[MUSIC PLAYING]
[APPLAUSE]
BARRY CUNLIFFE:
Ladies and gentlemen,
thank you for coming.
When I was talking to my editor
at Oxford University Press,
and she said, what are
you going to write next,
and I said, I'm going to
write about the Scythians,
her immediate reaction
was, who are they?
And I think that is not
unusual for the British
because we don't know
very much about them.
And we have had very few
exhibitions, traveling
exhibitions, of
Scythian material,
except one about a year
ago, a brilliant exhibition
at the British Museum which
some of you may have seen.
But before that, the last
exhibition was about 1978.
And if you want to see Scythian
material in British museums,
there's only one
small collection,
just a few artifacts,
in the museum in Oxford.
So they are really
not on our radar,
except that they
are very important.
The Greek historian
Ephorus, writing in
about the fourth
century BC, said
that there were four great
peoples of the barbarian world.
The Celts, the Scythians,
the Libyans in North Africa,
and the Indians.
So to a Greek, these were one
of the really important sets
of barbarians.
Where are they
and when are they?
Well, where are they is that
they live on the steppe.
And that's the dark
green bit on the map.
You can see this
great swathe of carpet
going from Manchuria in the
east right across central Europe
and ending up in the Great
Hungarian Plain up there.
Great Hungarian Plain is
the last bit of steppe.
So that area, open,
rolling grassland,
is the homeland of these people.
As you've seen from the
title, they were nomads,
and they responded--
they were conditioned,
their lifestyle
was conditioned
by this grassland.
Now, there is one very important
thing to know about this.
And that is that the steppe
is not an even environment.
The steppe up here in
Mongolia, which is--
if you want to see steppe,
that's the place to go--
is cold and very dry.
But as you get further and
further and further west,
it gets more moderate
in temperature,
and certainly wetter.
And that means that
the grass is lusher.
So if you were steppe
nomads in that area,
there would be a
tendency always to want
to move further west,
where the grass literally
is greener all the way.
And that sets up what's called
the steppe gradient, which
encourages people to move,
and to move, and to move.
And the whole history
of the Scythian
and the Scythian-related
peoples is
of this movement, always from
the east to the west, always
ending up in the Great Hungarian
Plain, which, as I say,
is the last bit of
steppe in the area.
Now, there is a bit
of steppe-- that's
a Mongolian steppe, in
fact, where, as I say,
it was very, very
well-preserved.
And this rolling grassland.
And if you-- you really need
to be there to appreciate it.
If you are on a horse--
this was taken from a horse.
If you're on a horse and
just going into the steppe,
you are drawn on.
You want to move.
There are no
constraints in movement.
You just want to move, and
move, and move, and move.
That's what quite a lot of the
travelers in the 19th century
were saying about the steppe.
It is a landscape of movement.
It encourages you always to find
out what's over the next hill.
And this lies behind the sort
of people we're talking about.
The area in which they
live encourages them always
to move on.
And they use, of
course, the horse.
The horse is very important.
This is the natural
environment for the horse.
These are wild horses, the
Przewalski's horse running wild
in Mongolia, in this
particular case.
Quite tame.
You can get up quite close
to them and photograph them.
So you've got the
animal for movement,
and you've got the
landscape for movement.
Sometime-- must've been around
in the middle of the fourth
millennium anyway--
some bright lad who
was herding horses
decided presumably to jump on a
horse and see what it was like.
And that's where horse riding
began here in the steppe
some time around
3,500, 3,400 BC.
And that changed the dynamic.
If you were now
riding on horses,
you could range over larger
and larger and larger areas
than if you were on your
feet as pastoralists
trying to round them up.
So horse riding starts here.
Horse domestication starts here.
But for a long time, the people
were simply pastoralists just
looking after their
animals fairly--
at a very simple level.
Sometime around about 1,000
BC, climate began to change.
And climate change is
an incredible dynamic
in archeology and
in anthropology.
We're beginning to recognize it.
Climate change, even
slight shifts of climate
can shove cultural
development very quickly
in a particular direction.
And it did so here.
This is a bit of the
Altai Mountains, which
is the mountainous
bit between Mongolia
and the rest of the steppe.
And it's called the
Minusinsk basin,
but that doesn't much matter.
The point I want to make
is it's mountainous.
There are sand mountains,
the Altai Mountains here.
It's a plain of very good
steppe, but very well-watered.
And some time about
1,000, as I say,
the temperature
suddenly improved.
It got warmer and wetter.
And the grass here
became much, much lusher.
And that gave people
more freedom .
They weren't constrained.
They were able to
move around more.
They were able to have
more leisure time.
And with that more
leisure time, it's
quite clear they began to
raid and develop tendencies
to want to move
out of their area,
find out what's behind it.
Perhaps gangs of young men
with nothing better to do,
and then bringing back the
animals they've raided,
bringing back the women they've
caught, or something like that.
But a new mobility
and a new freedom
connected with the rise of
a much more aggressive kind
of archeology.
The archeology of
warriors, in fact.
So here, we've got climate
really affecting economy,
which is affecting society.
And this is where what I
would call predatory nomads--
as opposed to ordinary
simple pastoral nomads--
predatory nomads begin.
And you can see their
equipment very clearly here.
The arrows at the top--
the bow and arrow
is very important,
as we see in a moment.
The short swords,
very effective.
Made of bronze, in this case.
And a very, very effective
thing, this battle
ax, either with a heavy
hammer end or a nice spiky end
for waving at your
enemies from horseback.
A very good weapon for
fighting from horseback.
So suddenly, the archaeological
record produces--
well, it was certainly
over 100, 150 years--
produces these
signs of aggression.
And also signs that hierarchies
were beginning to appear.
That some were getting
rich, and richer and richer.
One of the richest
early burials we've got
comes from more or less the
area I've just shown you.
It's a place called Arzhan.
And it was excavated about 30
years ago, 30, 40 years ago.
A large barrow,
a mound of earth.
As you see, it's about
60, 70 meters in diameter.
It has a pit in the middle--
there's a detail of it--
made of logs.
And that's where the ruler,
the king, or chief, or whatever
he was, was buried
with his female.
Probably not his
wife, because wives
in later Scythian
history, wives tend to--
wives survive husbands, tend
to go on and be quite powerful.
So this is a female
companion buried with him.
And all the way around him are
the coffins of his servants
who were killed at the time of
his death and buried with him.
And over here, these
black bits are the remains
of his six very fine horses.
So he is a wealthy person.
And when he dies, he is
provided with all this material.
He is buried, then, with his
female in the center there.
And around the outside is
this kind of timber structure.
And just to give
you some idea, that
contains 6,000
100-year-old larch trees.
So cutting down and
trimming 6,000 larch trees,
and moving them in, and
building into the structure
means he was able to command
a tremendous amount of power.
And within these
compartments, there
are horses buried with their
equipment, about 150 of them
altogether.
And looking at the
equipment with the horses,
archaeologists have been
able to show that they
come from very far away.
So presumably, here was a
person who was very important.
And people from
kilometers around
came and made offerings
at his burial.
So it suggests now that we're
getting big men, chieftains
emerging who are able to command
tremendous amount of power
and considerable territory.
This is 10th, ninth--
this is end of ninth
century that this appears.
And there is another
one, Arzhan 2,
which is even better
archaeologically in that it
wasn't robbed.
The other one, I should
say, had a pit dug into it,
and the bodies were dug out,
and all the gold with them.
But in this one, Arzhan
2, the central chamber
was perfectly preserved,
and so were the bodies,
and so was all their equipment.
And there were
thousands and thousands
of little gold objects there.
You can see that they had
gold bands around their legs.
And you can make out from this
that they were wearing clothes
which were sewn with gold.
Sewn with-- they were in fact
little 1-centimeter-long gold
animals.
Snow leopards, and deer,
and things like that.
And archaeology is enormous
fun, I hasten to add.
And when I was in
St. Petersburg,
in the museum meeting my
colleague who had actually
excavated this,
Russian archaeologist
who had excavated this, sitting
in a rather beat-up old office,
and he was telling me about it.
And I was asking him about
those little sewn-on things,
were they cast, or were
they hammered, and so on.
And he said, well, would
you like to see them?
So I-- yes, very much, expecting
to be taken to the museum.
So he went over to his very
battered old filing cabinet,
and took out a drawer,
brought out a big box,
put it on the table,
took off the lid,
and there were hundreds of these
wonderful little gold things,
and he was handing
them to me to look at.
The sort of thing that
would never normally happen.
You wouldn't be able to get
anywhere near them, normally.
So anyway, so it gives some idea
of the power of these people.
Gold, turquoise, garnet
are recurring things
in the burials of
the chieftains.
Now, that's about
the beginning of it.
And what we find then is that--
and the sites we've
been talking about
are right in the top
right-hand corner.
But the Scythian, or
Scythian-related peoples,
spread right across the
steppe to the royal Scyths
there north of the Black
Sea, the Pontiac area.
And they all had
different names.
And what we are seeing
there are the names
that the Greeks knew them by.
The Greeks were-- at
this stage, we're now
talking about fifth century.
Around the Black Sea, they
came into direct contact
with Scythians who were
north of the Black Sea.
And some Greeks actually
explored eastwards
and brought back the names.
So we've got all
those different names.
But they are all these
warrior nomad peoples.
And they were not static.
It was this constant
movement, a constant flow
of some breaking off and
going great distances,
setting themselves up
in positions of power
over the local natives, and
then moving on again and again.
And really like a lot of
dominoes falling the whole time
as these movements continued.
Now, the Scythians and
Scythian-related peoples
came into contact with
two main civilizations.
One were the Persians, who
occupied this area here.
And they write about the Saka.
And they say the Saka are just
the same as the Scythians.
The Saka are Scythians,
but we call them Saka.
So they write about them here.
And here is a relief
from Persepolis,
the Turkish capital, which
shows Scythians bringing gifts
to the Persian king.
And you know they're
Scythians because they
wear these pointed hats.
That's one of these
characteristics of them.
And here they are bringing
horses, gold, necklets,
and cloth of some sort.
Saddle cloth, presumably.
And this is part of
a monument that you
find that shows
all kinds of people
from all over the world
bringing gifts, specific gifts
for the Persian king.
So here are our Scythians.
Probably one of
the first images we
get of how the Scythians
would have looked.
Of course, they wear trousers as
well because they're horsemen.
And that's another way
of distinguishing them.
So Scythians in contact
with the Persians,
and Scythians in
contact with the Greeks.
Now, it's from the
Greeks that we get
some bits of history coming in.
We've got two sources,
basically, for Scythians.
We've got the archeology,
the hard archeology,
and we've got what the
Greeks tell us about them.
We have no history of Scythians
from the mouths of Scythians.
So the Greeks are always
looking at them as other,
so we've got to remember that.
But the Greeks tell us
that one batch of Scythians
moved down from the
heart of Asia Minor--
Asia somewhere, way
beyond the Caspian Sea.
And they moved down into the
steppe north of the Black Sea.
And one group settled where
I've cross-hatched there,
or hatched.
That's in the north Caucasus.
And we get this evidence
of them from the Greeks
moving through the
mountains because there
were good fights going on
down here in Asia Minor.
This was where the
Assyrians were.
And the Assyrians
were being beaten up
by the people of Urartu
who lived in that area.
So there were lucrative
wars going on.
And the Scythian
nomadic warriors
decided this was a good
place to be for a while.
So they spread down and
took part in these wars.
And we have detailed
accounts of how they fought,
and how they support--
had fought against
the Assyrians mainly.
And it's in that area that they
came across this art of Urartu,
a very distinct art.
And probably took back--
when they went back-- they were
only down here for a while,
and they go back home from
time to time and then come out
again--
they would have
taken back craftsmen.
And it's those
Urartian craftsmen
who start working gold--
this Is a gold dagger sheath--
and create these
curious little motifs
of half-man, half-fish-- well,
man-fish-horse creatures,
and make Scythian art which was,
up to this stage, rather bland.
Make it much more exciting.
And this sort of overlap
with the classical world
creates a very vibrant
and very distinctive art.
You can begin to
see it happen there.
Similarly-- that's that
batch of Scythians.
Others moved onto the steppe.
That green line marks the
northern edge of the steppe
before we get into the forest.
So settled here, north of
Crimea, in Ukraine, and went--
some of them penetrated
into the forest steppe.
And the different colors
there simply represent
different archaeologically
distinct groups of Scythians.
But overall, you get the
idea of where they are.
Some move through the
Carpathians into Transylvania,
and some moved on-- this is a
lot into the Great Hungarian
Plain.
So that's the sort
of geography of them.
And I've shown there
the main burial mounds.
And it was in this area that
they came into contact--
along the north shore
of the Black Sea--
they came into
contact with Greeks
who had set up colonies along
the north shore of the Black
Sea.
So they developed a sort of
symbiosis with the Greek world.
What the Scythians
were able to provide
were furs, horses, some corn,
grain, and slaves, all things
that the Greeks wanted.
What the Greeks
were able to provide
were little luxury goods--
wine and craftsmanship.
So Greek craftsmen in
this Black Sea interface
were making things
for the Scythians.
One of the things they
made was a lovely amphora,
a metal container for wine
which was decorated clearly
for Scythians taste, showing
the importance of the horse.
See Scythians tending,
hobbling a horse.
In this case, making a horse
lie down on the ground.
This human-horse relationship,
always very important.
Then we have these superb
little plaques showing Scythians
riding with their spears.
Those men are not
warriors attacking.
They're hunters.
And you can see what
they're hunting down here.
They're hunting hares.
And the hunt was very
important for the Scythians.
There's a wonderful
account which
the Greeks give
of a confrontation
between the Persian King
Darius and the Scythians.
And the Persian king
is really fed up.
He can't bring these Scythians
to have a good battle with him.
They keep on getting on their
horses and going off again.
But there is one time when the
two armies confront each other.
And then a hare,
we're told, runs
across the ground between
them, and the Scythians
forget the battle with the
Persians and go after the hare,
much to the real
annoyance of the Persians.
It's a good story, and
it may well be true,
but it does stress the
importance of hunting.
If they could tell that story,
then hunting must be important.
You can see, again,
typical dress here.
The soft boots.
The slightly baggy trousers.
The long coat of the rider.
And also, the characteristic
of long hair and beards,
which help distinguish them.
These coats were
presumably padded
with felt to keep them warm.
Now, the bow and arrow
are most important.
It was the main weapon.
And the bows were
these recurve types
made of bits of
wood stuck together,
sometimes with strips of
bone, and in that arc form.
And then you have to bend it
round with massive tension
there before you can string it,
and then even more tension when
you pull it.
And this bowl here, this beaker,
gives a marvelous indication
of how you string your bow.
Here is a typical Scythian with
his pointed hat and everything,
and he's stringing his bow.
He's bending it.
He's got it on one thigh,
and one knee is pressed back,
and he's pulling
it up in that way
so he can stretch
the string across.
Stringing the bow
was a real skill.
Here they are.
Here's one firing.
The bows were short bows,
of course, from horses.
And they all wore this
gorytos, which is a quiver,
for both the bow and the arrows.
They wore it on their left side.
And on this illustration, here
is a gorytos with its arrows
in there, and part of the strung
bow poking out at the top.
So you had that in
your left-hand side,
you could pull it
up very quickly,
take the arrows
out, and fire fast.
The arrow heads of bronze with
this rather nice little hook
on so that if you got
an arrow stuck in you,
it really hurt to pull
it out because you
ripped the wound apart.
So it was meant to keep
the arrows in the bodies
to make them less efficient.
Another way of making them
less efficient was with poison.
And we've got this
splendid account again
from one of the Greek writers
of how the Scythians were
adept at making poison.
They took the venom from
pregnant female snakes,
because it was
particularly vicious venom,
and they mixed it with blood and
left it for a couple of weeks
to ferment, and grow,
and get really nasty.
And then they smeared
their arrows with it.
And it was very effective.
So you didn't want to be on
the receiving end of a Scythian
arrow.
So that's one of the main
weapons that they worked with.
That bowl that we saw
from-- called [INAUDIBLE]..
The one up there with the
chap stringing his bow.
It's a very interesting bowl.
And if you look just
behind him, or just
sticking up from his
back, as it were,
there is his own gorytos
with his own bow in it.
So what he's doing,
he's stringing
a bow for someone else or
showing them how to do it.
It's not his own.
And that's the
sort of theme that
runs through the
other illustrations
on this particular vessel.
It's companionship.
It's working with someone.
There is one Scythian
binding the leg, presumably
of a wounded colleague.
Here are two friends in
intimate conversation.
And here, wonderful scene, and
goodness knows what he's doing,
but presumably
helping his friend
who's got toothache or
something like that.
But this sense of comradeship
is very important.
And it's brought
out here brilliantly
in this little bit of gold,
where at least these two guys--
it looks as though
it's a couple of drunks
fighting over a horn of wine.
But it presumably is the act of
creating a blood brotherhood.
And there are descriptions
of this, again in Herodotus,
how two people who are
going to be blood brothers
slash their arms, bleed
into a container of wine,
and then jointly drink
that container of wine.
That binds them for the
rest of their lives.
A typical piece of
social structure that
keeps warrior bands
together, and always
means that when
you go into battle,
you've got someone
watching your back,
and you're watching
someone else's back.
So it's a safer way of doing it.
Here's a reconstruction
from Kiev
museum based all solidly
on archaeological evidence
of a warrior who is actually
dressed for fighting.
There's his gorytos.
He's got his arrows in there.
He's holding his bow.
Typical baggy
trousers and boots.
Scale armor made of iron plates.
Very effective
overlapping scale armor.
Helmet, again with
iron scale armor.
And a good neck guard.
And he's carrying on
his back his shield
which is made of wickerwork.
Very light shield,
but very effective.
Keeps-- the blows glance off it.
And then two weapons,
the spear and the sword.
And there on a comb--
most of these things have been
found in the Pontic steppe
north of the Black Sea--
there is a battle
scene in operation.
Someone has been dismounted.
The horse is dying.
It's bleeding.
And there's someone
with his scale armor on,
and he's wearing in fact a
Greek helmet, in this case.
And he's going into
battle with someone
on his side against an enemy.
This may well be
his blood brother.
So a good scene of
battles in action.
So very fearsome appearance
of some kind of person
you wouldn't want to meet on
a tube station late at night.
It really is.
To be frightening.
To dress, to be frightening.
And here, on a
little gold band, is
someone carrying a human head.
And we have again descriptions
of civilians in battle,
and how they cut off the
heads of their enemies
because they were
paid or rewarded
according to the number
of enemies they'd killed.
So after the battle, they
had to have all these heads,
and bring them up, and have
them counted by the accountant
before they were
given their prize.
And it's much easier to do than
bringing up the whole body.
But then they also liked
to remember their enemies.
So they scalped them
and kept the scalps.
And Herodotus gives
us a brilliant account
of how they slice the skin from
ear to ear and around the back,
hold onto their hair, shake
it, and the skull falls out,
and they've got the scalp.
And they attach the scalps
to the reins of their horses.
But if they got
so many of them--
they're really very successful--
they actually make capes
out of scalps and wear them.
So I'm not endearing
you to them,
am I really, but it gives you
an idea of that society based,
you see, both on the
archaeological evidence
and visual evidence that
we've got, and on the accounts
that we've got.
We can balance the two together.
And one burial in the Altai
Mountains was actually scalped.
There's the mark of the
cut across his skull,
and the head doesn't
have any hair.
Now let's move to
the Altai Mountains,
because we get a
rather different view
of Scythian culture.
The Altai Mountains--
this is southern
Siberia now, just
north of Mongolia.
And you can see the
sort of landscape.
And here is what is called
a kurgan, a burial mound.
This is a very special--
is still just a very
special area in that
the ground freezes very hard.
It's where permafrost occurs.
And the ground freezes
to several meters' depth
every year, and then
thaws out in the summer,
but then freezes again.
Now, if you build a barrow
of stones over the ground,
it insulates it so the ground
beneath doesn't thaw out.
And that's very important.
It means that it
has preserved all
the archaeological material,
all the organic material which
you don't find anywhere else.
And here is these--
this is a place called
Pazyryk, and these burials
were excavated in the 1930s.
And then the archaeologists
were arrested by Stalin
and put in jail.
And then they were
let out in the 1940s,
and they went back and finished
the excavation, so good
was the material.
And here, you see
underneath the mound
a section of the
burial chambers built
of timber, plan of the burial
chambers built of timber,
rather like the ones we saw
earlier, with the burials
inside and all the
equipment buried
with the dead piled in
the spaces between the pit
and the chamber.
So piled in here.
You see bits of a
wheeled vehicle up there.
But the beauty of this is
that when they excavated it,
it was all perfectly preserved.
Now, how long it's going
to last with global warming
is a big issue.
And there are lots
of these cemeteries
in this area with
this wealth of really
marvelous archaeological
material perfectly safe.
No one needs to dig
them at the moment.
But when this global warming
starts and the permafrost
starts to go, then all this
archaeological evidence
will start to rot, and
you'll get back to only just
the metal surviving.
So it's a rather crucial time.
Now, let's just
see what there is.
Well, these are old
archive photographs.
But actually, even the
bodies are preserved,
and the skin on the bodies.
You can see that
guy fairly well.
And here lots of details.
This one has been cut open there
and along there, and sewn up
again.
And what was happening
here was that they
were taking out the entrails
and the bits that rot quickly
and stuffing the bodies
with straw and things
like that so that they
could be kept for a while.
Herodotus again describes this.
He says exactly that.
They open up the
bodies, and they
put herbs, and nice-smelling
things, and grass inside
and stuff them.
And so that they can carry
them 'round and show them
to all the people
in the tribal area.
Show the body.
And this is a part of-- it's
rather like the Queen Mother
lying in state in Britain.
It's that tradition of
needing to show people
that the king is dead so that
the successor has legitimacy.
So they're taking
the bodies around.
I think there's probably
another reason here in the Altai
Mountains, that if you
died in the winter,
no one would be able
to dig into the ground.
It's too tough
because of the frost.
And the body would have to
be kept until the summer
before burial.
So here, archaeological
evidence again supporting
exactly what Herodotus says.
Some of the bodies
were tattooed.
In fact, many of
them are tattooed.
This one looks almost
like my daughter.
[LAUGHTER]
But you can see--
quite literally.
And you can see here--
this is a piece of skin
from this chap's shoulder--
how wonderful the tattoos are.
These superb animals.
You can probably
make up the head
of a deer there with its
antlers over its back,
and its front leg, and its back
legs bent back on themselves.
It's a superb piece of art.
And this of course, would
have been totally lost to us
had this body rotted.
But here, all of this would
have meant a great deal,
and someone would have been
able to read this fellow.
It's like having a
bar code on your back,
and anyone who can read that bar
code would know what family he
belonged to, what tribe
he belonged to, and so on.
This is family history.
And as I say, all
the organic things
are preserved, including
this wonderful saddle
cloth made of felt with
applique decorations.
Again, wonderful animals,
and horse hair, and so on.
And the bridles are carved
out of wood with, again,
vitals of animal art.
Clothing.
That's a cloak made of skins
of animals sewn together.
And shoes.
Look how decorated the
sole of the shoe is.
This is with bits of
shiny marcasite attached.
And you wonder why you
do the sole of your boot.
That's because you're sitting
on the floor squatting
all the time, and the soles of
your feet, as it were, show.
It's part of your
visual display.
And then little
details like this.
A container holding hemp seeds.
And the burner with hot stone--
well, stones which were heated.
And hemp seeds were put on, and
they found charred hemp seeds
here.
And these sticks would have
taken a tent-like structure.
And this is where you go
to inhale fumes of hemp.
And again, the archaeological
evidence for it--
and Herodotus--
tells us exactly this.
That after funerals and so
on, they went into tents,
they inhaled hemp, and
they got high on it.
But it was a bit of purification
after the ceremonies of the--
the death ceremonies.
Some of the barrows--
I won't bore you
with all the detail
now that time is getting
on, but some of the barrows
were massive.
This is Chertomlyk, one
on the Pontic steppe.
They were built entirely of
turf on the Pontic steppe.
And that particular
one, it's got something
like a million turfs,
they reckon, building it.
Big turf-- cut a big
turf, sort of like this.
But about a million.
And some of them--
they've looked at what was
growing in the grass and so on.
Some of them must have come
from 4 or 5 kilometers away.
So to build that,
rather than just dig
a ditch around it
to pile up the dirt,
they've absolutely
devastated the pasture
for many, many kilometers
around to bring the turf in.
And that may well be that it's
giving the dead person pasture.
Your control of pasture is very
important for your livelihood.
So it's bringing the
pasture to the dead person.
It's a very interesting concept.
There's not time to go into
the deities in any detail,
simply to say that they had
an idea of their origins.
They believe that
a god of some kind
met with a water nymph
with half-female and half
with a sort of serpent tail.
And the result of
that was three boys.
And they were set a task,
and one boy succeeded.
And he was the founder
of the Scythians.
I think most people
have got origin myths,
and that's just one.
I haven't time to
go into that now.
And here is another
bit of mythology.
This is a carpet from Pazyryk.
Carpets are preserved
there as well.
And here is a rider approaching
a female goddess who
is holding the tree of life.
And this is presumably the
communion of the life forces
with the actual real world.
The warrior and
the goddess again.
And here again, on this gold
plaque, you've got the same.
You've got the goddess sitting.
The tree of life is over there.
And there is the warrior
approaching her on a horse.
So they've got this
very complex mythology
that we can just
begin to sketch out.
But we can't get to
the detail of it.
And then this brilliant,
brilliant animal art.
It's the art of predation.
Always conflict.
Conflict between the
wild and the less wild.
Snow leopards attacking deer.
Vicious birds
attacking deer again.
Or griffins attacking
a horse, and so on.
The art of predation.
This must represent some sort of
world view of the tension there
always is between the
more domestic world
and the wild world.
But again, we can just spot it
there, and not do much more.
But it does come close to us.
The Scythians moved into Eastern
Europe, into Hungary and so on,
and came up against the Celts.
And the Celts learned quite
a lot from the Scythians,
particularly Celtic art
learned from the Scythians.
So here is, from
the Altai Mountains,
a wooden boss with a
predatory bird on it.
Wonderful curved beak,
evil eye, and great wings.
Another predatory bird here.
There is its beak.
So two birds.
And here, from the
Thames at Wandsworth,
is a shield boss
with, again, the same.
The predatory bird
with its wings
spreading out on either side,
and the other bird opposite it
with the same sort of beak.
So here is a transmission of
some spirit of Scythian art
into the Celtic world, and
very much into our world.
This is only, what, a
couple of kilometers
from where we are now.
So they're not as
remote, perhaps,
as one might have thought.
Now, the Scythians
are only one of
the many predatory nomad tribes
that occupied the middle Asia.
The last of them that we know
about were called Alans--
but again,
essentially Scythians.
And the Alans lived in
the fourth century AD
where you see that pink.
And by that stage, this
was the Roman world.
But the Huns, one of
the predators coming in
from the Far East, moved in into
the land occupied by the Alans.
And the Alans were pushed out.
And some of the Alans--
you can see them in
that reddish line--
in around 370 moved into Europe.
They moved through
the Atlas Mountains,
and moved right
across towards Lisbon.
They were migrating people
who were joined by the Germans
and joined by the Huns, some
of the many migrating peoples
who poured into
Europe and brought
about the end of
the Roman Empire.
But essentially, it's
the same movement.
People in the Pontic
steppe being pushed out
by people coming
in from the east.
And they're pushed out.
Where do they go?
They go down into Asia Minor,
or they go into Europe.
And here we find them right
up against the Atlantic.
So our Scythians.
Horsemen.
Companions with a very, very
distinct kind of lifestyle,
very different from that of
settled agriculturalists.
They were not settled
agriculturalists,
and their lifestyle was
necessarily different.
What remains of them.
I suppose if you really wanted
to see the last remnants
of the Scythians--
or the Alans, in fact,
their successors--
you'd probably go to the
north Caucasus, to Ossetia,
North Ossetia, where
even in the 13th century,
the people were still--
AD-- people were still
called Alans there.
And there are still
words of Scythian
that are spoken in that area.
So the Scythians
still have successors,
as it were, in our world,
but in very remote places.
But their genes, the Scythian
genes, the nomad genes
from the steppe pervade us all.
OK, I must stop there.
I've gone on too long.
But any questions, I'm
very happy to have them.
AUDIENCE: Thanks for that.
It was really very interesting.
You just mentioned
Scythian language.
Can you talk a bit about
the linguistic picture
of that group?
BARRY CUNLIFFE: Not really.
Not really is the answer.
No.
It's not a simple
Indo-European language.
It's quite complex.
But since we have
so little of it--
they wrote nothing.
And there are no place names.
There's no real hard
evidence to go on.
It's just these few words that
remain in Ossetian language.
But I'm sorry, I can't say more.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
I can only say
that is really interesting
and very gripping.
If not linguistically, do we
have any DNA evidence maybe
from [INAUDIBLE]?
And you said the
homeland was East Altai.
Does that bring them into
relationship with Mongols,
and maybe--
or?
BARRY CUNLIFFE: Yes.
Well, the homeland
in the Altai, it's
quite clear that these
nomads always need to--
really, to be pure
nomads, they needed
to relate to communities
that were growing grain.
So you've got some in Central
Asia relating to the Persians,
in Pontic steppe, relating
to the Greeks, and so on.
But those who were in
the Altai were also
relating down into China.
And quite a lot of
Chinese artifacts
are based on Scythian ones.
And it's quite clear that the
people from the Altai Mountains
were providing horses,
and horse gear,
and training for the
developing Chinese world.
I couldn't go into
that, but that is there.
And one of the wheeled
vehicles that I pointed out
stuffed in the side of a
grave, that almost certainly is
a Chinese item that
is brought from China
out to the Altai Mountains.
There's also Chinese
silk that comes up.
So they are quite clearly in
contact with China as well.
And the first part of your
question about genetics.
A lot of work is now being
done on ancient DNA which
is of enormous
importance to archeology.
And it's mainly concentrated
on the earlier period,
and identifying steppe genes,
a genetic package that you
can say, that's from
the steppe, and trying
to trace that through Europe.
But it's difficult because
the first lot of steppe genes
comes into Europe long
before the Scythians.
There are people from the
steppe pouring into Europe,
and the Scythians is--
they are merely part
of a very long story.
So the first steppe genes
that come into Europe
are around about
2,900, 2,800 BC.
So couple of thousand
years earlier.
And interestingly,
a recent paper
was published in
"Nature" showing
that there was a lot of steppe
genes in Europe at that time.
And that somewhere
around 2,400, there
was a major incursion of people
with steppe genes into Britain
as well as part of
this earlier movement.
The geneticists who write
about it say a 90% replacement
of population, which I
cannot possibly believe.
I can't see how
you could replace
a population over a couple
of hundred years 90%.
But there is a lot
of steppe gene.
So genetics-- and
people have rather
tended to concentrate on the
earlier genetics rather than
the later, because the later
picture is much clearer
archaeologically
and historically.
But when they've worked
out all the early stuff,
they'll no doubt move into
looking at these later.
AUDIENCE: Thank you
so much for that.
It was really interesting.
You touched briefly
upon the wives
in the later stages
of Scythian culture,
the wives gaining
importance in communities.
Just wondering,
what was the role
of women in the Scythian
nomad communities?
Presumably, if the men were
all off fighting and hunting
all the time, what
are the women doing?
BARRY CUNLIFFE: Right.
Looking after the children
and the animals is the answer.
But no, it's important,
because I left out
the whole gender
bit, which is very
interesting among the Scythians.
There was much less
rigid gender division.
Some groups of Scythians--
in fact, Sarmatians, people
called Sarmatians, the women
were brought up as fighters.
And women were not allowed
to marry until they
had killed their first enemy.
And you can see
this in the burials,
that there are female bodies
decked out just like a male.
And Amazons, the story
of the Amazons, which
one hears about how they
cauterized the breasts so
that it didn't get in the way
of the bow string and so on.
And so certainly,
that gender overlap--
wasn't a gap.
Nor at the other end.
There were men who
are called effeminates
who were given great status.
They became the priests,
and the shaman, and so on.
They were seen to be
slightly different,
but they were important.
So society is much more
interesting, I think--
well, than perhaps a Victorian
society in Britain was.
And the general idea is that--
and I think that is right,
that the women
really did mostly--
they were the home base.
And the home base
was always moving.
That's the point.
And someone had to
look after that home
base, and the animals, and
the old, and the very young.
So I think that's probably
the general model.
But there are all
these subtleties
around the edge of it which
make it very, very interesting.
AUDIENCE: Professor, thank you
very much for a great talk.
I have a quick
question, because I've
been fascinated by
Scythians and Sarmatians,
so I've been doing a bit of
reading and going through all
this exhibitions and whatnot.
I just wanted to get your
take on the language,
because I was under
the impression
that their language belongs
to the Indo-Iranian branch
of Indo-European language,
especially when it
comes to Ossetia.
And Ossetians, they call
themselves "Irun," which
is the abbreviation of Iran.
So I just wondered, do
you support that kind of--
BARRY CUNLIFFE: I have to be
honest that I'm not a linguist.
So I've read things
about it, but I really
don't have any opinions.
But I think that it is
an Indo-Iranian language
is absolutely correct.
And indeed, the whole mythology,
what we know of mythology--
and I've had to leave
out quite a lot,
but the whole mythology
is very much Indo--
is Iranian-based.
And there are big
similarities there.
But I think we're talking
more of an area of Iran
and the steppe
sharing a culture,
rather than a flow from one
to the other necessarily.
It's much more of a
large area of sharing.
But I'm sorry I can't answer
the language question.
SPEAKER: Thank you very
much, Sir Barry Cunliffe.
BARRY CUNLIFFE: Thank you.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
