‘The Scythian Empire’ Review: The Riders From the Steppe
A powerful central Asian culture left its mark on civilizations from the Black Sea to the Yellow River, but history has better remembered its successors.
Scholarly depth and breadth rarely meet on equal terms. In “The Scythian Empire: Central Eurasia and the Birth of the Classical Age From Persia to China,” Christopher I. Beckwith marries the two to memorable effect. A professor of Eurasian studies at Indiana University Bloomington, Mr. Beckwith asserts the primacy of the Scythian Empire’s influence on the classical age. The Scythians, pastoral nomads who roamed the Central Eurasian steppe zone from around the eighth century B.C., are traditionally dismissed as uncouth predators whose legacy was negative, inconsequential or, at best, ambiguous. In the fifth century B.C., Aristophanes portrayed oafish, heavily accented Scythians policing Athens, while Herodotus decried their rule over the vanquished for its “violence and . . . pride”: “besides exacting from each the tribute which was assessed, they rode about the land carrying off everyone’s possessions.” Yet to Mr. Beckwith, the Scythians represent “one of the least known but most influential realms in all of world history.”
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The Scythian Empire: Central Eurasia and the Birth of the Classical Age from Persia to China
Historians have acknowledged Scythian innovations, including an unprecedented feudal structure, monotheism and sophisticated weapons—namely, short composite bows that allowed mounted archers greater range of movement. These practices are typically thought to have been copied by their better-known imperial successors, the Medes and Persians. Mr. Beckwith contends, however, that the Medes and Persians were actually “creolized” Scythians.
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Pre-Scythian Medes inhabited parts of contemporary Iran, Turkey and Iraq; theirs was “strictly a geographical region, not an ethnolinguistic entity or a political unit,” according to Mr. Beckwith. A fully realized Mede polity dates to Cyaxares’s overthrow of the Scythians (ca. 620 B.C.). “Raised as a Scythian,” Cyaxares is not known to have altered any “inherited Scythian clothing, weapons, state structure, religious beliefs, etc,” Mr. Beckwith writes. To do so would have gone against the grain, “because by that time . . . the Scythians . . . and the native peoples had merged.”
The reigns of the Medes and Persians, initiated by coups, were validated by their leaders’ identification with the Scythians’ royal lineage. Cyaxares, who led an allied force against the Assyrians, captured and destroyed Nineveh in 612 B.C. He was followed by his purported son, Astyages. Cyrus II, Astyages’s Persian grandson, in turn seized power in 550 B.C. Carrying on the Scytho-Mede line, Cyrus “kept the Empire and the entire imperial system intact—with the exception of the religious element—when he overthrew the Mede king.” Mr. Beckwith refers to this longest-lasting iteration as the Scytho-Mede-Persian Empire.
If the Medes and Persians were, in essential respects, Scythian by another name, why was the Scythian system so attractive to usurpers and impervious to change? The appeals of Scythian feudalism were its religious justification and the coherence of its “package”—the sovereign served the one God of Heaven and was supported by an evolving pyramid of vassals. Religion legitimized the king and imbued his subjects, direct and indirect, with divine purpose. Later claimants, Mr. Beckwith observes, could not retain their feudal hierarchy without its religious underpinning.
Proof can be found in the short-lived polytheism of Cyrus and Cambyses II: “They clearly did not understand,” Mr. Beckwith points out, “that because local ‘national God’ cults legitimized local national rulers, i.e., independent kings, a single unified empire required a single ruler legitimized by a single God.” Darius I restored the status quo ante, declaring, “The Great God is Ahuramazdā, who created this earth, who created that heaven, who created man, who created happiness for man, who made Darius king, one king of many, one lord of many.”
Mr. Beckwith cites linguistic evidence for the Scythians’ widespread legacy. Three cities called Agamatāna were built by Scythians (or Scythian speakers) “at the same time, but very far apart”: the Mede capital in modern-day Iran and, thousands of miles to the east, successive capitals of the Scytho-Chinese state of Chao. The author also notes that variants of the Scythian word for “royal line,” Aria, preserved its meaning in Bactrian, Old Persian and Chinese: “This word Harya . . . came to be used by Chinese speakers in the fourth century B.C. to refer to themselves, i.e., ‘us the Chinese’, meaning those who belonged to the legitimate ruling lineage, Harya.” A national signifier from Iran to China, Aria attests to Scythian reach.
An epilogue on capital-P Philosophy considers Scythian links to the “first great philosophers” of Greece, Iran, India and China: Anacharsis (“the Scythian”), Zoroaster, Gautama (“the Scythian Sage”) and Laotzu. Anacharsis, an early Greek Skeptic was half Scythian by birth and education. Zoroaster’s Gathas (“Hymns”) were composed in Old Avestan, an archaic dialect of Imperial Scythian. Gautama hailed from northwestern India or Central Asia, “regions known to have been ruled by the Scythians, Scytho-Medes, and related peoples who succeeded them.” Mr. Beckwith transcribes the foreign-born Laotzu’s full name, Lao-tan—“lao” was formerly pronounced like “k’ao”—into the Sanskrit Gautama. For Mr. Beckwith, the simultaneous appearance of these revolutionary figures and ideas was no coincidence. Rejecting the belief that ancient cultures were conceived locally, he proposes that the Scythians were the common denominator that “produced the great shared cultural flowering known as the Classical Age.”
Of Mr. Beckwith’s eight fresh and penetrating chapters, only the sixth, on Classical Scythian philology, is likely to challenge the nonspecialist. For the rest of the text, his prose and data-driven analysis are clear. But superior delivery does not on its own set his book apart. “The Scythian Empire” is simply, dazzlingly original. Ever-narrowing fields of academic study and inability to see the whole historical picture, he suggests, partly explain the Scythians’ discredit and neglect. As for Mr. Beckwith, his curiosity, imagination and learning—from the Yellow River to the Danube, from archaeology to linguistics—do what every history ought to do but few achieve: compel the reader to think.
Mr. Carter is vice chairman of 20th and 21st century art at Christie’s in New York.
Appeared in the January 21, 2023, print edition as 'The Figure In the Carpet'.