Princeton (2023) h/b 380pp £35 (ISBN 9780691240534)
The ancient Greeks may have seen Scythians as barbarian occupants of the Pontic steppe, but Professor Beckwith thinks they were much more than that. After pointing out that, insofar as they created ‘the world’s first huge empire’, they pre-dated the Huns and Mongols, he turns to his main question: ‘Did their empire last long enough to effect any changes? Did the Scythians contribute anything to world civilization beyond “better bows and arrows” and some rather spectacular gold sculptures?’ (p. 1).
His answer is an overwhelming ‘Yes’. In support of his position, he provides a chapter-length prologue, eight numbered chapters, a chapter-length epilogue, long appendices on ‘Zoroaster and Monotheism’ and ‘Scythian and Scytho-Mede Dress and Weaponry’, and some fifty pages of discursive endnotes (on top of the often lengthy footnotes in the main body of the text). The very title of the prologue, ‘Central Eurasian Innovators’, emphasizes that the book is meant to be challenging. Only the first chapter, ‘The Scythians in the Central Eurasian Steppes’, bears much relation to the archaeology and art that informed Barry Cunliffe’s The Scythians (OUP, 2019). Chapters Two to Four are about Scythians in Media and Persia, Chapters Five and Six about the Scythian language in, respectively, the Persian Empire and the steppe zone, Chapter Seven about Scythians and the first Chinese Empire, and Chapter Eight about Scythian capital cities (in both Central Asia and China).
The epilogue, ‘Scythian Philosophy and the Classical Age’, is perhaps the point at which the claims of the book are most readily comprehensible to readers who lack the author’s expertise, for it takes the view that four of the great thinkers of antiquity, Anacharsis, Zoroaster, the Buddha, and Lao-tzu—people with whom many readers will have engaged at one time or another—owed more to the world of the Scythians than they did to the other cultures they encountered. Of these four, the half-Scythian Anacharsis is naturally the one of greatest interest to students of classical Greece. B. quotes Diogenes Laertius to the effect that Anacharsis ‘wondered why among the Greeks the experts contend, but the non-experts decide’ (p. 236). He takes this remark on the part of Anacharsis to demonstrate that he was ‘the first in Greece to suggest [that] the philosophical question known as the Problem of the Criterion’ was ‘a philosophical problem that entailed dealing with entities such as ethical antilogies’. Consequently, Anacharsis can ‘be considered the spiritual founder of Greek logical-epistemological Scepticism’ (centuries before Pyrrho), a man of whom even Aristotle spoke approvingly (Nicomachean Ethics X.vi.6).
Unfortunately, it was not clear to the present reader that there was anything peculiarly ‘Scythian’ about Anacharsis’s no doubt insightful contribution to the development of Greek philosophy. Although, in one of his lengthy discursive endnotes (pp. 341-2), B. emphasizes Anacharsis’s Scythian-ness, it is still surely possible that the philosopher fell for ways of thinking that crossed his path in Greece and added to them simply because he was clever rather than because he was Scythian. The fact that he came to a sticky end after returning home (Herodotus iv.76) would seem to indicate that his fellow-countrymen no longer felt he was one of them.
In view of the fact that much of The Scythian Empire will give rise to detailed arguments of this kind, it may be helpful to single out three of the book’s most general features. First, B. is not really interested in Scythians who lived to the north of the Black and Caspian and Aral Seas. His focus is mainly on what a classicist would call the Persian Empire (and to a lesser degree on the first unified Chinese Empire). Second, the book does not see the Scythians as an overwhelmingly pastoral and nomadic people. They began as such, but in due course founded cities (including Ecbatana which had incarnations both in the Zagros Mountains and in the Far East). Third, in the search for relevant evidence, scholars have relied on archaeology and artwork at the expense of the insights to be derived from linguistic material.
By linguistic material B. does not usually mean material in ancient Greek. Of course he deploys Herodotus, but he is far more concerned to bring into play deductions from Akkadian, Babylonian, Aramaic, Hebrew, Chinese, Old and Young Avestan and more than one form of Persian. Quotations from all of these languages appear in the book’s footnotes. (Often, indeed, they are in their original scripts rather than in transliteration; one of them appears in a cuneiform font of the author’s own devising.)
B. is above all a linguist. He has compiled a dictionary of Aramaic. He draws massively on linguistic reconstruction to and from Scythian, and refers even to the still extant language of the Alans (now the Ossets of the North Caucasus, represented in the modern world by the conductor Valery Gergiev), on the grounds that it retains, apparently, bardic poetry in a Scythian-related tongue. When one takes into account that B. has also familiarized himself with the relevant secondary literature in all the main modern European languages, it is clear that not many readers will be able to follow him down the many paths he has trodden. Certainly this reviewer (principally a Slavist) is not able to do so. Readers therefore need to be cautious before they pass judgment on B.’s book, for, by comparison with the author, most of us are dilettantes.
It would not be surprising if some readers of the Classics for All website felt shock when confronted with what is on offer here. I used to wonder who the Medes were. If Cyrus was ‘King of the Medes and Persians’, where did the Medes come from, who were they, and where did they go? Were they the remote ancestors of today’s Kurds, who seem to live in the right part of the world but have still not achieved statehood? If you believe B., Medes were originally just the highly variegated inhabitants of a geographical region called ‘Media’ which was taken over by the Scythians. As a result they became Scythians themselves (or ‘Scytho-Medes’, to use his term). As a result, the half-Median Cyrus may be thought of as predominantly Scythian. Although Cyrus’s successor-but-one, Darius the Great, was indubitably Persian, he must also have owed something to the Scythians because he had royal blood; and anyway, B. says, by the time of Darius Scythian had become the daily spoken language of the Persian administration (despite the fact that it does not figure among the languages of the Behistun inscriptions, to which Darius himself apparently contributed one of the scripts). Later, in the Far East, Scythians were so important that the first ruler of a unified China (221-209 BC) —he of the terra-cotta army—was probably Scythian or at least owed a lot to the Scythians.
Thus the Scythians, in B.’s book, were very much more than pastoral nomads. Scholars who have dwelt on their material remains in the Pontic and other northern steppes need to employ linguistic tools if they are to understand the mark they made at lower latitudes. In their more southerly incarnations, they also engaged in the creation of political structures, the creation of devolved imperial administration and, perhaps most strikingly of all—to judge by the epilogue on Anacharsis et al. with which the book concludes—over-arching philosophies.
Before I read this book, I thought the prophet Jeremiah had produced the best summary image of Scythians when he said of them simply that ‘They ride upon horses’ (ch 6 v. 23). Although I would have been pleased if the prophet had mentioned their bows and spears and the fact that they wore trousers and pointed hats, I suspected that he had got to the heart of the matter. Now that I have read B.’s book, I am tempted to think again, for, if he is right, Scythians were far more than riders, mare-milkers and curd-eaters; they were also administrators and thinkers.
D.B. Saunders (Emeritus Professor of the Russian Empire, Newcastle University)