READING HALL

THE DOORS OF WISDOM

THE ASSYRIAN EMPIRE. TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER IX

THE SCYTHIANS AND NORTHERN NOMADS

I

THE NOMADS IN WESTERN HISTORY

ACROSS the old world from the Carpathians to the Khingan Mountains stretches a belt or crescent of steppe and desert, touching the 50th parallel at the ends and sinking to the 36th in the middle: at one end Hungary, at the other Manchuria, form extensions beyond the limiting ranges. In the middle the Pamir, Tien Shan and Altai mountains cut the belt in two; the way from one half to the other goes by the Gate of Dzungaria or by the more difficult passes through Ferghana.

North of this steppe-belt is a land of forest and tundra mostly inhabited by Finno-Ugrian tribes, who can scarcely be said to come into ancient history: their part has mostly been passive, to be pressed back or assimilated by their southern neighbours. The true nomads of the steppe-belt have been one of the dynamic forces of history. About a thousand BC, when we first can form any idea of the population of this region, the part east of the Tien Shan seems to have been inhabited by tribes of the Altaic race; Huns, Turks, Tartars, Mongols are the chief names borne by their descendants. To the west of the barrier the peoples would appear to have been Indo-European, Thracian, Iranian and the like. Both races were capable of the nomadic life, though it is only among the Altaic tribes that it still survives.

Historical information about this region can only come from its civilized southern neighbours. It begins at its eastern end in the annals of China. The Emperors Yao and Shun (2356—2208 BC) had to the north-west of them nomads called Hien-yun, with the same customs as are assigned to the later Hiung-nu or Huns. Under the Hia dynasty (2206-1766 BC) the Huns encroached upon China but were repulsed. The same thing happened again under the Chou dynasty, when the Emperor Stian drove them out (827-781 BC)

In Hither Asia early invasions from the north must have succeeded better: the rulers of the Kassites (1900 BC) and of Mitanni (1400 BC), bearing Indo-European names, must have northern ancestry. Tradition among the Indians and Iranians told of their having come from the north-west and we may regard them as having passed down through the Caucasus. If Trogus Pompeius and Diodorus had any foundation for their stories of a long Scythian domination in Asia before the time of Ninus, it might be sought in the Kassite empire. We find the Medes in Media by the ninth century BC. But the first movement from the north of which we have direct historical knowledge may well be the result of the very impulse given by the Chinese when they drove out the Huns about 800 BC. It was recorded by Greeks, Hebrews and Assyrians.

Aristeas of Proconnesus (placed by Herodotus about 260 years before his own time, say 680 BC) tells how the Arimaspians attacked their western neighbours the Issedones and drove them upon the Scythians. Herodotus says that it was the Massagetae who directly attacked the latter; in any case the Scythians pressed upon the Cimmerians and made them leave their land along the north coast of the Euxine and force their way through the Caucasus—no doubt the central pass of Darial is intended. They themselves followed in their track but took the eastern pass of Derbend. Accordingly, the Cimmerians came up against the kingdom of Urartu round about Lake Van and the Scythians into the land of Man farther east about Lake Urmia.

The appearance of Gimirrai (Cimmerians) south of the Caucasus can be dated by letters of Assyrian governors at the end of Sargon’s reign (722—705), this gives about a century for the impulse to arrive from the borders of China: the analogous movement started by the building of the Great Wall about 250 BC took much the same time to spend itself: the spread of the Mongol power in the thirteenth century A.D. was far swifter because it was not a mere impulse but a direct conquest, Batu Khan coming as far west as Poland.

Herodotus speaks as if the Scythians pressed hard after the Cimmerians, but we do not find them in Assyrian records until thirty years later, when Esarhaddon (681—669) proposes to use Bartatua, king of the Ashguzai (Scyths), against a league of Gimirrai, Sapardai, Madai (Medes) and Mannai threatening his borders towards Urartu. These are the biblical Gomer, Madai and Ashkenaz (Gen. X, 2, 3), Sepharad (Obad. 20), Minni and Ararat (Jer. LI, 27). Later, Esarhaddon boasts that he has scattered the unruly northerners and their ally Ishpaka the Ashguzai; but on the whole Herodotus is right when he makes the Scyths the enemies alike of the Medes and of the Cimmerians, that is, though not disinclined to plunder Assyrian provinces, they had the same foes as Assyria. When Esarhaddon (c. 679) drove the Cimmerians under Teushpa westward, the Scyths pressed them the same way. The Cimmerians flooded all Asia Minor, destroyed the Midas dynasty in Phrygia and were a great power for thirty years and more. Their king, T(D)ugdamme (Strabo’s Lygdamis) defeated and slew Gyges of Lydia about 652 BC.

Ardys, the next king of Lydia, aided by the Ionians whose cities had been sacked by Tugdamme, defeated him and apparently slew him, for Ashurbanipal soon after boasts of driving his son Sandakhshatra northwards. At the same time the Thracian Treres were also raiding in Asia Minor. Strabo says that “Madys the Cimmerian” destroyed a band of these; but as Herodotus and the Assyrians agree that Madyes son of Protothyes (Bartatua) was a Scythian, it is probable that his defeated enemies were Cimmerians. In any case, the Cimmerian dominion in Asia Minor did not last long, though they maintained themselves for many years in Sinope and Antandrus.

Meanwhile the Scythians were a great power farther east. Herodotus says that they ruled all Asia for twenty-eight years, ruled, it would seem, in this sense, that they raided as far as Egypt and that, in the struggle between the Assyrians and Mannai on one side and the Medes and Babylonians on the other, Scythian help was decisive. From the Babylonian texts recently published by Gadd and Sidney Smith it is clear that Babylon revolted as early as 625, whereas the Medes do not come in till 615, and in 614 failed against Nineveh, but took Ashur. In the following year they seem to have done nothing, but in 612 the Babylonians met the northerners and Medes, and in concert attacked and destroyed Nineveh. The defenders under Ashur-Uballit transferred the seat of the Assyrian kingdom to Harran and maintained themselves against the Babylonians, going down in 610 before the northerners.

The account in Herodotus reads as if the Medes had made a first attempt upon Nineveh, were attacked from the north by the Scyths, and lay under their domination for twenty-eight years, threw off this yoke, and then made a second and successful assault upon Nineveh. Diodorus speaks of a league of Medes and Babylonians throwing off their allegiance to Assyria and vainly besieging Nineveh, of a Bactrian force coming to help the Assyrians but persuaded by the rebels to join them, and of its aid turning the scale so that the Assyrians were defeated and hemmed into the city, which fell in the third year of the siege. These three accounts are combined by Gadd: the approach in 614 is the beginning of the three years of siege; the Bactrians are the northerners at first upon the Assyrian side and preventing any attack in 613, but coming over in 612 and making all the difference to the besiegers. The Chronicle speaks of the northerners as Umman-manda, a general term—we are not quite justified in calling them Scyths in the narrower sense, perhaps they were Sacae really from the Bactrian side. It ends with the surviving Assyrians and the Egyptians trying to recover Harran from them. This alliance of the Egyptians with the enfeebled successors of their conqueror Ashurbanipal was doubtless due to the terror inspired in Psammetichus by the Scythian raiders to whom he had paid blackmail upon his very frontier. After the ruin of Assyria the Medes turned upon the Scythians, slew the greater part of them and drove the rest back to Scythia. Nothing remained of their domination but a vague legend, a festival (the Sacaed), and the name of Scythopolis which the Greeks gave to Beth-Shan in Palestine, now again Beisan.

II

NOMADISM

Such is the first appearance of the nomads in Western history: with what manner of men does it deal? About their way of life we have much information, Chinese and Greek accounts of them in their natural habitat, descriptions of later tribes whose life was governed by the same conditions, and observation of modern nomads. As to the racial affinities of any particular nomad people it is exceedingly difficult to come to any decision. Their mobility and their readiness to coalesce with any successful movement produce a mixture of blood and an instability of nomenclature which make it almost impossible to determine what may be the true ethnic connotation of any particular name at any given time or place. Nomadism is a matter not of race but of environment, members of any race may take to a life dependent upon property in animals which have to wander over a large area to seek their food, and impose upon their owners the necessity of following their wanderings: the animal may be horse or camel, sheep, ox or reindeer, the man may be Semite, Turko-Tatar, Samoyed or Iranian, all nomads have something in common, and those which keep the same animals under the same conditions, even though they belong to different races, are more like each other than they are to settled kinsmen.

The nomad mode of life must not be regarded as primitive, or as a half-way house between hunting and agriculture: it is in some cases highly specialized and under favourable circumstances demands less labour than tilling the ground. It is only under severe pressure, natural, economic or political, that the nomad consciously adopts a settled life. If he establishes himself in countries where he cannot be a nomad, it is with no idea that hard work on the land will give a steadier return for his labour, his intention is to be a ruler and to live off his subjects instead of living off his cattle. This may succeed for a limited time, but the nomad loses his mobility and sooner or later finds himself on a level with the settled population and compelled to live in the same way: that is the end of him as nomad.

Nor are the wanderings of the nomad as free as we are inclined to picture them. If a tract of steppe has no owner, it will be because it can support nothing. Every place which produces grass will belong to some tribe or other; if another tribe encroaches upon it, the rights of the first are violated and will be defended unless a contest is too unequal. This is true even of areas which only furnish pasture in the spring or after the rains, but places affording nourishment in summer and still more those giving shelter and food in winter are strictly limited and their possession precisely assigned to particular families, and these resist any encroachment to the uttermost. Still, a nomad driven from his own pastures by the expansion of a neighbouring tribe is not as helpless as a husbandman torn up from the soil in which he is rooted. He has a fair chance of finding some nomad weaker than himself whose pastures he can seize, or failing that, a nomad tribe may conquer itself an empire over the cultivated lands. It is so strong for attack against a settled state that it has a very good chance of success, though success eventually means being absorbed by the despised cultivators.

The nomad is perhaps best off when he has left the unmitigated steppe and occupied a mixed country offering besides the pasture large areas suitable for agriculture and accordingly tilled by a population ready for him to exploit without abandoning his own mode of life. This has been the case in parts of Iran and still more in south Russia. On this state of things is founded the importance of Scythia for the ancient world. Just as a heavy rent is said to be the best means of making a farm productive, so a rapacious ruling class anxious to import foreign luxuries develops production for export in an agricultural country. But this state of things is not a permanent equilibrium. The ruling class tends to lose the mobility upon which its military power depends and is exposed sometimes to an uprising of its subjects, more often to being superseded by a new horde. The change is fatal to the old lords; likewise very disadvantageous to the subjects, and it is a series of such changes from the time of the Sarmatians to that of the Tartars which turned the steppes of southern Russia from an agricultural country fairly thickly populated but interspersed with spaces for nomads, into an empty land which had to be artificially resettled in the eighteenth century. But it is only a strong power under modern conditions that can enlarge the agricultural area at the expense of the nomadic: generally, just as the sand gains upon the fruitful country owing to man’s destruction of plants for fuel and fodder, so the settled populations exposed to the nomad’s incursions are steadily denuded: and in central Asia, Iran and Asia Minor we have nomads living their life where agriculture formerly throve.

III

THE SCYTHIANS OF SOUTH RUSSIA

It is in the light of these generalizations that we must consider the Scythians and neighbouring peoples in South Russia. First, as to the geographical position: Herodotus gives us two surveys differing in detail and hard to reconcile with the modern map. The general effect is that the Royal or Nomad Scyths were in the fifth century BC the paramount power from the Danube to the Don, with their own dwelling-place to the east of the Dnieper. To the west of that river lived tribes called Scythian but Scythian with a difference, ploughmen or husbandmen, probably Iranians. In the corners made by the coastline were non-Scythian tribes, Tyritae on the Dniester, Callipidae on the Bug, both perhaps of Thracian affinities, Tauri in the Crimea and Maeotae to the east of the Sea of Azov, more likely to be Caucasian. To the west and north the natural limit of Scythian dominion was formed by the edge of the forests, a line running E.N.E. from the Carpathians to the Volga. These sheltered Thracian (?) Agathyrsi in Transylvania, and farther west Iranian Sigynni, Neuri (possibly Slavs) in Volhynia, Finnish Androphagi and Melanchlaeni on the Desna and Oka and, apparently on the Volga, the more civilized Budini with the trading station of Gelonus. To the east of the Don ranged the Sauromatae, a rival horde of nomads akin to the Scyths and sometimes reckoned a part of them. Farther to the north-east were Thyssagetae in the lower Urals, Iyrcae, perhaps the ancestors of the Magyars, in the west Siberian steppes, beyond them Scythian colonists on the upper Irtysh. South of these about the Aral Sea were the hordes of the Massagetae, scarcely to be distinguished from the Sacae who threatened Iran.

East of these, perhaps in the Tarim Basin, lived the Issedones and beyond them the Arimaspi, almost certainly Mongols. These localizations and racial definitions are by no means universally accepted; the data are too contradictory; but they serve to give some idea of the mutual relations of the various tribes.

Herodotus gives us two entirely different accounts of the origin of the Scyths: of one account he reports two forms, one as native and the other as current among the Pontic Greeks; both agree in making the Scythians come into existence in the country called after them, about a thousand years before the invasion of Darius. In the native form Targitaus, son of Zeus by a daughter of the Borysthenes (Dnieper), had three sons, Lipoxais, Arpoxais and Colaxais, in whose time there fell from heaven four gold objects, a plough, a yoke, an axe, and a cup; these burned with fire when approached by the two elder brothers, but yielded themselves to Colaxais, the youngest, who accordingly was accepted as the overlord. From these brothers were descended four tribes called Auchatae, Catiari, Traspies, and Paralatae, and the real name of the whole nation was Scoloti, whereas Scyth was merely the Greek name. Colaxais divided the kingdom among his three sons, that part being chief in which the sacred gold objects were kept. In the form of the story as told by the Pontic Greeks, Heracles is father of three sons by Echidna, a monstrous woman living near the lower Borysthenes: the elder sons, Gelonus and Agathyrsus, fail to string their father’s bow and make way for the third, Scythes. It is noticeable that the names in the first form nowhere recur; they seem to lend themselves to interpretation from Iranian in its Sacan form, but with the mention of the plough the tale is not particularly suitable to a nomad people and probably belongs to settled inhabitants of western Scythia. The Greeks substituted for these unknown names eponymous ancestors to fit three familiar nations of Scythia.

In the other account the nomad Scyths are newcomers forced across the Araxes (apparently the Volga, perhaps the Jaxartes) by the Issedones or Massagetae, and displacing the Cimmerians from their seats in south Russia, and to this Herodotus himself inclines. Moreover, Herodotus does not reckon the south Russian Scythians as the only Scythians, for in his chapters on the trade route going towards the north-east he speaks of migrant Scyths somewhere north-west of Lake Balkash, and further he says that what the Persians called Sacae were the same as the Scythians; now the Sacae were the nomads on the north of Persia. Sometimes Herodotus uses the word Scyth in a narrower sense of the particular horde which bore rule in south Russia, as when he says the Scyths are quite few, that is the real Scyths. Thucydides speaks of them as the most numerous of races because, for the ordinary Greek, Scyth was anybody from the steppe region, just as for the Persian any nomad was a Saka. Perhaps the two words are the same, but it does not seem very likely, as the Assyrian form Ashguzai supports the Greek, the initial vowel being added to make pronunciation easier to Semites: the Hebrew Ashkenaz is a mistake (n for w): Scyth and Saka are each probably a tribal name spread to a whole people. It is generally agreed that this people spoke a kind of Iranian; one view would make it as distinct from Iranian as Indian, but this seems going too far. The modern survivals of the group are Ossete in the Caucasus, last remnant of the Sarmatians, and Galcha with kindred dialects in the Pamirs and to some degree Afghan. The clearest characteristic is a metathesis of Iranian mute and liquid, so that e.g. the root familiar in ‘Tigris’, meaning ‘swift’, occurs in the name of the Sarmatian queen Tirgatao, and probably in the legendary Targitaus. The Greek inscriptions of Olbia and Panticapaeum in the early centuries A.D. are full of names showing this phenomenon, and just enough older names are preserved to prove that it went back to much earlier times. We may therefore believe that from the Dniester to the Irtysh and to the upper Oxus there stretched a more or less unsettled population speaking this variety of Iranian and ready to follow the example of the earlier Indian and Iranian movements and press towards the south-east or indeed in any direction which afforded an opening.

The movement in the seventh century was ultimately a failure. The Scyths lost their dominion in Asia, though many of them must have found settlement there; districts of Armenia called Scythene and Sacasene are mentioned by Xenophon and Strabo, and the feast of the Sacaea, said to commemorate their destruction, would be as likely to commemorate their presence. A Scythian element in all the Pontic region would account for the Iranian colour of the Mithradatic empire. But if the Scythians certainly spoke an Iranian dialect, it is not clear what the Cimmerians spoke. Of the three or four names preserved Teushpa and Sandakhshatra are almost certainly Iranian, and Iranian Cimmerians would contribute to the Pontic Iranism. Also the tendency to confuse Scythians and Cimmerians would be more intelligible if they were closely akin; not only does Strabo confuse them in calling Madys a Cimmerian, but also in the Babylonian version of the Behistun inscription Gimirrai answers to the Persian Saka. Against this it has been suggested that the Cimmerians are actually the conquerors who imposed a language akin to Thracian and Phrygian upon the Caucasian inhabitants of Armenia; it is not known when these Indo-European speaking Armenians arrived—some think they came with the Phrygians about the tenth century. Armenian tradition derived its Haik kings from Gamir, used by them for Cappadocia. If the Cimmerians were Thracian it would account for the Thracian element that played a leading part in all the history of the Bosporan kingdom. The mounted barbarians represented upon the famous sarcophagus from Clazomenae in the British Museum are mostly taken to be Cimmerians, but their equipment is like nothing that we connect with the Scythian area: perhaps they are Treres from central Europe where big swords first developed.

Granted that the Scythians spoke Iranian and that Iranian nomads existed, being mentioned in Asia by Herodotus, there is still a possibility that there was among them an element from beyond the divide, an original Hunnish nucleus. This view, at one time prevalent, is now out of fashion, because the argument from similarity of customs is not very cogent, given the similarity of conditions over all the steppe area, and the argument from artistic style, the resemblances between Scythic things and those found about Minusinsk on the upper Yenisei, to which appeal has recently been made, assumes that the influence came down from north-east to south-west, whereas it is in south Russia that the earliest examples have been found and the makers of the Minusinsk bronzes were long-heads perhaps of European origin, and not in the least Hunnish. It is however difficult to disregard the evidence of the Hippocratic treatise, Of Airs, Waters and Places, which says that the Scyths are as different from the rest of mankind as are the Egyptians. The special points are a tendency to fatness, slackness and excess of humours, scantiness of hair on the body, and a singular mutual resemblance due to all living under the same conditions. Further, it goes on to say that the cold makes their colouring to be reddish brown, the colour of fair people much exposed to the weather; specially striking is the expression ‘most eunuch-like of men’, and the mention of a singular sexual indifference amounting in some of the men to actual impotence. This latter phenomenon has found a parallel among the Nogay Tartars; Herodotus mentions it and says it was due to the anger of Atargatis of Askalon when the Scythians sacked her temple upon their great raid. Hippocrates (if it was Hippocrates—the attribution is much questioned) is very insistent that it is a disease like any other disease, and modern writers have suggested that the Enarees, for such is their obviously Indo-European name, were the servants of some goddess and that the whole story of the raid past Askalon was due to some misconception of their position. The expressions in Jeremiah which have been held to refer to the Scythians and confirm the story of the raid are very vague and in some ways singularly inapplicable to the Scythians, fitting the Chaldeans much better. Be that as it may, the account of the physique of the most noble Scythians shows that they produced the same impression upon Hippocrates as Mongols do upon other European observers; compare especially spadonibus similes in Ammianus Marcellinus speaking of the Huns without any apparent imitation of the earlier writer. The representations of Scythians in works of Greek art do not offer anything very peculiar; some of the combats on the things from Solokha show two types, one perhaps a little Mongoloid and presumably Scyth, but a small admixture of Iranian blood (as in the Usbegs) produces a growth of hair which disguises the essential forms of the head. Confident assertions that no Mongol peoples crossed the divide before the great Migrations are refuted by Greek caricatures from Memphis dating from the fifth century BC, and showing both Mongoloid and Iranian types in Scythian headdresses. Further many Scythian names, especially those of gods, have resisted all Iranian inter­pretations; true they are probably very corrupt and cannot be explained as Turkish, but it looks as if there were some non­Iranian element present.

IV

SCYTHIAN CUSTOMS

The customs of the Scythians are known to us from Herodotus, Hippocrates and other authorities, supplemented by the data furnished by the tombs of which we shall speak later.

The governing condition of their lives was their essential dependence upon their beasts. Of these horses were the most important not only for riding but as yielding milk for kumys, cheese and dried curd, also for sacrifice. The Scythians were the only nation of antiquity to practise gelding, as the northern horse was less docile than the Arab. Neat cattle were used for milk and for food, also for drawing the great waggons. Both Hippocrates and Herodotus say that they were hornless owing to the cold, but the few representations from Scythic and neighbouring areas do not bear this out. Mutton bones as well as beef bones are found in the cauldrons deposited with the dead, so they had sheep, but no use was made of pigs. Upon occasion the Scyths hunted wild animals, deer, ibex and hare. They were very fond of all kinds of animals as a decoration upon silver work and the like. Some use they made of vegetable food, grain, garlic, onions and other bulbs. Besides the fermented mares’ milk, kumys, they drank wine when they could get it, and drank it neat.

Their habitations are described as waggons with tilts so large as to be like tents; probably they were tents capable of being put up on the ground at any place where a considerable stay was to be made. The women rode in the carts. The Sarmatians used folding tents like the modern yurta.

The dress of the Scythians is one of the most interesting things about them. Whereas the early Indians, Greeks and Italians wore clothes draped about the body rather than cut to fit it and sandals on their feet, the Iranians, Scythians, Thracians, Germans and Celts wore coats, breeches and boots. The Persian costume, as represented at Persepolis, is practically identical with the Scythian shown on various metal vessels of Greek work made for Scythian use: the materials are evidently much thicker than those which compose the somewhat similar clothes of oriental archers, Amazons and the like upon Greek pots made in Greece. The true Scythic coat of leather or thick stuff with edgings of fur was double­breasted, coming down to a point in front but rather short behind, and held in by a belt, the trousers of thinner material tucked into boots of soft leather or felt. Coat and trousers are sometimes adorned with spots perhaps representing gold plaques sewn on. The Scyths either went bareheaded or wore hoods more or less like the Russian bashlyk, with lappets for tying round the neck and a high point, so high as sometimes to fall over. Herodotus mentions these high caps as distinguishing the Sacae and they are markedly different from the rounder headdresses of the Persians—Skuka, the Saka conquered by Darius, wears a very sharply-pointed cap. Of the women’s dress we can form no clear idea: such figures as we have are apparently goddesses and no guide to mortals’ attire.

The rich of both sexes wore a great deal of jewelry, especially in the form of gold plaques sewn on to their dress in vast numbers: solid gold and silver were formed into headbands, earrings, neck­rings and necklaces, plaits and chains, bracelets and rings. The poorer people wore beads or bronze armlets. Most of the jewelry, especially the women’s, is of Greek work. Mirrors of various types helped the adjustment of this finery: there are many archaic examples of the round mirror with a handle projecting in the same plane, the later Greek round box-mirror, and a special Scythic type of round mirror with a loop at the back, perhaps developed from a phalera: the loop became an animal or even quite a high projection. This loop type seems to have spread from Scythia to Siberia and China. Combs were of course known and in some cases exquisitely ornamented.

The most characteristic weapon of the nomad was the bow, always the compound double curved bow suitable for use on horseback, much the same as the modern Manchu bow. No well-preserved specimens have survived, but we have plenty of pictures. They must have been about 2 ft. 6 in. long. The bow was mostly kept in a combined case and quiver called in Greek gorytus, a form peculiar to the Scyths and such as borrowed from them: many of these, or at least the gold plates with which they were covered, have been preserved. There were also simple quivers. The arrows, about the same length as the bow, were made of wood or reed, with points of stone, bone, iron, or most commonly of bronze; the typical shape has a triangular section. Great numbers of arrow heads, up to 200 or 300, are found buried with a Scyth. Spear-heads, generally of iron, are found in the tombs, but the spear was rather the weapon of the Sarmatian than the Scythian: they also had short darts.

Herodotus says that the Sacae had daggers—he calls the Scythian’s sword acinaces, the word he uses also for the Persian sword, and this is quite a short weapon; a long sword would be ξίφος. This agrees with the Scythic finds: the longest blades are not much more than 21 inches: and most are rather shorter. The earliest examples are of bronze, later of iron: the hilts are occasionally overlaid with gold and the sheaths likewise. The type is highly specialized and extends not only throughout Scythia and its outliers on the Kama and in Siberia but into Persia. The reliefs at Persepolis show one set of the palace guards wearing a short sword in a sheath with just such a side projection and chape as the Scythians used. The object was to suspend it out of a rider’s way, but the death of Cambyses was caused by the chape of his sword coming off when he was mounting his horse.

Herodotus specially mentions axes (sagaris) as characteristic of Scythians, but they are very rarely found, the most noticeable example being in the sixth century tomb at Kelermes. The Scyth always had a hone for whetting his weapons, a rod of schist with a hole at one end and often a gold mount.

Shields were oval or round, often with the figure of some beast in the centre; other defensive armour was not characteristic of the Scyths: helmets, breast-plates, brassarts and greaves are always of Greek work. In the latest tombs scale-armour appears, and this in various materials was more common among the Sarmatians.

The horse trappings of the Scythians are perhaps the most characteristic of their belongings: they seem to have used saddles but no stirrups; the practical bits and cheek pieces were decorated mostly in the special ‘Scythic’ style, elaborate trappings for state-horses being more often of Greek workmanship.

Funeral cars are preserved in most tombs, though they are so broken that it is hard to reconstruct them. The car suited for bringing a king’s body to the grave would equally suit the small portable standing tent: we find also clay models of other waggons with regular tilts. The cars were decorated with staves ending in bronze figures of animals and hollow rattles to frighten away evil spirits.

Vessels are found in all the graves. The largest are the great bronze cauldrons containing horse and mutton bones; the form seems Asiatic though the make is sometimes Greek. Drinking vessels might have two native shapes, either spherical or very shallow with a high handle, also that of the drinking horn or rhyton: but Greek shapes like the shallow bowl with a central boss were accepted and there was large use made of the fine Greek pottery. But the most famous Scythian cups were fashioned from the skulls of their enemies.

The same spirit is shown in their custom of taking scalps and collecting them. It reminds us that these people, for all their interesting art, their appreciation of Greek work, and a certain power of organization which for several hundred years kept them rich and powerful in an exposed country, were in other ways on a level with savages. Their strategy in war was to retire before an invader, confronting him with the desert in which they alone could move with speed and security, their tactics were to hover round an enemy and shoot him down; if he managed to come to close quarters, they would feign flight and when his formation was loosened turn again upon him. Outside the steppe country the Scyths were perhaps less successful than other nomads; their dominion in Asia was soon overturned, and though they raided into Thrace, and into the Caucasus, they never established them­selves beyond the mouths of the Kuban and the Dobrudzha: against walled towns, forests, and mountains they were helpless.

The position of women was very different among the Scyths from what it was among their neighbours, the Sauromatae, who were actually called woman-ruled. The Scythian women were confined to the waggon, so much even that their health suffered: the Scythian magnates could afford to keep their women in purdah. In general among the nomads, the women, though hard-worked and with no legal rights against their men-folk, lead an active life, have much responsibility, and exercise corresponding influence. It is possible that the Scythian women had been seized from a subject race—something unusual underlies the tale that they had remained behind during the twenty-eight years when the men were ruling Asia, so that they and their sons had to be reconquered.

V

RELIGION, BURIAL CUSTOMS

What we know of the Scythian religion is told us by Herodotus. The following deities were common to all: Tabiti-Hestia, who was venerated above the rest, next to her Papaeus-Zeus with Apia-Ge, husband and wife, after them Goetosyrus-Apollo, Argimpasa-Aphrodite Urania, and Ares. Thamimasadas-Poseidon was peculiar to the Royal Scyths. They raised no temples or altars to the gods save to Ares alone: Ares was represented by a sword planted in a mound of brushwood: to him human beings were sacrificed as well as horses and sheep. The list of gods conveys very little to us, as we do not know what aspect of the Greek gods is intended: it fits the gods of the Tartars as well as those of the Aryans. The names, as has been remarked, do not lend themselves to interpretation from Iranian, but the forms are very uncertain. The ritual required by Ares does not suit the open steppe. We hear more of the Scythians’ witchcraft than of their religion: the wizards divined the future with bundles of rods, and the Enarees by plaiting bast. If the king fell sick it was supposed to be because some man had broken an oath by the king’s hearth: wizards could divine the offender, but if they brought a false accusation they were burned to death on a cart full of brushwood. The oath of blood-brotherhood was taken by drinking wine in which the blood of the parties had been poured. In this matter of wizardry and oaths the Tartar parallels are particularly close. So are those in connection with burials, but in this case the ideas are common to most savage races.

Herodotus says that the burials of the kings take place in the land of the Gerrhi (somewhere about the great bend of the Dnieper). Here when their king dies they dig a great square pit. After this is ready they take the corpse, stuff it with sweet-smelling plants, wax it over, and put it on a waggon. Their own ears they crop, shear their hair, gash their arms, slit their foreheads and noses, and run arrows through their left hands. So they bring the corpse to the next tribe that they rule over: this joins the train, and so it goes from one tribe to another, each joining in, and when they have gone round all of them they come to Gerrhus last of all. There putting the body into the pit upon a couch, they stick spears into the ground all round it, put beams across the top, and mats upon these to form a roof. Next they strangle one of the dead man’s concubines and lay her in the vacant space of the burial pit, so too his cupbearer, cook, groom, servant, and messenger, also horses, and a first share of all his other goods, especially gold cups (they make no use of silver or bronze). When they have done this they heap up a great mound, vying with each other to make it high. After a year’s space they go on to do as follows: they take fifty of the king’s best attendants (these must be native-born Scyths, he takes whom he will among them, no bought slaves serve him) and strangle them, and fifty of the handsomest horses too, stuff them, set the men on their backs and bits in their mouths and leave them in a circle about the tomb. So the kings are buried. Ordinary Scyths are put upon a waggon, carried round and feasted by their friends for forty days, and then buried.

The examination of the tombs in south Russia yields no circle of strangled horsemen; set up above the surface of the ground they would leave no trace to our day, but the arrangements inside the mound are almost exactly such as Herodotus describes. Only the vessels of the dead man were not merely of gold but also of silver, ivory, or pottery. Curiously enough, the closest analogues are to be found on the river Kuban, north of the Caucasus, a region which is not mentioned by Herodotus as held by the Scyths: but their occupation of it is implied by their having passed the Caucasus in their great invasion of Asia. It is possible that by the fifth century they had lost their hold on it, since the graves mostly belong to the preceding century.

A striking picture of the funeral ceremony in this region has recently been given. For the grave of a Scythian chieftain a clearing was first made in the steppes. A big trench was then dug in the virgin soil with a corridor sloping down into it. Posts were set along the walls of the trench and of the corridor. The trench was covered with a conical and the corridor with a gabled roof: the roof of the tomb chamber was also supported by strong posts planted in the middle of the trench. The cubical frame of the tomb was probably lined with mats and rugs so as to make an almost exact copy of a nomadic tent. Under the tent another smaller one was sometimes constructed to contain the body of the chief and the treasures buried with him. In the fourth century under Greek influence this tent was replaced by a chamber of dressed stone. Round the central tent other skeletons are nearly always found, the female richly adorned, the male unadorned but furnished with weapons. Round the chamber on the edge of the trench bodies of horses, sometimes several hundreds, were disposed in regular order... From these data we can reconstruct the Scythian funerary ceremonial, essentially a nomadic ceremonial, cruel, bloody, and luxurious. The grave itself was a reproduction of the sumptuous tent in which the dead man had dwelt. The body was borne to the sepulchral tent in procession. The dead chief and the persons sacrificed in his honour, clad in festal attire, accompanied by the funeral furniture, were placed on the funeral cars each drawn by six horses, or on biers carried by retainers. Over the bodies were held canopies attached to poles surmounted by rattles and covered with bells. In front probably went one or more standard-bearers, the standards crowned like the poles of the canopy by emblematic figures in bronze. As the horses also wore bells the ceremony made a vast din intended to drive away evil spirits. When the tent was reached the bodies were laid in the grave, the objects round them: the horses were slaughtered and the corpses laid out, the canopy and car broken and put near the tomb or in the corridor. The ceremony over, the grave was covered with earth and a great barrow raised over it. The rites are almost the extreme expression of the belief that a man could take into the next world everything which gave him pleasure in this. The barbarity has been surpassed only by the Mongols. Mangu Khan died far from the ancestral burial place, and all who met the funeral procession, in number twenty thousand, followed him into the next world.

The oldest tombs are not all on the Kuban; others were about the great bend of the Dnieper, and in this district are concentrated the richest tombs of later centuries, especially from the latter half of the fourth and first half of the third century. In this area the riches are as great but the sacrifices of horses much fewer: enough to draw the funeral car, but not enough to make a really great show in the next world. Also it seems as if the king sometimes waited for his wife to die, instead of expecting her to be sati.

To give some idea of the richness of these tombs we may take the contents of Solokha, the last tomb excavated before the war, fifteen miles south of Nikopol and ten miles east of Great Zna­menka in the Tauric Government, in the middle of the ‘Gerrhus district’. The mound was about fifty feet high: in the centre had been the tomb of a queen arrayed in all her finery (now stolen) and supplied with drinking vessels, a cauldron, and a gridiron; near by were two horses with gold accoutrements. In the south­east part of the mound, approached by a deep shaft and a covered way, was a larger chamber containing the king’s body, by him his sword-bearer, and another servant near the entrance. A little to the west was a second pit with skeletons of a groom and five horses. The queen must have died first and the king was after­wards put into the same barrow. The king lay with his head to the west, his arms by his side. Round his neck was a golden tore 11 inches across, its ends lion heads with enamel; he wore three gold bracelets on his right arm and two on his left. Over him was a pall to which more than 300 gold plaques had been sewn; possibly these came off his trousers. Above his head lay an iron knife with a bone handle, some bronze arrow-heads, and a rusted sword. To its right a rusted coat of mail, a pair of bronze greaves, and a wooden cup mounted in gold, a little lower down a bronze helmet, two great iron spear-heads, a bronze mace and a leathern gorytus. To the king’s left lay a gold necklace and two rusty swords, one with a gold haft and sheath. Not far from his right shoulder was found a golden comb of the finest Greek work, its back adorned with a scene representing a horseman in Greek helmet and cuirass fighting two men in Scythian costume. Nearby stood seven silver vases mostly of native shapes but excellent Greek decoration.

In niches round the chambers were hidden various objects, in one a row of ten amphorae, in another three bronze cauldrons with beef and lamb bones, in another some gold-mounted object, and in a fourth a shallow golden bowl with a boss in the middle and reliefs all round, and a gorytus containing 180 arrow-heads and adorned with a repousse plate of very thin silver parcel gilt upon a backing of gypsum. This is interesting not only technically but because the figures of barbarians upon it show a type of face with snub nose and straight hair similar to the Pan or Silen of the coins of Panticapaeum and much less straight features than most representations of Scythians.

All the great tumuli of south Russia once held treasures like this; most were robbed soon after their construction, others in medieval times: the best chance of survival has been when robbers have plundered one of several tombs in a barrow, and thought they had exhausted its riches. The objects contained are not like the hoards of the Migration period, suggestive of miscellaneous booty. Not all were made by or for Scythians: sometimes things are demonstrably second-hand; but generally they were made by Greeks to meet Scythian requirements—either the shape of the object, gorytus, cauldron or drinking cup, or the scenes that adorn it, combats of Scythians, steppe-life, probably combats of beasts, show their purpose. This proves peaceable, probably commercial, relations between Scythians and Greeks. Herodotus tells us definitely of Scyths so much attracted by Greek life as to earn the enmity of their own people. The com­merce was founded on the export of corn through the Bosporan kingdom and to some degree through Olbia, to feed the industrial population of Greece. The Scythians, instead of making merely destructive raids first upon the barbarous populations about them and then upon the Greek cities of the coast, reduced the former to subjection and employed them to raise corn which they sold to the latter, perhaps also exacting a tribute of manufactured goods. Such a profitable position of frankly predatory middlemen gave them the wherewithal to pay for the countless riches with which their princes surrounded themselves in this world and the next; riches which were not confined to the gold and silver which have resisted the destruction of time, but no doubt included slaves, rich textiles, expensive wines and every kind of magnificence.

In this more sophisticated state the rulers seem to have developed a cult of the god, or more often goddess, who had conferred upon them their kingly power. This idea is common to other Iranians and the analogy of Sassanian reliefs enables us to interpret as investitures scenes of a god delivering a sacred cup to a king. The predominance of the goddess is suggested by what Herodotus says of Tahiti: it may be due to local instead of Iranian influences, as a great goddess is the chief feature of religion in the Bosporan kingdom and along the coast of the Crimea. We also get scenes of blood-brotherhood or communion.

It has been claimed that apart from the importations from Greek regions and in earlier times from Assyria and perhaps Iran there was a definitely nomad art, abstract and unrepresentational, a contrast to the figured art of the Mediterranean, Indian and Chinese areas; that this art was the true origin of the figureless Mussulman art and of the art of the Migration period in which figures and beasts are reduced to geometrical forms. That influences akin to the Scythic had the strongest possible effect upon this Migration art and through it upon European art of the early middle ages is becoming increasingly clear. But it seems to be going too far to call Scythic art non-representational. The Scyths appear to have had their own branch of the western Asiatic art of the seventh and sixth centuries BC; other branches were in Mesopotamia, the Hittite country, and Ionia, probably in Transcaucasia and northern Iran. Scythic taste essentially reduced an animal to a decorative system of abstract lines and planes aiming at strong contrasts of light and shade, even of colour, as against delicate gradations of modelling. The animal being treated as decoration its surfaces might be further decorated by smaller animals or animal motifs. Any part of an animal, especially its extremities, might suggest a likeness to some other animal form. So upon the most characteristic piece of Scythic work, the electrum deer from Kul Oba, just outside Panticapaeum, the last tine of the antlers is shaped like a ram’s head, and the body bears the figures of a lion, a hare and a griffin. Or else the surface is diversified by the musculature being exaggerated either as a complete double spiral, or in later stages by a coloured inlay making a dot and comma pattern. Weapons and horse-gear show the Scythic style at its best; women’s jewelry was almost always Greek or imitated from the Greek. When the nomads no longer imported these, their own style in a later form became dominant and was largely adopted by their neighbours from Siberia to the Atlantic.

In a later volume it will be told how Darius invaded the Scythian land from the west in order to secure his conquests in Thrace, and again how the Scythian power which had successfully resisted him finally succumbed to a general change of circumstances. On the eastern border the kindred Sarmatians, themselves being pressed from farther east, steadily encroached from the line of the Ural to the Volga, the Don and the Dnieper, so that the Scyths intensified their pressure upon the tribes of the middle Dnieper until on this side too central Europe made its weight felt. Meanwhile the grain trade with Greece was less profitable, that country now demanding less and being largely supplied from Egypt. Finally it is likely that the softening of fibre almost always observed in nomad tribes living off tributaries had set in, so that the Scyths were no longer the irresistible savages who had overrun eastern Europe and western Asia in the seventh century. But this, their decline and fall, is part of the history of the Hellenistic Age.

CHAPTER X

THE NEW BABYLONIAN EMPIRE