormous city, Gelonus, in the northern part of Scythia (4.108):
- "The Budini are a large and powerful nation: they have all deep blue eyes, and bright red hair. There is a city in their territory, called Gelonus, which is surrounded with a lofty wall, thirty furlongs [[[Template:Polytonic]] = ca. 5,5 km] each way, built entirely of wood. All the houses in the place and all the temples are of the same material. Here are temples built in honour of the Grecian gods, and adorned after the Greek fashion with images, altars, and shrines, all in wood. There is even a festival, held every third year in honour of Bacchus, at which the natives fall into the Bacchic fury. For the fact is that the Geloni were anciently Greeks, who, being driven out of the factories along the coast, fled to the Budini and took up their abode with them. They still speak a language half Greek, half Scythian." (transl. Rawlinson)
Recent digs in Bel'sk Template:Coor d, Ukraine uncovered a vast city identified by Boris Shramko as Gelonus. The city's commanding ramparts and vast 40 square kilometers exceeded even the outlandish size reported by Herodotus. Its location at the northern edge of Ukraine's steppe would have allowed strategic control of the north-south trade route. Judging by the finds dated to the 5th and 4th centuries BC, craft workshops and Greek pottery abounded, as well as slaves perhaps destined for Greece.
A letopys (chronicle) describes Slavic groups departing to Greece around the Gelonus area in 907.
The Ryzhanovka kurgan
A kurgan or burial mound near the village of Ryzhanovka in Ukraine, 75 miles south of Kyiv, has revealed one of the few unlooted tombs of a Scythian chieftain, one who ruled in the forest-steppe area on the western fringe of Scythian lands. There, at a date late in Scythian culture (ca. 250 - 225 BC), a recently nomadic aristocracy was gradually adopting the agricultural lifestyle of their subjects: the tomb contained a mock hearth, the first ever found in a Scythian context, symbolic of the warmth and comfort of a farmhouse.
"Scythian gold"
Scythian contacts with craftsmen in Greek colonies along the northern shores of the Black Sea resulted in the famous Scythian gold adornments that feature among the most glamorous prestige artifacts of world museums. Ethnographically extremely useful as well, the gold depicts Scythian men as bearded, long-haired Caucasoids. "Greco-Scythian" works depicting Scythians within a much more Hellenic style date from a much later period, when Scythians had already been greatly mixed with Greeks, clouding the issue of their origins.
Scythians had a taste for elaborate personal jewelry, weapon ornaments and horse trappings. They executed Central Asian animal motifs with Greek realism: winged gryphons attacking horses, battling stags, deer, and eagles, combined with everyday motifs like milking ewes.
In 2000 the touring exhibition 'Scythian Gold' introduced North Americans to the objects made for Scythian nomads by Greek craftsmen north of the Black Sea, and buried with their Scythian owners under burial mounds on the flat plains of present-day Ukraine, most of them unearthed after 1980.
In 2001, the discovery of an undisturbed royal Scythian-burial barrow illustrated for the first time Scythian animal-style gold that lacks the direct influence of Greek styles. Forty-four pounds of gold weighed down the royal couple in this burial, discovered near Kyzyl, capital of the Siberian republic of Tuva.
Sakas
Asians, especially Persians, knew the Scythians in Asia as Sakas. The Indo-Scythians were named "Shaka" in India, an extension on the name "Saka". Herodotus describes them as Scythians, called by a different name:
- "The Sacae, or Scyths, were clad in trousers, and had on their heads tall stiff caps rising to a point. They bore the bow of their country and the dagger; besides which they carried the battle-axe, or sagaris. They were in truth Amyrgian (Western) Scythians, but the Persians called them Sacae, since that is the name which they gave to all Scythians." (Herodotus VII. 64)
Shakas receive numerous mentions in texts like the Puranas, the Manusmriti, the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, the Mahabhasiya of Patanjali, the Brhat Samhita of Vraha Mihira, the Kavyamimamsa, the Brihat-Katha-Manjari, the Katha-Saritsagara and several other old texts. The accounts typically group Scythians as part of an amalgam of other war-like tribes from the northwest.
Indo-Scythians
Image:AzesII.jpg Template:Main
The Indo-Scythians, a branch of the Scythians, migrated into Bactria, Sogdiana, Kashmir, Gandhara, and finally, into Arachosia and the northwest Indian subcontinent, from the middle of the 2nd century BC to the 1st century BC.
The migrations in 175-125 BC of the Indo-European Yuezhi tribes, who originally lived in modern Gansu before themselves being expelled by the Xiongnu (Huns) tribes, displaced the proto-Indo-Scythians from Central Asia. Led by their king Maues, they ultimately settled in modern day Pakistan from around 85 BC, where they replaced the kingdom of the Indo-Greeks by the time of Azes II (reigned circa 35-12 BCE). The Yuezhi (this time federated under the name of Kushan) again overran the Indo-Scythians in the 1st century, but their rule persisted in some areas of Central India until the 5th century.
Scythians and China
Ancient influences from Central Asia became identifiable in China following contacts of metropolitan China with nomadic western and northwestern border territories from the 8th century BC. Gold was introduced from Central Asia between the 8th and the 7th century, and Chinese jade carvers began to make imitations of the designs of the steppes. The Chinese adopted the Scythian-style animal art of the steppes (descriptions of animals locked in combat), particularly the rectangular belt plaques made of gold or bronze, and created their own versions in jade and steatite.
Some Scythians may also have migrated to the area of Yunnan in southern China, following their expulsion by the Yuezhi. Excavations of the prehistoric art of the Dian civilization of Yunnan have revealed hunting scenes of caucasoid horsemen in Central Asian clothing (Mallory and Mair, "The Tarim Mummies")
The idea of Scythia
Owing to their reputation as promulgated by Greek historians, the Scythians served as the epitome of savagery and barbarism in the early modern period. Specifically, early modern English discourse on Ireland frequently resorted to comparisons with this people in order to confirm that the indigenous population of Ireland descended from these ancient "bogeymen", and showed themselves as barbaric as their alleged ancestors. Edmund Spenser wrote that "the Chiefest [nation that settled in Ireland] I Suppose to be Scithians ... which firste inhabitinge and afterwarde stretchinge themselves forthe into the lande as theire numbers increased named it all of themselues Scuttenlande which more brieflye is Called Scuttlande or Scotlande" (A View of the Present State of Ireland, c. 1596). As proofs for this origin Spenser cites the alleged Irish customs of blood-drinking, nomadic lifestyle, the wearing of mantles and certain haircuts and "Cryes [or wailings] allsoe vsed amongeste the Irishe which savor greatlye of the Scythyan Barbarisme". William Camden, one of Spenser's main sources, comments on this legend of origin that "to derive descent from a Scythian stock, cannot be thought any waies dishonourable, seeing that the Scythians, as they are most ancient, so they have been the Conquerours of most Nations, themselves alwaies invincible, and never subject to the Empire of others" (Britannia, 1586 etc., Engl. transl. 1610).
In the second paragraph of the Declaration of Arbroath the élite of Scotland claim Scythia as a former homeland of the Scots.
In the 19th century, romantic revisionists transformed the "barbarian" Scyths of literature into the wild and free, hardy and democratic ancestors of all blond Indo-Europeans. Aside from the findings of modern archaeology and genetics, most of what subsequent generations "knew" of Scythia and Scythians remained second-hand, a series of literary conventions.
Some modern groups still claim descent from the Scythians. The Scythians feature in the national origin legends of the Celts; they are also claimed by some romantic nationalist writers to have figured in the formation of the empire of the Medes and likewise of Caucasian Albania, the precursor in Antiquity of the modern-day Azerbaijan Republic. Most famously of all, the Russians were called Scythians in the 18th-century poetry, as some contemporary scholars sought to demonstrate their descent from ancient warriors described by Herodotus. Alexander Blok drew on this tradition in his last major poem, Yes, We Are the Scyths (1920).
References
- Torday, Laszlo (1998). Mounted Archers: The Beginnings of Central Asian History. Durham Academic Press. ISBN 1-90-083803-6.
- Davis-Kimball, Jeannine. 2002. Warrior Women: An Archaeologist's Search for History's Hidden Heroines. Warner Books, New York. 1st Trade printing, 2003. ISBN 0-446-67983-6 (pbk).
External links and notes
- The Slavonic Antiquity: Scythians, Sarmatians, Meotians and Slavs by Sergei V. Rjabchikov.
- Scythians overview by Chris Bennet.
- Livius articles on ancient history, entry on Scythians/Sacae.
- The early burial in Tuva.
- Scythian myth and culture; map.
- Color illustrations of Scythian gold.
- Published excavations of royal Scythian kurgan (barrow) at Chertomlyk reviewed.
- Herodotus, Histories, Book IV - translated by Rawlinson, the 1942 edition.
- Livio Stecchini, "The Mapping of the Earth: Scythia": reconstructing the map of Scythia according to the conceptual geography of Herodotus
- Livio Stecchini, "The Mapping of the Earth: Gerrhos"
- 1998 NOVA documentary: "Ice Mummies: Siberian Ice Maiden" Transcript.
- Jats
- on Sarmatian (a related Iranian group) trade and ethnic connections
- Scythia Group (a yahoo group for discussing the Scythians)
Ryzhanovka links
Genetic links
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