Barry Cunlife - The Scythians

further reading
Scythes (Hérodote 4.8–10)’, in V. Fromentin and S. Gotteland (eds.), Origines gentium
(Bordeaux, 2001), 207–20.
A comprehensive overview of Scythian religious beliefs is provided in D. RaevÂ
skiy, Scythian Mythology (Sofia, 1993). The goddesses revered by the Scythians are
discussed in Y. Ustinova, ‘Snake-Limbed and Tendril-Limbed Goddesses in the Art
and Mythology of the Mediterranean and Black Sea’, in D. Braund (ed.), Scythians and
Greeks: Cultural Interactions in Scythia, Athens and the Early Roman Empire (Sixth Century BC–
First Century AD) (Exeter, 2005), 64–79 and is more fully treated in the same author’s
The Supreme Gods of the Bosporan Kingdom: Celestial Aphrodite and the Most High God (Leiden,
1999), 67–128. Other significant works are S. S. Bessonova, Religioznye predstavlenija
skifov (Scythian Religious Conceptions) (Kiev, 1983) and the same author’s ‘O
kul’te oruzhiya u skifov’ (Scythian Religious Conceptions), in E. V. Chernenko et al.
(eds.), Vooruzhenie skifov i sarmatov (Scythians and Sarmatian Arms) (Kiev, 1984), 3–21.
The imagery of the deities is well covered in E. Jacobson, The Art of the Scythians: The
Interpenetration of Culture at the Edge of the Hellenic World (Leiden, 1995) and in the same
author’s ‘The “Bird Woman”, the “Birthing Woman” and the “Woman of the Animals”:
A Consideration of the Female Image in the Petroglyphs of Ancient Central
Asia’, Arts Asiatiques, 52 (1997), 37–59. To put Scythian belief systems into the broader
context of Iranian religion see G. Widengren, Die Religionen Irans (Stuttgart, 1965) and
W. W. Malandra, An Introduction to Ancient Iranian Religion: Readings from the Avesta and
Achaemenid Inscriptions (Minneapolis, 1983).
The most thorough treatment of the intermediary between the Scythians and
their gods is D. Margreth, Skythische Schamanen? Die Nachrichten über Enarees-Anarieis bei
Herodot und Hippokrates (Schaffhausen, 1993). For a much earlier, but no less important
treatment, see K. Meuli, ‘Scythica’, Hermes, 70 (1935), 121–76. The broader questions
of the relationship of shamanistic practices and Eurasian rock art are addressed in
H.-P. Francfort, ‘Central Asian Petroglyphs: Between Indo-Iranian and Shamanistic
Interpretations’, in C. Chippindale and P. S. C. Taçon (eds.), The Archaeology of Rock
Art (Cambridge, 1998), 302–18. The rattles and bells often decorated with standing
animals, which are likely to have been used in religious ceremonies, are discussed
in exhaustive detail in K. Bakay, Scythian Rattles in the Carpathian Basin and their Eastern
Connections (Budapest, 1971).
Scythian art is a vast topic. In this chapter we have restricted our discussion to
animal art, which lies deeply rooted in the nomadic world. The subject was comprehensively
discussed in K. Jettmar, Art of the Steppes: The Eurasian Animal Style (London,
1967). In a classic work, now of historical interest, M. I. Rostovtzeff, The Animal Style
in South Russia and China (Princeton, 1929), the author argued for an Iranian source
for both eastern and western Eurasian animal art styles—a view now superseded by
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