With four decades having passed since the publication of Renate Rolle's seminal but lamentably brief work The World of the Scythians (Die Welt der Skythen) in 1980, an updated account of this little-known and poorly understood people was much needed. Two recent books have sought to fill that role.
Sir Barry Cunliffe is an Emeritus Professor of European Archaeology at Oxford, whose previous work has focused mainly (but not exclusively) on Celts. In The Scythians, he does an excellent job of applying his interpretive skills to the archaeological record left by the ancient Eurasian steppe nomads, not just in eastern Europe where they captured the imagination of Greek writers, but also all the way across Central Asia to the Altai Mountains (at the juncture of modern-day Kazakhstan, Russia, Mongolia, and China), which Cunliffe considers to be their original homeland.
This approach follows on nicely from the British Museum's 2017 exhibition, ‘Scythians: Warriors of Ancient Siberia’, which presented a treasure trove of objects originating from the Altai that are now held in the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia. These include many stunning examples of the familiar ‘Scythian Triad’ of distinctive cultural artefacts, specifically their weapons—short swords (akinakes), trilobate arrowheads, and battle axes—equestrian gear including saddles and harnesses, and art objects such as ornaments and jewellery, usually representing animals and often made of gold. These items were generally found in grave sites under burial mounds known as kurgans, which are found all the way across Central Eurasia from Bulgaria to South Korea.
Of course, these raiders from the Altai did not appear out of nowhere; they were part of a much broader landscape of nomadic peoples who had begun spreading eastward across the steppe from the region of the southern Ural Mountains a millennium earlier. These fierce, independent-minded tribal bands shared some cultural traits, including horse-breeding, the development of superior forged weaponry, and the invention of the war chariot. They likely spoke related dialects of proto-Iranian. In a broad sense, they are associated with the material culture labelled ‘Andronovo’ by Soviet archaeologists, which lasted from about 2000 to 1150 BCE and stretched from the Ural River in the west to the Yenisei in the east.
Cunliffe highlights these cultural connections and continuities when discussing the steppe nomadic peoples of the millennium that followed: ‘what is evident, particularly from the archaeological data, is that there was a broad similarity in the culture of the nomads from the Altai to the Danube and, given the mobility of the times, it is simpler to regard them as belonging to a broad cultural continuum’ (p. 51). The tribes that the Greeks called ‘Scythians’—meaning ‘[mounted] archers’—were one component of this expansive cultural continuum.
What is confusing is that the Greeks, like the Persians and Chinese, were not very precise in how they applied the term ‘Scythian’ or the various tribal names by which they knew the different steppe nomadic groups with whom they came into contact or heard about from others. Greek and Persian sources alike use ‘Scythian’ (or its Persian equivalent, ‘Saka’) at times to mean a specific group and at others to refer to the nomads in general. The Sauromatians, Aorsi, Sarmatians, Siraces, Sacae, Massagatae, Roxolani, and others can in some respects all be considered as ‘Scythians’, alongside the people most often associated with the name who dominated the Pontic steppe region between the eighth and second centuries BCE. These were of course the ‘Scythians’ who were in most direct contact with the Greeks and therefore described in greatest detail in the Greek sources. Modern historians such as Iaroslav Lebedynsky (who has probably published more than anyone on the subject, although his huge volume of French works remains untranslated) still consider the Pontic group to be the ‘true’ Scythians, while referring to related peoples living further to the east as ‘Scythic’.
Cunliffe takes the more accurate (to my mind) position in emphasising the Scythians’ Altaic origins. He proposes that a combination of climate fluctuations and population pressures triggered repeated westward migrations from the Scythians’ Central Asian homeland, entailing economic adaptations such as abandonment of agriculture due to cold and drought or the expansion of herds when climatic conditions were more favourable (pp. 65–70). Thus, the Near East and Europe saw the appearance of the Cimmerians first, then the Scythians, followed by the Sarmatians, Roxolani, and others, all in successive waves erupting out of Central Asia over the course of 1,000 years.
Cunliffe's book is written in fluid, readable prose. It is richly illustrated, with beautiful colour maps and images on almost every page. In addition to providing a general historical narrative of the Scythians’ interactions with the Greeks, Celts, Thracians, and others, he describes in detail what can be gleaned regarding their social structure, daily routines, gender roles, and religious life, to the extent that the available data allow. The archaeological evidence for the Scythians stretching over a vast area is quite rich but, in the absence of internal written documents, our interpretation of their material culture or social (even ethno-linguistic) composition remains stuck in the realms of guesswork. Greek, Persian, and Chinese written sources provide some descriptive information about Scythian culture, but naturally cannot be taken as fully accurate or authoritative. As Cunliffe notes: ‘At best they offer entertaining anecdotes, usually unexplained, invariably incomplete, and filtered through the values of the observer’ (p. 265). As for what language(s) the Scythians spoke, all we know is what can be reconstructed through the analysis of some of their tribal and personal names and toponyms; these would seem to place them within the north-eastern Iranian linguistic family from which modern Ossetian is descended.
In the end, we are still a long way from having a detailed understanding of the steppe nomads of the first millennium BCE, but Cunliffe manages to provide a reasonably coherent, if unavoidably incomplete, picture. If one wishes to learn what is currently known about the Scythians, then this is the book to read.
Four years after the appearance of Cunliffe's valuable mise-à-jour of Scythian studies, University of Indiana Professor Christopher I. Beckwith published his own ultra-revisionist narrative, The Scythian Empire, in early 2023. The two books could not be more different. Cunliffe, like most who have written on the Scythians, relies mainly on archaeology. Beckwith is a linguist, although his training is in Tibetan, not Iranology. Cunliffe's book is sober and conservative, incorporating the latest archaeological discoveries in ways that mostly expand and elaborate on existing understanding of Scythian culture. Beckwith, on the other hand, seeks to stand the entire field on its head by radically recasting virtually everything to do with ancient Eurasia.
No one could ever accuse Christopher Beckwith of underselling his subject. He introduces his readers to the culture of the mounted archers who roamed and raided across the Eurasian steppe in ancient times as being ‘one of the least known but most influential realms in all of world history’ (p. 3), boldly asserting that ‘the chief innovations of the Classical Age’ came not from the riverine agricultural civilisations (i.e. Mesopotamia and Egypt), but ‘from Central Asia, thanks to the Scythians’ (p. 4). Reviewers in non-specialist media such as the Wall Street Journal, the New Yorker, the Library Journal, and the Asian Review of Books—it would appear that the author is blessed with an unusually proactive literary agent!—seem to have taken Beckwith at his word, gushing at his daring and original ideas. Reviews in academic journals have been more restrained, finding his arguments for the most part unconvincing. The present reviewer falls into the latter category.
Beckwith's book contains much in the way of interesting propositions, but the author's self-aggrandising presentation—which is plagued by exaggerated generalisations, overdrawn conclusions, weakly supported claims, and special pleading—is off-putting. His assertion in the Preface that the connections among the multifarious proto-Iranic tribes (which he anachronistically lumps together under the perennially imprecise term ‘Scythian’) have been ‘completely overlooked’ is simply not true, which raises one's suspicions when he claims to have discovered things not ‘noticed at all by anyone before’ (p. xi). While what he says often appears reasonable up to a point, much of his narrative begs so many questions that the reader feels unable to fully trust any of it.
The Preface is followed by a section on terminology (Central Eurasia, Silk Road, etc.), which is appreciated but insufficient. To begin with, Beckwith does not define either ‘Scythian’ or ‘empire’—a rather glaring omission, as he employs them in ways that depart substantially from standard usage (pp. xix–xxi). Indeed, many of the flaws and apparent exaggerations in the book stem from the author's failure to provide and defend clear definitions of these terms that might have persuaded the reader to accept his unconventional use of them.
Instead of choosing ‘Scythian’ as an umbrella label for all Iranian-speaking steppe nomads, it might have been more appropriate to refer to them as ‘Aryans’, as that is the word they seem to have applied to themselves. After all, Darius identifies in his Bisotun inscription as ‘an Aryan, having Aryan lineage’, not as ‘a Scythian, having Scythian lineage’. But Beckwith accords a far more restricted meaning to Darius's ariya, asserting with casual confidence that, in Old Persian, it means ‘the legitimate heavenly royal line’ (p. 19). This definition, however, is hard to accept. The term, which Mallory and Adams have reconstructed as deriving from proto-Indo-European *h₂er(y)ós, was a group self-designation meaning ‘[we] the free [ones]’, used in contrast to the neighbouring tribes, seen as ‘natural slaves’, that the Aryans regularly raided, and there is no clear indication that Darius understood it in the far more specific sense that Beckwith claims.
Putting aside the objection that grandiose notions of royalty seem anachronistic when referring to what were really just tribal chieftains, in attributing an uninterrupted legacy to the ‘Scythians’ of ‘One eternal royal line’ (the title of chapter 4), Beckwith ignores the fact that the rulers of the various historical dynasties that he claims as uniformly ‘Scythian’ were hardly all direct descendants of each other. A broadly ethnic definition, on the other hand, would have been more consistent with the mythological tradition of the Aryan tribes, who thought it their right to ‘liberate’ livestock from non-Aryans, seeing them as undeserving inferiors. In that respect, the self-designation ‘Aria’ occurs far more widely than ‘Skuδa’ and its derivatives, which seem to be behind Beckwith's preference for the blanket term ‘Scythian’.
As for ‘empire’, Beckwith conflates a wide range of circumstances from different places and times as if they all constituted a single massive, unified, persistent, all-pervasive thing: ‘From the Scythian conquest through the long Scytho-Mede-Persian Achaemenid “Dynasty”, the empire retained all of the key innovative Scythian elements that constituted it’ (p. 75). What exactly was this single and enduring ‘Scythian conquest’? Is Beckwith referring to the dispersal of the post-Sintashta Andronovo peoples across the Eurasian steppe? It would seem so, as he claims that his ‘Scythian empire’ (‘the world's first huge empire’) begins in around 1700 BCE (p. 1)—‘the world's first true “empire”, in what became, and still is, the usual sense’, though he does not specify what this ‘usual sense’ definition of ‘empire’ is (p. 82). Beckwith seems to be in denial of the fact that, in most cases, these proto-Iranian peoples, like tribal nomads throughout history, were mostly content just to raid, not conquer.
There is simply no real evidence for anything resembling a Eurasian steppe ‘empire’ throughout the period that Beckwith discusses; rather, there were just tribes—many, but not all of them related to each other and speaking similar Iranian dialects—surviving under harsh conditions by pasturing their livestock and raiding their neighbours. Occasional, ephemeral confederations of these tribes for opportunistic acts of aggression can hardly be said to constitute any kind of grand and lasting ‘empire’. The Iranic nomads were of course present over a vast territory, and their influence upon settled peoples from the Black Sea to the Yellow River is significant. But the widespread presence of culturally and linguistically related tribes does not imply that they were consistently unified, much less that they embodied a polity that ‘ruled’ from Media to China as Beckwith would have it (p. 80). Their occasional dominance of settled regions (and of each other) was almost entirely limited to the exacting of tribute; it did not extend to administrative affairs prior to the Achaemenid period, and then only in the context of one of these Iranic groups: the Persians. Even if the Qin Emperor Zhao Zheng came from a Scythian background as Beckwith claims (p. 219), his administrative reforms took place in China and Beckwith's attributing them to steppe precedents (‘or at least the Chao version of the Scythian imperial system’, p. 221) is far from being conclusive.
Throughout the book, the author shows a tendency to somewhat arbitrarily define words in ways—sometimes quite novel—that appear to support whatever argument he happens to be making. His knowledge of a wide range of languages will make it difficult for the typical reader to contest these definitions, although specialists in individual languages may well do so. (This reviewer, for example, being ignorant of Chinese, cannot assess the plausibility of the Xiongnu chieftain Modun's name being a Sinicisation of the proposed Iranian *Bagatvana, of the epithet Xia deriving from ‘Aria’, or both the Zhao capital Handan and the Qin's Xianyang from *Agamatana/Ecbatana. Others will presumably weigh in on this.) Similarly, assessing Beckwith's suggestion that the Scythians invented philosophy (pp. 234–276), with the Buddha and Laozi taking their places alongside Anacharsis and Zarathushtra as ethnic Scythians, is best left to philosophers.
Since, as with Humpty Dumpty, a word means just what Beckwith chooses it to mean, his arguments are often tautological. This is particularly evident in chapter 5, in which he describes an unattested but, in his mind, universally dominant Iranian language that he calls ‘Imperial Scythian’. He states that this (hypothetical) tongue ‘is virtually identical to Avestan’ (p. 31) and served as ‘the spoken administrative language of the Scytho-Mede Empire and later the Achaemenid Persian Empire’, as well as being ‘the native language spoken in most of Iran, in Southern Central Asia … and in Western Central Asia’ (p. 238). The similarities between Avestan and Median vocabulary items culled from Tavernier's Old Iranian Lexicon are admittedly intriguing (pp. 150–151), but much more is needed to establish Beckwith's claim that ‘[t]he identity of Avestan, Median and Scythian as dialects of one spoken language, Imperial Scythian, means that we do after all have texts in Scythian and “Median”: they are the Avesta’ (p. 165).
Beckwith's insistence on an original and steadfast Scythian monotheism is another argument built on very shaky foundations, contradicted by data from across the ancient Iranian world. The mere existence of a myth belonging to one of many Iranic steppe tribes, reported by Herodotus, in which the primal man is engendered by a sky deity need hardly be extrapolated as demonstrating that ‘the Scythians were monotheists’ (p. 44). What is this Scythian ‘Early Mazdaism’, which Beckwith considers to have preceded the ‘Early Zoroastrianism’ of the Gathas (p. xxi)? If the proto-Iranians had a most prominent deity within their patently pantheistic pantheon, then it was most likely Mithra, as ancient Central Asian petroglyphs as well as survivals among the Ossetes and non-Muslim Kurdish groups strongly suggest. (One suspects as well that the ‘Ares’ mentioned by Herodotus as being worshipped by the Scythians in the form of a sword was also an avatar of Mithra, likely unnamed due to a taboo.) Moreover, Kellens has shown that, alongside the elevation of the hitherto obscure Mazda, the ostensibly monotheistic Gathas actually see the emergence of entirely new deities, such as Ashi.
Why credit Darius I and his successor Xerxes with promulgating ‘a new religious philosophy’ (p. 18) if their alleged monotheism was merely a ‘restoration of the pre-Cyrus religious policy’ (p. 71)? Beckwith wrongly states that ‘[w]orship of Anahita and Mithra is condemned by Zoroaster (though he does not name them), and both of these “false gods” (also unnamed) were anathematized by Darius’ (p. 45). The fact that, as Beckwith parenthetically acknowledges, neither source names these two deities calls into question the assertion that they were the ones condemned by Zoroaster and anathematised by Darius. Beckwith later comments that the anti-polytheistic Zoroaster's native region cannot have been the steppe because (he claims) the nomadic ‘Scythians’ were already monotheists (p. 239). Continuing with this circular reasoning, he goes on to imply that Zoroaster's original home must have been in the ‘polytheistic’ Near East, adding that the first component of his name, ‘Zara-, is surely Semitic zar'a “seed (of)”, i.e., “son (of)”, so it is probably Ancient Near Eastern in origin’ (p. 240). He later completes the etymology by opining that the second component derives from the Akkadian goddess Ishtar, such that ‘Zarathushtra’ actually means ‘“Seed of Ishtar”, “Son of the Star”, or something to that effect … a perfect name for a man whose teachings enlightened much of the ancient world’ (p. 271).
The steppe nomads certainly must have had a strong oral tradition, but the example of the Gathas can hardly be taken as an indication that ‘the Scythians cultivated religious poetry’ (p. 52). Even if one were to be generous and identify Zoroaster as a ‘Scythian’, the fact that, according to tradition, he was rejected by his native society and found patronage only under a distant chieftain belies Beckwith's claim and, in any case, the Gathas were a priestly liturgy—not something aimed at or even accessible to the general community.
Skipping ahead a millennium or so (on linguistic grounds, it is highly unlikely that Zoroaster was a contemporary of Cyaxeres as Beckwith assumes), whatever role the Alans may or may not have played in ‘transmitting key motifs of Scythian epic poetry to early medieval Europe’ (What key motifs? Based on what examples?), Beckwith exaggerates even the highly speculative suggestions of Bachrach and others (principally Littleton and Malcor, whom he does not cite) when he states that these ‘formed the core of what became the King Arthur cycle of tales’ (p. 53).
The Scythian Empire, like its author's earlier Empires of the Silk Road (Princeton, 2009), is a monumental work of wide-ranging erudition and adventurous argumentation. Both works suffer from overstatement and overreach apparently driven by the author's romantic personal obsessions—enabling him to imagine, for example, contrary to the forensic evidence presented by Cunliffe on disease and mortality (p. 201), that ‘[t]he Scythians were on the whole healthy, long-lived people’ (p. 49). Beckwith's main purpose in writing Empires seems to have been to glorify and elevate the steppe nomads through unabashed apologetic: ‘The warriors of Central Asia were not barbarians. They were heroes’ (p. xxv). In The Scythian Empire, his overriding fixations are ‘legitimate’ kingship—safeguarded through the preservation of precious royal blood—and monotheism, as if the credit for originating these two things is the greatest honour that could possibly be bestowed upon a people. His total dedication to this cause leads him to take considerable liberties with the available data.
Beckwith has a maddening tendency to present his assertions, which may or may not be true and often come across as quite farfetched, as if they were established fact. Specialists will of course question these at every turn, as they should. General readers, however, perhaps attracted by glowing reviews in the mainstream media, may be easily misled into accepting wholesale the author's overblown claims to have made numerous ‘new discoveries’ when, in fact, what he has done is to present an array of audacious speculations in support of a dubious overarching premise. This is a book to make one think, but it needs to be read with considerable care.
