With the Scoloti war was the most honourable occupation; those who pursued a handicraft were not held in such respect as the rest;[494] the wealthier men had numerous slaves to look after their flocks, and do the work in their tents. The Scoloti usually fought as bowmen on horseback. Their bows were of peculiar form and curvature;[495] the copper points of their arrows are said to have been poisoned;[496] beside the bow they carried a battle-axe, sabre, dagger, and lance, with a whip.[497] Their corslets and shields are said to have been made of elk's skin. "No man escapes them," Herodotus says; "and no man can overtake them and bring them to hand-conflict, if they do not wish to be overtaken, and their rivers help them." When a Scolote slays an enemy for the first time, he drinks of his blood;[498] he who has slain no enemy receives no wine at the banquet which the chief of the canton gives once in each year, but must sit neglected in a corner; he who has slain many enemies, drinks out of two goblets at once.[499] The Scoloti take the scalps from their slain enemies and hang them on the bridles of the horses, and he who has most of these scalps passes for the bravest. Some take the skins from the dead, and make of them covers for their quivers. Any one who would have a share in the booty must bring to the king the heads of the enemies he has slain.[500] They sacrifice every hundredth man among the prisoners, and keep the rest as slaves. If a Scolote has a quarrel with another, and receives him from the king to put to death, he preserves his skull, even though he may be a near relation. The poorer people cover these skulls with ox-hide; the wealthier have them gilded, and use them as drinking-vessels: if a stranger comes among them, they exhibit these skulls, and boast of them.[501]
According to this description the Scoloti were a people, who, by the pursuit of agriculture at the mouths of their rivers, by some handicraft, by dividing the land into cantons, by fixing sacred places in the cantons, and by a monarchy governing all the tribes, had advanced beyond the nomadic stage. Hardened by life in the steppes, accustomed to bear hardships, and content with little, the Scoloti are excellent riders, and soldiers of great endurance. The picture which Herodotus has given of their manners displays a certain carelessness, kindliness, and sociability, but these qualities are accompanied by traits of horrid barbarism, cruelty, and blood-thirstiness. They can endure hunger and thirst; they take pleasure in banquets and drinking. The head of the tribe assembles his tribe each year for a feast, at which the brave men drink out of two goblets at once. The nearest relatives place the body of the dead on a waggon, and carry it round among their friends, each of whom provides a banquet, at which food is placed for the dead as well as for the living. When forty days have been spent in this manner, the dead person is buried.[502] When the Hellenes introduced wine among the Scyths—the introduction perhaps took place after the beginning of the seventh century—men and women drank immoderately of it beside their mare's milk, and became violently intoxicated.[503] They also lived in great uncleanliness. The want of water in their steppes made cleanliness difficult, but that was no reason for never washing themselves at all, which Herodotus tells us was the habit of the Scoloti. Only the wealthier sort among the Scoloti had more than one wife; the women were without rights, and belonged to their husbands in just the same way as any head of their cattle: this right of property in the wife even descended to the sons, who had an hereditary claim and right to their mothers. The execution of the family along with the guilty person; the blinding of slaves, which certainly cannot have been so widely spread as Herodotus maintains; the use of scalps for ornaments; and the custom of drinking out of the skulls of slain enemies, are barbarous practices. The self-mutilation at the death of a king, the strangling of the servants of a dead ruler, and of one of his wives, that they may accompany him into the grave, the setting up of horses and men slain for the purpose as a body-guard round the graves of the kings, are indeed a proof of veneration and honour towards the chief of the nation, but the form which this veneration takes is savage and cruel.
According to the statement of Herodotus, it was after the middle of the seventh century B.C. that the Scoloti first came from the East and reached the northern shore of the Black Sea. This is contradicted by the acquaintance which the Homeric poems show with the milkers of horses beyond the Thracians; by the narrative of Herodotus himself, according to which the Amazons, conquered in old days by Heracles on the Thermodon, fled to the shore of the Mæotis, and found the Scoloti there, and became the mothers of the Sarmatians by the young men of that tribe;[504] and lastly, by the legend of the Scoloti themselves, according to which they were derived from the daughter of the river Borysthenes. According to this they regarded themselves in any case as a tribe settled from all antiquity on the Borysthenes, and with this the statement of Herodotus agrees when he tells us, that the Scoloti maintained that 1000 years had elapsed since the time of their progenitor, the son of the sky-god, and the daughter of the Borysthenes, down to the time of King Darius.[505] Herodotus represents the Scoloti as driven to the west by the Massagetæ, who dwelt in the east, a tribe which we shall have to seek on the Jaxartes. In this way the Scoloti come into the land of the Cimmerians, who inhabit the north shore of the Black Sea, and the Cimmerians fly before them to Asia Minor. It was shown above that the Cimmerians appeared at the mouths of the Halys about the year 750 B.C., and that soon after the year 700 B.C. they traversed Phrygia, and in the first decade of the seventh century came into collision with the Assyrians and the Lydians (I. 546 ff.). If we cannot contest the fact with Herodotus, that the Scoloti formerly came from the east into the steppes above the Black Sea, his narrative of their actual irruption into the land of the Cimmerians is self-contradictory. When the Scoloti came from the east, the Cimmerians debated on the Tyras, i. e. on the Dniester, whether they should resist or give way; they determined to give way, and fled from this land—not westward to the Danube, but eastward along the shore of the Black Sea to Asia. If they wished, when assembled on the Dniester, to retire before the enemy coming from the east, they must go to the west: Herodotus represents them as going from the Dniester to the east directly in the teeth of the advancing enemy in order to reach Asia Minor round the north and east shores of the Black Sea. From this contradiction we may gather that the Scoloti dwelt for a long time in the steppe to the north of the land of the Cimmerians—i. e. to the north of the shore of the Pontus; that they pressed toward the sea, from a desire to possess themselves of the fruitful region to the south of the forest-tract at the mouths of the Dniester, Bug and Dnieper; and finally overcame the Cimmerians, the ancient population of the coast, and compelled them to seek other dwelling-places. Only the mountainous district of the Crimea was maintained by the Tauri (p. 230), a tribe of the Cimmerians,—and hence the whole peninsula retains the name Crimea after this nation—while the Scoloti acquired the better land on the coast, about the middle of the eighth century, and became an agricultural people, soon after this time, at the mouths of the rivers and on the plains of the Crimea. The exiled Cimmerians won new abodes on the south shore of the Black Sea, at the mouth of the Halys, and from this point, in repeated predatory campaigns extending through a century, they laid waste Asia Minor as far as the west coast—(what the legends of the Greeks and Herodotus tell us of the manners of the Tauri represent to us the Cimmerians as crafty barbarians)—until they finally succumbed to the arms of the Lydians, and amalgamated with the native tribes of the region into the nation of the Cappadocians (I. 549).
Of what origin, of what tribe were the Sarmatians, the Scoloti, and the people living above them to the north, the Neuri, the Androphagi, and Melanchlæni? According to Aristeas, it was the "one-eyed Arimaspians," who had given the impulse to the movement of the northern tribes to the west. Herodotus maintains that the name Arimaspians means "the one-eyed" in the language of the Scoloti.[506] The explanation is false. The word certainly belongs to the western branch of the Aryan language, i. e. to the family of language prevailing on the table-land of Iran and the regions bordering on it; it means those who have obedient horses (airyamaçpa). If this was the name by which the Arimaspi called themselves, they were a nation of the Aryan race; if it was the name by which the Sarmatians and Scoloti named the nation to the east of them, the Sarmatians and Scoloti must have spoken an Aryan language. Herodotus further maintains that the Scoloti called the Amazons Oiorpata, and that this name meant "slayers of men."[507] This explanation also is false. In Old Arian (Old Bactrian) Oiorpata would appear as Vayapati; Vayapati does not mean the slayers, but it does mean the lords, of men.[508] It was the masculine employment of the Sarmatian women—their riding, their participation in hunting and warfare, which gained for the women of the Sarmatians the name of "lords of men" among their neighbours, the Scoloti, with whom women were in a very subordinate position. It was indeed this position and these habits of the Sarmatian women which caused the Greeks to unite the Sarmatians and the Amazons, and make the latter the mothers of the Sarmatian race. Thus, for the Greeks, the Amazons who disappeared on the Thermodon could arise to a new life on the steppes of the Don (I. 557 ff.).
The names of the progenitors of the Scoloti, of the three sons of Targitæus; Lipoxais, Arpoxais, and Colaxais (p. 236), appear to contain in the second part of the words the old Arian word kshaya, i. e. prince. The two older brothers strive in vain to win the shining gifts which fell from heaven—the golden goblet, the golden battle-axe, the golden yoke, and the golden plough: it is only the youngest who can take them. In the Avesta the splendour of majesty recedes three times before Yima; the first time Mithra seizes it, then Thrætaona, then Kereçaçpa: the kings of the Avesta sacrifice in order that "the mighty royal majesty may unite with them." The Turanian Frangharçian grasps three times in vain "after the splendour of the majesty of the Arian lands."[509] According to the statement of Herodotus the royal tribe of the Scoloti, i. e. the tribe from which Colaxais is sprung, to which the royal house belonged, was called "Paralatai." In old Aryan this name might mean "the advanced" (paradhata) or "the leaders" (pararata). Nor do the names of the gods of the Scoloti contradict the derivation from an Aryan stock. Tabiti, the name of the goddess of the hearth, means in Aryan "the burning," "the illuminating," just as the name of the deity Œtosyrus (perhaps vita-çura, i. e. "strong with the bow") reappears in the Persian name Artasyrus.[510] But if the language of the Scoloti was Aryan, and they were therefore of an Aryan stock, the Sarmatians must have been of the same stock, for the Sarmatians and the Scoloti spoke, as Herodotus told us (p. 232), the same language. And if Herodotus adds that the Sarmatians spoke the language of the Scoloti badly, and their ancestresses, the Amazons, learnt it badly from their husbands, this means no more than that they spoke a different dialect of the same language. Diodorus calls the Sarmatians a branch of the Medes planted on the Tanais; to Pliny the Sarmatians are descendants of the Medes. These statements show a close relationship between the Sarmatians and an Aryan nation.[511] The names and words also, exclusive of those examined, which have been handed down to us as Scolotian and Sarmatian, can mostly be traced back to Aryan roots. The names of the rivers Tanais and Borysthenes (vouruçtana) would mean, in old Aryan, the "outstretched," and "having a broad strand." The names Spargapeithes, Ariapeithes, Ariarathes, in use among the Scoloti, recur in a similar form in Persia. What Herodotus tells us of the rites of the Scoloti, the worship of the hearth-fire as the "queen of the Scythians," corresponds to the worship of the hearth among the Aryans in Iran, as well as on the Indus. At the same time the different name, the female form of the latter, the names of the other deities in Herodotus, the barbarous worship of the war-god (p. 236), show that the Scoloti must have separated themselves from the community of the Aryans before the eastern branch were in possession of the Punjab, and the middle branch in possession of Iran, and there arrived at the religious conceptions expressed in the hymns of the Rigveda, and in the creed of Iran, as it existed before Zarathrustra. As it was the Scoloti who gave names from their language to the rivers which flowed through their steppes, they must have pastured their flocks on them from an early period. Not less than these names, and the legend of the Scoloti about the antiquity of their nation and its origin from the Borysthenes, does the comparison of the Iranian languages support the conclusion that the Sarmatians and the Scoloti must have broken off from the tribes of Iran at a very early period,[512] and the Scoloti, who are situated further to the west on this side of the Don, earlier than the Sarmatians. If, therefore, we must recognise in the Scolotians and Sarmatians people of Aryan stock and character, their neighbours in the north, the Neuri, the Androphagi, and the Melanchlæni, must count as the fathers of the Sclaves.[513]
FOOTNOTES:
[470] "Iliad," 13, 5, 6. Strabo, p. 300, 302. Æsch. "Prom." 11. 1, 2, 416.
[471] Herod. 1, 201; 4, 13, 27. On the confusion of the Araxes and Jaxartes in Herodotus, see vol. v.
[472] Herod. 4, 21, 57, 123. Cf. Strabo, p. 496-498.
[473] Herod. 4, 47-50.