Barry Cunlife - The Scythians

scythians in central asia
In another incident a year later 3,000 Sakā horsemen
joined the rebellion of the Bactrians and Sogdians
against Alexander, but when the battle turned against
them they decided to plunder the baggage of their allies
and made off with their spoils into the steppe. Later, in
327, when news came that Alexander was intending to
lead an expedition to India, Sakā detachments flocked to
his cause unable to resist the lure of plunder.
The proximity of the thriving Achaemenid empire
and the chaotic period which saw its demise created a
variety of opportunities for contingents of Sakā horsemen
to thrive. The rewards and the plunder generated
by this involvement flowed back into their steppe homeland
to be used in cycles of gift exchange, the exotic
items much admired, until finally they were consigned
to the earth as the burial goods of their last owner.
For more than 200 years the nomads had confronted
7.5 Gold plaque in the form of a fabulous winged lion-griffin. the Persian empire receiving, through a myriad of social
One of the items from a hoard known as the Oxus treasure mechanisms, a wide variety of valuable craft goods feeding
their senses with new images redolent with meanings.
which was probably found at Takht-i Kuvad, Tajikistan. It is of
Persian inspiration. Items like this introduced the symbolism of
exotic mythological beasts into the Scythian repertoire. While they may not have fully understood the iconography
of these items, they reminded them of the exotic elite
world which they so valued. Thus new motifs began to enter the nomad repertoire—
lotus flowers and palmettes, lions and fabulous beasts such as winged bulls and sphinxes.
Some of these alien images were copied by nomad craftsmen from Achaemenid imports
and skilfully incorporated into the native milieu, while in the frontier markets there will
have been craft-workers, schooled in the Persian tradition, eager to provide luxury goods
to satisfy the tastes of their nomad customers. It was a situation not dissimilar to that
existing between the Scythians and the Greeks towns along the north Pontic coast.
Landscapes with People
The various classical texts that survive do scant justice to the great variety of people
who occupied the 3,000 km of the Central Asian steppe and desert steppe stretching
between the Urals and the Altai–Sayan mountains. To understand something of
that variety we have to rely on archaeological evidence gained from the examples of
many hundreds of graves which reflect an attitude to death. Comparable evidence of
daily life gained from settlements is very limited, not least because the settlements of
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