BABYLON AND PERSIA

4l8MEDIA, BABYLON, AND PERSIA.tions speaking seven different languages. It is verypossible that the Greeks purposely kept these thingsrather dark, so as not to divulge the secret of theircommercial operations and the sources of theirgreatest profits.5. The country of which Herodotus gives us sodetailed and animated an account answers to thesouthern half of Russia. Of the nations which in¬habited or roamed those vast and in great part wildregions, he only gives us the names as far as theywere known to him, and in the Greek forms, whichmake foreign places and people so hard to identify;as to their manners and customs, he dismisses themmostly with this sweeping and uncomplimentary re¬mark : " The Euxine (Black), Sea, where Dareiosnow went to war, has nations dweUing around it,with the one exception of the Scythians, more un¬polished than those of any other region that weknow of." Accordingly he devotes to the Scythiansmany most interesting pages. In the first placehe notes that they really were named Skoloti,but the Greeks had got into the habit of call¬ing them Scythians. This agrees with what weknow from other sources, namely, that " Scythians "was not a race-name at all, but one promiscuouslyused for all remote, little known, especially nomadicpeoples of the north and northeast, denoting tribesas well of Turanian as of Indo-European stock ; tothe latter the Scythians of Russia are now uni¬versally admitted to have belonged. He dividesthe nations into the " Husbandmen," the only por¬tion of it that was settled and given to farming