Encyclopaedia Britannica > Volume 21, ROT-Siam

SCYTHIA
576
through the steppe from exhausted to fresh pasture-
grounds, their women in waggons roofed with felt and
drawn by oxen, the men on horseback, the droves of sheep,
cattle, and horses following. They lived on boiled flesh,
mare’s milk, and cheese; they never washed, but enjoyed
a narcotic intoxication in combination with a vapour bath
by shutting themselves up within curtains of felt and strew¬
ing hemp seed on heated stones. The women, in place of
washing, daubed themselves with a paste containing dust of
fragrant woods and removed it on the second day. Like
many other barbarians, the Scythians, at least in Hippo¬
crates’s time (ed. Littre, ii. 72), were not a specially hardy
race; they had stout, fleshy, flabby bodies, the joints con¬
cealed by fat, their countenances somewhat ruddy. The
observation of Hippocrates that they all looked alike is one
that has often been made by travellers among lower races.
They were liable to dysentery and rheumatism, which they
treated by the actual cautery; impotence and sterility were
common, and, though the accounts vary, it is probable that
the race was not very numerous (Herod., iv. 81).
Hippocrates’s description has led many writers to view
the Scythians as Mongolian; but the life of the steppe
impresses a certain common stamp on all its nomad in¬
habitants, and the features described are not sufficiently
characteristic to justify the assumption of so distant a
Mongol migration. What remains of the Scythian lan¬
guage, on the other hand, furnished Zeuss with clear
proofs that they were Aryans and nearly akin to the
settled Iranians. The most decisive evidence is found in
Herodotus (iv. 117), viz., that Scythians and Sarmatians
(^.v.) were of cognate speech; for the latter were certainly
Aryans, as even the ancients observed, supposing them to
be a Median colony (Diod., ii. 43; Pliny, vi. 19). The
whole steppe lands from the Oxus and the Jaxartes to the
Hungarian pusztas seem to have been held at an early
date by a chain of Aryan nomad races.
The Scythian deities have also an Aryan complexion.
The highest deity was Tahiti, goddess of the hearth;
next came the heaven-god Papaeus, with his wife the
earth-goddess Apia; a sun-god, (Etosyrus; a goddess of
fecundity, Arippasa, who is compared with the Queen of
Heaven at Ascalon; and two gods to whom Herodotus
(iv. 59) gives the Greek names of Heracles and Ares.
These deities were common to all Scythians. The royal
horde had also a sea-god, Thamimasadas. In true
Iranian fashion the gods were adored without images,
altars, or temples, save only that Ares had as his symbol
a sabre (Herod., iv. 62), which was set up on a huge altar
piled up of faggots of brushwood. He received yearly
sacrifices of sheep and oxen, as well as every hundredth
captive. Ordinarily victims were strangled. Diviners were
common, and one species of them, who came only from
certain families, the Enarians or Anarians, were held in
high honour. These supposed their race to have offended
the goddess of heaven, who in revenge smote them with
impotence; they assumed the dress and avocations of
women and spoke with a woman’s voice.1 Divination was
practised with willow withes as among the Old Germans;
the Enarians, however, used lime-tree bark. False pro¬
phets were tied on a waggon with burning brushwood, and
the frightened team was driven forth. Oaths were sealed
by drinking of a mixture of wine with the blood of the
parties into which they had dipped their weapons. When
the king was sick it was thought that some one had
sworn falsely by the deities of his hearth,2 and the man
1 Reineggs in 1776 observed the same symptoms, with the same
consequence of relegation among the women, in certain Nogai Tatars
on the Kuban.
The plural (Herod., iv. 69) reminds us of the Fravashi of the king
m the Avesta.
was beheaded whom the diviners, or a majority of them,
pronounced to be the culprit. When the king commanded
the death of a man all his male offspring perished with
him (for fear of blood-revenge). He who gained a suit
before the king had the right to make a drinking-cup of
his adversary’s skull. Actions at law thus stood on the
same footing with war, for this is what one did after slay¬
ing a foe. The Scythians fought always on horseback
with bow and arrow, and the warrior drank the blood of
the first man he slew in battle, probably deeming that his
adversary’s prowess thus passed into him. No one shared
in booty who had not brought the king a foeman’s head;
the scalp was then tanned and hung on the bridle. Cap¬
tive slaves were blinded on the absurd pretext that this
kept them from stealing the mare’s-milk butter they were
employed to churn.
The government was strictly despotic, as appears most
plainly in the hideous customs at the burial of kings. The
corpse of an ordinary Scythian was carried about among
all the neighbours for forty days, and a funeral feast was
given by every friend so visited. But the royal corpse
was embalmed and passed in like manner from tribe to
tribe, and the people of each tribe joined the procession
with their whole bodies disfigured by bloody wounds, till
at length the royal tombs at Gerrhi were reached. Then
the king was buried along with one of his concubines, his
cupbearer, cook, groom, chamberlain, and messenger, all
of whom were slain. Horses, too, and golden utensils were
buried under the vast barrow that was raised over the grave.
Many such tumuli (called in Tatar Jcurgan) have been found
between the Dnieper and the sources of the Tokmak, a
tributary of the Molotchnaya. Then, on the first anniver¬
sary, yet fifty horses and fifty free-born Scythian servants
of the king were slain, and the latter were pinned upright
on the stuffed horses as watchmen over the dead.
The Scythians deemed themselves autochthonous; their
patriarch was Targitaus, a son of the god of heaven by a
daughter of the river Dnieper. This legend, with the
site of the royal graves, points to the lower Dnieper as
the cradle of their kingdom. The further legend (Herod.,
iv. 5) of the golden plough, yoke, battle-axe, and cup
(tokens of sovereignty over husbandmen and warriors)
that fell from heaven, and burned when the two eldest
sons of Targitaus approached them, but allowed the
youngest son to take them and become king, has been
well compared by Duncker with the Iranian conception
of hvareno, the halo of majesty, which refused to be
grasped by the Turanian Franrage, but attached itself to
pious kings like Thraetaona. The eldest brother, Lipoxais,
wTas ancestor of the Auchatse; the second, Arpoxais, of
the Catiari and Traspians ; the youngest, Colaxais (whose
name seems to be mutilated), was father of the royal
tribe of Paralatse, and from him, too, the whole nation
had the name of Scolots. Pliny (H.N., iv. 88) places the
Auchatse on the upper Bug, so this seems to be the proper
name of the agricultural Scythians; if so, the Catiari and
Traspians will be the Borysthenian and nomad Scythians
who dwelt between the husbandmen and the royal horde.
Colaxais divided his kingdom among his three sons, the
chief kingdom being that in which the golden relics were
kept; and these three sons correspond to the three kings
of the ^ Scythians in the time of Darius’s invasion, viz.,
Scopasis, whose realm bordered on the Sarmatians; Idan-
thyrsus, sovereign of the chief kingdom; and Taxacis,—the
last two being neighbours of the Budini and the Geloni.
According to the Scythians, Targitaus lived just a thousand
years before the year 513 B.c.,—a legend which, taken with
the tradition of autochthonism, indicates a much earlier
date for the immigration of the Scythians than we should
deduce from other narratives.