Barry Cunlife - The Scythians

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LANDSCAPES
WITH PEOPLE
Communities exist in landscapes and landscapes help form communities.
This is particularly true of the Scythians, whose natural habitat was the Eurasian
steppe. They were the inheritors of traditions stretching back for more
than three thousand years during which time people had learned to adapt to the
steppe environment in all its subtle variations, developing their subsistence strategies
to suit the many regional differences. They had also to contend with climate change
which, even if only of minor amplitude, in so fragile an ecosystem would have had a
major dislocating effect. Nor should we forget the impact of population growth. The
holding capacity of the steppe was limited. When a population outgrew the available
resources migration provided the only readily available safety valve. Steppe society
existed, then, in a state of unstable equilibrium: so delicate was the balance that the
slightest trigger could upset the system and set everything in motion.
The nomadic communities of the steppe occupied a territory between huntergatherers
to the north and sedentary agriculturalists to the south and there would,
inevitably, have been extensive contacts across the ill-defined boundaries between
them. As the sedentary polities developed into more complex states and empires,
contact increased, driven largely by the demand of the south for commodities. So it
was that across the Black Sea, the Caucasus Mountains, and the Central Asian deserts
trade networks developed along which new ideas, behaviours, and desires flowed to
infect nomad society. These interactions served both partners well, but they introduced
a dynamic that could drive change.
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