Barry Cunlife - The Scythians

scythians in the longue durée
and a distinctive culture. Sometime in the period 174 to 160 bc the Huns advanced
westwards, defeating the Massagetae who were living in the region of the Syr Daria
delta and the neighbouring Sakā, forcing them to abandon the Kazakh and Central
Asian steppe and to move westwards. By the end of the first century ad, the Roman
historian Tacitus records the presence of Hunnoi living in the vicinity of the Caspian
Sea. The gradual build-up of Huns in the region was a long drawn-out process, and
it was not until ad 370 that they began their sudden and spectacular advance westwards
into Europe, driving the remaining Sakā/Sarmatian nomads before them.
Standing back from the broad swathe of history, while the detail is often obscure,
the broad rhythms of life are clear enough. Central Asia was something of a holding
ground. It received pulses of people coming from the east displacing the resident
population and driving them to the south and to the west in a kind of domino effect.
It was in this way that the horse-riding nomads first began to arrive on the Pontic
steppe—people the classical writers called Kimmerians and Scythians. Thereafter
the westerly flow continued steadily until the sudden incursion of the Yuezhi and
Wusun in the second century bc drove the Sakā south into Afghanistan and India
and westwards into the Pontic region. It was at this time that the Huns moved into
the Kazakh steppe. Thereafter there seems to have been a period of relative calm until
the end of the fourth century ad, when the Huns began their relentless sweep into
Europe displacing the descendants of the Sakā/Sarmatians, driving them literally to
the ends of the earth.
The Sarmatians in all their Variety
We saw in Chapter 5 how nomadic people broadly categorized as Sarmatians, but
called by some writers Sauromatae, began to cross the river Don and oust the Scythian
elite, driving them into the Crimea and into the region of the Danube delta. The
first stages of this process began early in the fourth century bc. The westward flow
of population probably continued on a gentle scale until the beginning of the second
century bc when the migrations intensified, exacerbated by the pressure of new
people arriving in Central Asia from the east—the Yuezhi, the Wusun, and the Huns.
The period which this initiated, lasting from the early second century bc to the late
first century ad, is referred to as the Middle Sarmatian period. A number of different
Sarmatian peoples are mentioned in the surviving texts, the most prominent being
the Aorsi, Siraces, Roxolani, Iazyges, and Alani, but all shared a broadly similar culture.
They were bands of nomadic horsemen, intent on establishing their authority
over new territories. While large-scale movements of populations were involved and
people were displaced, it is likely that much of the indigenous population remained
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