Barry Cunlife - The Scythians

preface
Many years ago as a young undergraduate at Cambridge I came across a
brief reference, in a series of essays written by Gordon Childe, to horsemen
who had moved westwards from the Pontic steppe and had established
themselves in Hungary at the end of the Bronze Age. I was surprised to find that
none of my teachers at Cambridge had any interest in, or indeed much knowledge of,
the subject so I decided to follow it up, as far as I could, from published sources and to
make it my own. That which we discover for ourselves we cherish. So began a lifelong
fascination with the warrior nomads of the steppe.
Some years later, in the early 1970s, I managed to arrange a brief study trip to Hungary,
then still under Soviet control, the first of many visits to Eastern Europe to meet
colleagues and to establish academic links. It was in the National Museum in Budapest,
looking in awe at two great gold stags, brought to northern Hungary by horsemen
from the steppe, that the brilliance and energy of the Scythian world first really
struck home. Thereafter I have dogged the footsteps of the Scythians, in the Ukraine
and the Crimea, and across Central Asia as far as Mongolia. I have also made pilgrimages
to two of the world’s greatest collections of Scythian art, in the State Hermitage
Museum in St Petersburg and the Museum of Historical Treasures in Kiev. This book
is my homage to these remarkable people.
For the most part the story told here is presented as a straightforward narrative
but a small collection of end matter has been added: a list of Scythian kings, a brief
timeline, and a Gallery of Objects in which ten selected items, which best illustrate
Scythian life, are presented—chosen because they are frequently referred to in the
text. There is also a section offering a Guide to Further Reading for those who, I hope,
might wish to begin to dig deeper into the detail.
To an educated Greek, the Scythians were one of the four great peoples of the barbarian
world. They were well known. Scythian archers were frequently depicted on
Attic Black-Figured pottery and historians like Herodotus recorded stories from their
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