Ep501 - Barry Cunliffe | The Scythians: Nomad Warriors of the Steppe
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Welcome to the Talks at Google podcast, where great minds meet. I'm Kyle, bringing you this week's episode with author and archaeologist Sir Barry Cunliffe. Talks at Google brings the world's most influential thinkers, creators, makers, and doers all to one place. Every episode is taken from a video that can be seen at youtube.com/talksatgoogle. Sir Barry Cunliffe has been professor of European archaeology at the University of Oxford for 35 years and is a fellow of the British Academy.

In this talk, he discusses his new book, The Scythians: Nomad Warriors of the Steppe. The Scythians were nomadic horsemen who ranged wide across the grasslands of the Asian steppe from the Altai Mountains in the east to the Great Hungarian Plain in the 1st millennium BCE. Their steppe homeland bordered on a number of sedentary states to the south: the Chinese, the Persians, and the Greeks. And there were inevitably numerous interactions between the nomads and their neighbors.

The Scythians fought the Persians on a number of occasions, in one battle killing their king and on another occasion driving the invading army of Darius the Great from the steppe. Relations with the Greeks around the shores of the Black Sea were rather different. Both communities benefited from trading with each other. This led to the development of a brilliant art style, often depicting scenes from Scythian mythology and everyday life.

It is from the writings of Greeks like the historian Herodotus that we learn of Scythian life, their beliefs, their burial practices, their love of fighting, and their ambivalent attitudes to gender. It is a world that is also brilliantly illuminated by the rich material culture recovered from Scythian burials, from the graves of kings on the Pontic steppe with their elaborate gold work and vividly colored fabrics, to the frozen tombs of the Altai Mountains where all the organic material—wooden carvings, carpets, saddles, and even tattooed human bodies—is amazingly well preserved.

Barry Cunliffe here marshals this vast array of evidence, both archaeological and textual, in a masterful reconstruction of the lost world of the Scythians, allowing them to emerge in all their considerable vigor and splendor for the first time in over two millennia. Originally published in December of 2019, here is Sir Barry Cunliffe, "The Scythians: Nomad Warriors of the Steppe." Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for coming.

When I was talking to my editor at Oxford University Press and she said, what are you going to write next? I said, I'm going to write about the Scythians. Her immediate reaction was, who are they? And I think that is not unusual for the British because we don't know very much about them.

We have had very few traveling exhibitions of Scythian material, except one about a year ago, brilliant exhibition at the British Museum, which some of you may have seen. But before that, the last exhibition was about 1978. And if you want to see Scythian material in British museums, there's only one small collection, just a few artifacts,

in the museum in Oxford. So they are really not on our radar, except that they are very important.

The Greek historian Ephorus, writing in about the fourth century BC, said that there were four great peoples of the barbarian world: the Celts, the Scythians, the Libyans in North Africa, and the Indians. So to a Greek, these were one of the really important sets of barbarians. Where are they and when are they? Well, where are they is that they live on the steppe.

And that's the dark green bit on the map. You can see this great swathe of a sort of carpet going from Manchuria in the east right across central Europe and ending up in the Great Hungarian Plain up there. Great Hungarian Plain is the last bit of steppe.

So that area, open rolling grassland, is the homeland of these people. They were, as you've seen from the title, they were nomads and they responded, they were conditioned, their lifestyle was conditioned by this grassland. Now there is one very important thing to know about this and that is that

The steppe is not a sort of even environment. The steppe up here in Mongolia, which is, if you want to see steppe, that's the place to go, is cold and very dry. But as you get further and further and further west, it gets more moderate in temperature and certainly wetter. And that means that the grass is lusher.

So if you were steppe nomads in that area, there would be a tendency always to want to move further west where the grass literally is greener all the way. And that sets up what's called the steppe gradient.

which encourages people to move and to move and to move. And the whole history of the Scythians and the Scythian-related peoples is of this movement, always from the east to the west, always ending up in the Great Hungarian Plain, which, as I say, is the last bit of step in the area.

Now there is a bit of step, that's the Mongolian step in fact, where as I say it's very, very well preserved. This rolling grassland and if you really need to be there to appreciate it, if you are on a horse, this was taken from a horse, if you're on a horse and just sort of going into the step,

You are drawn on. You want to move. There are no constraints in movement. You just want to move and move and move and move. That's what quite a lot of the travelers in the 19th century were saying about the steppe. It is a landscape of movement. It encourages you always to find out what's over the next hill. And this lies behind the sort of people we're talking about.

The area in which they live encourages them always to move on. And they use, of course, the horse. The horse is very important. This is the natural environment for the horse. These are wild horses, the Pezhvalsky's horse running wild in Mongolia in this particular case. Quite tame. You can get up quite close to them and photograph them.

So you've got the animal for movement and you've got the landscape for movement. Sometime, must have been around in the middle of the fourth millennium anyway, some bright lad who was herding horses decided presumably to jump on a horse and see what it was like.

And that's where horse riding began, here in the steppe, sometime around 3500-3400 BC. And that changed the dynamic. If you were now riding on horses, you could range over larger and larger and larger areas than if you were on your feet as pastoralists trying to round them up.

So horse riding starts here, horse domestication starts here. But for a long time, the people were simply pastoralists, just looking after their animals at a very sort of simple level.

Sometime around about 1000 BC, climate began to change and climate change is an incredible dynamic in archaeology and in anthropology. We're beginning to recognize it. Climate change, even slight shifts of climate, can shove cultural development very quickly in a particular direction. And it did so here. This is a bit of the

Altai Mountains, which is the mountainous bit between Mongolia and the rest of the steppe. And it's called the Minusinx Basin, but that doesn't much matter. The point I want to make is it's mountainous. There are the Sayan Mountains, the Altai Mountains here. It's a plain of very good steppe, but very well watered. And sometime about a thousand, as I say, the temperature suddenly improved.

It got warmer and wetter, and the grass here became much, much lusher.

And that gave people more freedom. They weren't constrained. They were able to move around more. They were able to have more leisure time. And with that more leisure time, it's quite clear they began to raid and develop tendencies to want to move out of their area, find out what's behind it, perhaps gangs of young men with nothing better to do, and then bringing back the animals they've raided, bringing back the women they've caught or something like that.

But a new mobility and a new freedom connected with the rise of a much more aggressive kind of archaeology, the archaeology of warriors, in fact.

So here we've got climate really affecting economy, which is affecting society. And this is where what I would call predatory nomads, as opposed to ordinary simple pastoral nomads, predatory nomads begin. And you can see their equipment very clearly here. The arrows at the top, the bow and arrow is very important as we'll see in a moment.

The short swords, very effective, made of bronze in this case, and a very, very effective thing, this battle axe, either with a heavy hammer end or a nice spiky end for waving at people, waving at your enemies from horseback, a very good weapon for fighting from horseback.

So suddenly the archaeological record produces, well, suddenly over 100, 150 years, produces these signs of aggression and also signs that hierarchies were beginning to appear, that some were getting rich and richer and richer.

One of the richest early burials we've got comes from more or less this area I've just shown you. It's a place called Arjan and it was excavated about 30 years ago, 40 years ago. A large barrow, a mound of earth, as you see it's about 60, 70 meters in diameter.

It has a pit in the middle, there's a detail of it, made of logs.

That's where the ruler, the king or chief or whatever he was, was buried with his female, probably not his wife because in later Scythian history, wives that survive husbands tend to go on and be quite powerful. So there's a female companion buried with him.

And all the way around him are the coffins of his servants who were killed at the time of his death and buried with him. And over here, these black bits are the remains of his six very fine horses. So he is a wealthy person and when he dies he is provided with all this material.

He is buried then with his female in the center there and around the outside is this kind of timber structure. And just to give you some idea, that contains 6,000 hundred-year-old larch trees. So cutting down and trimming 6,000 larch trees and moving them in and building them into the structure means he was able to command a tremendous amount of power.

Within these compartments there are horses buried with their equipment, about 150 of them altogether. Looking at the equipment with the horses, archaeologists have been able to show that they come from very far away.

So presumably here was a person who was very important and people from kilometers around came and made offerings at his burial. So it suggests now that we're getting big men, chieftains emerging who are able to command a tremendous amount of power and considerable territory. This is 10th, 9th,

This is end of ninth century that this appears. And there is another one, Arzian II, which is even better archaeologically in that it wasn't robbed. The other one, I should say, had a pit dug into it and the bodies were dug out.

and all the gold with them. But in this one, Arjan II, the central chamber was perfectly preserved and so were the bodies and so was all their equipment. There were thousands and thousands of little gold objects there. You can see they had gold bands around their legs and you can make out from this that they were wearing clothes which were sewn with gold.

They were in fact little one centimeter long gold animals, snow leopards and deer and things like that. Archaeology is enormous fun, I hasten to add. When I was in St. Petersburg in the museum meeting my colleague who had actually excavated this, a Russian archaeologist who had excavated this, sitting in a rather beat up old office,

and he was telling me about it. I was asking him about those little sewn on things, were they cast or were they hammered and so on. And he said, "Would you like to see them?" So I said, "Yes, very much." And I'm expecting to be taken to the museum. So he went over to this very battered old filing cabinet and took out a drawer, brought out a big box, put it on the table, took off the lid, and there were hundreds of these wonderful little gold things in. He was handing them to me to look at in a sort of

thing that would never normally happen. You wouldn't be able to get anywhere near them normally. So anyway, so it gives some idea of the power of these people. Gold, turquoise, garnet are recurring things in the burials of the chieftains. Now, that's about the beginning of it.

What we find then is that, and we're talking, the sites we've been talking about are right in the top right-hand corner, but the Scythians or Scythian-related peoples spread right across the steppe to the royal Scyths there north of the Black Sea, the Pontic area. And they all had different names. And what we're seeing there are the names that the Greeks knew them by.

The Greeks were at this stage, we're now talking about the 5th century, around the Black Sea. They came into direct contact with Scythians who were north of the Black Sea. And some Greeks actually explored eastwards and brought back the names. So we've got all those sort of different names, but they are all these warrior nomad peoples. And they were not static people.

It was this constant movement, the constant flow of some breaking off and going great distances, setting themselves up in positions of power over the local natives and then moving on again and again. Really like a lot of dominoes falling the whole time as these movements continued.

The Scythians and Scythian-related peoples came into contact with two main civilizations. One were the Persians who occupied this area here, and they write about the Saka. And they say the Saka are just the same as the Scythians. The Saka are Scythians, but we call them Saka. So they write about them here, and here is a relief

from Persepolis, the Turkish capital, which shows Scythians bringing gifts to the Persian king. You know they're Scythians because they wear these pointed hats. That's one of these characteristics of them. Here they are bringing horses, gold necklets, and cloth of some sort, saddlecloth presumably.

This is part of a monument that shows all kinds of people from all over the world bringing gifts, specific gifts for the Persian king. Here are our Scythians, probably one of the first images we get of how the Scythians would have looked. Of course they wear trousers as well because they're horsemen and that's another way of distinguishing them.

So, Scythians in contact with the Persians and Scythians in contact with the Greeks. Now, it's from the Greeks that we get some bits of history coming in. We've got two sources basically for Scythians. We've got the archaeology, the hard archaeology, and we've got what the Greeks tell us about them. We have no history of Scythians from the mouths of Scythians.

So the Greeks are always looking at them as other, so we've got to remember that. But the Greeks tell us that one batch of Scythians moved down from the heart of Asia somewhere, way beyond the Caspian Sea, and they moved down into the steppe north of the Black Sea. And one group settled where I've cross-hatched there, the hatched,

That's in the North Caucasus. And we get this evidence of them from the Greeks moving through the mountains because there were good fights going on down here in Asia Minor. This was where the Assyrians were, and the Assyrians were being beaten up by the people of Urartu who lived in that area. So there were lucrative wars going on.

and the Scythian nomadic warriors decided this was a good place to be for a while. So they spread down and took part in these wars, and we have detailed accounts of how they fought and how they fought against the Assyrians mainly. And it's in that area that they came across this art of uratu, a very distinct art

and probably took back, when they went back, they were only down here for a while, they go back home from time to time and then come out again, they would have taken back craftsmen and it's those Uratian craftsmen who start working gold, this is a gold dagger sheath, and create these curious little motifs of half man, half fish, well, man, fish, a horse,

creatures and make Scythian art, which was at this up to this stage rather bland, make it much more exciting and this sort of overlap with the classical world creates a very vibrant, very distinctive art. You can begin to see it happen there.

Similarly, that's that batch of Scythians. Others moved onto the steppe. That green line marks the northern edge of the steppe before you get into the forest.

So, settled here, north of the Crimea in Ukraine, and some of them penetrated into the forest steppe. The different colors there simply represent different archeologically distinct groups of Scythians.

but overall you get the idea of where they are. Some moved through the Carpathians into Transylvania and some moved on, this is a lot, into the Great Hungarian Plain. So that's the sort of geography of them. And I've shown there the main burial mounds

It was in this area that they came into contact along the north shore of the Black Sea. They came into contact with Greeks who had set up

colonies along the North Shore of the Black Sea. So they developed a sort of symbiosis with the Greek world. What the Scythians were able to provide were furs, horses, some corn grain, and slaves, all things that the Greeks wanted. What the Greeks were able to provide were sort of little luxury goods, wine, and craftsmanship.

So Greek craftsmen in this sort of Black Sea interface were making things for the Scythians.

One of the things they made was a lovely amphora, a metal container for wine, which was decorated clearly for Scythian taste, showing the importance of the horse. Scythians tending, hobbling a horse, in this case making a horse lie down on the ground. This human-horse relationship, always very important. Then we have these superb little

plaques showing Scythians riding with their spears. Those men are not warriors attacking, they're hunters. And you can see what they're hunting down here, they're hunting hares.

The hunt was very important for the Scythians. There's a wonderful account which the Greeks give of a confrontation between the Persian king Darius and the Scythians. The Persian king is really fed up. He can't bring these Scythians to have a good battle with him. They keep on getting on their horses and going off again. But there is one time when the two armies confront each other

And then a hare, we're told, runs across the ground between them and the Scythians forget the battle with the Persians and go after the hare. Much to the real annoyance of the Persians. It's a good story, but it may well be true. But it does stress the importance of hunting. If they could tell that story, then hunting must be important.

You can see again typical dress here, the soft boots, the slightly baggy trousers, the long coat of the rider and also the characteristic of long hair and beards which help distinguish them. These coats were presumably padded with felt to keep them warm.

The bow and arrow, most important, was the main weapon. And the bows were these recurve types made of bits of wood stuck together, sometimes with strips of bone, and in that arc form. And then you have to bend it round with massive tension there before you can string it. And then even more tension when you pull it.

And this bowl here, this beaker, gives a marvelous indication of how you string your bow. Here is a Scythian, a typical Scythian with his pointed hat and everything, and he's stringing his bow, he's bending it, he's got it on one thigh and one knee is pressed back and he's pulling it up in that way so he can stretch the string across. Stringing the bow was a real skill.

Here they are, here's one sort of firing. The bows were short bows, of course, from horses. And they all wore this goritus, which is a quiver.

for both the bow and the arrows. They wore it on their left side. And here is, on this illustration, here is a goritas with its arrows in it there and part of the strung bow poking out at the top. So you had that in your left hand side. You could pull it up very quickly, take the arrows out and fire fast. The arrows, arrowheads of bronze,

with this rather nice little hook on so that if you got an arrow stuck in you it really hurt to pull it out because you sort of ripped the wound apart. So it was meant to keep the arrows in the bodies to make them less efficient. Another way of making them less efficient was with poison.

And we've got this splendid account again from one of the Greek writers of how the Scythians were adept at making poison. They took the venom from pregnant female snakes, because it was particularly vicious venom, and they mixed it with blood.

and left it for a couple of weeks to ferment and grow and get really nasty. And then they smeared their arrows with it and it was very effective. So you didn't want to be on the receiving end of a Scythian arrow. So that's one of the main sort of weapons that they worked with. That bowl that we saw from Kul Uba, the one up there with the chap stringing his

bow. It's a very interesting bow and if you look just behind him or just sticking up from his back as it were, there is his own goritas with his own bow in it. So what he's doing, he's stringing a bow for someone else or showing them how to do it, it's not his own. And that's the sort of theme that runs through the other illustrations on this particular vessel.

It's companionship. It's working with someone. There is one Scythian binding the leg, presumably of a wounded colleague. Here are two friends in intimate conversation.

Here, it's a wonderful scene, and goodness knows what he's doing, but presumably helping his friend who's got toothache or something like that. This sense of comradeship is very important. It's brought out here brilliantly in this little bit of gold where these two guys, it looks as though it's a couple of drunks fighting over a horn of wine, but it presumably is the act of creating a blood brotherhood.

There are descriptions of this again in Herodotus, how two people who are going to be blood brothers slash their arms, bleed into a container of wine, and then jointly drink that container of wine. That binds them for the rest of their lives, a typical piece of sort of

social structure that keeps warrior bands together and always means that when you go into battle you've got someone watching your back and you're watching someone else's back. So it's a safer way of doing it. Here's a reconstruction from Kiev Museum based all solidly on archaeological evidence of a warrior who is actually dressed for fighting. There's his goritas,

He's got his arrows in there, he's holding his bow, typical baggy trousers and boots. Scale armour made of iron plates, very effective overlapping scale armour. Helmet again with iron scale armour and a good neck guard.

and he's carrying on his back his shield which is made of wickerwork, a very light shield but very effective. He keeps the blows, the lance off it and then two weapons, the spear and the sword. And there on a comb

Most of these things have been found in the Pontic steppe north of the Black Sea. There is a battle scene in operation. Someone has been dismounted, a horse is dying, it's bleeding. There's someone with his scale armour on. He's wearing in fact a Greek helmet in this case.

and he's going into battle with someone on his side against an enemy. This may well be his blood brother. So a good scene of battles in action. So it's a very fearsome appearance, the sort of kind of person you wouldn't want to meet on a tube station late at night. It really is, you know, to be frightening, to dress to be frightening.

Here, on a little gold band, is someone carrying a human head. We have again descriptions of Scythians in battle and how they cut off the heads of their enemies because they were paid or rewarded according to the number of enemies they'd killed.

So after the battle they had to have all these heads and bring them up and have them counted by the accountant before they were given their prize.

and it's much easier to do than bringing up the whole body. But then they also liked to remember their enemies, so they scalped them and kept the scalps. Herodotus gives us a brilliant account of how they slice the skin from ear to ear and around the back, hold onto their hair, shake it, and the skull falls out and they've got the scalp cut.

And they attach the scalps to the reins of their horses. But if they've got so many of them, they're really very successful. They actually make capes out of scalps and wear them.

So, I'm not endearing you to them, am I really? But it gives you an idea of that society. Based, you see, both on the archaeological evidence and visual evidence that we've got and on the accounts that we've got. We can balance the two together. And one burial in the Altai Mountains was actually sculpted. There's the mark of the cut.

across his skull and he doesn't have any hair. Now let's move to the Altai Mountains because we get a rather different view of Scythian culture. The Altai Mountains, this is southern Siberia now, just north of Mongolia. And you see the sort of landscape. And here is what is called a kurgan, a burial mound.

This is a very special, or is still just a very special area in that the ground freezes very hard. It's where permafrost occurs.

and the ground freezes to several meters depth every year and then thaws out in the summer and then freezes again. Now if you build a barrow of stones over the ground it insulates it so the ground beneath doesn't thaw out and that's very important. It means that it has preserved all the archaeological material, all the organic material which you don't find anywhere else.

And here is a place called Pazyryk and these burials were excavated in the 1930s and then the archaeologists were arrested by Stalin and put in jail and then they were let out in the 1940s and they went back and finished the excavation. So good was the material. And here you see underneath the mound a section of the burial chambers

built of timber, plan of the burial chambers built of timber, rather like the ones we've seen, we saw earlier, with the burials inside and all the equipment buried with the dead piled in the spaces between the pit and the chamber. So piled in here. You see bits of a wheeled vehicle up there. But the beauty of this is that when they excavated it, it was all perfectly preserved.

Now, how long it's going to last with global warming is a big issue. There are lots of these cemeteries in this area with this wealth of really marvelous archaeological material, perfectly safe and no one needs to dig them at the moment.

But when this global warming starts and the permafrost starts to go, then all this archaeological evidence will start to rot and you'll get back to only just the metal surviving. So it's a rather crucial time. Now let's just see what there is. Well, these are old archive photographs, but actually even the bodies are preserved and the skin on the bodies. You can see that guy fairly well.

And here lots of details. This one has been cut open there and along there and sewn up again. And what was happening here was they were taking out the

entrails and the bits that rot quickly and stuffing the bodies with straw and things like that so that they could be kept for a while. Herodotus again describes this. He says exactly that. They open up the bodies and they put

herbs and nice smelling things and grass inside and stuff them so that they can carry them around and show them to all the people in the tribal area, show the body. And this is a part of, it's rather like the Queen Mother lying in state in Britain. It's that tradition of needing to show people that the king is dead so that the successor has legitimacy.

So, they're taking the bodies around. I think there's probably another reason here in the Altai Mountains that if you died in the winter, no one would be able to dig into the ground. It's too tough because of the frost, and the body would have to be kept until the summer before burial. So here, archaeological evidence again supporting exactly what Herodotus says.

Some of the bodies were tattooed. In fact, many of them were tattooed. This one looks almost like my daughter. And you can see, I mean, quite literally.

And you can see here, this is a piece of skin from this chap's shoulder. How wonderful the tattoos are, these superb animals. You can probably make out the head of a deer there with its antlers over its back and its front leg and its back legs bent back on themselves. It's a superb piece of art. And this, of course, would have been totally lost to us had this body rotted. But here...

All of this would have meant a great deal and someone would have been able to read this fellow. It's like having a barcode on your back, you know, and anyone who could read that barcode would know what family he belonged to, what tribe he belonged to and so on. This is family history. And as I say, all the organic things are preserved.

including this wonderful saddle cloth made of felt with plique decorations, again wonderful animals and horse hair and so on. And the bridles carved out of wood with again vital sort of animal art.

Clothing, that's a cloak made of skins of animals sewn together. And shoes, look how decorated the sole of the shoe is, this is with bits of marcasite, shiny marcasite attached. And you wonder why, you know,

to the sole of your boot. It's because you're sitting on the floor, squatting all the time, and the soles of your feet, as it were, show. It's part of your visual display. And then little details like this: a container holding hemp seeds, and the burner

with hot stones, well stones, which were heated and hemp seeds were put on and they found charred hemp seeds here and this, these sticks would have taken a tent-like structure and this is where you go to inhale hemp, fumes of hemp.

Again, the archaeological evidence for it and Herodotus tells us exactly this, that after funerals and so on, they went into tents, they inhaled hemp, and they got high on it. But it was a bit of purification after the death ceremonies.

Some of the barrows, I won't bore you with all the detail now that time is getting on, but some of the barrows were massive. This is Czertomlik, one on the Pontic Steppe. They were built entirely of turf on the Pontic Steppe. And that particular one, it's got something like a million turfs, they reckon.

building it, cut a big turf sort of like this, about a million. And some of them, they've looked at what was growing in the grass and so on, some of them must have come from four or five kilometres away. So to build that, rather than just dig a ditch around it to pile up the dirt, they've absolutely devastated the pasture for many, many kilometres around to bring the turf in.

That may well be that it's giving the dead person pasture. Your control of pasture is very important for your livelihood, so it's bringing the pasture to the dead person. It's a very interesting concept.

There's not time to go into the deities in any detail, simply to say that they had an idea of their origins. They believed that a god of some kind met with a water nymph, half female and half with sort of serpent tails.

and the result of that was three boys and they were set a task and one boy succeeded and he was the founder of the Scythians. I think most people have got origin myths and that's just one. I haven't time to go into that now. And here is another bit of mythology. This is a carpet from Paziric. Carpets are preserved there as well. And here is a rider

approaching a female goddess who is holding the tree of life.

And this is presumably the communion of the life forces with the actual real world, the warrior and the goddess again. And here again on this gold plaque you've got the same. There's the goddess sitting, the tree of life is over there, and there is the warrior approaching her on a horse. So they've got this very complex mythology that we can just begin to sketch out, but we can't get to the detail of it.

And then this brilliant, brilliant animal art. It's the art of predation.

always conflict, conflict between the wild and the less wild. Snow leopards attacking deer, vicious birds attacking deer again, or griffins attacking a horse and so on. The art of predation, this must represent some sort of worldview of the tension that there always is between the more domestic world and the wild world.

but again we can just spot it there and not do much more. But it does come close to us. The Scythians moved into Eastern Europe, into Hungary and so on, and came up against the Celts. And the Celts learned quite a lot from the Scythians, particularly Celtic art learned from the Scythians. So here is from the Altai Mountains

a wooden boss with a predatory bird on it, wonderful curved beak, evil eye and great wings. Another predatory bird here, there is its beak, so two birds.

And here, from the Thames at Wandsworth, is a shield boss with, again, the same, the predatory bird with its wings spreading out on either side and the other bird opposite it with the same sort of beak. So here is a transmission of some spirit of Scythian art into the Celtic world and very much into our world. This is only, what, a couple of kilometers from where we are now.

So they're not as remote perhaps as one might have thought. Now the Scythians are only one of the many predatory nomad tribes that occupied the Middle Asia. The last of them that we know about were called Alans, but again essentially Scythians. The Alans lived

in the fourth century AD, where you see that pink. And by that stage, this was the Roman world. But the Huns, one of the predators coming in from the Far East,

moved in into the land occupied by the Alans and the Alans were pushed out and some of the Alans, you can see them in that reddish line, in around 370 moved into Europe. They moved through the Atlas Mountains and moved right across towards Lisbon. They were migrating people who were joined by the Germans and joined by the Huns, some of the many migrating peoples

who poured into Europe and brought about the end of the Roman Empire. But essentially it's the same movement. People in the Pontic steppe being pushed out by people coming in from the east. And they're pushed out. Where do they go? They go down into Asia Minor or they go into Europe. And here we find them right up against the Atlantic. So, our Scythians. Horsemen, companions,

with a very, very distinct kind of lifestyle, very different from that of settled agriculturalists. They were not settled agriculturalists and their lifestyle was necessarily different. What remains of them, I suppose if you really wanted to see the last remnants of the Scythians,

or the Alans in fact, their successors, you'd probably go to the North Caucasus, to Ossetia, north of Ossetia, where even in the 13th century, the people were still called Alans there. And there are still words of Scythian that are spoken in that area. So the Scythians still have

successors, as it were, in our world, but in very remote places. But their genes, the Scythian genes, the nomad genes, genes from the steppe, pervade us all. Okay, I'm going to stop there. I've gone on too long. But any questions, I'm very happy to have them. Thanks for that. It was really very interesting. You just mentioned Scythian language. Can you talk a bit about the linguistic picture of that group?

Not really, not really is the answer. No, it's not a simple Indo-European language, it's quite complex. But since we have so little of it, they wrote nothing, and there are no place names, there's no real hard evidence to go on, it's just these few words that remain in Ossetian language. But I'm sorry, I can't say more.

Yeah, I think I can only say Ed is really interesting and very gripping. If not linguistically, do we have any DNA evidence maybe from any bergamots? And you said the homeland was sort of like East Altai. Does that bring them into relationship with Mongols? Maybe? Or...

Yes. Well, the homeland in the Altai, it's quite clear that these nomads always needed to really, to be pure nomads, they needed to relate to communities that were growing grain.

So you've got in Central Asia relating to the Persians, in Pontic State relating to the Greeks and so on. But those who are in the Altai were also relating down into China. And it's quite a lot of Chinese

artifacts are based on Scythian ones. It's quite clear that the people from the Altai Mountains were providing horses and horse gear and training for the developing Chinese world. I couldn't go into that.

And one of the wheeled vehicles that I pointed out stuffed inside of a grave and almost certainly is a Chinese item that is brought from China to the Altai Mountains. There's also Chinese silk that comes up. So they are quite clearly in contact with China as well. And the first part of your question about genetics,

A lot of work is now being done on ancient DNA, which is of enormous importance to archaeology. It's mainly concentrated on the earlier period and identifying step genes, a genetic package that you can say that's from the step, and trying to trace that through Europe.

But it's difficult because the first lot of step genes comes into Europe long before the scythians. There are people from the step pouring into Europe and the scythians, they're merely part of a very long story. So the first sort of step genes that come into Europe

are around about 2,900-2,800 BC, so a couple of thousand years earlier. And interestingly, a recent paper was published in Nature showing that there was a lot of step genes in Europe at that time and that somewhere around 2400 there was a major incursion of people with step genes into Britain as well.

as part of this earlier movement. The geneticists who write about it say a 90% replacement of population, which I cannot possibly believe. I can't see how you could replace a population over a couple of hundred years 90%. But there is a lot of step gene. So genetics, and people have rather tended to concentrate on the earlier genetics rather than the later because the later picture is much clearer archaeologically and historically.

But when they've worked out all the early stuff, they'll no doubt move into looking at these later. Thank you so much for that. It was really interesting. You touched briefly upon...

the wives in the later stages of Scythian culture, the wives gaining importance in communities. I'm just wondering, what was the kind of role of women in the Scythian nomad communities? Presumably, if the men are all fighting and hunting all the time, what are the women doing?

Right, looking after the children and the animals is the answer. But no, it's important because I left out the whole gender bit, which is very interesting among the Scythians. There was much less sort of rigid gender division. Some groups of Scythians, in fact Sarmatians,

people called "Sarmatians," the women were brought up as fighters, and women were not allowed to marry until they had killed their first enemy.

You can see this in the burials, that there are female bodies decked out just like a male. And Amazons, the story of the Amazons, which one hears about how they cauterized the breasts so that it didn't get in the way of the bowstring and so on. Certainly that gender overlap

wasn't a gap. Nor at the other end, there were men who were called effeminates who were given great status. They became the priests and the shaman and so on. They were seen to be slightly different, but they were important. So society is much more interesting, I think, well, than perhaps a Victorian society in Britain was.

The general idea is, and I think that is right, that the women really did mostly, they were the home base. And the home base was always moving, that's the point. And someone had to look after that home base and the animals and the old and the very young. So I think that's probably the general model, but there are all these sort of subtleties around the edge of it which make it very, very interesting.

Professor, thank you very much for a great talk. I have a quick question because I've been fascinated by Scythian and Sarmatian. So I've been doing a bit of reading and going through all these kind of exhibitions and whatnot. I just want to get your take on the language because...

I was under the impression that their language belongs to the Indo-Iranian branch of Indo-European language, especially when it comes to Ossetia. And Ossetians, they call themselves "Irun", which is the abbreviation of Iran. So I just wanted to say, do you support that kind of...? I have to be honest that I'm not a linguist.

I've read things about it, but I really don't have any opinions. But I think that it is an Indo-Iranian language is absolutely correct. And indeed, the whole mythology

What we know of mythology, and I've had to leave out quite a lot, but the whole mythology is very much Iranian-based. There are big similarities there.

I think we're talking more of an area of Iran and the steppe sharing a culture rather than a flow from one to the other necessarily. It's much more of a large area of sharing. But I'm sorry, I can't answer the language question. Thank you very much, Sir Barry Connolly. Thank you. Thank you.

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