The Sarmatians

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A Roman emperor on a marble column, raised over the Forum at the height of the empire’s reach, recorded the enemy he most wanted remembered. On the spiral of Trajan’s Column, among the captured Dacians and the trampled dead, ride horsemen unlike any other in the frieze: man and mount alike encased to the fetlock in overlapping scale, the rider bent low over a lance held in both hands. The Romans called such cavalry cataphractati, the wholly armored. The figures are Sarmatians, or the Roxolani who were one of their peoples, and the sculptor gave their armor a fish-scale pattern that may exaggerate but does not invent. For half a millennium these were the masters of the grassland north of the Black Sea, and the column is one of the few places the ancient south chose to look at them directly.

The peoples of the open grass

The Sarmatians were an Iranian-speaking people of the steppe, kin to the Scythians whom they followed and in time displaced on the Pontic grassland — the open country running from the Don and the Volga westward toward the Danube. The Greek and Roman writers knew them under shifting names. The older Greek accounts called them Sauromatae; the later sources, Sarmatians. The two are the same people seen across a span of centuries, and the modern view, drawn from Britannica and the comparative study of the Iranian tongues, holds the later Sarmatians to be the Sauromatae of Herodotus grown into a larger world. Their own name appears to come from an Old Iranian root, and one reading of it carries the sense of a people armed with the bow and the dart — a name, if so, that named them by their fighting.

They were not a nation but a confederation, a moving order of tribes that rose and fell and renamed itself across the steppe. The constituent peoples are known chiefly through the Roman frontier that faced them. The Iazyges came to occupy the plain between the Danube and the Tisza, the grassland wedged inside the great northern bend of the empire. The Roxolani held the Black Sea steppe eastward toward the Dnieper. The Aorsi ranged the country between the Don and the Caspian, masters of a caravan trade that reached toward the Caucasus. And last and most far-traveled came the Alans, who gathered the eastern Sarmatian tribes under their own name and carried it, in the end, across the whole breadth of Europe. The relations among these peoples — who absorbed whom, where one tribe ended and the next began — are reconstructed from outside testimony and from the grave-goods of their kurgans, and much of the detail remains contested. What is not contested is the shape of the whole: an Iranian horse-people who held the western steppe from roughly the third century before our era, when they crossed the Don and broke the Scythian dominion, until the Goths and then the Huns unmade their world in the centuries after.

That displacement of the Scythians was gradual and not a single conquest. The two peoples were close enough in tongue and in life that the absorption of one by the other left, in many places, more a change of name than a change of population. Through the third and second centuries before our era the Sarmatian tribes pressed west across the Don, taking up the Scythian population they did not drive off, until by about 200 before our era they had become the ruling people of the southern Russian steppe in the Scythians’ place. The greatest extent of that dominion, around the turn of the first century before our era, reached from the Vistula in the northwest to the mouth of the Danube and eastward across the grass to the Volga, with the Black and Caspian seas and the wall of the Caucasus on the south. It is worth keeping the steppe peoples distinct here. The Sarmatians are the armored successors and the warrior-women; the Saka are the eastern Iranian nomads of Central Asia, the Scythians of the Persian record; the Cimmerians are the earlier raiders whom the Scythians themselves had displaced, known to Assyria and to Greece before the Sarmatian name was written. They are one family across a thousand years of grass, and they are not interchangeable.

Sarmatian cataphracts on Trajan’s Column, early second century CE, in the standard plates of Conrad Cichorius. Conrad Cichorius (1863–1932), via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

The lance, the fire, and the women who rode

What set the Sarmatians apart in the memory of the ancient world was a way of making war. The Scythian had been above all an archer, fighting loose and at a distance, wheeling and loosing arrows and refusing the close fight. The Sarmatian noble turned that order on its head. He and his horse went into battle sheathed in armor — scale of iron or bone or horn, sewn in overlapping rows to cover the rider’s body and the horse’s flanks and chest — and in his two hands he carried a lance the Romans called the contus, a long thrusting weapon couched and driven home by the whole weight of the charging animal. This is the cataphract, the heavily armored shock cavalry whose reach and momentum could break a line of infantry that an arrow-storm only stung. The Sarmatians did not invent the armored horseman alone, but they made him their signature, and the Roman world learned the cataphract in large part by being charged by them. The change had a logic the steppe could supply: heavier horses bred on the rich Pontic grass, the iron to scale a rider and a mount, and a society of mounted nobles who could afford the weight of war. The bow was not abandoned — the Sarmatians carried it still — but the decisive instrument became the lance and the closing charge rather than the arrow loosed in flight. The legions met that charge across the Danube for three centuries, and in the end they imitated it, raising armored cavalry of their own; the later Roman and Byzantine cataphractarii and clibanarii descend, in name and in form, from the kind of horseman Rome first learned to fear on the northern grass. The line that runs from the Sarmatian lancer toward the mounted knight of later ages is often drawn and remains, in its details, a contested inheritance — but the weight of scholarly opinion grants the steppe cataphract a real place among the ancestors of the heavy horse.

Of the inner religion of these people the ancient record gives only glimpses, all of them from outside. As with the Scythians, the Sarmatians appear to have honored a war-god in the form of a sword. The blade was set upright — thrust into the ground or fixed on a raised altar — and there it received the cult, the divine power present in the iron itself. Herodotus had described this rite among the Scythians, who worshiped their war-god in an upright sword and whom the Greeks read through the name of their own Ares; centuries later, as the Encyclopedia.com summary of the sources records, the historian Ammianus Marcellinus found the same custom living on among the Alans, who fixed a naked sword in the earth and worshiped it as the god of war. Alongside the sword stood fire. Greek notices from the third century before our era report that the Sarmatians revered fire, and the importance of fire in their burials gives that report some archaeological weight — a reverence consonant with the wider Iranian world, which kept the sacred flame at the center of its devotion. There was, so far as the record shows, no temple and no separate priestly caste of the kind a settled people builds; the god lived in the blade and the flame, not in a house. How much of this picture is the steppe’s own and how much is a Greek and Roman habit of seeing the alien through the familiar — the war-god named for Ares, then for Mars — is among the things the outside record cannot finally settle. What recurs across the centuries and across the separate witnesses, from Herodotus on the Scythians to Ammianus on the Alans, is the sword set upright and the fire kept; that recurrence is the firmest ground there is.

And among the Sarmatians the Greeks set a thing that fascinated them and that they could not quite hold steady: the women who rode and hunted and went to war. The locus is Herodotus, who in the fourth book of his Histories tells how the Sauromatae came to be. After a battle on the river Thermodon the Greeks carried off captive Amazons by ship; the women rose and killed their captors, drifted to the Scythian shore, took horses, and lived by raiding until young Scythian men were sent to win them. The two peoples joined, but the Amazon women would not take up the settled life of Scythian wives, and so the couples moved off to found a new people beyond the Don. “Their women,” Herodotus writes of the Sauromatae who descended from this union, “ride out hunting, with their men or without them; they go to war, and dress the same as the men.” He adds the marriage law: no maiden weds until she has killed an enemy, and some grow old unmarried, unable to fulfill it. The medical writer Hippocrates, in the treatise On Airs, Waters, and Places, reports the same in a colder key — that the Sauromatian women ride, draw the bow, and cast the javelin from horseback, and fight in war so long as they are virgins, withdrawing from arms only when they marry.

This material has to be handled with care, because the Greek frame is itself part of the evidence and not a transparent window. The Amazon descent is a Greek myth doing Greek work, fitting an alien people into a story the Greeks already told; the cauterized breast that Hippocrates assigns these women belongs to the Amazon legend and not to any steppe reality. What survives the frame is the plainer report that among these people women rode and bore arms — and here the spade has met the texts partway. In the early 1990s a joint excavation under the archaeologist Jeannine Davis-Kimball opened a field of kurgans near Pokrovka, in the southern Ural steppe, in the country where Herodotus had located the Sauromatae. As the report Beyond the Amazons records, among the burials were graves of women laid out with their weapons — iron daggers and swords, bronze-tipped arrows, the whetstones to keep an edge. One young woman lay with a dagger at her left hand and a quiver of forty arrows at her right; the leg bones of a girl of thirteen or fourteen were bowed from a life on horseback; another woman was buried with a bent arrowhead still lodged in her body, as if she had carried her death home with her. These are not a literal Amazon nation, and no responsible reading turns them into one. They are evidence that among the early Sarmatians some women rode armed and were buried as warriors are buried — a smaller and stranger fact than the myth, and a truer one.

Rome’s river and the long road west

For all their distance, the Sarmatians entered Roman history because Rome’s frontier ran along the Danube and the steppe pressed against it from the north. The Iazyges, settled on the Hungarian plain inside the river’s bend, and the Roxolani to the east were the tribes the empire knew first and fought longest. They raided across the river; they were bought off and they came again. The sharpest of these collisions came in the wars of Marcus Aurelius. From the 160s into the 170s of our era the emperor fought a long and grinding struggle along the whole length of the Danube against the Germanic Marcomanni and Quadi and against the Sarmatian Iazyges, whose cavalry had carried devastation deep into the provinces. In 175, as the account of the Marcomannic Wars records, the Iazygian king Zanticus came to terms: he gave back a hundred thousand Roman prisoners and furnished eight thousand of his horsemen as auxiliaries to Rome. Of these, five and a half thousand were sent to the far end of the empire, to Britain — a contingent of Sarmatian lancers posted to the cold edge of the world, their long afterlife in that island a matter of speculation ever since.

That posting is a small image of the larger Sarmatian fate, which was to be scattered westward. The settled order of the steppe could not hold against the pressures that came in the third and fourth centuries of our era — first the Goths driving down from the Baltic toward the Black Sea, then the Huns sweeping in from the east and breaking every confederation in their path. Under that hammer the Sarmatian peoples came apart and moved. The Alans above all became a people of the migration: bands of them rode west with the Germanic peoples in the great upheavals of the fifth century, crossed into Gaul and Spain, and some reached as far as North Africa with the Vandals. Others stayed in the high valleys of the Caucasus, where their descendants endured; the Ossetians of the central Caucasus carry the Alan inheritance and an Iranian tongue down to the present, the last living thread of the steppe Iranian world.

The Sarmatians left no literature of their own, and so they reach us only at one or two removes. They reach us through the Greek and Roman writers who watched them from across a river or a sea and wrote them down at a distance and in their own interest — through Herodotus and Hippocrates on the early Sauromatae, through Strabo and the geographers on the tribes, through the historians of the empire on the wars of the Danube and the long retreat. They reach us through the archaeology of their kurgans: the armored dead, the long lances and the scale, the gold worked in the steppe animal style, and the graves of the armed women that gave the old Greek story an unexpected confirmation. And they reach us through the comparative study of the Iranian languages, which can still hear, in the place-names of the southern Russian rivers and in the speech of the Ossetians, the echo of the tongue these horsemen spoke. The exact relations among their tribes, the truth behind the Amazon descent, the measure of their place among the ancestors of the mounted knight — these stay open to argument. What stands clear is the figure on Trajan’s column: the rider and the horse in scale, the lance in both hands, a people who held the open grass for five hundred years and then rode west into the ruin of the ancient world, leaving their iron and their gold and their armed women in the mounds of the steppe.

The steppe world around 100 BCE: Sarmatia across the Pontic grassland, with the Scythian remnant in Crimea and Parthia to the south. Dbachmann, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

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