The Scythians
The Scythians were a large group of loosely connected people who lived in Russia, and also further south around the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. They were like the Hittites, the Greeks and the Germans. We don't know when the Scythians first formed a group, but by 600 BC they were certainly already well established, and took over some of the land to their south (modern Turkey) for a while. The Medes pushed the Scythians back to the Black Sea again, and after the establishment of the Persian Empire the Persian king Darius mounted another campaign against the Scythians in the Black Sea area. But this time the Persians lost, and the Scythians kept on living around the Black Sea. The Scythians remained identifiable as a group for another eight hundred years, until around 200 AD another very similar group, the Sarmatians, overran them and took over their territory. But soon after that, beginning about 300 AD, the Indo-Europeans in Central Asia began to lose ground to Turkic and Mongol speakers like the White Huns, and although descendants of the Scythians and the Sarmatians still live in that area (modern Georgia and Ukraine) today, by 1500 AD the rulers of Central Asia by 1500 AD were Turks and Mongols.
Why did people want to punch Socrates?
Where did Egyptians bury your liver?
How old are the Rocky Mountains?
What does a half-timbered house look like?
How do you spin wool?
(a project)
A lot of what we know about the Scythians comes from the Greek historian Herodotus, who wrote a long description of Scythian religious rituals, lifestyles, and principles as part of his history of the Persian Wars. Herodotus wrote in the 400s BC. Herodotus tells us that the Scythians liked to make drinking cups out of the skulls of their enemies. But Herodotus is trying to show how the Greeks are more civilized than the barbarians (which explains why the Greeks won the Persian Wars) and so he naturally tends to emphasize the Scythians' bloodiest traditions.
To find out more about the Scythians, check out these books from Amazon.com or from your library:
Beyond Celts, Germans, and Scythians: Archaeology and Identity in Iron Age Europe, by Peter Wells (2001). A short discussion of the problems with labelling other people "Scythians" and so on - what does that mean? Is anyone really a "Scythian"? Raises a lot of good questions.
Scythians and Greeks: Cultural Interaction in Scythia, Athens, and the Early Roman Empire, by David Braund and others (2004). Tries to answer some of these questions, with essays by a number of different specialists including some who are themselves from Ukraine and Georgia.
The First Horsemen, by Frank Trippett (1974). A Time Life book, now pretty out of date.
Archaic Greece
The Persians
Main West Asia history page
