The Scythians

← Encyclopedia

On the open grassland north of the Black Sea, in the first millennium before the common era, a people lived who built no cities and left no books. What they left instead were mounds. Across the Pontic-Caspian steppe, from the Danube to the Don and far eastward into Siberia, the horizon is broken by burial tumuli — some low and weathered, a few raised to the height of a small hill — and beneath the largest of them lie kings dressed in gold, their horses slaughtered around them, their grave goods worked in a style of animal forms that no settled civilization had produced. These are the Scythians: mounted, Iranian-speaking, illiterate, and so completely committed to the horse that a Greek who met them could scarcely imagine where their power ended. They are known to history twice over — through the long ethnographic report of one curious Greek, and through the gold the steppe gave back.

A people of the grass

The Scythians were one branch of a wider family of Iranian-speaking nomads who occupied the Eurasian steppe in the Iron Age. Their language belonged to the Eastern Iranian group, a cousin of the tongue of Zoroaster’s hymns and of the Old Persian of the Achaemenid inscriptions, reconstructed today largely from personal names preserved in Greek inscriptions of the northern Black Sea cities and from its surviving descendant, Ossetian, spoken in the Caucasus. They called themselves, the Greeks reported, by a name rendered Skolotoi; the Greeks called them Skythai, and through the Greeks the name passed to every later language.

They belonged to a continuum of kindred peoples whom outsiders distinguished by region and era rather than by any sharp ethnic line: the Cimmerians who preceded them on the western steppe and whom they displaced; the Saka of Central Asia and the Persian frontier, whom the Achaemenids fought and depicted; the Massagetae beyond the Caspian; and the Sarmatians who, from the third century BCE, pressed in from the east and gradually absorbed or replaced the Scythians proper on the Pontic grassland. To speak of “the Scythians” with precision is to speak of the people Herodotus met in the fifth century BCE on the steppe behind the Greek colonies of the north Black Sea coast — but the culture, the gear, and the art extend across a far wider world, and the Scythian horizon proper runs from roughly the eighth and seventh centuries BCE to the third.

Their economy was the herd and the wagon. Cattle, sheep, and above all horses moved with the seasons across grassland that could not be plowed but could be grazed without limit. Households traveled in covered carts; the dead alone were given a fixed address. From this mobility came a power out of all proportion to the population: a people who could not be besieged because they had nothing to besiege, who could not be starved into a decisive battle because their wealth walked on four legs and went where they went.

The horse and the bow

The military signature of the Scythians was the mounted archer. Riding without stirrups — which had not yet been invented — and shooting from the saddle a powerful composite bow built up of wood, horn, and sinew, the Scythian warrior could loose arrows at a gallop, wheel away from a charge, and turn to shoot again over the horse’s tail in the maneuver later ages would call the Parthian shot. Their arrowheads were small, socketed, often three-edged, and made by the thousand; they carried bow and quiver together in a combined case, the gorytos, slung at the hip. Against an enemy who fought on foot in close ranks, or even against heavier cavalry, this was a way of war that refused to be pinned down: it harassed, withdrew, exhausted, and struck only when the odds had been arranged.

The decisive demonstration came against the largest power of the age. Around 513 BCE the Persian king Darius led an enormous army across the Bosporus and the Danube into the Scythian lands, intending to bring the steppe under the King of Kings. The Scythians declined to give him the pitched battle he needed. They retreated before him, drove off their herds, filled in the wells and springs, and burned the grass, drawing the Persian host deeper into an emptiness that fed no one. By the account in Herodotus, they taunted the king with riddling gifts and asked why he did not stand and fight — and answered, when he asked the same of them, that having neither cities nor planted fields to lose, they had nothing he could threaten. Darius withdrew without a victory. The campaign became the classic instance of how a settled empire breaks itself against a people who carry their country with them; it is also one of the few moments when the steppe nomads enter the imperial record as a named adversary rather than a rumor at the map’s edge.

The witness of Herodotus

Almost everything written about the Scythians from inside the ancient world descends from the fourth book of the Histories of Herodotus, composed around 440 BCE. Herodotus had access to the Greek trading colonies of the north Pontic shore — Olbia above all — where Greeks and Scythians met, intermarried, and traded, and where a man who went and asked could gather what the steppe would not write down. Book IV is the fullest ethnography of the Scythians that antiquity produced: their origin legends, their kings and tribes, their gods, their oaths, their burials, and their war with Darius.

It must be read as what it is — the report of an outsider, set down in Greek categories, attributing rather than asserting. Herodotus himself draws the line he is famous for: he is bound to record what he is told, not to believe all of it, and he marks the seam between what he saw, what he reasoned, and what he merely heard. His Scythia is partly fieldwork and partly the literary geography of the far north, where the credible shades into the fabulous. Yet on point after point where his account could later be checked against the spade, it has held up to a degree that has surprised his readers. The frozen tombs of the eastern steppe, sealed under ice for two and a half millennia, returned customs he had described from hearsay — and so the Histories, for all their distance from their subject, remain the indispensable text, the spine on which the archaeology hangs its flesh.

The gods of the steppe

The religion Herodotus reports is sky-facing, hearth-centered, and almost without images. He gives the Scythians seven great deities and, following the habit Greek writers brought to every foreign pantheon, names each by its nearest Greek equivalent — an interpretatio graeca that tells as much about Greek assumptions as about Scythian belief, since it presumes the gods are everywhere the same powers under local names.

At the head of the pantheon he places a goddess he calls by her Scythian name, Tabiti, and equates with Hestia — the goddess of the hearth and its fire, held in highest honor of all. That a nomad people should crown its pantheon with the hearth rather than with a thunderer is itself eloquent: for a household that lives on the move, the fire it carries and rekindles is the one fixed center, the portable shrine of a people without temples. Below Tabiti, Herodotus ranks Papaios, whom he equates with Zeus, with Api the earth as his consort; then Oitosyros, matched to Apollo; a great goddess he calls Argimpasa, matched to a celestial Aphrodite, Aphrodite Ourania; and, among the Royal Scythians alone, a god of the waters he equates with Poseidon. He notes that they also honored figures he names by the Greek Heracles and Ares, without giving their Scythian names — and it is Ares whose cult he describes at length, the single Scythian god, he says, to be given an image and an altar.

That cult is the strangest and most concrete thing in his account. The god of war, he reports, was worshipped not as a statue but as an ancient iron sword — a short straight blade of the kind the Scythians carried, the akinakes — set up on the summit of a vast heaped altar of brushwood, one such mound raised in every district. To this iron the Scythians brought offerings of cattle and horses, and, Herodotus adds, a portion of their prisoners of war, the blood poured over the blade. The sword planted upright and given sacrifice is the image of a people whose god of battle had the shape of the weapon itself — iron worship in the most literal sense, the divinity resident in the blade. Beyond Ares, the Scythians of his telling raised no temples, carved no cult statues, and built no altars to their other gods: a religion of fire and sky and the open ground, suited to a people who had no permanent place to put a sanctuary. It is a cousin, at a great remove, of the wider Iranian religious matrix — the reverence for fire, the high sky-lord, the moral weight given to the oath — though the doctrinal systems of that matrix, the Wise Lord and the dualism that the Avesta would carry, belong to the settled and priestly Iranian world rather than to the steppe.

Diviners and the binding oath

Reading the future was a recognized office. Herodotus describes Scythian diviners who worked with bundles of willow rods, laying out and gathering up a great quantity of wands while they spoke their pronouncements, and a separate class of seers he calls the Enarei — soothsayers who, he says, had received the art of divination from a goddess and prophesied with strips of lime-tree bark. When the king fell ill, it was held to be because someone had sworn falsely by the royal hearth — by the fire of Tabiti, the most binding oath a Scythian could take — and the diviners were summoned to name the perjurer. The whole apparatus turns on the sacredness of the hearth-fire and the oath sworn upon it: to lie by the king’s hearth was to sicken the king’s body, and the seers’ task was to find the lie. That a false oath could strike the sovereign in the flesh marks how completely the political and the sacred were one thing on the steppe; the king’s health was the kingdom’s, and both rested on the inviolability of the fire.

The kurgans and the gold

The dead were the one Scythian institution that did not move, and it is from the dead that nearly all the material evidence comes. Over a person of rank the Scythians raised a kurgan — a mound of earth heaped over a timber-lined burial chamber — and over a king they raised mountains of earth, vying, Herodotus says, to make the heap as great as possible. The royal burial he describes is among the most arresting passages in ancient ethnography. The king’s body was carried in procession through the tribes, then laid in a great square pit on a bed of greenery; with him were strangled and buried one of his concubines, his cup-bearer, his cook, his groom, his steward, and his message-bearer, together with horses and gold cups, and the mound was raised above them all. A year later, by his account, fifty of the finest young attendants and fifty horses were killed, gutted, stuffed, and mounted on a ring of stakes and frames around the tomb — a spectral guard of mounted riders ringing the dead king, set there to keep him company on the grassland.

The spade has confirmed the architecture and the horror. Kurgans across the steppe yield exactly this furniture: the timber chamber, the sacrificed attendants, and the slaughtered horses by the dozen and the hundred. At the earliest great royal tomb, Arzhan in the Tuva region of southern Siberia, excavators counted the remains of more than a hundred and fifty horses laid out around the central burial; tree-ring dating places the mound near the late ninth or early eighth century BCE, at the very threshold of the Scythian world. And in the frozen tombs of the Pazyryk valley in the Altai, where ground ice preserved organic material that elsewhere rots away, the bodies came out tattooed, the textiles and felts intact, the saddles and horse-trappings still bright — and with them, as will appear, the apparatus of a rite Herodotus had described from hearsay alone.

What draws the eye, and drew the looter and the archaeologist alike, is the gold. Scythian burials are among the richest of the ancient world: pectorals, plaques, sword-sheaths, cups, and the dense gold appliqués that were sewn across a chief’s clothing so that he was buried, almost literally, in a skin of worked metal. The masterworks blend Scythian subject with Greek hand — the great gold pectoral from the Tovsta Mohyla kurgan in Ukraine, with its registers of pastoral life and animal combat, was worked by Greek goldsmiths of the Black Sea cities for a Scythian lord — and they testify to a steppe aristocracy wealthy enough to commission the finest craft of the settled world and bury it in the ground.

The animal style

The art the Scythians made their own, before and beneath the Greek imports, is the animal style — a way of rendering beasts that is instantly recognizable across the whole steppe and the foundation of what is called Scytho-Siberian art. Its subjects are creatures in tension: the stag with its legs folded beneath it and its antlers swept back into a single flowing curve; the coiled feline; the eagle, the griffin; and above all the predator locked on its prey, the cat or wolf or raptor sunk into a deer or a horse. The forms are stylized to the edge of abstraction, muscle and antler and beak resolved into taut interlocking curves, the animal compressed to fit a plaque or a sword-sheath or the cheekpiece of a bridle without losing its charge of motion.

The style is functional before it is decorative — it lives on gear, on the things a rider carries and wears, and it appears at the very beginning of the Scythian record. The gold from Arzhan, at the eastern dawn of the culture, already shows the coiled predators and the massed animal forms that the western steppe would carry for centuries. The repertoire is not random. The triad that recurs — birds, hoofed grazers, and beasts of prey — has been read as a map of a three-layered cosmos, the bird above, the grazing herd in the middle world, the predator below, so that the gold a chief wore was also a model of the order he moved through: a world of eater and eaten, sky and grass and the killing ground between. The animal style spread far beyond the Scythians proper, eastward across the steppe and into the art of peoples who never heard the name, one of the most durable visual languages the ancient world produced — and it remains the clearest voice of a people who wrote nothing down, speaking in stags and griffins what they did not set in words.

The cleansing smoke

Among the customs Herodotus reports, one has become the most famous because the frozen ground confirmed it so exactly. After a burial, he says, the Scythians cleansed themselves; and their manner of cleansing was unlike the Greeks’. They set up a small frame of three poles leaning together, stretched felt cloths around it to make a tight tent, and set within a vessel of hot stones onto which they threw the seed of the hemp plant. The seed smoldered and gave off a vapor, he writes, that no Greek vapor-bath could surpass; the Scythians, sitting inside, howled with pleasure at it. He frames the whole thing as purification — the men’s answer to the problem of how to make oneself clean again after handling the dead, in a people whose men did not wash with water.

For a long time this was filed among Herodotus’s tall tales of the north. Then, in the late 1940s, the Soviet archaeologist Sergei Rudenko opened the frozen Barrow 2 at Pazyryk and found, beside the preserved bodies, exactly the gear the Histories described: a small six-pole frame for a tent, a bronze and stone censer, and within it the charred seeds of hemp. The hearsay of the fifth century BCE lay in the ground, intact, where the ice had kept it. The find is the single most striking vindication of Herodotus’s Scythian ethnography — proof that behind even his strangest report there could stand a custom he had only heard described, carried back across two and a half thousand years in a vessel of burnt seed.

Between the worlds

The Scythians lived at the meeting of settled empires and never became one. To the west their territory bordered the lands of Thrace, and through the Greek colonies of the Black Sea coast they were in steady contact with the world of ancient Greece — trading grain and slaves and gold-work, and lending the Greek imagination its standing image of the barbarian horseman, the figure the Athenians put on their vases and even hired as a city police force of Scythian archers. The Greeks read Scythian frenzy and ecstasy through the lens of their own Dionysus: Herodotus tells the story of the Scythian king Skyles, who took up the secret rites of the god in the Greek city of Olbia and was killed by his own people for it — a parable, from the steppe side, of the danger of the settled gods to a king of the grass. To the south and east they pressed against the Achaemenid frontier, fought Darius to a standstill, and shared with the Iranian world its reverence for fire and its sky-lord, even as their religion stayed imageless and unsystematized where the Persian priesthood built a creed.

They were the node that connected without being absorbed — the channel through which goods, motifs, and the technology of mounted war passed between the forests, the grassland, and the great river civilizations, while the people themselves stayed mobile, stayed armed, and stayed apart. When the Sarmatians came out of the east and the Greek and then Roman world closed in from the south, the Scythians of the open steppe gave way; but the form of life they had perfected — the herd, the wagon, the bow shot from horseback, the king under his mountain of earth — did not end with them. It was a full statement of how to be powerful without being fixed — mobility itself turned into a political form — and the gold under the kurgans is its record: a people who lived by movement and were buried, at the last, in the one ground they had agreed to stand still on.

Scholarship and the textual record

The Scythians sit at the join of two disciplines — the philology of a single ancient text and the archaeology of thousands of mounds — and the modern picture is built by reading each against the other. The principal literary source is the fourth book of Herodotus’s Histories; the standard public-domain English texts are George Campbell Macaulay’s translation (1890) and A. D. Godley’s facing Loeb version (1920–25), both long out of copyright and freely available, the former through Project Gutenberg (Volume I, containing Books I–IV). The reception of his Scythian ethnography — long doubted, repeatedly confirmed — is laid out for a general readership in the Penn Museum’s Expedition essay, Herodotus and the Scythians, which sets his royal-burial and hemp passages beside the kurgan and Pazyryk finds that bore them out.

For the language, the religion, and the historical frame, the indispensable reference is the Encyclopaedia Iranica, whose article on the Scythians treats their Eastern Iranian speech, the pantheon Herodotus recorded, and the place of the people within the wider Iranian world. The synthetic history of the steppe nomads runs from the relevant chapter of The Cambridge History of Early Inner Asia (Cambridge University Press, 1990) on the Scythians and Sarmatians through the major exhibition catalogs of recent decades. On the art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s essay on Scythian art traces the animal style and its Greco-Scythian fusion in the Black Sea workshops; the British Museum’s 2017 catalog Scythians: Warriors of Ancient Siberia, edited by St John Simpson and Svetlana Pankova, gathers the Siberian and Pontic material under one cover. The frozen Pazyryk tombs were published by Sergei Rudenko, whose excavations of the 1920s through 1940s appeared in English as Frozen Tombs of Siberia (1970); the Arzhan kurgans of Tuva have been brought into the literature chiefly through the work of Mikhail Gryaznov and, for the later Arzhan 2 burial, Konstantin Čugunov, Hermann Parzinger, and Anatoli Nagler. Because the Scythians wrote nothing, the discipline is permanently triangulated — the Greek text, the Iranian comparanda, and the gold from the ground — and no one of the three is read without the other two.

→ Related: Herodotus · Achaemenid Empire · Zoroaster · Dionysus · Thrace · Ancient Greece · Iron Age · Divination · Hestia