Ancient literary conceptions of eastern scythian ethnography from the 7th to the 2nd Century B.C.

Abstract

The Scythians were an idea. The ancient Iranian-speaking nomads of Eurasia (from the Carpathian mountains in the west to the Tien Shan in the east) left no written texts of their own. They left instead a trail through the records of the sedentary societies with which they came into contact. These records are numerous, but scattered. The perspectives they offer range from Urartian, Assyrian and Babylonian, to Ionian, mainland Greek, Persian, Bosporan, Alexandrian, Seleukid, Baktrian, Parthian and Chinese. The forms in which records are extant range from maritime and overland itineraries, military surveys, geographies, histories, and treatises on natural science, medicine, philosophy and politics, to poems, romances, titulary epigrams, historical inscriptions, letters and prayers. It is through these diverse records that the ethnographic history of ancient Eurasia is to be approached. As the ethnography of the Maeotis-Caucasus region and Central Asia are often closely linked by literary tradition and historical circumstances, the primary concern of the present work has been taken to be those records of most relevance to the ethnography of the nomads dwelling between the Don and Crimean Bosporos in the west and the Tien Shan and Pamir mountains in the east, nomads who might for convenience be called 'Eastern Scythians'. This work will not concern itself with those sources dealing with the so called 'Royal Scythians' of the Ukraine, Dobrudja and Crimea (e.g. most of Herodotos' Book IV). Western and Soviet scholars may be characterised as adopting fundamentally different approaches to the study of these nomads' ethnographic history. The western scholars favour philological investigation, migration theories, and a perspective from the periphery, while the Soviet scholars favour archaeological investigation, theories of indigenous ethnogenesis, and the periodisation of nomad social, economic and cultural change. Western scholars rarely stop to reflect upon either their own methodology or that of the Soviets, while Soviet scholars often reflect upon their own methodology and criticise that of the Western scholars. More significant, however, than these methodological differences are the methodological similarities. Common to nearly all modem scholars writing in the field of Scythian studies, Western and Soviet, archaeologist, philologists and historians, are two tendencies... Show more