The Scythian: His Rise and Fall

Abstract

In the contemporary world of ideas, the ancient race called Scythians holds virtually no place in the popular imagination. Indeed, even among historians, limited by the modern historiographical insistence on the documented 'facts,' the Scythians are frequently ignored altogether or relegated to appendices and footnotes with the unicorn, Prester John, and Atlantis.1 Such connotations as the Scythians may have today are limited largely to a reference to their cannibalism in King Lear (I.i.118), their wrought gold fibulae in museums, and the tangential knowledge which may come from reading histories of Persia and Greece. These ideological vestiges are almost the sole remains of a flourishing tradition which lasted from, roughly, the ninth century B.C. until the nineteenth century A.D.; and the very historiographical genre which in the modern era has practically eliminated the Scythian myth was the agency through which that tradition was formulated and perpetuated for 2300 years. In actuality, the Scythians, an Indo-European tribe, are believed to have migrated from Central Asia along with their cousins-germane, the Sarmatians, into Northern Turkestan and the broader Caspian area in such quantities that by 700 B.C. they heId the territory from Rumania and Hungary in the west to Afghanistan in the east. Always nomadic, the Scythian herdsmen and hunters eventually came into contact with the Greeks in Asia Minor, who were the first to record in any detail the existence of the barbarians to the norh. Since the Scythians were effective horsemen, probably being the first people to ride horseback or to wear trousers, they were much in demand as mercenaries, by the militaristic rulers of ancient Assyria and Persia, though the Scythian nation as a whole avoided communication with the Mediterranean world as much as possible.2 No central government ever evolved, the Scythian political system being a loose alliance of tribes much in the manner of the American Indian; and, like the Indian, the Scythian lived in a portable house, practiced social communism, us,ed tomahawks, and scalped his enemies. In the first or second century B.C., some centuries after they had been afforded a place in history by Heredotus and his successors, the Scythians were over-run and assimilated by the Sarmatians; but the Hellenic world continued to call the hybrid nation ' Scythians ' or ' Getae,' the latter being the usual appellation after the third century A.D.3 Such are the 'facts ' which the twentieth-century historian considers valid enough to give credence to; but these are only fragments of a richly developed trTopta of the Scythians which underwent many interesting and