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This chapter discusses Herodotus's account of Olbia. Whilst he was forthcoming about his visit and experiences in the Egyptian Thebes, Herodotus did not claim to see Olbia firsthand. And although he had seen Olbia for himself, he did not say so in plain terms. Although Olbia was very central to Herodotus's account of Scythia, his description and narrative of Olbia was rather limited. Olbia nonetheless received more attention from Herodotus compared to other Greek communities, however Olbia was peripheral to his interests. His avoidance of the city's official and designated name which was preferred by the citizens is not insignificant. His avoidance of the official name implied his manner of underplaying the importance of the place as a channel through which most of his Scythian information came. His accounts of the Scythian ethnography more than as results of long years of patient fieldwork were the results of information collected unsystematically as seen in his disordered presentation of the geographical and ethnographical information of Olbia. His accounts of the Scythian conservatism and resistance to foreign influence was out of convenience, allaying qualms about combining items of information gathered over time, but was not altogether borne out by his narrative. Unable to claim direct access to native Scythian informants on their own ground, he was not keen to advertise the derivative quality of his material, and close attention of the Olbiopolitai might have exposed what he wanted to camouflage.

This chapter examines whether there are Scythian loanwords in the Old Iranian languages, namely Avestan and Old Persian. Since all three languages are closely related, it is not simple to prove borrowing. Old Persian vocabulary contains many words which must be of Iranian but non-Persian origin. These words are usually attributed to Median, but it is in principle equally possible that they are borrowed from any other Iranian language, including Scythian. Only when we find phonological features which are characteristic of Scythian can we be confident that we are indeed dealing with a Scythian loanword.

This chapter focuses on the trade between the Greek and the Scythian worlds on the north coast of the Black Sea. The majority of previous articles and topics on this subject tended to revolve around the issue of the significance for the Scythian society of exchange with Greek cities, ignoring the significance of such exchange and trade for the Greek cities particularly for Olbia. Furthermore, little work has been devoted to the change of such significance for Olbia over time. Hence, this chapter sheds a new and fresh look at the Olbian-Scythian relationships, their beginnings and their developments. Exchange relationships between Olbia and Scythia began in the early sixth century BC and persisted through the fifth and the fourth centuries BC. These trade exchanges resulted in significant economic development and a great deal of exchanges were made during the fourth century. This slowly waned towards the end of the fourth century. The diminished trade exchanges between Olbia and Scythia were caused by a number of complex factors. Although Olbia's economical and market development depended on trade exchanges, its whole economy was not truly defined by the city's exchange, rather it was based on agriculture.

This chapter examines the role of the Black Sea as a source of grain for the Aegean Greek world, and particularly for Athens, in the fifth and fourth centuries. It is argued that the beginning of Athens' reliance on the Black Sea as more than a lucrative and strategic asset, and ultimately as the systematic source of most of its imported grain, first began near the end of the Peloponnesian War, with the collapse of Athens' Aegean empire. For most of the fourth century Athens and the Bosporan (Spartocid) Kingdom were bound in a tight social and economic relationship largely designed and determined by the mutual interests of their elites. Archaeological evidence and the iconography of Graeco‐Scythian art illustrate this interdependence. The “school” of the Athenian rhetorician Isocrates is argued to have been the crucial network along which this elite relationship functioned culturally and politically.

This chapter focuses on Trakhtemirov, one of the most important ancient settlements of the Early Iron Age in the Ukraine. During the ancient period, the trade routes and caravans met at Trakhtemirov which was situated over the three crossing points of the Dneiper. Its location on the steep heights assured residents of Trakhtemirov security of settlement. On three sides it was protected by the course of the Dnieper while on the other side it was defended by the plateau of the pre-Dneiper elevation. The ancient Trakhtemirov city is located around 100 km below Kiev, on a peninsula which is jutted into the river from the west. Trakhtemirov in the Early Iron Age was important as it was the site of the Cossack capital of Ukraine. It was also the site of the most prestigious artefacts of the Scythian period and a site for various items of jewellery, tools and weaponry. The abundance of artefacts in Trakhtemirov suggests that the city is a central place among the scattered sites of the middle course of the Dneiper.

Studies of the social and economic issues of the early societies emerged from the encounter of archaeology with other disciplines which are concerned with the sociological aspects of traditional societies. The study of Scythia or Scythology offers an extensive material that makes it a primary model of socio-economic models. This chapter aims to determine the specific features of the socio-economic development and structure of Scythia. It examines the changes in Scythia and Scythian economic history. It reviews the concepts of unity or lack of unity in Scythia to provide a better understanding on the key problems of the social, political, and economic history of Scythia. It also discusses the issues surrounding the statehood of steppe Scythians. The emphasis of the chapter is on the economic framework and the features of the development of the nomadic society in the Early Iron Age as represented in the archaeology of the Scythian culture.

The time from the Mauryas to the Guptas can be broadly divided into four phases, which are closely linked to a series of dynasties. The first phase comes with the Mauryas proper. The second phase is indigenous, covered by the succeeding dynasties of the Śuṅgas, the Kanvas, the so-called Mitras, Dattas, and others. The third phase is dominated by intruding Westerners, be they of Iranian, Scythian, or Kushana stock. The fourth phase is another phase of Indian resurrection. This chapter recognizes a dispersal of foreign rule and the return to traditional values. The movement culminates in the accession of the Guptas around 320 ce. The chapter also shows how some well-known and some new Brāhmī inscriptions as well as in Kharoṣṭhī script present evidence for changes of a general nature of two sorts.

In ancient Greece, pretending to belong to a different ethnic group was a significant source of humour. In Thesmophoriazusae the tritagonist, who had earlier in the play appeared in such histrionically extravagant roles as Agathon and Cleisthenes, faced the most demanding ‘ethnic’ role in the extant Greek comic repertoire: for the last quarter of the play he needed to pretend to be not only unfree and untutored in theatre, but an import into Athens from the far-flung northern shore of the Black Sea. The role of the Scythian archer is one of the most remarkable in the drama of the period. This chapter argues that Thesmophoriazusae is a comic response to a very particular type of role in tragedy — the villainous barbarian monarch in Euripides' innovative escape tragedies. For many decades, indeed until the middle of the 1980s, the only aspect of this role to attract any significant attention from scholars was the element of linguistic caricature.

This chapter considers a group of theologians who traveled widely and corresponded with each other. They developed a pneumatology which responded to certain anthropological concerns related to Pelagianism and certain Christological concerns related to Nestorianism. The Scythian monks exchanged letters with Fulgentius of Ruspe. This chapter argues that the Scythian monks are responsible for the Chapters of Saint Augustine, a document which was used at the Synod of Orange. Thus, this chapter closes the arguments made in the previous two chapters concerning the sources of the pneumatology used at Orange. It also shows a third set of Augustinian theologians. Fulgentius of Ruspe presents the fullest reception of St Augustine of all the theologians treated in this book. He understands Augustine’s response to multiple controversies and applies Augustine’s pneumatology to new controversies, including the Christological issues at play in 6th century Nestorianism.

The chapter examines the relationships between Prokofiev’s early music and the poets that inspired him. Guided by Konstantin Balmont’s poetic characterization of him in the early 1920s as a “sun-sounding Scythian,” it looks at two specific facets of Russian Symbolism and post-Symbolism that informed Prokofiev’s works: the sun cult and Scythianism. Prokofiev’s luminous Scythianism encompasses the paradox of the lyricism of his early songs and the perceived barbarism of his rejected ballet Ala and Lolli, from which the composer derived his Scythian Suite. By analyzing Prokofiev’s collaboration with Gorodetskii on Ala and Lolli and the composer’s settings of Balmont’s and Akhmatova’s poems, we can understand how the incarnations of the sun god in the Russian Silver Age informed both the sunrise music and the aesthetics of horror in the ballet and the suite. The chapter also reflects on Ala and Lolli as an unrealized ballet in the shadow of Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring.

This chapter considers the two most fundamental assumptions about Greco-Scythian art in current understandings, both inside and outside academia. The first assumption is that the naturalistic genre scenes on the objects illustrated the world which the ancient producers and consumers of Greco-Scythian art saw around themselves. The second assumption is that these producers and consumers should be identified with the Greeks and Scythians represented in the textual tradition of the northern Black Sea region. The chapter also examines the risks involved in incorporating images with textual representations, as exemplified by the Russian scholar Mikhail Ivanovich Rostovtzeff in Iranians and Greeks in South Russia (1922), a book that deals with northern Black Sea archaeology and inspired by scenes of supposed mystery rituals on Greco-Scythian metalwork. Rostovtzeff suggested that the meeting of Greek and Iranian culture in the northern Black Sea region had created conditions similar to those prevailing in the Mediterranean after Alexander the Great's conquests, thus opening up new perspectives on Russia's cultural and spiritual foundations.

This chapter examines the reception of Greco-Scythian art in imperial Russia, focusing on the court museum built by Nicholas I, known as the New Hermitage, in the mid-nineteenth century. It first considers Peter the Great's collection of Greco-Roman marbles and the role it played in endowing the naturalistic figures of classical art with political meaning. It then analyses the various interpretations of Greco-Scythian artefacts as they entered the Russian visual culture predetermined by Peter's project of westernisation and the growing nationalism of the post-Napoleonic era. It also looks at the social and psychological conditions of the pre-Revolutionary Russian intelligentsia which gave rise to Russian scholar Mikhail Ivanovich Rostovtzeff's work on Black Sea antiquities. In particular, it discusses Rostovtzeff's Hellenism and the Scythianism of the poet Aleksandr Blok as two radically opposed alternatives in conceiving Russia's historical identity and destiny.

This chapter examines epigraphic and sculptural monuments from the Cimmerian Bosporus with a view to tracing the formation of a trans-cultural network of elite cooperation. More specifically, it considers the political system in which Greco-Scythian art and other objects were crafted. It first reviews the archaeology and history of the Bosporan state with the aim of integrating texts and objects in other ways and of placing Greco-Scythian metalwork within a broader spectrum of monuments. It then looks at the history of scholarship on Bosporus, with particular emphasis on Russian scholar Mikhail Ivanovich Rostovtzeff's seminal account of Bosporan statehood and culture in terms of Greco-Iranian dualism. It argues that this dualism is a feature of the ideological self-fashioning of the Bosporan elite that was consciously cultivated already in antiquity. The chapter also analyses statue dedications as a major type of political monument and concludes by describing the dualism embodied in epigraphy and material culture as an organising principle capable of shaping the dispositions of the Bosporan elite in relation to each other and to outsiders.

This chapter examines how the figured scenes in Greco-Scythian art relayed notions of elite virtue and how the objects guided and gave meaning to real-life activities. It attempts to reconcile iconographic and agency-based approaches to Greco-Scythian art in order to analyse the notion that Greek nudity in art was anchored in the Greeks' supposedly untroubled attitude to nakedness in life. It looks at a number of examples of draped nudes to highlight the profound differences in culture and life-ways separating the different producers and consumers of Greco-Scythian metalwork. It also considers how Greco-Scythian art could relate to its ancient viewers regardless of their ability to associate images with prior stories or texts. Finally, the chapter discusses Greco-Scythian genre scenes that characterise Scythians as civilised barbarians capable of forming strong associations through verbal agreement.

This chapter examines the evidence of Greco-Scythian art in practice by focusing on tombside feasts from burial mounds on the Bosporus. It suggests that those feasts provided one of the primary sites for the use and display of Greco-Scythian metalwork and defined elite power as a religious system independent of other forms of statehood on the Bosporus, especially the Greek polis. It also considers religion in ancient Bosporus in relation to the views expressed by Russian scholar Mikhail Ivanovich Rostovtzeff and his successors.

This book has explored the social lives of Greco-Scythian art over an extensive chronological span from the perspective of the disciplinary traditions of classical archaeology, making ample reference to a selection of the most important grave assemblages from mounded tombs on the Cimmerian Bosporus that were excavated in pre-Revolutionary times. It has also analysed a variety of status occupations represented on the Greco-Scythian implements, particularly the noble feast, and has highlighted commensality as a fundamental political institution. Citing the work of Russian scholar Mikhail Ivanovich Rostovtzeff, especially his inference from the Greco-Scythian depictions of conviviality to the presence of Iranian rites of communion in the northern Black Sea region, the book has shown how images can reveal what the past really looked like and what the ancients believed, rather than how they constructed their beliefs about the world.

This chapter examines the influence of Russian historian Boris Alexandrovich Rybakov on Soviet archaeology. It first provides an overview of Rybakov's early life before turning to his career, including his leadership at the Institute for the History of Material Culture and his tenure at the State Historical Museum. It then considers Rybakov's efforts to uphold the originality and high standard of early Russian culture and his rise as leader of Slavic-Russian archaeology in the mid-1950s, along with his foray into cognate disciplines such as epic and mythology. Finally, the chapter discusses Rybakov's major works, including his research on the origin of the Slavs, the Scythian tribes, and the beginning of urban life in Kiev.