Barry Cunlife - The Scythians

the rise of the pontic steppe scythians
On their return they found an army of no small size prepared to oppose their entrance.
For the Scythian women, when they saw that time went on and their husbands did not
come back, had intermarried with their slaves… . When therefore the children sprung
from these slaves and the Scythian women grew to manhood and understood the circumstances
of their birth they resolved to oppose the army which was returning from
Media.
(Hist. iv. 1–3)
It is not difficult to understand the attitude of the younger generation when faced
with a horde of raddled old veterans returning to upset their social order. But in the
end it was the veterans who won the day.
West of the Don
The archaeological evidence shows that the initial influx of nomads coming from
Central Asia in the late eighth and early seventh century took up residence in the
north Caucasus. Some may have continued on into the great sweep of the Pontic
steppe but at first their numbers were limited and it was not until the late seventh
and early sixth century, partly as the result of new people coming from Central Asia
and partly from groups moving westwards from the north Caucasus, that the steppe
began to be occupied on any scale. Even then the actual numbers cannot have been
great. Of the three thousand or so Scythian tombs found on the steppe only sixty are
so far known to date to the seventh or sixth centuries.
The nomadic Scythians who reached the Pontic steppe found themselves to be in
a highly favoured position. To the north lay the forest steppe, already well populated
with farming communities, producing a range of desirable commodities including
iron, charcoal, furs, honey, and slaves, as well as grain, while to the south, along the
Black Sea coast were the Greek colonial establishments eager to obtain raw materials
and manpower for themselves and for export to the motherland. The steppe nomads
were able to articulate the exchanges between their neighbours and to begin the long
process of integrating with them.
The forest steppe zone to the north was divided into a number of discrete territories
by the great rivers that flowed across it towards the Black Sea. The different
regions were occupied by different cultural groups with roots deep in the past. Those
to the far north were tribes described by Herodotus as lying beyond the Scythians,
but there were also forest steppe tribes with much closer links to the Scythians of
the steppe. The relationship of this periphery to the steppe dwellers was complex
and changed over time. At one level there was cultural interaction between the two
spheres involving various systems of trade and exchange. This resulted in the forest
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