Barry Cunlife - The Scythians

the rise of the pontic steppe scythians
The women of the Sauromatae … frequently hunt on horseback with their husbands,
sometimes even unaccompanied, in war taking the field, and wearing the same clothes
as the men… . Their marriage law states that no girl shall wed until she has killed a man
in battle. Sometimes it happens that a woman is unmarried in old age having never
been able, in her whole lifetime, to meet this condition.
(Hist. iv. 116–17)
The archaeological evidence bears out the prominent role of women. A number of
rich female burials have been found with the body of the deceased being accompanied
by the equipment of a warrior (below, pp. 218–19).
Herodotus, then, is clear that in spite of close similarities to the Scythians, the Sauromatae
believed themselves to be a separate people. At the time when Darius made
his ill-advised advance through Scythian territory in the late sixth century, the Sauromatae
joined the anti-Persian confederacy conscious of the fact that Darius was fast
approaching their territory.
There is a further problem of terminology which has to be faced. While Herodotus
was clear that the people he had heard about living between the River Don and
the Urals were called Sauromatae, later writers, from the fourth century bc onwards,
refer to the inhabitants of this broad region as Sarmatian, and the Sarmatian tribes
feature large during the following few centuries. It may simply be that the two names
were interchangeable as their similarity might suggest. But there are other possibilities.
It may be that the Sarmatians were a horde from the east who began to penetrate
Sauromatian territory and then gained ascendency over them. Another possibility is
that all the nomadic peoples stretching from the Urals to the Don were called Sarmatians
and that the Sauromatae were one branch living on the Lower Volga who took
their name from their leading family. The historical texts are no help and the archaeological
data, while copious, are difficult to interpret. Here we will continue to use the
term Sauromatian where it is not in conflict with the historical evidence.
The Sauromatae are known almost entirely from the many hundreds of graves that
have been excavated. They demonstrate a degree of cultural similarity stretching from
the River Don to the southern Urals, but within this area two discrete groups can
be identified, one focused on the Lower Volga, the other in the Samara–Ural region.
These differences are likely to reflect the Late Bronze Age substratum from which
they emerged. The Lower Volga group developed from the Srubnaya culture, while the
Samara–Ural group arose in the area of the Andronovo culture. What gave Sauromatian
(or early Sarmatian) culture which developed from these disparate origins its appearance
of unity was the impact of nomadic bands coming from the east who brought with
them a more warlike culture predicated on elite bands of horse-riding warriors.
122