The Scythians
Scythians bringing tribute, from the
Persian palace at Persepolis
The Scythians were a large group of loosely connected
people who lived in Russia, and also further south around the Black
Sea and the Caspian Sea. We don't
know when they first formed a group, but by 600 BC
they were certainly already well established,and took over some of the land to their south (modern Turkey)
for a while. The Medes pushed the Scythians back
to the Black Sea again, and after the establishment of the Persian
Empire the Persian king Darius mounted another campaign against the
Scythians in the Black Sea area. But this time the Persians lost, and the
Scythians kept on living around the Black Sea. The Scythians remained identifiable
as a group for another eight hundred years, until around 200 AD
another very similar group, the Sarmatians, overran them and took over their
territory. Descendants of the Scythians and the Sarmatians still live in
that area (modern Georgia and Ukraine) today.
A lot of what we know about the Scythians comes from
the Greek historian Herodotus,
who wrote a long description of Scythian religious rituals, lifestyles,
and principles as part of his history of the Persian
Wars. Herodotus wrote in the 400's BC. Herodotus
tells us that the Scythians liked to make drinking cups out of the skulls
of their enemies. But Herodotus is trying to show how the Greeks
are more civilized than the barbarians
(which explains why the Greeks won the Persian Wars) and so he naturally
tends to emphasize the Scythians' bloodiest traditions.
To find out more about the Scythians, check out these books from Amazon.com or from your library:
Beyond Celts, Germans, and Scythians: Archaeology and Identity in Iron Age Europe, by Peter Wells (2001). A short discussion of the problems with labelling other people "Scythians" and so on - what does that mean? Is anyone really a "Scythian"? Raises a lot of good questions.
Scythians and Greeks: Cultural Interaction in Scythia, Athens, and the Early Roman Empire, by David Braund and others (2004). Tries to answer some of these questions, with essays by a number of different specialists including some who are themselves from Ukraine and Georgia.
The First Horsemen, by Frank Trippett (1974). A Time Life book, now pretty out of date.
Archaic Greece
The Persians
Main West Asia history page
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