The Galloping Goldsmiths

Everyone has heard of the Scythians but where did they come from, how did they live and what was it that helped them to rise to power?

The Scythians were horse-rearing nomads who flourished between the 9th and 2nd centuries BC and dominated a vast swathe of fertile grassy steppe from the edge of China across Kazakhstan and southern Russia and as far west as the northern Black Sea. They raided through the mountain passes of the Caucasus into large areas of the Middle East in the 7th century BC.

Late Assyrian histories tell us that they threatened the northern borders of Assyria but how, in 676 BC, their king Esarhaddon (r 680–669 BC) ‘put to the sword Ishpaka, a Scythian, an ally who could not save himself’.

Then, in 519 BC, the Achaemenid ruler Darius I (r 522–486 BC) relates how he crushed internal opposition to his accession and campaigned against the ‘Pointed Hat Scythians’, killing one of their chiefs and leading another called Skunkha into captivity. Skunkha,who is shown on Darius’ rock-cut relief at Bisitun, which overlooks a major pass connecting western Iran with Mesopotamia, wears trousers, jacket and a tall conical hat.

Other Achaemenid reliefs and sculptures show Scythian men (some wearing conical hats) in their typical dress of belted trousers and longsleeved gowns, carrying pointed battle-axes and short swords, and bringing horses.

Persian sources distinguish between three types of Scythian, whom they called Saka. First, there are the Saka haumavarga or ‘haoma-drinking Saka’ (the juice from a sacred plant, the haoma), who may be the same as the ‘Amyrgian Scythians’, referred to by the 5th-century BC Greek writer Herodotus, who devoted almost an entire Book in his Histories to describing their customs. Next come the Saka tigraxauda (‘Saka with pointed caps’), and, finally, the seemingly western Saka tayai paradraya (‘Saka beyond the sea’).