Scythia

The Greek name of the steppe nomads, Skýthai, and their land Skythía, the subject of the long fourth book of Herodotus, our richest ancient account of any steppe people. To the Greeks of the Black Sea colonies the Scythians were the great northern neighbor, traders in grain and slaves and a standing image of the nomad: mounted, tattooed, drinking from the skulls of their enemies. The name covered the Pontic nomads specifically but spread, in Greek usage, to stand for the northern barbarian in general.

Skýthai belongs to the western naming tradition, the family of forms descended from an Iranian *Skuda that also yields the Assyrian Iškuza and the Hebrew Aškenaz; through the Latin Scythae it became the standard European word for the steppe peoples. It stands opposite the eastern Saka tradition, the Persians’ and Indians’ name for the same nomad world, the two halves of the Scythian continuum meeting on this page under names that look unrelated but label one people. The Greeks alone also recorded what the Scythians called themselves, the Skólotoi.

The Hebrew name Aškenaz, a son of Gomer in the table of nations and, in Jeremiah, a real northern kingdom: the prophet calls up “Ararat, Minni, and Ashkenaz” against Babylon, a coalition of Urartu, the Mannaeans, and the Scythians, exactly the powers of the seventh-century north. Aškenaz is the Assyrian Iškuza, the Scythians, taken into Hebrew, with a likely confusion of the letters r and n turning an original Aškuz into Aškenaz.

This slightly corrupted form has had the most remarkable career of any name in this atlas. In the early Middle Ages, as Jewish scholars mapped the peoples of Genesis onto the nations of their own day, Aškenaz was attached to the Germanic lands along the Rhine, and Ashkenazi became, and remains, the name of the Jews of central and eastern Europe and their Hebrew-German culture. A seventh-century Assyrian word for the horse-archers of the steppe thus became, by way of a scribal slip and a medieval identification, the name of a great branch of the Jewish people. Few names travel so far from where they began.

The Assyrian name of the Scythians, Iškuza (also Ašguza), recorded in the seventh century when a Scythian power appeared on Assyria’s northern horizon. Esarhaddon’s queries to the sun-god ask whether to give an Assyrian princess to Bartatua, king of the Iškuza, in marriage, a diplomatic alliance against the Cimmerians and Medes; the Scythians, briefly, were players in Near Eastern politics, raiders who could be enemies or allies.

Iškuza is the easternmost of the *Skuda family, the Assyrian rendering of the same Iranian name that the Greeks heard as Skýthai. Its real importance, though, lies in what became of it: the form passed into the Hebrew table of nations as Aškenaz, the r and n of the consonant-skeleton easily confused in the Hebrew script. The Scythians thus entered the Bible under a slightly garbled version of their Assyrian name, and that garbled form, Aškenaz, would have the longest afterlife of any name on this page.

The Old Persian name of the steppe nomads, Sakā, the Achaemenid term for the Scythian peoples on the empire’s northern and eastern frontiers. The royal inscriptions distinguish their kinds: the Sakā Haumavargā (the haoma-drinking Saka), the Sakā Tigraxaudā (the Saka “with pointed caps”), and the Sakā Paradraya (the Saka “across the sea,” the Pontic Scythians). Darius campaigned against them, captured their chief Skunkha, and depicts him, tall pointed hat and all, at the end of the line of rebel kings on the Behistun relief.

Sakā is the headword of the eastern naming tradition, the Iranian self-name that the Persians, the Indians, and the Chinese all used, against the Skýthai of the Greeks. The Achaemenids applied it across the whole nomad world they touched, from the Black Sea to the Jaxartes, so that the Pontic Scythians of Herodotus and the Central Asian Saka of the Persepolis reliefs are, in Persian eyes, one people under one name. Through Sanskrit Śaka and Chinese Sài the same name reached India and China; it is the eastern counterpart of everything the Greek and Assyrian record calls Scythian.

The Scythians’ own name for themselves, Skólotoi, preserved by Herodotus alone. Recounting their origin-legend, he reports that the royal Scythians took the name Skólotoi from one of their early kings, and adds the crucial gloss that “the Greeks call them Scythians.” It is the one place in the record where the steppe people speak their own name, caught in a Greek transcription because they had no writing to set it down themselves.

Skólotoi is almost certainly the same name as Skýthai and the Assyrian Iškuza, all reflexes of an Iranian *Skuda, “the archers” or “the shooters,” differing only in how each language heard and adapted the foreign sounds. That the self-name and the Greek exonym are at root one word is itself the point: the Scythians did not call themselves something wholly other than what their neighbors called them, but the neighbors each reshaped the shared name to their own tongue. The endonym survives only because a Greek historian thought to ask, and to write the answer down.

The Chinese name of the Saka, Sài 塞, the easternmost rendering of the Iranian self-name. The Han histories record the Sai as the people who held the Ili valley and the western Tian Shan before the chain-reaction of steppe migrations displaced them: pushed by the Yuezhi, who had themselves been pushed by the Xiongnu, the Sai moved south and west, some of them into the northwest of India to become the Indian Śakas. The Hanshu speaks of their king, the Sai-wang, and of the lands they were driven from.

Sài completes the eastern arc of the *Saka family, the same name the Persians wrote Sakā and the Indians Śaka, now in Chinese characters at the far end of the steppe. Its appearance in the Han record is a small triumph of cross-continental onomastics: a single Iranian people, the Saka, can be tracked under recognizably the same name from Darius’s inscriptions in Persia, through the Sanskrit sources of India, to the Chinese annals of the Western Regions, three literatures that never read one another nonetheless naming the one nomad people alike.

The Sanskrit name of the Scythians, Śaka, the Indian form of the Iranian *Saka. To India the Śakas were not a distant rumor but conquerors: Saka peoples pushed down from Central Asia into the northwest in the last centuries BCE and founded the dynasties of the Western Kshatrapas, the “Indo-Scythian” kings whose coins and inscriptions fill the record of the period. Their memory is permanent in the Indian calendar, whose most widespread era, the Śaka era beginning in 78 CE, still dates documents in India today.

Śaka is the Indian member of the eastern *Saka family, the same self-name that the Persians wrote Sakā and the Chinese Sài, reaching India directly through the nomads who settled there rather than through any Greek or Western mediation. The Indian grammarians and lawgivers treated the Śakas, with the Yavanas (the Greeks) and the Pahlavas (the Parthians), as the archetypal foreign peoples on the northwestern frontier, the outsiders who kept coming over the passes. That a steppe people should give its name to a calendar still in use is the measure of how deeply the Śakas marked India.

The Latin name Sacae, the eastern Scythians as the Greeks and Romans knew them through the Persian world, taken from the Iranian *Saka by way of Greek Sákai. Pliny and the geographers use Sacae specifically of the Central Asian nomads beyond the Caspian and the Jaxartes, distinguishing them, more or less, from the Scythae of the European north, though the two names label the same nomad continuum from its two ends.

Sacae is the one place where the eastern *Saka tradition surfaces in the Western record, the Persian name carried into Latin alongside the Greek Scythae. Its presence shows the Greeks and Romans dimly aware that their northern Scythae and the Sacae of the Persian frontier were versions of one another, even as they kept the two names apart. The Latin thus preserves, side by side, both of the great naming traditions for the steppe peoples: Scythae from the Greek, Sacae from the Persian, the western and eastern names for one people meeting in a Roman geographer’s list.

The Latin name of the Scythians, Scythae, taken from the Greek; for the Romans, as for the Greeks before them, the Scythae were the archetypal nomads of the far north, and the name broadened to cover almost any people of the steppe beyond the empire’s reach. Horace makes the free-roaming Scythian a moral foil to soft Roman luxury; Pliny catalogues the Scythian peoples from the Danube to the unknown east.

Through the Latin Scythae the Greek name passed into the European languages as the general word for the ancient steppe peoples, and “Scythian” remains the standard term in modern scholarship for the Iranian nomads of the Pontic and Central Asian grasslands. The Latin thus fixed the western half of the naming tradition, the *Skuda family, in the form the modern world inherited, while the eastern *Saka survived chiefly in the learned name Sacae and in the Indian and Iranian record. Of the two great names for one people, it was the Greek-and-Latin Scythae that the West kept.