Barry Cunlife - The Scythians

the scythians as others saw them
Other Greeks were also taking an interest in distant lands and their people. One
was Hellanikos of Lesbos (c.490–405), who wrote a number of books, including
Babarika Nomina in which there was a section on Skythika. Some of the material he
used seems to have come from the writings of Hecataeus but only fragments survive
and it is impossible to be certain.
A far more important source, important not least because the text survives in full,
is the justly famous Histories of Herodotus of Halicarnassus (c.484–425). The book
opens with the author introducing himself and then telling his reader what to expect:
The purpose is to ensure that the traces of human actions are not lost through time and
to preserve the memory of the important and remarkable achievements of both Greeks
and non-Greeks. Among the subjects covered is, in particular, the course of hostilities
between Greeks and non-Greeks.
His principal theme was the conflict between the Greeks and the Persians between
490 and 470 but he sets the story in the broadest of contexts emphasizing, as all good
historians should, the geographic and ethnographic setting of his narrative. His evident
love of all the esoteric data at his fingertips leads him to offer an encyclopaedic
view of the world full of fascinating detail and anecdote, this background accounting
for at least two thirds of the book.
His early life, probably spent in or around the Dorian city of Halicarnassus, would
have brought him into contact with travellers offering information about distant
lands and it seems probable that he himself travelled to Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the
northern shore of the Black Sea. At some stage, around 447, he left home for good,
spending a few years in Athens and then, in 443, joining a colonial expedition organized
by Athens to found a city at Thurium in southern Italy. His History, written over
many years, was completed by about 430 and became widely known, though not
universally appreciated, by his near contemporaries. Thucydides would write him off
as a mere storyteller but in the more mellow assessment of the orator, Cicero, he was
the ‘Father of History’.
There has been, and continues to be, much debate about the acuity of his judgement
in using his disparate sources but it is clear from asides in the text that he was
conscious of the difference between what he regarded as valid sources and mere hearsay
and was prepared to say so. He also observed things for himself and interviewed
informants in the course of his travels. It was probably at the Greek port of Olbia
on the north shore of the Black Sea that he gathered much of his information about
the Scythians and their country which makes up so much of Book iv of his History.
In the early twentieth century, his Scythian ethnography was considered by some
scholars to be a stereotype of the barbarian ‘Other’, created to reassure his Greek
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