Cover image: A gold plaque depicting a Scythian on horseback. Credit: Public Domain / Wikimedia Commons

At the dawn of the 7th century BC, the ruthless struggle for dominance on the steppes north of the Black Sea between the nomadic people of the Cimmerians and the Scythians—a tribal confederation of Europoid, Iranian-speaking tribes that had only recently arrived from the East—was destined to have momentous consequences for much of the Near Eastern world of the period. Attempting to escape their relentless pursuers, the defeated Cimmerians crossed the Caucasus mountain range to the south and turned west toward Asia Minor, spreading chaos throughout the kingdoms of the region. Likewise, unwilling to allow their “prey” to escape and under the leadership of their king Madyes, the Scythians also crossed the Caucasus and entered the kingdom of Urartu, in the lands of today’s Kurds and Armenians.

The country, rich in mineral resources and notorious for the exceptional breeds of horses raised in its mountain valleys, soon won over the warlike nomads, who decided to transfer their political center to regions south of the Caucasus. From there, they would set out and for roughly a century become a scourge upon the settled peoples of the Middle East.

Their first victims were the Medes, a tribal confederation of the peoples of the Iranian plateau, who had likely united politically in order to confront the expansionist Assyria to their west. Subsequently, having subjugated the Medes, the Scythians turned against the mighty Neo-Assyrian Empire (911–609 BC) to their south. Although our main historical source, Herodotus, wrote roughly two centuries later and the Assyrian records themselves are sparse, what is certain is that at some point during the decade of the 670s the two powerful kingdoms reached some form of agreement, as the Scythian king Partatua took as his wife the daughter of the Assyrian emperor Esarhaddon, along with rich gifts as her dowry.

At the same time—or perhaps shortly thereafter—a Scythian war band under some anonymous, ambitious warlord crossed Mesopotamia and Syria and reached the borders of Egypt, which at that time was ruled by the 26th Saite Dynasty (664–525 BC).

The Scythians undoubtedly impressed both the Egyptians and the other peoples of the region, as a Jewish prophet refers to the Scythians as “an ancient, mighty people whose language is hard to understand. They are always fearless, and their quivers are like an open grave. They will eat your harvest and your bread, they will devour your sons and your daughters, they will feed on your sheep and your cattle, they will eat your grapes and your figs.” Faced with the fear of destruction, Pharaoh Psammetichus I (663–609 BC) offered the dreadful invader rich gifts and heavy tribute so that he would abandon his land and return to the East.

For approximately five more decades, (scholarly estimates range c. 670–620 BC) the Scythians would remain south of the Caucasus, holding Media under their influence and clashing intermittently with their other neighbors. Their next spectacular blow came in 612 BC, when, in cooperation with the Medes, they besieged and utterly destroyed the Assyrian capital Nineveh, to such an extent that when the Ten Thousand passed through its ruins in 401 BC, no one any longer remembered the name of the ancient metropolis.

The once-mighty empire soon collapsed completely under the successive blows of the Scytho-Median forces and the Babylonians. The Scythians evidently obtained a substantial share of the spoils; however, the political balance in the region appears to have shifted dramatically against them, as the power vacuum left by the collapse of the Assyrian Empire was filled by the Chaldeans of Babylon in the Fertile Crescent and by the Medes in the regions of northern Mesopotamia and eastern Asia Minor.

The presence of these restless nomads south of the Caucasus could no longer be tolerated by the now-strengthened Medes, who therefore adopted decisive measures. According to Herodotus:

“They not only exacted tribute from all the peoples, but also raided and plundered whatever those peoples possessed. At some point, therefore, Cyaxares and the Medes invited the Scythians to a banquet and killed their leading men.”

With their principal war leaders eliminated in this manner, the main body of the Scythians was soon pushed back beyond the Caucasus. Although it is uncertain to what extent the ancient accounts reflect the precise sequence of events, it is nevertheless clear that the Scythians exerted a significant direct or indirect influence on the peoples of the Middle East.

In addition to the Assyrians, the powerful Phrygian kingdom in Asia Minor also appears to have collapsed amid the turmoil caused by the invasion of the Cimmerian refugees from the steppe, while a century later the Achaemenids would regard the Scythians as a sufficiently serious threat to undertake a campaign into the steppe aimed at neutralizing them. Scythian archers are reported to have trained young Iranian aristocrats in the arts of archery and horsemanship, and throughout the 5th and 4th centuries BC they consistently remained objects of both fear and admiration for their military capabilities, until finally a new wave of invaders from the east—the likewise Iranian-speaking Sarmatians—replaced them during the 3rd century BC as the new dominant power of the Pontic steppe.

Sources/Bibliography:

Herodotus (c. 430 BCE). The Histories. Translated by G. C. Macaulay

Assyrian Royal Inscriptions (c. 9th–7th century BCE).

B. Cunliffe, The Scythians: Nomad Warriors of the Steppe, publ. Oxford University Press, 2021.

I. M. Diakonoff, “The Median and Achaemenian Empires: Politics and Culture”, publ. Cambridge University Press, Iranian Studies
Vol. 20, No. 1 (1987).