Secret_History

248 The Secret History of the World
Scott Littleton and Linda Malcor made the serendipitous discovery of the
parallels between the stories of King Arthur and the Ossetian saga of Batraz which
has enabled a major leap in understanding the origins of the themes, and we hope
to develop it further here. According to Littleton and Malcor, a fellow scholar, J.
P. Mallory, told them that at the end of the Marcomannian War in the year 175
AD, the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius sent a contingent of 5,500 Sarmatian
cataphracti 161 from Pannonia to Britain. Their descendants survived as an
identifiable ethnic group into the fourth century and possibly longer. It was, as
Littleton and Malcor put it, just an “interesting bit of trivia” gleaned from Tadeusz
Sulimirski’s book The Sarmatians.
Sarmatians are a sub-group of Scythians, and the term “Scythian” can mean
either the ancient Scythian tribes described by Herodotus, or, in the larger sense, it
can apply to all of the Northeast Iranian steppe peoples. The Scythians of
antiquity, and their cousins, the Sarmatians and Alans, were nomads of the Central
Asian steppes. At the time of their greatest manifestation on the stage of history,
the tribes extended from Hungary to China. These Scythians were big, blond and
blue-eyed, and based on the accounts that have come down to us, and
archaeological findings, their nomadic culture has sharp parallels with the most
ancient occupants of Europe.
At the end of the classical period, these steppe dwellers had been driven to the
edges of their homeland by the Altaic speakers, the Huns and Turks. Some
migrated to Afghanistan, eastern Iran, western India, and others invaded the
Roman Empire as either conquerors or supporting mercenaries. Many of them
migrated into Britain, Italy, France, Spain and North Africa. Others retreated into
Poland, European Russia and the Caucasus. The assumption has been that the
Scythians, the sub-tribes of Iazyge 162 Sarmatians, Alans, etc, vanished without a
trace. But that is not, apparently, the case. It seems clear, upon reviewing the
evidence, that the steppe dwellers became the aristocracy of Europe. According to
Littleton and Malcor, another group of the Alani retreated into the Caucasus and
survived as an ethnic group called the Ossetes, or Ossetians, in what is now known
as the Republic of Georgia.
The Holy Grail was the chief concern of the Alans who settled in Gaul and
Spain in the fifth century. They were tall, blonde and good looking, and lived a
nomadic life in wagons. Their main claim to fame was their skill as horsemen. The
Scythians (including the Alans) were referred to as Goths, and the one thing they
all had in common was their extraordinary art. They assimilated into the territories
they finally settled in, intermarrying with the Romans and other indigenous
161 Cavalry, mounted soldiers.
162 The name “Jadczyk” is a “Polish-ized” variation of Iazyge.