Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia From the Bronze Age to the Present (17 page)

2

The Royal Scythians

The First Steppe Empire and Creation of the Silk Road

With the perfection of equestrian skills and development of the techniques and life-style of mounted horse nomadism around the beginning of the first millennium
BC
,
³
the steppe zone core of Central Eurasia belonged to the Northern Iranians. In the middle of the millennium, the Scythians, the first historically well-known pastoral nomadic nation, migrated into the Western Steppe and established themselves there as a major power. Other steppe Iranians migrated eastward as far as China.
⁴

While the Scythians are best known as fierce warriors, their greatest accomplishment was the development of a trade system, described by Herodotus and other early Greek writers, that linked Greece, Persia, and the lands to the east and made the Scythians immensely wealthy. Their motivation was not greed, as historians from Antiquity up to the present have often attributed to Central Eurasians. From later periods about which more is known, it is clear that a major driving force behind their interest in trade was the need to support their sociopolitical infrastructure, which was built around the person of the ruler and his comitatus, or oath-sworn guard corps, whose members numbered in the thousands. A bustling land-based international commerce developed in Central Eurasia as a direct result of the trade interests of the Scythians, Sogdians, Hsiung-nu, and other early Central Eurasians. These interests are explicitly mentioned in the early Greek and Chinese sources. Although some long-distance trade had existed for millennia, it only became a significant economic force under the Scythians and other steppe Iranians and their successors. Because the Central Eurasians traded with people on their borders whoever they were, they traded with the civilizations of Europe, the Near East, South Asia and East Asia and indirectly connected the peripheral cultures to each other through Central Eurasia.

During the heyday of Scythian power, the peripheral city-state cultures of High Antiquity also reached their apogee. The fact that the classic philosophical works in the ancient Greek, Indic, and Chinese languages were produced at about the same time has long intrigued scholars, suggesting the possibility that there was some interchange of ideas among these cultures already in that period. The existence of Central Eurasian philosophers has generally been overlooked.

The Scythians’ empire and trade network in the Western Steppe constituted a template for subsequent, increasingly powerful states based in Central Eurasia. The growth in wealth and power of Central Eurasians, and their increasing contact with peripheral cultures, led to invasions by peripheral states—usually justified by claims that the Central Eurasians had invaded them first. The earliest known invasions are by the Chou Dynasty Chinese, who defeated the people of Kuei-fang in two battles in 979
BC
and captured more than 13,000 people, including four chiefs (who were executed) and much booty.
⁵
The Chinese repeatedly invaded the Eastern Steppe at every opportunity from then on
⁶
down to modern times. The Achaemenid Persians under Darius conquered Bactria and Sogdiana and then invaded Scythia in circa 514–512
BC
. The Macedonians and Greeks under Alexander invaded Central Asia in the late fourth century
BC
. The latter two conquests had very strong repercussions for the cultures of Central Asia.

Iranian State Formation in Central Eurasia and Iran

The Iranian domination of Central Eurasia must have begun before circa 1600
BC
, when the Group B Indo-Europeans appeared in upper Mesopotamia and the Greek Aegean, and members of the same group also moved into India and China. Although the earliest evidence for simple steppe nomadism goes back to the third millennium
BC
, perhaps as an adaptation to the fact that the region is climatically unsuited to intensive agriculture, on the basis of archaeology, as well as the earliest historical and linguistic evidence, it is now agreed that the
horse-mounted
pastoral nomadic life-style was developed by the Iranians of the steppe zone early in the first millennium
BC
.
⁷
While this does not precede the earliest clear evidence for horse riding by anyone anywhere, the steppe Iranians do seem to be the first people who took to riding as a normal activity, not something undertaken only by daredevils and acrobats.
⁸
Despite the polemics by specialists in the ancient Near East, it is unusually difficult to believe that the Indo-Europeans—who probably first domesticated the horse and in any case are the first people known from ancient Near Eastern sources to be expert in the use of horses—were the last to learn how to ride them. The first people who are known to have relied nearly exclusively on the mounted archer in warfare were Central Eurasian Iranians, who for centuries maintained their superiority in this kind of warfare.
⁹

Persians are mentioned in ninth-century
BC
Assyrian sources,
¹⁰
but the first solid, clear historical accounts of Iranian-speaking peoples are in connection with the Medes and Scythians a century later.

In the late eighth century
BC
the Medes, an Iranian people, established a kingdom in and east of the Elburz Mountains of northwestern Iran. They were major opponents of the Assyrians in the early seventh century, but at that point the Cimmerians and the Scythians invaded Media and dominated or actually took control of the kingdom.
¹¹

The Scythians were a Northern (or “East”) Iranian people. According to Herodotus (born 484
BC
), who actually visited the city of Olbia (located at the mouth of the Bug River) and other places in Scythia,
¹²
they called themselves
Scoloti.
They were called
Saka
by the Persians and, in Assyrian,
I
š
kuzai
or
A
š
kuzai.
All of these names represent the same underlying name as the Greek form
Scytha-,
namely Northern Iranian *Skuδa ‘archer’.
¹³
It is the name of all of the Northern Iranian peoples living between the Greeks in the West and the Chinese in the East.

The Cimmerians, a little-known steppe people thought to have been Iranians, entered the ancient Near East in the late eighth century
BC
, where they defeated Urartu in 714
BC
. They then attacked the Phrygians to the west and destroyed their kingdom in around 696
BC
, but were subsequently defeated by the Assyrian king Esarhaddon (r. 681–669
BC
). Although the Cimmerians next defeated and killed the Lydian king, Gyges, in battle in 652, they were themselves crushed shortly afterward by the Scythians under their king Madúês
¹⁴
in the 630s. According to Herodotus, the Scythians “invaded Asia in their pursuit of the Cimmerians, and made an end of the power of the Medes, who were the rulers of Asia before the coming of the Scythians.”
¹⁵
This account sounds remarkably similar to that of later Central Eurasian state-foundation conflicts, including that of the Hsiung-nu versus the *Tok
^w
ar, the Huns versus the Goths, and the Turks versus the Avars.

The Scythians were involved in wars all across the ancient Near East, from Anatolia to Egypt, usually (perhaps always) in alliance with the Assyrians or others. “In Mesopotamia, Syria, and Egypt, in the sites of the 7th to the beginning of the 6th centuries B.C., particularly in the defensive walls of towns, bronze arrowheads of the Scythian type have been found—the direct result of invasions and sieges.” The Scythians also left their arrowheads in the clay walls of the northern Urartian fortress of Karmir-Blur (near Yerevan), which they destroyed.
¹⁶
Finally the Medes crushed the Scythians around 585
BC
.
¹⁷
The surviving Scythians retreated back north.

The Medes subsequently joined with the Babylonians in a successful attack on Assyria that led to the destruction of the Assyrian Empire. Shortly before 585
BC
, the Medes destroyed the remnants of the Urartian state to their northwest and extended their realm as far as western Anatolia and northern Syria,
¹⁸
but they were in turn conquered in 553 or 550
BC
by the Persian leader Cyrus (r. 559–530), who absorbed the whole Median kingdom and essentially merged his realm with it, founding the Persian Empire.
¹⁹
Under Cyrus the Persians took Iran and Anatolia and, in 539, attacked the Babylonians, defeating them and incorporating the entire Near East except for Egypt and Arabia into the empire. Cyrus then invaded Central Asia, where he died in battle in 530 or 529 against the Massagetae, a North Iranian people whose queen, following steppe custom, made a trophy out of his skull.
²⁰

The Western Steppe: The Scythians and Sarmatians

The Cimmerians, who the Greeks say were the inhabitants of the Pontic Steppe before the Scythians, are mentioned in Near Eastern sources before and during the Scythian period there but are otherwise little known. After their defeat by the Medes, the Scythians retreated back into the North Caucasus Steppe. Having acquired from the Medes, Urartians, Assyrians, and other peoples in the ancient Near East much wealth, knowledge about absolute monarchy, and experience in war, they used their skills to subjugate the people there—probably including their own Iranian relatives—and establish an empire that soon stretched across the entire Western Steppe north of the Black Sea, from the Caucasus west as far as the Danube. The western part of this territory included vast agricultural lands farmed by Thracians.