Barry Cunlife - The Scythians

the rise of the pontic steppe scythians
steppe elites emulating Scythian styles of burial, but there were also military interventions.
In the middle Dnieper region many forts were built by the indigenous population
in the seventh and sixth centuries, which implies a period of social tension,
but in the fifth century, after some had been violently destroyed, most were abandoned.
A likely scenario is of a long period of conflict initiated by raiding warlords
from the steppe attempting to establish authority in these distant regions. Pressures
from without are likely to have exacerbated internal tensions. The intricacies of the
situation are difficult to grasp from the archaeological evidence but it is reasonable
to assume that over two centuries or so the forest steppe communities came increasingly
under Scythian domination.
Standing back from the mass of archaeological detail it is possible to characterize
the development of the Early and Middle Scythian periods (c.750–c.400 bc) in
terms of the outside influences to which the Scythian communities were subjected.
Throughout the seventh century the most important influences came from Asia
Minor through the Scythians who had settled in the North Caucasus, but after about
600 bc the contacts had all but dried up and there is some evidence to suggest that
people were moving away from the Kuban region to settle on the steppe west of the
Don. The sixth century saw an intensification of interaction with the farming communities
of the forest steppe to the north and west, the nomadic steppe Scythians
now establishing their authority over the native populations. This was also the time
when Scythian influences extended westwards through the Carpathian Mountains
to the Great Hungarian Plan and beyond (below, pp. 150–6). Finally, towards the end
of the sixth century, throughout the fifth, and reaching a peak in the fourth century,
it was the Greek cities of the north Pontic coast that had the greatest cultural impact.
Olbia at the mouth of the Dnieper river and Panticapaeum on the Crimean peninsula
overlooking the Kerch Strait were the two main foci, the first feeding the demands of
Scythian elites concentrated in the Dnieper valley, the second serving the Crimea and
the Kuban regions.
The Middle period (c.600–400 bc) also saw considerable changes to Scythian society
on the steppe as the nomads began to become more sedentary. More than one
hundred settlements are known from this period along the River Dnieper, including
large complex trading sites like Kamenskoe (below, pp. 129–31), and there is now
ample evidence for crop growing, with some of the settlements producing considerable
quantities of wheat and millet, probably consumed in the form of porridge, and
also barley grown as animal feed. One of the reasons for this shift in lifestyle may
have been a change in climate that led to a diminution in quality pastureland on the
steppe, but the impact of growing links with the Greek world and the intensification
of trade cannot have failed to have been factors in the changes now coming about.
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