Barry Cunlife - The Scythians

the scythians as others saw them
Jeremiah was written in the late seventh or early sixth century at just the time that the
Scythians raiders were making their way south through the Levant towards Egypt.
For those in their path the prophecy must have suddenly become very real.
We have summarized the stories contained in the Greek and Assyrian sources.
At best they are a fragmentary record of what must have been a complex interaction
between incoming bands of predatory nomads and the sedentary states south of the
Caucasus over a period of a century or more. The sources seem confident enough
to distinguish between two ethnic groups, Kimmerians and Scythians, implying
that they were active in different spheres. There is no need to dismiss any of this but
in all probability the flow of nomad horsemen from the steppe started earlier than
the texts would allow and it would certainly have been a lot more complex. We will
return to the archaeological evidence for the nomad presence later (pp. 103–9).
Greeks living along the Aegean coast of Asia Minor will have heard stories of the
Scythians and their brief dominance in Asia after the collapse of the Assyrian rule.
They would have been more directly aware of the devastation wrought by the Kimmerian
horsemen on their homelands a few generations before. There may have been
physical reminders of it still evident. Who would not have recalled when visiting the
temple of Artemis at Ephesus the attempt of the Kimmerians to burn it? Indeed there
may have been traces of the fire still remaining on the temple stonework. One effect
of these events is recorded on an inscription dating to 283 bc found on the island of
Samos. It refers to a still-ongoing dispute between Samos and the city of Priene on
the mainland over a seaside region that was abandoned by its inhabitants during a
Kimmerian attack four hundred years earlier.
It was the Greeks of these coastal cities who were to organize the colonial ventures
which established trading enclaves and settlements around the Black Sea at the
interface with the Pontic steppe, the original homeland of the Kimmerians and the
Scythians. Those who knew their history may have wondered at the game the Fates
were playing.
The Black Sea Adventure
The Greek colonization of the Black Sea littoral was the result of a number of factors
but the one driving force was the rise in population in the Greek cities scattered
around the Aegean.
In normal circumstances animal communities reproduce at such a rate that, if
unconstrained, the population increases exponentially until the holding capacity
of the environment is overstepped and can no longer provide sustenance for the
growing population. At this point tensions appear within the community leading to
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