Papaios

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Of the seven powers the Scythians honored, one alone carried a name that a Greek listener could turn over and find already half familiar. When Herodotus set down the gods of the steppe and matched each to its nearest Greek counterpart, he came to the lord of the heavens, named him in the Scythian tongue, and added a remark he made for no other god on the list: this one, he said, was most rightly named. The Scythians called their sky-power Papaios — a word, to a Greek ear, very near the babble a child makes for its father — and to Herodotus that name seemed to fit the high god so exactly that he paused over it. The father above was, in the literal sense of his name, the Father.

The second power

The fullest single notice of the Scythian gods stands in the fourth book of the Histories, composed around 440 BCE by a Greek who had gone to the trading cities of the north Black Sea coast and asked. Herodotus lists the deities the Scythians propitiate and ranks them by the honor they receive. The hearth-queen comes first — Tabiti, whom he matches to the Greek Hestia, held in highest honor of all. Then, in his own phrasing, the Scythians “propitiate Hestia in especial, and secondly Zeus and Earth, whom they deem to be the wife of Zeus.” The Zeus of that sentence is Papaios; the Earth is Api. Herodotus has named the second rank of the steppe pantheon in a single clause, and folded into it the one relation that organizes the whole: the sky-father and the earth, reckoned as husband and wife.

The list goes on past them — a sun-power he calls by the name of Apollo, a great goddess he matches to a celestial Aphrodite, and two further gods he names only by their Greek equivalents, a Heracles and an Ares. But the architecture is set in the first two ranks. At the center stands the hearth, the portable fire of a people without temples; over it, at the head of all begetting, stands the sky. The Scythians, Herodotus says, raised no images and built no altars to these powers, the war-god alone excepted. Papaios had no statue, no shrine, no carved face. He was the vault overhead, addressed where every nomad always stood — under the open sky of the grassland.

That namelessness in stone is part of what makes him hard to recover. The high god of the steppe survives as a word in a Greek list and as a position in a ranking, and almost nothing more is told of him directly. What can be said of Papaios must be reasoned out from the name itself, from the goddess he is paired with, and from the story of descent in which he stands at the source — three thin threads, each of which has to be handled for what it is.

The Scythian lands of the Pontic steppe, the grassland over which Papaios stood as the open heaven. Antiquistik, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

The Father

The name is the firmest thread, and it points the same way Herodotus pointed. Read through the Iranian tongue the Scythians spoke — an Eastern Iranian speech reconstructed today chiefly from personal names in the Greek inscriptions of the Pontic cities — Papaios is taken by most scholars for a word of paternity, a Scythian form built on the root that runs across the Indo-European languages in the child’s name for a father, the papa sound. The reconstructed form is usually given as something like Pāpaya, and rendered “father,” with “protector” or “guardian” offered as near alternatives that come to the same fatherly office — readings gathered in modern surveys of the steppe religion and of the Scythian pantheon. This is a scholarly reading of a bare theonym, not a fact stated by any ancient source; but it is a reading that Herodotus himself half anticipated when he called the name most rightly given to the sky-lord, and it converges with the god’s place in the descent.

If the name is right, then the Scythians did not so much have a sky-god whom they also called Father as a Father-god who happened to be the sky. The two are the same divinity seen from two sides — the heaven overhead and the begetter at the head of the line. In the comparative study of the Iranian religions the figure has a recognizable kinship: a high heaven-power, the sky as the masculine principle, set against the earth and the waters as the feminine. Scholars have set him beside the Zoroastrian Wise Lord, Ahura Mazda, as the Scythian answer to the same Indo-Iranian inheritance — though the comparison must be drawn with care, since the steppe religion stayed imageless and without a priestly creed where the settled Iranian world built one. Papaios is the sky-father of a people who carried no scripture; the doctrine that grew up around the high god further south belongs to a different and later world.

The marriage of sky and earth

The second thread is Api, the power Herodotus reckoned the wife of his Zeus. Her name has been read through the same Iranian filter as a word for the waters — a cognate, scholars suggest, of the Avestan word for water — so that the consort of the sky is the earth and the moisture together, the ground and what the ground holds. The pairing of the two is among the oldest shapes in the inherited stock of Indo-European myth: the bright sky above as father, the broad earth below as mother, their union the act from which the lived world descends. The same marriage of heaven and earth can be traced, in differing forms, across the Vedic, the Greek, and the Baltic traditions — a structure so widespread that comparative scholars treat it as part of the common ancestral imagination rather than a thing borrowed late from one cousin by another.

Here the discipline of the sources matters most. Herodotus gives the Scythians the names of a sky-father and an earth-consort, and he gives the relation between them — husband and wife, the heaven and the earth. He does not give a narrated theogony; there is no Scythian creation-poem preserved, no scene of the wedding of sky and ground set down in any language the Scythians themselves wrote, because they wrote none. So the marriage of Papaios and Api is best stated for exactly what the record supports: a divine pairing, named by an outsider, that falls into a pattern the comparative study has mapped many times over. To go further — to supply the steppe with a full myth of the joining of heaven and earth on the strength of the pattern — would be to write the poem the sources withhold. The shape is there in the two names and the one word of relation. The narration is gone.

What the pairing does establish, securely, is the frame of the steppe cosmos. The earth-and-water mother below, the sky-father above, and between them, in the middle world, the space where people and herds and horses live. That tripartite order — a world below, a world above, and the inhabited band between — recurs in the reading scholars give to the animal-style gold the Scythians wore, where the bird in the sky, the grazing beast in the middle, and the predator beneath have been read as a map of the same three layers. Papaios is the topmost band of that cosmos, the lid of the world. Where Tabiti is the fire at the fixed center of the moving camp, Papaios is the vault that contains it, and the steppe is framed between the hearth and the heaven.

A Scythian gold stag in the “animal style,” the grazing beast of the middle world in the layered steppe cosmos over which the sky-father stood. Photograph Wmpearl, Cleveland Museum of Art, via Wikimedia Commons. CC0.

The head of the descent

The third thread is the story the Scythians told of their own beginning, and it is the one place where the sky-father does something rather than merely stand overhead. Herodotus gives the genealogy a few pages before the list of gods, and gives it — this is the catch that has to be held — under the Greek names. The first man born in the land that was then empty, he reports, was Targitaus, and Targitaus was the son of Zeus and of a daughter of the river Borysthenes, the great river the Greeks knew by that name and later ages by the name Dnieper. The equation that turns this into a Scythian theogony is the one Herodotus supplies a few sections later: his Zeus is Papaios, and the earth-and-water daughter of the river is Api. Read back through the pantheon-list, the genealogy says that the first Scythian was begotten by the sky-father upon the earth-and-water mother — the marriage of heaven and earth made flesh in a first man.

From Targitaus the story runs on. He had three sons, and in their day golden objects fell burning from the sky — a plough, a yoke, a battle-axe, and a cup. The two elder brothers reached for the gold and the fire drove them back; only the youngest could take it up unharmed, and to him, by that sign, the kingship passed. From those sons the branches of the Scythian people descended, and the royal line traced itself to the youngest, the one the gold had chosen. The whole descent thus climbs, generation by generation, to a single source above all the rest: through the first king, through the first man Targitaus, up to the sky-father at the top. The authority of the Scythian king and the origin of the Scythian people were one genealogy, and its highest term was Papaios.

The comparative scholars have lingered over the three brothers and the four golden gifts, reading the falling tools as a partition of social function — the cup of rite, the axe of war, the plough-and-yoke of herding and tillage — an inherited Indo-European schema of the ordered society descending from the divine source. That reading belongs to the contested register; it is an interpretation laid over Herodotus’ bare narrative, plausible and much argued, not a thing the steppe stated of itself. What is not in doubt is the shape of the descent as Herodotus reports it: a people that derived its kings and its order from a first man, and that first man from the union of the heaven and the earth.

The name behind the mask

Almost everything here passes through one filter, and the filter has a color of its own. The practice by which Herodotus and his fellow Greeks gave every foreign god the name of its nearest Olympian — the interpretatio graeca — assumes that the gods are the same powers the world over, wearing different names in different tongues. Under that assumption Papaios becomes Zeus, the sky-father of the steppe folded into the sky-father of the Greeks. The match is not arbitrary; both are heaven-gods, both stand high in their pantheons, and Herodotus plainly felt the names rhymed. But the mask distorts even as it explains. The Greek Zeus is a thunderer, a wielder of the bolt, a god of a settled people with temples and statues and a vast body of story; the Scythian Papaios is an imageless vault over a moving camp, with no preserved myth but the bare descent and no shrine but the open air. How much of the one we can safely read into the other is among the genuinely open questions of the subject, and the honest answer is: less than the easy equation suggests. The Greek name tells us where Papaios stood in the sky. It does not tell us what the Scythians, in their own thought, made of him there.

How much, too, the “Father” reading owes to the accident that the Scythian word sounded like a Greek child’s word for papa is a question that cannot now be closed. Herodotus, hearing the name, found it apt for a sky-father; a modern philologist, reconstructing it, finds a paternal root; the two judgments reinforce each other, and yet both look at the same short word across the same long silence. That the steppe left no theology of its own to set against the Greek list is the governing fact of the whole inquiry. Papaios is recoverable as a name, a rank, a consort, and a place at the head of a descent — and beyond that, the figure thins into the open sky he was.

Reception

Papaios reaches later ages almost entirely through the one Greek who wrote him down. Without the fourth book of the Histories the steppe would have kept its high god as silently as it kept the rest of its religion, and the name would be lost. Herodotus preserves four things: the name itself, the equation with Zeus, the second rank after the hearth-queen, and — read together with the pantheon-list — the genealogy that makes the sky-father the begetter of the first Scythian. Everything later said of him is built on those four points, and the building has to respect how few they are.

The second life of Papaios has been in the comparative study of the Indo-Iranian and Indo-European religions. There the sky-father-and-earth-mother pair has been set beside its cousins across the family, and the Scythian instance — Papaios and Api — taken as one witness among several to an inherited structure older than any of its surviving forms. In that science the steppe god is not a curiosity at the edge of the Greek world but a data point at the center of a large argument about what the speakers of the ancestral tongue imagined the world to be made of. The Iranian philology that reads his name, the comparative mythology that reads his marriage, and the archaeology that reads the layered cosmos out of the animal-style gold all converge on the same figure from different sides.

And the modern reconstruction of the Scythian pantheon has given him back his position. In the ordering that scholars draw out of Herodotus, the powers of the steppe are ranged in their tiers — the hearth at the summit, then the sky and the earth, then the sun and the heavenly goddess and the rest — and Papaios holds the heaven against which the others are placed. The five great deities are differentiated by their offices: Tabiti the fire of the hearth and the oath, Api the earth and the waters below, Argimpasa the heavenly goddess of the diviners, Goitosyros the sun over the grass. Papaios is the one above them all, the open vault, the Father at the head of the line — the term the Scythians climbed to when they traced their kings and themselves back to the source, and the name a Greek, hearing it, thought most rightly given.

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