Iranians and Greeks in South Russia - Robert Bedrosian's Armenian ...

THE S ARM AT IAN S 115
construction of the Limes which we know as the Great Wall of China.
This movement probably displaced a number of Iranian tribes in
Central Asia and in Turkestan, who turned northward and westward,
as the Scythians had turned before them, and made for western Siberia
and the Ural and Volga steppes to the north of the Caspian : the
southern road being barred by the kingdom of Parthia. I have no
doubt that the events which took place in Central Asia during the
third and second centuries were much less elementary and more
complicated than the Chinese sources make them out ; although the
Chinese account is by no means so simple as the version given above.
For further details we must wait until the results of recent exploration
are better known and better digested : Russian, German, French,
British and Japanese exploration in Chinese Turkestan, Seistan and
Baluchistan. The new data, linguistic, archaeological, and his-
torical, will perhaps afford a clearer view of Central Asiatic history
in the last centuries before and the earliest after Christ. This much
we can already affirm, that the flow of Sarmatian tribes towards the
South Russian steppes was due to the political and economic condition
of Central Asia between the fourth and the second centuries B.C. : a
symptom of which was a movement of Mongolian tribes towards the
west, and a corresponding movement of Iranians.
The second century B.C. seems to have been the critical period
of Sarmatian expansion in South Russia, although archaeological
evidence and a few historical passages indicate that long before this
period Sarmatian tribes had been slowly moving towards the west.
But the earliest certain notice of Sarmatians in the South Russian
steppes dates from the second century B. c. I have already quoted
the evidence of Polybius, proving the presence of Sarmatians between
Don and Dnieper in 179. From the part played by the Sarmatian
king in the political events of this period, it is clear that by 179 Sarmatian
power was firmly established between Dnieper and Don, counterbalancing
the Scythian power, which, as we have seen from the
archaeological evidence treated in the last chapter, centred in the
Crimea. To judge from the chronology of Scythian tumuli, it was
in the second half of the third century that the Sarmatians crossed
the Don and invaded the steppes between Don and Dnieper. This
date is confirmed by Strabo. The authority used by Strabo for his
seventh book, Artemidorus of Ephesus, who wrote at the end of the
second century, bears witness that about this time the advance guard
of the Sarmatians, the lazygians, reached the steppes between
Dnieper and Danube, while the next in order, the Roxalans or White
Alans, were between Don and Dnieper and figured on the political