Barry Cunlife - The Scythians

further reading
who believe his accounts to be accurate and historical. Among the first school are
D. Fehling, Herodotus and his ‘Sources’: Citation, Invention, and Narrative Art (rev. English
edn., Leeds, 1989) and F. Hartog, The Mirror of Herodotus (rev. English edn., Berkeley,
2001). Both are roundly taken to task by W. Pritchett in his The Liar School of Herodotos
(Amsterdam, 1993). The debate is nothing if not entertaining. A more downto-earth
assessment is provided in A. I. Ivantchik’s paper, ‘The Funeral of Scythian
Kings: The Historical Reality and the Description of Herodotus (4, 71–72)’, in L. Bonfante
(ed.), The Barbarians of Ancient Europe: Realities and Interactions (Cambridge, 2011),
71–106, in which the author compares Herodotus’ descriptions of royal funerals with
the archaeological reality and is impressed by the precision of the correlation. Other
interesting contributions to the debate include: J. G. F. Hind, ‘The Black Sea: Between
Asia and Europe (Herodotus’ Approach to his Scythian Account)’, in G. R. Tsetskhladze
(ed.), The Black Sea, Greece, Anatolia and Europe in the First Millennium BC (Leuven,
2011), 77–93, which carefully dissects the structure of Herodotus’ account; H. J.
Kim, ‘Herodotus’ Scythians viewed from a Central Asian Perspective: Its Historicity
and Significance’, in Ancient West and East, 9 (2010), 115–34; and S. West, ‘Herodotus
and Olbia’, in D. Braund and S. D. Kryzhitskiy (eds.), Classical Olbia and the Scythian
World (cited above), 79–92.
Herodotus’ description of the different groups of Scythians and their immediate
neighbours is less easy to follow and to map onto archaeological reality, but attempts
have been made by T. Taylor in his ‘Thracians, Scythians, and Dacians, 800 BC–AD
300’, in B. Cunliffe (ed.), The Oxford Illustrated Prehistory of Europe (Oxford, 1994), 389–90
and, in more detail, by I. Lebedynsky, Les Scythes: les Scythes d’Europe et la période scythe
dans les steppes d’Eurasie, VIIe–IIIe siècles (2nd edn., Paris, 2010), 55–62.
The presence of Scythians in Athens, serving as a police force, provided the Greek
urban elite with a source of amusement: they were foreigners and thus fair game for
ridicule. These issues are discussed in B. Bäbler, ‘Bobbies or Boobies? The Scythian
Police Force in Classical Athens’, in Braund (ed.), Scythians and Greeks (cited above),
114–22. The question of foreign archers depicted on Greek pottery is addressed in
A. I. Ivantchik, ‘Who were the “Scythian” Archers on Archaic Attic Vases?’, in the
same volume, 100–13. The same author returns to a discussion of the ethnic identity
of the Scythian archers in a more lengthy treatment, ‘ “Scythian” Archers on Archaic
Attic Vases: Problems of Interpretation’, in Ancient Civilizations from Scythia to Siberia,
12 (2006), 197–271. A corpus of the relevant material is provided in M. F. Vos, Scythian
Archers in Archaic Attic Vase Painting (Groningen, 1963).
The theme of the Scythian ‘other’ is also explored in J. Porucznik, ‘The Image of
a “Drunken Scythian” in Greek Tradition’, in Proceedings of the 1st Annual International
Interdisciplinary Conference (2013), 710–14. That Scythians were regarded by some Greek
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