The Wrong Nomads
The Scythians have always been useful to other people. Herodotus devoted the fourth book of his Histories to them, and used them chiefly to establish what a Greek was by describing somebody who was not one: no cities, no ploughed fields, no temples, and a set of funeral customs to make an Athenian’s hair stand up.
Two and a half thousand years later they were still being pressed into service. In January 1918, with the empire collapsing around him, Alexander Blok wrote a poem called The Scythians, addressed to Europe, which opens:
Yea, we are Scythians, Yea, Asians, a squint-eyed, greedy brood.
(Trans. Babette Deutsch and Avrahm Yarmolinsky, Modern Russian Poetry (1921)
Blok’s Russian is grander than that, incidentally—his word for “eyes” is the high, archaic one, and the whole force of the line lies in the collision between barbarian content and ceremonial diction. His translators, working three years later, heard rather more insult in it than was actually there. Which is itself one more episode in the long history of people helping themselves to the Scythians.
Herodotus used them to say we are not that. Blok used them to say we are. The nomads themselves have never been consulted.
When I wrote about the steppes north of the Black Sea as the Indo-European homeland, we left aside the fact that it was not only the Hittites who came out of them. The roads of the Indo-European nomads diverged—and then met again on the Armenian Highland, at the end of the Urartian period.
Two routes
The Cimmerians took the Black Sea road. Their country lay between the Dnieper and the Don, and their way into the Near East ran along the coast. In the eighth and seventh centuries BC they were plundering Phrygia—the kingdom of King Midas, whose historical original, Mita of Mushki, appears to have been ruined by precisely these people—along with Cappadocia and eastern Anatolia.
The Scythians came later and by another road. Their earlier homeland lay further east, in the steppes of southern Siberia and Central Asia, from which they moved west into the Black Sea region and the northern Caucasus. By the seventh century BC Scythian bands were crossing the Darial Gorge and other passes of the Greater Caucasus into Transcaucasia, and reaching Media and Assyria.
These migrations coincided with a much heavier trial for Urartu, which by then had spent nearly a century in exhausting wars with Assyria. It was the Assyrian campaigns that did most to undermine the kingdom; when nomad raids were added to them, the state was left badly weakened, and Media put the final full stop to its history around 590 BC.
The stela, and the fifteen-hundred-year error
To the period immediately after the fall of Urartu belongs a stone stela found in 2020 at Ormanlı, in the Şenkaya district of Erzurum province. It dates to roughly the fifth century BC—about 2,500 years ago.
The Turkish press reported it as Kipchak. This is unlikely to be correct.
The Kipchaks—the Cumans, or the Polovtsians of Russian chronicle and of Borodin’s Prince Igor—do not appear in the Near East until the ninth to eleventh centuries AD, which is more than fifteen hundred years after this monument was carved.
What we most probably have is a statue of exactly those Indo-European nomads who were working the region over at the time. Stone figures of this kind, known in Russian as kamennye baby—“stone women,” though most of them are men, the name coming not from any female subject but from a Turkic word for “ancestor”—are found right across Eurasia, from the steppes of southern Siberia and Kazakhstan to Ukraine and the Black Sea coast. They are generally memorials, connected with the cult of ancestors and of warriors.
The Erzurum stela fits neatly into that tradition, and shows how the steppe style reached the Armenian Highland at a transitional moment—between the fall of Urartu and the arrival of the Achaemenid Persians.
The gesture
It has one further peculiarity. The figure is shown with its arms crossed on its breast, as though hugging itself.
Today the pose reads as a meme. At the time it was very probably a sacred sign—a symbol of protection, or the attitude of the dead. And yet there is something recognisable in it all the same: it seems to tie the world of the ancient nomads to our own.
It was just then, in the sixth century BC, that a new power was coming onto the stage: the Achaemenid Persian empire. I shall write about its exhibits in the Erzurum Museum next time.
