The Scythians ruled over the present territory of Russia for almost a millennium. Neither the Persian Empire nor Alexander the Great could break them. But suddenly, overnight, this people mysteriously disappeared into history, leaving behind only majestic burial mounds.
Who are the Scythians
Scythians are a Greek word used by the Greeks to designate nomadic peoples living in the Black Sea region between the courses of the Don and Danube rivers. The Scythians themselves called themselves Saki. For most of the Greeks, Scythia was an outlandish land inhabited by "white flies" - snow, and the cold always reigned, which, of course, did not correspond to reality.
It is this perception of the country of the Scythians that can be found in Virgil, Horace and Ovid. Later, in the Byzantine chronicles, the Slavs, Alans, Khazars or Pechenegs could be called Scythians. And the Roman historian Pliny the Elder wrote back in the 1st century AD that “the name“Scythians”passes to the Sarmatians and Germans,” and believed that the ancient name was fixed for many of the peoples most remote from the Western world.
This name continued to live on, and in The Tale of Bygone Years it is repeatedly mentioned that the Greeks called the peoples of Russia “Scythia”: “Oleg went to the Greeks, leaving Igor in Kiev; He took with him a multitude of Varangians, and Slavs, and Chudi, and Krivichi, and Meru, and Drevlyans, and Radimichs, and Polyans, and Northerners, and Vyatichi, and Croats, and Dulebs, and Tivertsy, known as Tolmachi: all of them were called Greeks "Great Scythia".
It is believed that the self-name "Scythians" means "archers", and the beginning of the emergence of the Scythian culture is considered to be the 7th century BC. The ancient Greek historian Herodotus, in whom we find one of the most detailed descriptions of the life of the Scythians, describes them as a single people, breaking up into various tribes - Scythian farmers, Scythian plowmen, Scythian nomads, royal Scythians and others. However, Herodotus also believed that the Scythian kings were descendants of the son of Hercules, a Scythian.
The Scythians for Herodotus are a wild and rebellious tribe. One of the stories tells that the Greek king went crazy after he began to drink wine "in the Scythian way", that is, without diluting, as was not the custom among the Greeks: "Since that time, as the Spartans say, every time when they want to drink stronger wine, they say: "Pour in the Scythian way."
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Another demonstrates how barbarous the Scythian customs were: “Each has many wives according to custom; they use them together; they enter into a relationship with a woman, putting a stick in front of the house. " At the same time, Herodotus mentions that the Scythians also laugh at the Hellenes: "The Scythians despise the Hellenes for their Bacchic frenzy."
Fight
Thanks to the regular contacts of the Scythians with the Greeks, who are actively colonizing the surrounding lands, ancient literature is rich in references to the nomadic people. In the 6th century BC. the Scythians drove out the Cimmerians, defeated Media and, thus, took possession of all of Asia. After that, the Scythians retreated to the northern Black Sea region, where they began to meet with the Greeks, fighting for new territories. At the end of the 6th century, the Persian king Darius went to war against the Scythians, but despite the crushing power of his army and a huge numerical superiority, Darius did not manage to quickly crush the nomads.
The Scythians chose a strategy of exhausting the Persians, endlessly retreating and circling around the troops of Darius. Thus, the Scythians, remaining undefeated, earned themselves the fame of impeccable warriors and strategists.
In the IV century, the Scythian king Atey, who lived for 90 years, united all the Scythian tribes from the Don to the Danube. Scythia during this period reached its highest flowering: Atey was equal in strength to Philip II of Macedon, minted his own coin and expanded his possessions. The Scythians had a special relationship with gold. The cult of this metal even became the basis for the legend that the Scythians managed to tame the griffins guarding gold.
The growing power of the Scythians forced the Macedonians to undertake several large-scale invasions: Philip II killed Atheus in an epic battle, and his son, Alexander the Great, went to war against the Scythians eight years later. However, the great commander failed to defeat Scythia, and had to retreat, leaving the Scythians unconquered.
During the II century, the Sarmatians and other nomads gradually drove the Scythians out of their lands, behind them were only the steppe Crimea and the basin of the lower Dnieper and Bug, and as a result, Great Scythia became Small. After that, Crimea became the center of the Scythian state, well-fortified fortifications appeared in it - the fortresses of Naples, Palakiy and the Hub, in which the Scythians took refuge, fighting with Chersonesos and the Sarmatians. At the end of the II century, Chersonesos found a powerful ally - the Pontic king Mithridates V, who went to war against the Scythians. After numerous battles, the Scythian state was weakened and drained of blood.
The disappearance of the Scythians
In the 1st and 2nd centuries AD, it was already difficult to call the Scythian society nomadic: they were farmers, quite strongly Hellenized and ethnically mixed. The Sarmatian nomads continued to press the Scythians, and in the III century the invasion of the Crimea by the Alans began. They devastated the last stronghold of the Scythians - Scythian Naples, located on the outskirts of modern Simferopol, but could not stay for a long time on the occupied lands. Soon, the invasion of these lands began by the Goths, who declared war on the Alans, and the Scythians, and the Roman Empire itself.
The attack on Scythia, thus, was the invasion of the Goths around 245 AD. All the fortresses of the Scythians were destroyed, and the remnants of the Scythians fled to the south-west of the Crimean peninsula, hiding in remote mountainous areas.
Despite the seemingly obvious complete defeat, Scythia did not last long. The fortresses that remained in the southwest became a refuge for the fleeing Scythians, and several settlements were founded at the mouth of the Dnieper and on the Southern Bug. However, they too soon fell under the onslaught of the Goths.
The Scythian war, which after the events described was waged by the Romans with the Goths, got its name due to the fact that the name "Scythians" began to be used to refer to the Goths who defeated the real Scythians. Most likely, there was a grain of truth in this false naming, since thousands of the defeated Scythians joined the Gothic troops, dissolving into the mass of other peoples who fought with Rome. Thus, Scythia became the first state to collapse as a result of the Great Migration.
The Goths completed the case, the Huns, who in 375 attacked the Black Sea region and killed the last Scythians who lived in the Crimea mountains and in the Bug valley. Of course, many Scythians again joined the Huns, but there was no question of any independent identity.
The Scythians as an ethnos disappeared in the maelstrom of migrations, and remained only on the pages of historical treatises, with enviable persistence continuing to call all new peoples "Scythians", usually wild, rebellious and unbroken. It is interesting that some historians consider Chechens and Ossetians to be the descendants of the Scythians.