Barry Cunlife - The Scythians

predatory nomads
trilobate socketed arrowheads but there are also short swords (akinakes), horse gear,
and occasionally battleaxes and animal art. Some of these items occur in burials and
some, particularly the arrowheads, are found in destruction layers in settlements like
the Urartian fortress of Karmir Blur. It is, however, impossible to assign them specifically
to Kimmerians or to Scythians. Indeed, the fact that some of these arrowheads
occur in contexts as late as the fifth century show that these types had been
adopted by the local communities. That said, there can be little doubt that much of
the nomadic-style metalwork was introduced by raiders from the steppe between the
late ninth and late seventh century bc. In Georgia, in the south Caucasus, ten burials
containing nomad gear may well be the graves of steppe nomads. Four of them were
buried with their horses.
One burial of particular interest was found at Imirlev in Amasya province. It was a
kurgan grave in the form of a square-built chamber containing a single human burial
accompanied by at least one horse, an iron akinakes (short sword), a bimetallic battleaxe,
a bronze horse bit with stirrup-shaped ends, twenty-eight or more bilobate
arrows, and a gold bracelet with animal-style decoration. Here, clearly, was the grave
of a steppe raider, his equipment showing that he was broadly a contemporary with
the Arzhan 1 chieftain dating to the late ninth century. The discovery shows that
nomadic warriors were penetrating the region possibly as much as a century before
the first mention of Kimmerians in the region in 714 bc.
Kimmerians in the West
The simple narrative offered by the Greek sources of Kimmerians who were living
around the northern shores of the Black Sea being forced to leave their homeland by
incoming Scythians offers a convenient model against which to compare the archaeological
evidence. If Strabo is to be believed, Kimmerians were present in Thrace and
were negotiating alliances with Thracian tribes. This has led archaeologists to write
of a hybrid Thraco-Kimmerian culture and to link it with a widespread distribution
of bimetallic daggers, horse gear, and other artefacts of eastern type which extends
into the Great Hungarian Plain, along the middle Danube valley, and northwards into
southern Poland. Some archaeologists have taken this to represent the westward
migration of Kimmerians, either the ultimate extension of the initial spread from the
Altai–Sayan in the ninth or eighth century or the population displaced from the Pontic
region by the arrival of the Scythians in the late seventh century.
In the puszta—the steppe region of the Great Hungarian Plain lying within the
eastern part of the Carpathian arc—a distinctive culture, named after the Hungarian
site of Mezöcsát, has been recognized. It is known almost entirely from cemeter-
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