The Scythians & the Steppe

In the summer of 1993, on the high, windswept Ukok plateau of the Altai mountains, where Russia meets Kazakhstan, Mongolia and China, the Russian archaeologist Natalia Polosmak and her team opened a burial mound. Under the stones, water had seeped into the log chamber more than two thousand years earlier and frozen solid, and the ice had preserved what it held. Inside a larch-wood coffin lay a young woman of the Pazyryk culture, dressed in a silk blouse and a woollen skirt, wearing a tall felt headdress decorated with carved and gilded animals. Her left shoulder and arm were tattooed with fantastic animals: a deer with a griffin's beak and antlers ending in flowers. Six horses, saddled and harnessed, had been killed and buried beside her. The "Ice Maiden", as the press named her, was one of the peoples of the great Iron Age steppe whom the Greeks called Scythians. Their world stretched from the Danube to Mongolia, and its religion is known to us through two very different witnesses: the ground, and Herodotus.

The Scythians and their cousins

In the first millennium BCE, the grasslands of Eurasia were dominated by mounted nomads who spoke Iranian languages, herded horses, cattle and sheep, fought as archers on horseback, and buried their leaders under great earth mounds, kurgans. The Greeks called those north of the Black Sea Skythai; the Persians called their eastern cousins Saka; later came the Sarmatians and Alans. Related cultures stretched across the steppe to the Altai (the Pazyryk culture) and Tuva, where the royal kurgan of Arzhan dates to the ninth to seventh centuries BCE. Modern scholars group them as the "Scythian world" or "Scytho-Siberian" cultures, sharing a way of life, weapons, horse gear and, above all, an art of animals, while differing from region to region.

The Scythians left no texts of their own. Their descendants, in a sense, survive: the Ossetians of the Caucasus speak an Iranian language descended from that of the Alans, and their Nart sagas preserve heroic legends that scholars such as Georges Dumézil traced back to the Scytho-Sarmatian world.

Herodotus in Scythia

The Greek historian Herodotus, writing about 430 BCE, devoted the fourth book of his Histories to the Scythians, drawing on what he learned in the Greek colonies on the Black Sea coast, perhaps at Olbia. He is our main written source, and he is a Greek describing strangers, often through Greek categories. His account includes:

• The origin of the Scythians. The first man, Targitaos, son of Zeus and of the daughter of the river Borysthenes (the Dnieper), had three sons. In their time four golden objects fell from the sky: a plough and yoke, a battle-axe and a cup. When the two elder brothers approached, the gold blazed with fire; when the youngest, Kolaxais, approached, it cooled, and he took it and became king. The royal Scythians kept the sacred gold and honoured it with great sacrifices every year. Dumézil read the four objects as the emblems of three social functions, farming, war and sovereignty or priesthood, the pattern he saw across Indo-European myth; that interpretation is influential and debated.
• The gods. Herodotus lists them with Greek equivalents: first Tabiti (Hestia, goddess of the hearth), then Papaios (Zeus) and Api (Earth), then Goitosyros (Apollo), Argimpasa (Aphrodite Ourania), and gods he calls Herakles and Ares. The royal Scythians also sacrificed to Poseidon under the name Thagimasadas. The Scythians, he says, made no statues, altars or temples, except for Ares.
• The sword of Ares. In each district a vast pile of brushwood, three furlongs square, was raised, with a flat top reached by a ramp. On it stood an ancient iron sword, the image of Ares. To it they sacrificed horses and cattle every year, and of every hundred prisoners of war one, whose blood they poured over the sword.
• Divination. Soothsayers foretold the future with bundles of willow rods, laying them out one by one and speaking as they did. The Enarees, men who, Herodotus says, lived "like women" and had been cursed by Aphrodite, divined by twisting and untwisting strips of lime-tree bark in their fingers. If the king fell ill, diviners named the person who had sworn falsely by the royal hearth; if they were found guilty by other diviners, they were beheaded, and if acquitted, the diviners were burned in a wagon of brushwood.
• The hemp tent. After a funeral, the Scythians purified themselves by building a small tent of felt on three poles, placing red-hot stones in a dish inside, and throwing hemp seeds onto them. The seeds smoked, and the Scythians "howled with pleasure" in the vapour, which Herodotus took for a steam bath.
• Oaths and trophies. They swore oaths by mixing their blood with wine in a cup and drinking it; they drank from the skulls of enemies, gilded inside; they scalped enemies and hung the scalps on their bridles.

The king's funeral

Herodotus describes at length the funeral of a Scythian king. The body was disembowelled, filled with aromatic herbs, coated in wax, and carried on a wagon from tribe to tribe for forty days, each tribe's mourners cutting their ears, scratching their faces and piercing their hands with arrows. At the burial place, in the land of the Gerrhoi near the Dnieper, the king was laid in a great square pit with one of his concubines, his cup-bearer, cook, groom, servant and messenger, all strangled, and his horses, and gold cups. A huge mound was raised. A year later, fifty of his best servants and fifty of the finest horses were strangled, gutted, stuffed, and set up on stakes around the mound, the dead riders mounted on the dead horses, as a ghostly guard.

It sounds like a traveller's tale. But the excavation of the great kurgans of the Dnieper region, Chertomlyk, Solokha, Tovsta Mohyla and others, has confirmed much of it: royal burials with retainers and a woman, dozens of horses buried around the tombs, gold vessels, and evidence of great funeral feasts. One study found archaeological support for eleven of the seventeen elements in Herodotus's description. The fifty impaled horsemen themselves have not been found as he describes them, though horse burials around the mounds are common. Tovsta Mohyla, excavated in 1971 by Borys Mozolevsky, yielded a famous gold pectoral, a neck ornament with scenes of Scythians sewing a sheepskin shirt and milking ewes, surrounded by griffins attacking horses.

Gold, animals and the "animal style"

What survives above all from the Scythian world is its art, and it is an art of animals. Scythian craftsmen, and Greek goldsmiths working for Scythian patrons, made weapons, horse harness, belt plaques, vessels and clothing ornaments covered with deer, elk, horses, ibex, big cats, birds of prey and griffins, often twisted, curled or locked in combat. The gold stag from the kurgan at Kostromskaya (seventh century BCE), with its legs folded beneath it and its antlers streaming back along its body, is the classic example. At Pazyryk the frozen tombs of chiefs preserved felt hangings, carpets (including the oldest surviving pile carpet), wooden carvings, horse masks with antlers attached, and tattoos on the bodies of the dead.

Why animals? Scholars have proposed that the images were amulets, clan or rank emblems, representations of gods, or a cosmology in which predator and prey stood for the cycles of life and death. A recent line of interpretation reads them through "perspectivism", the idea found in many hunting peoples that animals are persons with their own points of view. None of these is certain; the art's meaning must be inferred, and it may have meant different things in different places.

Hemp, horses and the other world

Archaeology has confirmed, with remarkable precision, one of Herodotus's strangest reports. At Pazyryk, the Soviet archaeologist Sergei Rudenko found in the 1940s the frames of small tents, copper cauldrons filled with stones and charred hemp seeds, and a leather pouch of hemp seeds tied to a tent pole, just as Herodotus described. In 2019, chemical analysis of wooden braziers from the Jirzankal cemetery in the Pamir mountains of western China, dated to about 500 BCE, found residues of cannabis with high levels of the psychoactive compound THC: the earliest clear chemical evidence of cannabis burned for its effects, probably in funeral rites.

Horses were at the centre of the steppe world and of its religion. At Arzhan 1 in Tuva, one of the oldest royal kurgans, well over a hundred horses were buried in chambers around the central grave; at Arzhan 2, a royal couple lay with thousands of gold objects. Horses were sacrificed to accompany their owners into death, sometimes dressed in masks that turned them into antlered deer or griffins: horses transformed into mythical animals to carry their riders to the next world.

Warrior women

The Greeks told stories of the Amazons, a people of women warriors on the edges of the known world, and Herodotus says the Sarmatians descended from Scythian men and Amazon women, and that their women rode, hunted and went to war. Archaeology suggests the stories had a basis. Across the steppe, many women were buried with weapons, bows, arrows, spears and armour, and some bear battle injuries; estimates suggest that in some regions up to about a third of Scythian-era women's burials contain weapons. In 2019 archaeologists on the middle Don excavated a kurgan with four women of different ages buried with weapons, one wearing a ceremonial headdress. The religious meaning of women's warrior status is unknown.

The believer's lens

No one practises Scythian religion in its ancient form, but a few modern revivalist groups in Ossetia, in the tradition called Uatsdin, and among some neopagans, look to the Scytho-Alanic past as their spiritual ancestry. For the Scythians themselves, as far as Herodotus and the tombs let us see, the world was full of sacred powers: the hearth above all, the fire at the centre of the household and of the king's authority; the sky and the earth; the sword as the embodiment of war; horses and animals as companions and bearers of power; and the dead, who went on living in the mound, served by their people and their horses. Oaths bound men before the gods, and divination revealed who had broken them.

The skeptical lens

The historian's first caution is that Herodotus wrote as a Greek about "barbarians", sometimes to entertain and often to make points about Greeks. He mapped Scythian gods onto Greek ones, may have misunderstood what he heard, and repeated some things he himself doubted. Where archaeology can check him, on royal funerals and the hemp tents, he is often confirmed in general and sometimes contradicted in detail.

The second is that "Scythian" covers many peoples across thousands of kilometres and several centuries. The Pazyryk culture of the Altai and the royal Scythians of the Dnieper were related but not identical; generalizing from one to all is risky.

The third concerns modern claims. The Scythians have been claimed as ancestors by many nations, and modern nationalist or esoteric writers have made them the source of everything from the Celts to the Slavs; such claims outrun the evidence. The Ossetian connection is linguistic and literary, and genuine; others are speculative.

Symbology and sacred encoding

• The sword as god. The iron sword planted on the brushwood mound was, for Herodotus, the image of Ares himself: a weapon made divine, and war worshipped in its instrument.
• The golden gifts from heaven. The plough and yoke, axe and cup that fell from the sky are sacred objects that encode kingship: only the rightful king can touch them without being burned. Dumézil's three-function reading (farming, war, sovereignty) is one interpretation among several.
• The hearth. Tabiti, first of the gods, and the oath "by the king's hearth" made fire the sacred centre of society.
• The recumbent stag. The most repeated image of Scythian art, the deer with legs folded and antlers flowing back, has been read as a sun symbol, a clan emblem, a guide of the dead, or a sacrificial animal. Its meaning is inferred.
• The griffin. The eagle-lion hybrid, often shown attacking a horse or deer, was shared with Greek and Persian art and may have stood for the guardian of gold (Herodotus speaks of gold-guarding griffins in the far north-east) or for the predator in the cycle of life and death.
• Tattoos. The animal tattoos of the Pazyryk dead, found on men and women, may have marked identity, status, or protection; some have been read as a map of the wearer's spiritual allies. Their use is documented; their meaning is not.
• The horse transformed. Antlered masks on sacrificed horses turned them into mythical animals: an explicit visual statement that the horse in the tomb was no longer an ordinary horse.
• Kurgan stelae. Stone figures of warriors with weapons, belts and drinking horns, set up on burial mounds, were memorials and perhaps images of ancestors or heroes; later steppe peoples continued the tradition.
• Deer stones. In Mongolia and southern Siberia, carved standing stones of the late Bronze Age covered with flying stylized deer, older than the Scythians, show that the deer and the sky were sacred on the steppe long before them.

Connections

The Scythians were Iranian cousins of the Persians of Zoroaster (ch06), sharing gods and ideas of fire and oath, and contemporaries of Classical Greece (ch15), whose colonists traded with them and whose historian described them. Their horse sacrifice and royal burials belong with Sacrifice & the Scapegoat (ch51) and Sacred Kingship (ch49), their mounds with the Neolithic and Bronze Age burial traditions of ch42 and ch57, and their journeys of the dead with Journeys to the Underworld (ch47). The steppe nomads who followed them, Huns, Turks and Mongols, carried the religion of the sky explored in Tengri & the Mongols (ch81), and the shamanic practices of northern Asia described in ch75 are cousins of their diviners and hemp rites. Their women warriors are part of the story behind the Greek myths of the Amazons.

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From The Divine Archives · https://getconexto.com/chapters/ch78.html · a comparative library of the sacred.