Barry Cunlife - The Scythians

bodies clothed in skins
This usually happened, he said, after the men had found themselves to be impotent.
Accepting the condition as the will of the gods ‘they put on female attire, reproach
themselves for effeminacy, play the part of women, and perform the same work as
women do’. Noting that gender transfer was more prevalent among the rich, who
habitually rode horses, Pseudo-Hippocrates puts the cause of impotence down to
the evils of horse-riding, of which he evidently disapproves (see p. 200), ‘because they
always wore trousers and spend most of their time on horseback, unable to fondle
themselves, and from cold and fatigue they forget their sexual desires’.
Herodotus was aware of the effeminate males among the Scythians. He calls
them Enarees and says that they were punished by the deities with the ‘female sickness’.
They were adept at divination, using a special method taught to them by Venus,
which involves taking a piece of the inner bark of the linden tree and splitting it into
three, twining and untwining the strips around their fingers while they prophesy
(Hist. iv. 67). Herodotus, always keen to offer a plausible explanation, says that the
Scythians who plundered the temple of Venus in Ascalon were punished with the
female sickness by the goddess—a punishment passed down the generations (Hist.
i. 100). Both Herodotus and Pseudo-Hippocrates, then, agree that the desire of some
Scythian males to take on the female role was induced by the gods and that such
people had supernatural powers enabling them to become diviners and shamans.
Transgender behaviour was a characteristic of shamanism in various parts of the
world in the recent past.
Work and Play
The life of pastoral nomads was controlled by the needs of their animals, needs which
varied with the seasons and with the constraints of the territories over which they
ranged. It was a life of movement demanding interminable hours in the saddle or
cooped up in the cramped space of the covered wagons, waiting for the relief of making
camp. But even in these sedentary interludes the animals had to be guarded and
moved from pasture to pasture, requiring that men spent long periods away from
home.
The composition of the flocks and herds varied from region to region. Horses,
sheep, and cattle were the favoured beasts but goats are known and yaks have been
identified in the Altai. For many of the Scythian communities, horses were their
principal concern. Nomad communities living on the steppe in recent times ran
herds of about a thousand beasts, half comprising breeding mares, half foals and
geldings together with a few stallions, some fifteen to twenty. The management of
so large a herd required skill simply to keep it together and on the move. A variety
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