I hope the detailed story about the life of the Scythians did not have time to tire you and dull your attention? Believe me, there is no superfluous information in this book, almost everything mentioned here is far from accidental. It's like a gun in the Stanislavsky Theater, if it hangs on the stage, then it must fire. What we have learned about the Scythians will still be useful to us in the future. However, I understand that the reader can't wait to quickly plunge into the world of historical secrets and mysteries. Well, we'll have plenty of them.
One of them was asked by the old man Herodotus, talking about the gods worshiped by the Scythians. For, according to the ancient Greek chronicler, these nomads honored the same heavenly patrons as the Greeks themselves. This is how it looked from the point of view of the father of historical science: “As for the Scythian customs, they are like that. Scythians worship only the following gods. First of all - Hestia, then Zeus and Gaia (Gaia is considered the wife of Zeus); after them - Apollo and Heavenly Aphrodite, Hercules and Ares. These gods are recognized by all the Scythians, and the so-called royal Scythians also bring sacrifices to Poseidon. In the Scythian language Hestia is called Tabiti, Zeus (and, in my opinion, quite correctly) - Papey, Gaia - Api, Apollo - Goytosir, Aphrodite Heavenly - Agrimpasa, Poseidon - Fagimasad.
If you think about it, this passage from Herodotus will turn out to be the most incomprehensible and mysterious, much more curious than even the passages about Hyperboreans and Amazons. Firstly, the pantheon of the Scythians is amazing in itself: among the most revered by inveterate nomads, heavenly patrons suddenly turned out to be Hestia - the goddess of the hearth, Gaia - the goddess patronizing agriculture, and it is completely incomprehensible why the inveterate land inhabitants who came to Europe from somewhere from deserts of Central Asia, began to profess the cult of Poseidon - the ruler of the seas and oceans.
Secondly, the Scythian gods are so close to the inhabitants of Olympus that Herodotus, without embarrassment, gives their Greek names. This means that the entire mythology of the Hellenes and the northern Black Sea steppes almost completely coincides, with the exception of certain details - for example, Gaia as the wife of Zeus. One could, of course, assume that the Scythians borrowed their religious ideas from the Greek colonists who settled from the 6th-5th centuries BC on the northern shores of Pontus Euxine, but what Herodotus further narrates about the traditions of this tribe completely negates such a possibility.
The father of all historians, in particular, writes: “The Scythians, like other peoples, also stubbornly avoid foreign customs, and they avoid not only the customs of other peoples, but especially the Hellenic ones. This was clearly shown by the fate of Anacharsis and then Skil. " Anacharsis was a Scythian from a royal family, he traveled a lot around the world and became famous everywhere as a sage and wit. Admired by his talents, the Hellenes recognized him as one of the seven most famous sages of antiquity. By the way, he was the only non-Greek among them. It is said that when Anacharsis arrived in Athens, he sent a messenger to tell the smartest of the Athenians, the famous reformer Solon, that he wanted to see him and become his friend. The answer was Hellenic arrogant. The Athenian ruler said that they make friends at home. "Solon is just at home, why shouldn't he make a friend?" - retorted the witty Scythian.
It was this sage Anacharsis, on his way home to Scythia, who visited the Greek city of Cyzikos located in Asia Minor, where he took part in a holiday dedicated to the Mother of the Gods - Cybele. He made a vow, in the event of a safe return, to bring a sacrifice to this deity and arrange an all-night vigil. Which he did. As Herodotus writes: “At the same time, Anacharsis hung on himself small images of the goddess and beat the tympans. Some Scythian spied on the performance of these rituals and reported to King Saul. The king himself arrived at the place and, as soon as he saw that Anacharsis was celebrating this holiday, he killed him with an arrow from a bow. To this day, the Scythians, when asked about Anacharsis, answer that they do not know him, and this is because he visited Hellas and adopted foreign customs."
No less tragic was the fate of Skil, the Scythian leader, who, "reigning over the Scythians, did not at all like the customs of this people," because, due to the upbringing he received from his mother, he gravitated towards Hellenic culture. Therefore, this ruler of nomads began to lead a double lifestyle. In the city of Greek colonists Borisfenes, he got himself “a large luxurious palace, surrounded by a wall. There were marble sphinxes and griffins around … and he settled there his wife, a local native. " Coming to this city, Skil ordered to lock the gates so that none of the Scythians could see him, dressed in Greek clothes and lived like a rich Hellene. "For a month or more he stayed in the city, and then put on the Scythian clothes again and left the city." Once the two-faced Skill decided to perform a ritual dedicated to the god of winemaking and drunkenness Bacchus. “After all, the Scythians condemn the Hellenes for the Bacchic ecstasy. Indeed, according to them, there cannot be a deity that makes people insane. When the king finally took initiation into the mysteries of Bacchus, some borisfenite, addressing the Scythians, mockingly remarked: “You, Scythians, laugh at us for the fact that we are serving Bacchus and we are seized at this time by divine frenzy. And now your king is seized by this god: he not only performs the mysteries of Bacchus, but also goes mad, as if possessed by a deity. If you do not believe, then follow me, and I will show you this! " Scythian leaders followed Borysthenite … At the sight of Skyla, passing by with a crowd of Bacchantes in a Bacchic frenzy, the Scythians became terribly indignant. " The entire army immediately rebelled against their king and did not calm down until the traitor's head was cut off. “So tightly the Scythians hold on to their customs,” Herodotus sums up his stories,- and such severe punishment they subject those who borrow strangers."
It is curious that the indignation of the Scythians aroused the worship of those gods, as in the case of Bacchus and Cybele, who appeared from the Greeks themselves quite late and were borrowed by them from the former population of the Aegean, conquered by the ancestors of the Hellenes during the famous invasions of the Ionians and Dorians. These gods were very popular among the inhabitants of Asia Minor cities, namely they were the first Greek colonists on the Black Sea coast. Therefore, if the Scythians had borrowed their cult from the Greek colonists, in their pantheon there would have been, first of all, the very same gods, for whose worship Skil and Anacharsis died. This means that the Scythian deities cannot have anything in common with the Greek ones. But why are they so similar to the latter?
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It turns out that the Scythians, whose ancestral home is either Central Asia, or even Southeast Siberia, in particular the Sayan-Altai region, brought with them from the depths of the mainland practically the same heavenly patrons that lived on the Greek Olympus? Isn't it a mystery of history?
But even more curious is the fact that Herodotus, naming the Scythian names of common gods, regarding the nickname of Zeus among the nomads - Papey - suddenly notices that, in his opinion, it is more correct than that of the Greeks. Imagine a phenomenon - an enlightened, civilized Greek, a representative of a nation that has always arrogantly treated all neighbors without exception, suddenly admits that the name of the main god of the Hellenic pantheon, the father of all gods, sounds more correct in the language of barbarians! "Papey", or more precisely "papay", comes, of course, from the Aryan name for the father, ancestor. Compare the Russian "dad". It is obvious that once the supreme god was called in the same way among the Greeks, and the memory of this was still fresh in the era of Herodotus. But let's leave the strange riddle of the Scythian gods unanswered for now, let's talk about other customs of this unique tribe.
The Scythians did not build temples to their gods, with the exception of sanctuaries to the God of War. In honor of him, mounds of brushwood were erected, into the top of which a long iron sword stuck. Human sacrifices were brought to this idol, the sword was sprinkled with the blood of enemies during the rituals.
The Scythian funeral rite can tell inquiring minds a lot. The body of the deceased was placed on a cart and transported across the steppe to relatives and friends. Treats were arranged everywhere, and part of the food and drink was offered to the deceased. After forty days of such a journey, the deceased was buried. The bodies of the kings were embalmed and also carried around. Everyone expressed sorrow - they cut off their luxurious long hair in a circle, cut off part of their ear, pierced their left arm with an arrow.
Then the ashes of the leader were sent to Guerry (City of the Dead), where the royal graves were located. Herodotus believed that this place was somewhere on the Dnieper (Borisfen), but the location of Herr was a great secret among the Scythians and it is possible that the ancient historian was deliberately misled by the secretive nomads. At least until now, archaeologists have not been able to find the compactly located City of the Dead in those parts.
They buried with the king, after having killed one of the concubines, servants, horses. Weapons and gold bowls were placed in the grave. Then a high mound was erected over the burial vault. A year later, having selected 50 servants and 50 of the most beautiful horses, they were killed, turned into stuffed animals and placed these "riders" on stakes sticking out of the ground around the mound. These mummies of riders and their horses were supposed, according to the creators of the composition, to scare away all travelers who accidentally got into this sacred place. Although the stern glory of the warlike northern barbarians guarded the peace of the dead rulers of the Northern Black Sea region, perhaps better than any watchmen. The great ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus in "Chained Prometheus" spoke of the inhospitable barbarians who:
“On the far end of the Earth
Near the waters of Meotian, On high wheels, with long-range
Without parting with bows, we are used to living.
Don't go near them …"
Author: Igor Kolomiytsev