Known as the barbarians of the north, the Scythians were expert horsemen that roamed the great steppe of Eurasia more than 2,000 years ago. But how much do we know about them?In today's episode of The Ancients, Tristan Hughes is joined by Dr Owen Rees to explore this infamous nomadic culture who wore trousers, wielded bows and arrows and boasted Amazon-like warrior women who may even have fought in battle. Along the way Owen explains the fascinating story of the Scythian settlement of Bilsk - a great hulking Iron-Age mega-town fortified with miles and miles of winding walls on the edge of the Great Steppe in southern Ukraine.Presented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Aidan Lonergan, the producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music courtesy of Epidemic SoundsThe Ancients is a History Hit podcast.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on
Chapter 1: Who were the Scythians?
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So to summarize this first part with you, Owen, it's almost as if the Greek portrayal of the Scythians, there is an agenda there to portray them as the classic barbarian, the completely opposite way of life and people to the Greeks based on where they live in the world, as you say, living far to the north, near the edges of the world. And yet, despite that evident agenda in the writing,
there is a degree of historical basis for many of the things that people like Herodotus write about the Scythians.
Yeah, absolutely. And it is revealing, really, because what they're not talking about is some bogeyman that's been created. We're actually seeing a Greek cultural reaction to a culture that is the opposite of itself or what it perceives to be the opposite of itself. And sometimes it elicits fear and sometimes it elicits intrigue and sometimes it elicits respect.
So we also see early on in some of the stories of Herodotus as well, a cliche of writing likeness throughout history, which is the idea of the noble savage. So sometimes the Scythians are presented as a pure way of living, a simpler way of living. And they have that kind of
wisdom that's supposed to come from that they understand you know without the the drive for money the drive for power the drive for this that and the other that they can just live a simpler way you know with nature and the way we're supposed to be so we do also see that as well so it is interesting that as you say but the basis of this we're not seeing an entirely fictionalized presentation
But again, we've got to be a bit careful as to where we assume Herodotus is still being right, where we assume that the Hippocratic writings are still correct, things like that. Before we move on, what's also this thing with headhunting? Headhunting. Another cliche, I'm afraid. that we get of the northern tribes or northern cultures from Rome and Greece.
Headhunting is like the antithesis of, shall we say, civilized life. It's the idea of going around and actually hunting people down, specifically to take trophies and things like that. It was for a very long time assumed, again, that this is just, like I said, a cliche. However, one of the sites we're going to talk about, there is actually potentially evidence, possibly,
of human skulls being worked to transform into drinking vessels, which is a story Herodotus tells us that the Scythians do. I say, allegedly, this is not accepted across the board by all scholars. It is a bit debated, but it just becomes more plausible. And ultimately, they are headhunting. That might also explain a lot of the cultural fear that goes with it.
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Chapter 2: What do ancient sources say about Scythians?
So you have ancient Egyptian script found in a tomb, in a rich tomb outside Bilsk in northern Ukraine.
2,000 kilometers away from Egypt itself.
Yes, we do.
That's how interconnected the ancient world can be. It doesn't mean anyone in Bilsk is really aware of Egypt. It doesn't mean anyone in Egypt is particularly aware of Bilsk. What we've got is an interconnected marketplace and trade network that spans thousands and thousands of kilometers that allows Egypt to appear in Northern Ukraine. We don't even know how it got there. We don't know.
It may have come via Greece. It may have come via Persia and their trade networks. It might come through another trade network we don't know anything about. What is just fascinating is one, an Egyptian set of items appears there. And two, that someone who is not Greek, living in Bilsk, presumably Scythian, wants this and wants that artifact, those items from Egypt.
So they clearly hold some sort of prestige to it, probably because of how expensive they would have been.
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And so if we've got the Greeks stretching, they've got cities and settlements in the Black Sea, there are contacts with ancient Egypt. Let's say it was a Greek trader, if we focus on this particular object, who was coming from the Mediterranean world or maybe from Egypt, and he's got these Egyptian goods with him, and he ultimately wants to reach Bilsk. How would a Greek trader get to Bilsk?
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