Authors: Christopher I. Beckwith
Tags: #History, #General, #Asia, #Europe, #Eastern, #Central Asia
Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia From the Bronze Age to the Present (18 page)
From their base in the steppe, the Scythians further developed a longdistance trade network, described by Herodotus, that they found already in place. With their discovery that the Greeks living in their colonial towns on the Black Sea coast—and as far away as Greece—would pay gold for grain, the Scythians began an extremely profitable business.
21
Their appetite for luxuries, especially gold, grew rapidly. The Scythian royal burials were filled with beautifully crafted golden treasures in the Scythian animal style, some of which escaped tomb robbers and now grace the museums of Russia and Ukraine. Because gold is not native to the area of Scythia, all of it was imported, mostly from great distances, including as far as the Altai Mountains, as archaeology has revealed.
22
This particular gold route thus constituted a considerable part of early east-west transcontinental trade.
As mentioned earlier, the Scythians’ sociopolitical practices included the comitatus, the apparent ritual sacrifice of which in one instance is vividly described by Herodotus and has been confirmed to some extent by archaeology.
23
The Scythian Empire is said by Herodotus to have consisted of several peoples,
24
of which he gives differing accounts. The national origin myth he relates purports to explain the division of the Scythians into three branches:
25
There appeared in this country, being then a desert, a man whose name was Targitaus. His parents, they say … were Zeus and a daughter of the river Borysthenes [the Dnieper]. Such (it is said) was Targitaus’ lineage; and he had three sons, Lipoxaïs, Arpoxaïs, and *Skoloxaïs,
26
youngest of the three. In the time of their rule (so the story goes) there fell down from the sky into Scythia certain implements, all of gold, namely, a plough, a yoke, a sword, and a drinking cup.
27
The eldest of them, seeing this, came near with intent to take them; but the gold began to burn as he came, and he ceased from his essay; then the second approached, and the gold did again as before; when these two had been driven away by the burning of the gold, last came the youngest brother, and the burning was quenched at his approach; so he took the gold to his own house. At this his elder brothers saw how matters stood, and made over the whole royal power to the youngest.
28
Lipoxaïs, it is said, was the father of the Scythian clan called Auchatae; Arpoxaïs, the second brother, of those called Katiari and Traspians; the youngest, who was king, of those called Paralatae. All these together bear the name of Skoloti, after their king *Skoloxaïs; “Scythians” is a name given them by Greeks.
29
The explanation of the four implements given by Herodotus is undoubtedly mistaken, based on his own text. Despite the youngest son’s possession of the gold objects, the four implements clearly correspond to the four peoples subsequently divided up among the three sons. They also correspond to the occupations of the four Scythian peoples given below in his own text: the plow for the Plowing Scythians, the yoke for the Husbandmen, and the sword for the Royal Scythians, which leaves the drinking cup for the Nomad Scythians.
30
Herodotus and all other sources agree that the nation as a whole was ruled by the Royal Scythians, the warriors who controlled most of the wealth. They were “the largest and bravest of the Scythian tribes, which looks upon all the other tribes in the light of slaves.” Below them were the Nomad Scythians, who were perhaps simply the nomadic Scythians who did not belong to the royal clan; the Husbandmen, called Borysthenites by the Greeks; and the Plowing Scythians, agriculturalists who grew grain “not for their own use, but for sale.” The localization of these peoples on Scythian territory, though described by Herodotus, is not well established, but the Crimea and the region to the west of it (southern Ukraine), where the rich soil has remained highly productive down to the present day, was occupied primarily by agriculturalists, while the eastern part, which is still largely open grassland, was occupied by the pastoral nomads.
In addition, Herodotus describes a great number of other peoples, Scythian, part-Scythian, and non-Scythian, living within the Scythian realm, such as “the Callippedae, who are Scythian Greeks, and beyond them another tribe called Alazones; these and the Callippidae, though in other matters they live like the Scythians, sow and eat corn, and onions, garlic, lentils, and millet. Above the Alazones dwell Scythian tillers of the land, who sow corn not for eating but for selling; north of these the Neuri; to the north of the Neuri the land is uninhabited as far as we know.”
31
Archaeological studies indicate that some of these and perhaps other peoples in the Scythian realm were not Northern Iranian in culture but Thracian, and probably spoke Thracian or other non-Iranian languages.
Despite the factual complexity, theoretically Scythian society was divided into four peoples plus the ruler: an ideal organization typical of Central Eurasian states at least as late as the Mongol Empire. It is also notable that the dominant people considered all the others as their “slaves.”
32
This view was shared by other peoples in Central Eurasia later on as well.
Herodotus
33
describes the Scythians as “pure nomads”:
I praise not the Scythians in all respects, but in this greatest matter they have so devised that none who attacks them can escape, and none can catch them if they desire not to be found. For when men have no established cities or fortresses, but all are house-bearers and mounted archers, living not by tilling the soil but by cattle-rearing and carrying their dwellings on waggons,
34
how should these not be invincible and unapproachable? This invention they have made in a land which suits their purpose and has rivers which are their allies; for their country is level and grassy and well watered and rivers run through it not much less in number than the canals of Egypt.
The account of Herodotus is the earliest surviving narrative description of any Central Eurasian nomadic people in any source, but already it contains elements of the misleading stereotype that has dominated histories of Central Eurasians down to the present day. Herodotus, like other peripheral culture authors of his time and later, was fascinated by nomadism. He does not say much about the extensive agriculture that went on in the Scythian realm. He also neglects to explain why the Scythians maintained the cities he comments on, in particular Gelonus, which was located at the northern edge of the steppe in the territory of the Budini, another of the many “Scythian nations” he describes:
The Budini are a great and numerous nation; the eyes of all of them are very bright, and they are red-haired. They have a city built of wood, called Gelonus. The wall of it is thirty furlongs [stadia] in length on each side of the city; this wall is high and all of wood; and their houses are wooden, and their temples; for there are among them temples of Greek gods, furnished in Greek fashion with images and altars and shrines of wood; and they honour Dionysus every two years with festivals and revels. For the Geloni are by their origin Greeks, who left their trading ports to settle among the Budini; and they speak a language half Greek and half Scythian. But the Budini speak not the same language as the Geloni, nor is their manner of life the same. The Budini are native to the country; they are nomads, and the only people in these parts that eat fir-cones; the Geloni are tillers of the soil, eating grain and possessing gardens; they are wholly unlike the Budini in form and in complexion. Yet the Greeks call the Budini too Geloni; but this is wrong. All their country is thickly wooded with every kind of tree; in the depths of the forests there is a great and wide lake and marsh surrounded by reeds; otters are caught in it, and beavers.
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The city of Gelonus, or one more or less exactly like it, has been excavated by archaeologists at Belsk (Bilsk), on the northern edge of the steppe. It is a forty-square-kilometer settlement, and “the commanding ramparts [which are 20.5 miles long]
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and remarkable extent of the site suggest a place of great importance. Strategically situated on the exact boundary of the steppe and forest-steppe, Gelonus could have controlled trade from north to south. The presence of craft workshops and large amounts of imported Greek pottery, dating from the fifth and fourth centuries
BC
, suggest that it did.”
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The attention of the Persians and Greeks was surely drawn by the prosperity of the Scythians, not their martial prowess, which would obviously have been a good reason for
not
invading them. It was hardly any desire for vengeance that induced Darius to consider the conquest of Scythia, as Herodotus claims, but the belief that Scythia was worth conquering.
Darius (r. 521–486) usurped the throne during the civil war between Cyrus’s successor Cambyses and his brother. He greatly expanded the frontiers of the Persian Empire to include Egypt in the southwest, northwestern India in the southeast, and Central Asia in the northeast. He met resistance in the north from the steppe Iranians—the Sakas and Scythians
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—and in the west from the Greeks. After defeating the Sakas or “Asian Scythians,” and capturing their king, Skuka, in 520–519
BC
,
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he decided, against the advice of his counselors, to invade Scythia, home of the European Scythians, and subjugate it. Darius prepared by having a bridge of boats built across the Bosphorus to Thrace and ordered his Ionian Greek subjects to sail to the Danube and up the river to the point above where the mouths separate, and bridge it for him.
In 513–512
BC
Darius marched a huge army—according to Herodotus, 700,000 men strong—across the Bosphorus and through Thrace, which he subdued as he went, until he reached the Danube.
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He then crossed the river and marched eastward into Scythia, ordering his Ionian forces to guard the bridge until he returned. The Persians chased the Scythians across the empty steppe, seeking to do battle with them, but the Scythians used the classic Central Eurasian guerrilla warfare technique of feinting and withdrawing,
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which forced the Persians to march deeper and deeper into Scythian lands, where they found no cities to conquer and no supplies to commandeer. In frustration, Darius sent a message to the ruler of the Scythians, Idanthyrsus, demanding that he stand and fight or simply surrender. The Scythian replied, according to Herodotus:
It is thus with me, Persian: I have never fled for fear of any man, nor do I now flee from you; this that I have done is no new thing or other than my practice in peace. But as to the reason why I do not straightway fight with you, this too I will tell you. For we Scythians have no towns or planted lands, that we might meet you the sooner in battle, fearing lest the one be taken or the other wasted. But if nothing will serve you but fighting straightway, we have the graves of our fathers; come, find these and essay to destroy them; then shall you know whether we will fight you for those graves or no. Till then we will not join battle unless we think it good.
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Darius ended up retreating, having built a few fortresses in his progress across Scythia. He had accomplished nothing except the further strengthening of the Scythians’ reputation as a great warrior nation.
The wars of Darius and his successors against the Greeks continued down to the time of the Macedonian prince Alexander the Great. After subduing the Levant and Egypt, Alexander turned to the Persian Empire in 334
BC
. He finally defeated Darius III (r. 336–331
BC
) and after the latter’s death in 330
BC
in Central Asia, Alexander had himself proclaimed Persian emperor. He had conquered the entire Persian Empire, including Bactria and Sogdiana. To cement his control of the Central Asian region, he married Roxana (Roxane), a Bactrian noblewoman, in 327.
Alexander does not seem to have planned an invasion of Scythia, perhaps due to the military difficulties involved. His army consisted largely of highly trained Macedonian and Greek foot soldiers, whose phalanx formation was difficult for any enemy to overcome, but his cavalry was small. The only way to subdue a fully mobile nomadic nation was with a full-sized nomadic-style cavalry. His limited mounted forces could not have taken on a large nomadic army fighting in its home territory. Despite the undoubted advantage that his cavalry gave him in flanking movements in sedentary Near Eastern battles, Alexander would have faced the same problem Darius encountered.
The successors of the Scythians, the Sarmatians (in Greek, Σανρομάζα ‘Sauromatians’), spoke a Northern Iranian language akin to Scythian. They were notable for the great prominence of women in general and especially for the presence among them of women warriors. According to Herodotus they were called
Oiorpata
‘man slayers’ in the Scythian language.
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The unusual status of women, which was markedly different from the extremely androcentric Scythian and Greek cultures, was noticed by Herodotus and has received solid confirmation by archaeology. Although the tale he recounts about the Sarmatians’ origin as a cross of Scythian boys and Amazon women is probably just an entertaining story, it is likely that the Greek legends about the race of Amazons are based on the real-life Sarmatian women warriors. In the last couple of centuries
BC
, the Sarmatians came into contact, and conflict, with the Romans.
The Eastern Steppe: The Hsiung-nu
