Barry Cunlife - The Scythians

12
SCYTHIANS IN THE
LONGUE DURÉE
The wide expanse of steppe flowing through Eurasia, with its grey-green horizons
receding in the distance and its shimmer as the wind rustles the grass,
challenges everyone to be on the move. Like the sea, it is a world where
nothing can stay still and, like the sea, it sweeps everything onward. For millennia
people have progressed through the steppe, sometimes in repeating patterns of
Âtranshumance and sometimes with astonishing speed, crossing huge distances to
seek out new pastures.
The Scythians occupy only one small part of the grand narrative. Before them,
in the third and second millennia bc, antecedent movements can be detected in the
archaeological record. Early in the third millennium nomadic pastoralists living in
the Pontic–Caspian steppe, known as the Yamnaya culture, had begun to expand
westwards along the lower Danube valley and into the Great Hungarian Plain and
some archaeologists have argued that there was another expansion eastwards across
1,500 km of steppe to the edge of the Altai–Sayan mountains at about this time, introducing
new techniques of metal-working to the region. The scale of these movements,
recognizable in the scattered detritus of the archaeological record, is difficult
to judge but it may have been comparatively modest.
It was sometime at the beginning of the first millennium bc that flows began of
people from the east, from the area that is now eastern Kazakhstan, southern Siberia,
and Mongolia—movements that were to continue in waves over more than two
thousand years. Climate is likely to have been a prime mover, exacerbated by popula-
311