Barry Cunlife - The Scythians

the scythians as others saw them
landings on the alien shores will have left few archaeological traces. Later, when
friendly natives were encountered, regular seasonal visits developed to encourage a
little lucrative trade. If successful, these places would, in time, have become trading
enclaves with Greeks overwintering, creating permanent settlements which might
eventually grow into fully fledged colonies. According to the ancient author Pseudo-
Scymnus, the first colony was founded at Sinope on the southern (Asia Minor) shore
of the sea. Strabo later described the site as ‘beautifully equipped both by nature and
human foresight, for it is situated on the neck of a peninsula and has on either side
harbours and roadsteads and wonderful tuna fisheries …’. He claimed that the first
settlement was developed by the native Kimmerians and was later refounded by colonizers
from Miletos. One of its sister colonies, Trapezus, further along the same coast,
was, according to Eusebius, founded in 756 bc. How much reliance can be placed on
these traditional stories is debatable. The earliest pottery so far found at Sinope is of
the late seventh century but there would be nothing at all surprising if settlement had
begun many decades earlier.
Stories of strange people who lived in the lands of mists on the north shores of
the sea were circulating in the eighth-century Greek world and were known to both
Hesiod and to Homer, who referred to the nations as Hippemolgi (mare-milkers) and
Galactophagi (curd-eaters)—appropriate descriptions of nomadic pastoralists who
grew no grain. Other stories may have originated from these early encounters like
that of gold-rich Colchis where Jason and his followers ventured to find the Golden
Fleece. It may have been from these early travellers’ tales that Herodotus, composing
his Histories in the fifth century, heard the story of the ‘wandering Scythians’ who
‘once dwelt in Asia’ and, driven out by the Massagetae, entered ‘the land of the Kimmerians’,
thus arriving on the Pontic steppe, the region they still inhabited at the time
when Herodotus was doing his research. The historian goes on to relate what he
understood to have happened next. In the face of the Scythian threat the Kimmerians
were in discord. The elite—the ‘Royal tribe’—wanted to stay and fight; the rest of the
people thought it best to leave. Dissent led to a civil conflict in which the Royal tribe
was slain, and their bodies were buried near the River Tyras (Dniester). ‘Then the rest
of the Kimmerians departed and the Scythians on their arrival took possession of a
deserted land’ (Hist. iv. 11). We will return to the fate of the Kimmerians later (below,
pp. 106–7). Herodotus, looking back on these events, reminded his readers that there
were still traces of the Kimmerians to be seen, Kimmerian forts, and place names like
Kimmeria (the Crimea) and the Kimmerian Bosphorus, the strait leading from the
Black Sea to the Sea of Azov.
These ethnic dislocations were playing out at the end of the eighth century when
the Greeks were first beginning to explore the Black Sea. Stories based on current
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