Barry Cunlife - The Scythians

the scythians as others saw them
events and observations of native behaviour merged with fanciful tales and speculations:
it was an enticing mix. When, in the mid seventh century, the Greek city states
encircling the Aegean began to experience social tensions caused by demographic
growth, the Black Sea offered attractive prospects for entrepreneurial colonization.
The nomads of the misty shores were soon to become close neighbours.
Crossing the Caucasus
Herodotus adds one further observation on the Kimmerians: that they fled into Asia
Minor keeping to ‘a route that led along the sea shore’, the implication being that at
least some of the survivors of the internal conflict made their way eastwards, at first
along the Black Sea coast following the coastal route into Asia Minor, the intention
being to seize new land to settle or to find gainful employment as mercenaries in the
internecine struggles now being played out in the region. En route, Herodotus says,
they settled on the peninsula of Sinope. In the same section (Hist. iv. 12) he adds that
‘the Scythians followed them but missing their route poured into Media. For … the
Scythians held the Caucasus on their right …’. That northern nomads were active in
the territory of the Medes at this time is confirmed by other sources which refer to
the intruders as Scythians. What is less convincing is that they did so in pursuit of the
Kimmerians. A more likely reading of the events of the second half of the eighth century
is that the advance of horse-riding nomads coming from Central Asia involved
many groups of varying allegiances driven by different aspirations: one group moved
westwards into the Pontic steppe; others skirted the western shore of the Caspian
Sea to establish themselves in the territory of the Medes, roughly modern Kurdistan.
Thereafter, those identified as Kimmerian and Scythians remained active in Asia
Minor until about 630 bc, but they kept to separate spheres and there is no record of
them ever coming into confrontation.
The last twenty years of the eighth century saw the Assyrian empire at its strongest
and most extensive. Under Sargon II (r. 721–705) it had expanded from its original
focus in the Tigris and Euphrates valleys northwards into the fringes of the mountain
ranges of Anatolia, westwards to the Taurus Mountains, and south-westwards
to include the lands between the coast of the Mediterranean and the Syrian Desert.
The Medes and Mannaeans occupied the mountain region to the east; the kingdom
of Urartu, with its capital of Tushpa on Lake Van, flanked the north, centred in what
is now Armenia; while further west in Asia Minor were the kingdoms of Phrygia and
Lydia. It was a time of tension with Urartu and the Assyrians contesting their border
region. For the steppe nomads the rivalries of the powerful polities and the consequent
social disruption created tempting opportunities.
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