Goitosyros

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Over the grassland north of the Black Sea the sun rose and set against nothing. There were no mountains on most of that horizon to break its rising, no city skyline, no forest wall — only the flat edge of the steppe, where the light came up clean across a thousand miles of grass and went down clean at the far side of it. The people who lived under that sky rode after their herds from one grazing to the next and watched the sun cross the whole of the day’s arc without obstruction. Among the gods they honored, one was the brightness itself. A single Greek author wrote his name down, in two slightly different spellings, and matched him to the Greek god of light. Past that name and that match, almost nothing of him survives.

The name and the rank

The author is Herodotus, and the passage is the short catalog of Scythian gods in the fourth book of his Histories, at 4.59. He lists the powers the Scythians worship and gives each a Greek equivalent, then supplies the names the Scythians themselves used. In George Rawlinson’s rendering the line runs: “In the Scythic tongue Vesta is called Tabiti, Jupiter (very properly, in my judgment) Papaeus, Tellus Apia, Apollo Oetosyrus, Celestial Venus Artimpasa.” The god matched to Apollo is the one named here. His Scythian name reaches the modern world in more than one spelling because the manuscripts of Herodotus do — Oetosyrus in Rawlinson, Oitosyros and Goitosyros in other editions and in the scholarship, the initial G present or absent according to the reading. Both forms name the same god; this entry follows the convention of giving Goitosyros as the headword and Oitosyros as the variant, because that is how the literature most often carries him.

That is nearly the whole of the ancient record of him. He has no rank stated in so many words, but the order of the list places him: after the fire-goddess Tabiti, whom Herodotus honors first of all and matches to the Greek Hestia; after the sky-father Papaios, set against the Greek Zeus, and the earth-mother Api reckoned his consort. Goitosyros comes in the rank below, among the powers Herodotus names alongside the heavenly goddess Argimpasa and the two figures he calls by the Greek names Heracles and Ares without giving their Scythian ones. The modern reconstructions of the Scythian pantheon, working from the same list, generally set him in that third tier — one of the ordered powers of a cosmos we know only from the bare names and the Greek gods set beside them.

He has no kin in the surviving text. The Greek Apollo had a mother, a twin sister, a famous birth on a floating island; the Scythian god matched to him has none of that on record. No myth attaches to his name. No parentage is given, no consort, no birth-story, no deed. What Herodotus supplies is a name, a place in a sequence, and a translation into Greek — and the translation, here as everywhere in his catalog, is the move that does the work and the move that has to be watched. To call this god Apollo is to say something definite about him; it is also to lay a Greek template over a steppe power and trust that the two matched at the joint that mattered. Which joint Herodotus had in mind — the sun, the bright bow, the light, the prophetic art — he does not say. He gives the equation and moves on.

The sun over the grassland

What can be said of Goitosyros’ power has to be built from the equation and from his name, because the text gives no third thing. Both lines of evidence point first at the sun, and there the broad agreement of the modern study rests; but the name pulls, at the same time, toward a different domain, and that pull is the distinctive problem of this god.

Take the equation first. Among the powers of the Greek pantheon, Apollo by the fifth century was firmly a god of light and increasingly identified with the sun; the Greek who reached for him to render a Scythian god was reaching, most readers have concluded, for a power of brightness and the daylit sky. That a sky-watching, horse-keeping people of the open steppe should hold a sun-god among their high powers is in itself unsurprising — the sun was the great unbroken fact of the grassland, the thing that crossed the whole horizon every day over a country with nothing to hide it. The World History Encyclopedia and the standard surveys of Scythian religion take Goitosyros accordingly as the Scythian sun, the solar member of the seven. There survive from the steppe and its neighbors images of a radiate god — a deity with rays about his head, riding a chariot drawn by horses — that have been read as this solar power, though no inscription ties such an image to the name Goitosyros, and the connection is an inference from iconography rather than a caption.

Now the name, and here the picture divides. The comparative study of the Scythian theonyms reads them through the Iranian languages, the family to which the Scythian speech belonged — for the Scythians were an Iranian-speaking people, cousins in tongue to the Persians and to the world of Zoroaster’s hymns, and their gods’ names, surviving only in Greek letters, can be set against the wider Indo-Iranian vocabulary. One reading reconstructs the name as something like Gaithasura and parses it through Iranian words for the herd and for possession: the first element compared to a term for a flock or a cattle-pasture, so that the god comes out as a power “rich in herds” or “rich in flocks,” a divinity of the beasts on which the steppe life turned, worshiped — on this view — across the common people whose wealth was their cattle. A second reading takes the variant spelling Oitosyros and reconstructs instead something like Vaitasura, “might of the willow,” tying the god to the Scythian diviners’ willow rods that Herodotus describes elsewhere. And the simplest reading aligns the name with a word for the radiant or the shining and lets it mean what the Apollo-equation already suggests: the sun.

The Encyclopaedia Iranica, surveying exactly this terrain, notes that the functions of the Scythian gods have been worked out chiefly from Herodotus’ identifications with Greek gods and, where possible, from the etymology of their names — and that for this god the two methods do not point cleanly to one answer. The name has even been compared to an epithet of the Iranian sun-and-covenant god Mithra, a comparison that would pull it back toward the solar reading, though that link too has been contested. So the question sits unresolved at the center of him: is Goitosyros first the sun, the brightness Herodotus translated as Apollo, or first a god of the herds whom a Greek, seeing a high bright power, fitted to his own god of light? The single name cannot settle it, and the honest account leaves it open. Most of the modern literature inclines to the sun, taking the Apollo-equation as the firmer clue and the radiant iconography as support; but the herd-reading is not a fringe guess, and it carries the warning that the Greek lens may have brightened into a sun-god a power the Scythians knew as the prosperer of their cattle. The two readings need not even fully exclude each other — the sun that ripens the grass and the wealth of the beasts that graze it are not far apart in a herding people’s world — but the text gives no warrant to merge them, and they are best held as the two live possibilities they are.

A god of light beside a god of iron

It is worth setting Goitosyros, the bright and lightly-attested power, against the one Scythian god whose cult Herodotus describes in full — because the contrast marks how unevenly the record falls across the pantheon, and because the two are easy to confuse and must not be. The god Herodotus calls by the Greek name Ares, the war-god, is the most concretely documented divinity in his whole Scythian account, and the most physical. To this god, Herodotus reports at 4.62, the Scythians raised in every district a vast altar of heaped brushwood, a great square platform of piled faggots renewed each year; and on the summit of each such mound they set, upright, an ancient iron sword — the akinakes, the short straight blade the Scythians carried — and to that planted iron they brought offerings of cattle and horses, and a portion of their prisoners of war. The sword itself was the image of the god. He had no statue and no temple; the other Scythian gods, Herodotus says, had no images, altars, or temples at all, and only this war-power was given a cult-object, and that object a weapon.

Goitosyros is the opposite kind of figure in the record. Where the war-god is all altar and blade and described rite, the sun-god is all name and equation and silence — no altar reported, no image identified, no rite set down. The two stand at the far ends of how much survives. And they must be kept apart on their own terms as well as their documentation: the bright power of the daylit sky, matched to Apollo, is not the iron power of the brushwood altar, matched to Ares. The blade-god of the war-rite and the sun-or-herd god of the open grassland are different members of the same short list, and the temptation to let the better-documented one color the dimmer must be resisted. What we have of Goitosyros is precisely what the war-god’s cult shows by contrast: a name in a list, a Greek god set beside it, and the steppe’s own theology behind both, mostly gone.

A Scythian vessel worked with steppe warriors and the transfer of the bow of sovereignty — the bright bow that the Greek Apollo carried was among the things a Greek may have heard in the name of the sun-god he matched to him. Via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 1.0.

What reaches us of the brightness

Goitosyros comes down to the present along three lines, each at its own distance from him, and the shortness of all three is the real subject of any account of this god.

The first line is Herodotus, and on its own it carries nearly the entire ancient inheritance of this god. His Scythian name surfaces in no other classical author, and no voice from the steppe itself records him; the whole of what is known — that the Scythians honored such a power, that they ranked him below the fire-queen, the sky-father, and the earth-mother, and that one Greek writer of the fifth century before the common era set the name Apollo against his own — descends from a single sentence, written at second or third hand by a man who had no Scythian to check it against. That one-sentence foundation is the governing fact of the case, and it bears stating without padding. The equation with Apollo is a Greek act of translation, an alien power fitted to the nearest god of the observer’s own sky, and what the fit conceals cannot now be recovered: the borrowed name marks a high, bright deity, most likely the sun, but whatever further shape the Scythians gave him went unwritten and is past retrieval.

The second line is the comparative Iranian science, the reading of his name through the family of languages his people spoke. This is where the modern study has been able to add something the Greek did not — and where, in his case, it has added a doubt rather than a certainty. The philology that resolved Tabiti cleanly into a fire-name could not do the same for Goitosyros: it produced instead the standing disagreement between the herd-reading and the sun-reading, the cattle-prospering god and the radiant one, with the willow-divination reading at the edge of the debate. The science here does not close the question; it opens it, and marks the one place where the steppe’s own word, recovered from the Greek spelling, pulls against the Greek translation laid over it. That is an honest result and not a failure. It tells us that the equation with Apollo, firm as it looks on the page, may sit over a god the Scythians named for something other than the sun — and that the bare name will not say which.

The third line is the modern reconstruction of the Scythian pantheon as a whole, the discipline that has assembled the one Greek catalog, the mute and spectacular gold of the royal mounds, and the comparative philology into a single picture of the steppe sacred world. In that picture Goitosyros has a place but a faint one. He is the hardest-glimpsed of the high powers — fainter than the fire-queen Tabiti, whom a king named as the queen of the Scythians; fainter than the sky-father Papaios at the head of the steppe genealogy; fainter even than the war-god of the iron sword, whose cult fills a chapter. The animal-style gold that crowds the great kurgans — the vessels of Kul-Oba above the strait, the comb from Solokha, the tiered pectoral of Tolstaya Mogila, the frozen felts and tattoos of Pazyryk in the Altai — shows stags and griffins and the predator on its prey, but no figure the excavators can point to and name with confidence as the sun-god. He is the god the record gives a name and almost nothing more.

It is a thin shape for a god to have come down in: one sentence, two spellings, a Greek name laid over a steppe one, and a name in his own tongue that points two ways at once. Yet the thinness is part of the truth about him. The sun over the grassland needed no temple and left no idol; it was simply there, crossing the open sky over a people who watched it the whole day’s length, and the one Greek who passed by heard their name for it, wrote it down as best his ear and his alphabet allowed, and called it Apollo. Whether the name he caught meant the brightness or the herds, the Scythians knew and did not write, and the steppe kept its own counsel — leaving the brightest of its high powers as the dimmest in the record, a god of the sun half-glimpsed through one foreign sentence and the long argument over a single word.

→ Related: Tabiti · Papaios · Api Goddess · Argimpasa · Scythians · Apollo · Herodotus · The Sarmatians · The Saka · The Cimmerians · Kul Oba · Solokha · Tolstaya Mogila · Pazyryk · Hestia · Zeus · Gebeleizis · Bendis