CHAPTER 7
Riders on the Storm
Cavalry, Assyrians, Libraries, and Scythians
After crushing an Aramaean uprising in 883 BCE, King Ashurnasirpal II of Assyria tells us in his own words what happened to these rebels of the city of Tela along the Euphrates in Syria:
I built a pillar over against the city gate and I flayed all the chiefs who had revolted and I covered the pillar with their skins. Some I impaled upon the pillar on stakes and others I bound to stakes round the pillar. I cut the limbs off the officers who had rebelled. Many captives I burned with fire and many I took as living captives. From some I cut off their noses, their ears, and their fingers, of many I put out their eyes. I made one pillar of the living and another of heads and I bound their heads to tree trunks round about the city. Their young men and maidens I consumed with fire. The rest of their warriors I consumed with thirst in the desert of the Euphrates.
Not to be outdone, two centuries later, another Assyrian king, Sennacherib, describes his campaign against the Elamites in 691 BCE in equally gory detail: “I cut their throats like lambs, cut off their precious lives as one cuts string. Like the many waters of a storm, I made the contents of their gullets and entrails run down upon the wide earth. My prancing steeds, harnessed for my riding, plunged into the streams of their blood as into a river…. With the bodies of their warriors I filled the plain, like grass. Their testicles I cut off and tore their privates like the seeds of cucumbers in June.”
Between 900 and 640 BCE, the Assyrians, who honored their god through conquest and expansion, fought 108 wars of varying intensity to acquire territory or to unleash unforgiving punitive expeditions against insolent neighbors. “Neo-Assyrian royal inscriptions describe hundreds of military campaigns, often in great detail,” writes Assyriologist at Yale University Eckart Frahm in Assyria: The Rise and Fall of the World’s First Empire. “Few civilizations of the ancient world have left richer sources for a careful study of military history than the Neo-Assyrian age, vividly illustrating how the Assyrian war machine actually worked.” While the Assyrians revolutionized warfare with the first use of mobile siege towers, wall-scaling ladders, battering rams, and tunnelers, cavalry was their war-winning weapon and, like the pale horse, their messenger of death.
Originally a city-state dissected by the Tigris-Euphrates valley and important trade routes, Assyria seemingly always attracted the lusting gaze of the major imperial powers of the second millennium BCE: the Egyptians, Hittites, and Mittani. As vassals of the Mitanni, the Assyrians acquired a chariot tradition and then used it, in conjunction with adopted Egyptian battle tactics, to defeat the Babylonians, Hittites, Mittani, and smaller polities between 1300 and 1230 BCE.
Assyria ruthlessly filled the power vacuum created by the Sea People and the collapse of the Hittite Empire. Around 900 BCE, the resurrection and consolidation of the traditional Assyrian homeland centered on the three major cities of Nimrud, Nineveh (Mosul), and Ashur—all situated on the Tigris in northern Mesopotamia—began to take shape.
With the aid of the cavalry horse, Assyria rose from the ashes as the phoenix of the Iron Age to restore its former glory—and then some. Under the direction of adroit kings, the Assyrians carved out an impressive empire unprecedented in size, scope, and sophistication to obtain vital raw materials (notably wood and iron) and pastures for their horses, the heartbeat of their unrivaled military. Assyrian society was based on military might and imperial conquest to feed its insatiable appetite for the spoils of war. The stunning martial, academic, and engineering exploits of the vaunted Assyrians and their eminent kings have gained historical renown through a substantial and varied collection of ancient inscriptions and texts, including the Old Testament.
The imperial period of the Neo-Assyrian Empire witnessed the reign of six influential monarchs: Ashurnasirpal II (883–859 BCE); his son Shalmaneser III (858–824 BCE); Tiglath-pileser III (744–727 BCE), followed by the greatest of all Assyrian kings, Sargon II (721–705 BCE).[*1] He was succeeded by his son Sennacherib (704–681 BCE) and then by his great-grandson Ashurbanipal (668–631 BCE). At the height of its power under Ashurbanipal, the Assyrian Empire stretched some 540,500 square miles, from southern Anatolia in the north, down the biblical rivers to the Persian Gulf in the south, and from the Egyptian Nile delta in the west to Persia in the east.
The Assyrians unabashedly built their power base and economic dominance through fear, violence, and brutality. They utilized deportation, slavery, forced marches, rape, mutilation, and gruesome torture. Ruthless secret police and elite militias—fed information and targets by an extremely efficient intelligence system—conducted methodical and coordinated terror campaigns. Even by ancient standards of warfare and cruelty, the Assyrians were especially sadistic. Their ultimate power, however, rested with their warhorses.
While there is preceding evidence of horseback riding in a military context, the earliest known true cavalry formations belonged to the Assyrian king Tukulti-Ninurta II (890–884 BCE). These small, mounted detachments were initially tasked with acting as the supporting “eyes and ears” for the main infantry forces through patrolling and reconnaissance. His initial operations northward into the horse-rich lands of Urartu, centered in Anatolia and the southern Caucasus, supplied his cavalry with superior mounts standing roughly fifteen hands. These imported horses, most likely bred and shuttled south by the nomads of the steppe, were unparalleled in the southern reaches.
The ascent of cavalry: Assyrian relief at Nimrud depicting horses and riders, circa 728 BCE. (British Museum/Robert Harding Images)
The conventional cavalry practiced by the Assyrians was a sophisticated enhancement of the individualistic and fluid mounted raiding tradition established beyond the Assyrian gaze by the horsemen of Urartu and their northern nomadic Indo-European Cimmerian and Scythian neighbors. “Hard-learned strategic lessons gradually passed southward from the steppes into chariotry circles,” notes archaeologist Brian Fagan. “Once convinced of the value of mounted warfare, the Assyrians learned quickly.” So did others.
To counter Assyrian cavalry incursions, Urartu quickly raised formal mounted units of its own. Following a raid against Urartu in 714 BCE, Sargon II conceded, “The people who live in that province of Urartu are all very able in matters of cavalry, and there are none equal to them.” Well, none other than the Assyrians, that is.
The reasons for this initial contrast between the casual, organic, pseudo-cavalry of the steppe and the calculated, regimented cavalry of the Assyrians was due largely to environmental differences. Farming practices in the river valleys of the Middle East demanded hydraulic and irrigation technologies associated with higher population densities. Regulating the masses to maximize agrarian production required stringent and complex sociopolitical structures, including centralized bureaucracies, sophisticated transportation networks, and professionalized militaries. These rigid attributes of sedentary society were far more inflexible and draconian than what was needed on the open forage pastures and nomadic hunting grounds of the Eurasian Steppe patrolled by relatively small, free-ranging populations.
The disciplined organizational scaffolding that permeated Assyrian culture was applied to all components of the military. “Altogether, a radical rationality seems to have pervaded Assyrian military administration, making their armies the most formidable and best disciplined the world had yet seen,” states acclaimed historian William H. McNeill. “Yet it seems no exaggeration to say that the fundamental administrative devices for the exercise of imperial power which remained standard in most of the civilized world until the nineteenth century AD first achieved unambiguous definition under the Assyrians.” When measured against these benchmarks, the modern blueprint for centralized governance and empire building was assembled by Assyrian warhorses.
The Assyrian conversion from chariotry to cavalry, however, was gradual. Like all else, this transition was guided by trial-and-error evolution, practice, and the training of both horse and rider. The horse and weapon are only as effective as their human handler. “Cavalry expertise improved from the two-man team of warrior and horse-handler, both seated precariously behind the horse’s motion, to the cavalry of Sargon II and later kings which were seated independently in a more balanced and secure fashion,” explains Ann Hyland. “Using this balanced seat cavalry was now wholly a strike force, with each rider a combat trooper. It lessened the need for horses per unit, or alternatively allowed the strike force to be doubled.”
Initially, Assyrian cavalry fought in pairs. The archer or swordsman always rode the horse on the right, allowing for freedom of movement with his right weapon hand, while his companion on the left held a shield and the reins of both horses. Early Assyrian cavalry was certainly not the dashing and debonaire “light cavalry” of imagination.
The arrival of an effectively independent and highly mobile Assyrian mounted warrior was tied directly to the dramatic augmentation in Assyrian horse stocks acquired through tribute and raids. Sargon, for example, demanded that his subjects deliver their equine excises to a specific collection point on the first of the month. “Should even one day pass by, you will die,” he wrote of the literal deadline. “Whoever is late will be impaled in his own home, and his sons and daughters too will be slaughtered.” Cavalry horses were a serious, life-or-death business.
Exemplified by the forays of Tukulti-Ninurta and Sargon, the Assyrians specifically targeted steppe horses from distant fields beyond the Zagros Mountains of northern Anatolia and Persia. These “mighty steeds” were legendary and referred to by Herodotus as the “sacred ‘Nisean’ horses, named after the huge Nisaean Plain in Media which produces these tall horses.” Although the exact location of the Nisaean Plain remains a mystery, it can be safely said that these horses, the most valuable south of the steppes, came from the lands of Urartu and Media.
The grazing fields south of the Median capital of Ecbatana (now Hamadan, Iran) were awash with alfalfa, also called lucerne. This clover relative, known locally as Median grass, contains upwards of 13 percent digestible protein, roughly double that of most hays. It is also rich in vitamins and minerals, including high levels of iron and calcium. This exceptionally nutritious and widely available fodder explains the muscular, robust, and athletic descriptions of Nisean horses, which averaged between fifteen and sixteen hands.
When Alexander the Great visited the renowned Nisean herds in 324 BCE upon his return from India, he counted roughly 50,000 to 60,000 horses grazing on the plain. This represented a fraction of the estimated herd peak of 150,000 during the high point of the Persian Empire. Now thought to be an extinct breed, these horses, known to the Chinese as Tianma, or “Heavenly Horse,” were the elite cavalry mounts of the ancient world.
Given their ubiquitous presence across our epic battle-scarred human saga, we intrinsically associate horses with great exploits of military history. We must remember, however, that horses do not come born, built, broken, and trained for war. They are instinctively temperamental and skittish animals, evolved for flight, not fight! Training a horse to charge headlong into a whirlwind of destruction, smoke, noise, crowds, and chaos is no easy feat. The innate evolutionary follow-the-leader attribute alluded to earlier goes only so far. Tutoring and drilling a horse to become a fearless, finely tuned weapon of war takes time, effort, and the guidance of a trained hand. Kikkuli and his ancient contemporaries certainly understood this challenge.
Assyrian texts reveal the existence of horse masters like Kikkuli who were skilled in the arts of breeding and training. This must have also been of paramount concern for all cultures seeking to establish professional cavalry. In his seminal manual On Horsemanship, written around 365 BCE, the Greek soldier and author Xenophon proffered guidelines on how to train a horse to navigate the swirling maelstrom of battle, advising: “You must also tell your groom to take the colt through crowds and to familiarize it with all kinds of sights and sounds; and if the colt finds any of this alarming, the groom must not lose his temper with it, but should calm it down and gently teach it that there is nothing to be afraid of.” Horses, like most humans throughout our long history of violence, had no choice in the matter.
Securing horses through plunder and tribute from conquered territory was a primary Assyrian war aim. There was a constant need for horses to expand the cavalry branch and to replace those lost through combat, disease, and natural decay. These levies and plunders, particularly against northern kingdoms, netted thousands of horses. Tiglath-pileser III captured five thousand Nisean horses in a single campaign against the Medes, while acquiring another two thousand in disciplinary fines from a subjugated king whose only crime was that, apparently, he “was indifferent towards Assyria’s achievements.” While conducting more than fifty military operations, Tigleth-pileser also resettled or exiled over six hundred thousand deportees.
An independent ministry of “horse recruitment officers” called musarkisus was established to obtain and manage horses (and mules and camels) and provide for the needs of the cavalry.[*2] In their prestigious position, the musarkisus were responsible for maintaining the imperial system of stables, corrals, and feed. Assyrian writings also hint at rudimentary equine veterinary services.
The “Horse Reports” from Nineveh, a series of twenty letters spanning a three-month period during the reign of King Esarhaddon, circa 680 BCE, register 2,654 horses entering the city through tributes, trades, and raids. These imported horses were then handpicked and branded into specific roles by the musarkisus: 1,840 chariot horses, 787 cavalry mounts, and 27 breeding studs. As demonstrated by this horse specialization, the battle-hardened Assyrian military had matured into the most sophisticated, formidable, and effective fighting force of its time. It was also massive.
The professional Assyrian army under Sargon II fluctuated between one hundred thousand and two hundred thousand soldiers (possibly upwards of three hundred thousand with the total mobilization of conscripts and foreign mercenaries) and twenty thousand horses across various military occupations. It was the largest the world had seen, roughly doubling that of runners-up the Egyptians under Ramses II, 550 years earlier. Assyrian soldiers were also completely outfitted with iron weapons, helmets, and armor, making them the first “iron army” in history.
The specially forged weapons room in the armory at Sargon’s newly constructed royal complex at Dur-Sharrukin contained more than two hundred tons of iron weaponry. During his sixteen-year reign, Sargon II conducted at least ten major campaigns. The biblical “weeping prophet” Jeremiah describes these sweeping offensives with chilling accuracy: “Behold, he shall come up like clouds, And his chariots like a whirlwind. His horses are swifter than eagles. Woe to us, for we are plundered!”
While Assyrian kings were the destroyers of worlds, they were also great builders of infrastructure and sprawling royal complexes, palaces, and temples, interconnected by an extensive network of roads (including the main Royal Road) and way stations utilized by efficient mounted couriers. It is estimated that it took no more than five days to deliver a message across the farthest reaches (some 450 miles) of the Assyrian Empire. “The speed and frequency with which messages were sent back and forth throughout their empire,” recounts Frahm, “was nothing short of revolutionary in its time.”
Numerous kings relocated the capital to their own custom-built cities. When Ashurnasirpal II, the sadistic flaying king mentioned earlier, crafted his own nine-hundred-acre capital complex enclosed by five miles of defensive wall at Nimrud, it took fifteen years to complete. “The palace of cedar, cypress, juniper, boxwood, mulberry, pistachio wood, and tamarisk, for my royal dwelling and for my lordly pleasure for all time, I founded therein. Beasts of the mountains and of the seas, of white limestone and alabaster I fashioned and set them up on its gates,” he boasted at the grand opening in 879 BCE. “Silver, gold, lead, copper, and iron, the spoil of my hand from the lands which I had brought under my sway, in great quantities I took and placed therein.” To share in his commemorative celebration and parade his wealth and power, the king invited 69,574 of his closest friends and family to indulge in a ten-day housewarming party featuring an all-you-can-eat smorgasbord buffet and a fully stocked open bar.
The elaborate complex at Nimrud remained the capital of Assyria for 150 years, until Sargon II erected his own capital at Dur-Sharrukin. Following his death in 705 BCE while leading a cavalry charge in Anatolia, his son and successor, Sennacherib, immediately refurbished and expanded the ancient city of Nineveh, including the construction of an archival library, to serve as the royal seat. To irrigate his lavish, verdant garden at Nineveh (most likely the actual Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World), Sennacherib invented the water screw (Archimedes’ screw) technology using a pioneering technique for bronze metal casting.[*3] Of course, the bills for such extravagant construction projects were all covered by the spoils of war, courtesy of the cavalry horse.
Sennacherib is arguably one of the most notorious Assyrian kings, achieving biblical immortality for his protracted military offensive against Jerusalem in 701 BCE and for brutally destroying the pesky city of Babylon twelve years later. “With their corpses I filled the city squares…. The city and its houses, from its foundation to its top, I destroyed, I devastated, I burnt with fire,” Sennacherib recorded proudly. “Through the midst of that city I dug canals, I flooded its site with water, and the very foundations thereof I destroyed. I made its destruction more complete than by a flood. That in days to come the site of that city and its temples and gods might not be remembered, I completely blotted it out with floods of water and made it like a meadow.”
During his earlier cordon of Jerusalem, Sennacherib attempted to badger Hezekiah, the king of Judah, and his subjects into battle: “The king of Assyria wants to make a bet with you people! He will give you two thousand horses, if you have enough troops to ride them. How could you even defeat our lowest ranking officer, when you have to depend on Egypt for chariots and cavalry? Don’t forget it was the Lord who sent me here with orders to destroy your nation!…These people, like you, will soon have to eat their own excrement and drink their own urine.” Sennacherib and his futile siege of Jerusalem were further consecrated in Lord Byron’s “galloping,” rhythmic 1815 poem “The Destruction of Sennacherib,” narrated from the Hebrew perspective, with its famous opening line, “The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold.”
The legend of Sennacherib was sealed when he was assassinated by two of his sons in 681 BCE, shortly after his renovation of Nineveh. His grandson, Ashurbanipal, is generally regarded as the last great king of the Assyrian Empire before its downfall and the sack of Nineveh in 612 BCE. Over the course of three decades, he launched more than thirty military campaigns to put the finishing strokes on restoring traditional Assyrian territory.
Riders on the storm: Ashurbanipal on horseback, from a relief at Nineveh, circa 645 BCE. (Zev Radovan/Alamy Stock Photo)
Like his grandfather, Ashurbanipal was also immersed in academia and invention. “l solved complicated mathematical problems that have not even been understood before,” he inscribed. “I read the artfully written texts in which the Sumerian version was obscure and the Akkadian version for clarifying too difficult. I am enjoying the cuneiform wedges [writing] on stones from before the flood.” In keeping with his thirst for knowledge, the scholarly king oversaw the creation of the first systematically organized library in history, known as the Royal Library of Ashurbanipal.
The Assyrian monarch regarded his remarkable library at Nineveh, which contained more than thirty thousand clay tablets from across the empire, including The Epic of Gilgamesh (a foundational religious text written as a heroic saga, and perhaps the oldest surviving literary work on earth), as his crowning achievement and understood the historical magnitude and eternal moment of his immense archive: “I, Ashurbanipal, king of the universe, on whom the gods have bestowed intelligence, who has acquired penetrating acumen for the most recondite details of scholarly erudition (none of my predecessors having any comprehension of such matters), I have placed these tablets for the future in the library at Nineveh for my life and for the well-being of my soul, to sustain the foundations of my royal name.” Although it appears his motivations were not entirely altruistic, as he was also attempting to secure his legacy, we nevertheless owe Ashurbanipal a debt of gratitude for his progressive and enlightened thinking.
The value of his universal library to future generations cannot be overstated. It contained texts on everything from medicine, politics, astronomy, and botany, to warfare, engineering, spirituality, and trade. In addition to tablets, Ashurbanipal also collected scholars from across his domain to stock and oversee his magnificent library. In his 1920 book The Outline of History, author H. G. Wells christened it “the most precious source of historical material in the world.” The vast anthology of human history and the living echoes of ancient voices contained in this extraordinary collection were acquired across the far reaches of the Assyrian Empire conquered by the first horse-charged cavalry. Not only did the horse propagate language, but also it preserved history.
I suppose the library stands as small penance for the otherwise ruthless Assyrian era. No empire lasts forever, and Ashurbanipal might have realized when he was reciting his earnest library dedication that the end was near. It turned out to be a presaging requiem of sorts. Like the Roman Empire almost a thousand years later, maintaining a centralized seat of power over a strained multiethnic empire proved too much for the Assyrians. As their influence waned, compounding pressures hastened their collapse.
After Ashurbanipal’s death in 631 BCE, the Assyrian Empire faced escalating threats on three simultaneous fronts. Palace intrigue, domestic strife, and tenuous power struggles between competing political parties erupted into a series of bloody conflicts of succession that spilled over into broader civil wars. The draconian rule of the Assyrian regime over its subjugated peoples eventually ignited a string of popular uprisings. The eastern borders of the Assyrian heartland were breached by the Medes and Persians; wild Cimmerian and Scythian horse warriors from the frontier steppe roamed freely across the former empire, pillaging as they pleased. Eventually the walls of Nineveh, and its library, came crumbling down. Twenty years after his death, Ashurbanipal’s great library was buried under the charred and smoking rubble of his burning palace at Nineveh, lost to history for 2,500 years.[*4]
The vengeance wrought upon Nineveh in 612 BCE by a motley coalition of Medes, Babylonians, Persians, Cimmerians, and Scythians was captured in vivid prose by the biblical prophet Nahum:
Doom to the crime capital! Nineveh, city of murder and treachery, here is your fate—cracking whips, churning wheels; galloping horses, roaring chariots; cavalry attacking, swords and spears flashing, soldiers stumbling over piles of dead bodies. You were nothing more than a prostitute using your magical charms and witchcraft to attract and trap nations. But I, the Lord All-Powerful, am now your enemy. I will pull up your skirt and let nations and kingdoms stare at your nakedness. I will cover you with garbage, treat you like trash, and rub you in the dirt. Everyone who sees you will turn away and shout, “Nineveh is done for! Is anyone willing to mourn or to give her comfort?”
Assyrian brutality and sadism were apparently met in kind. “So complete was the destruction that two centuries later, Xenophon and his Greek mercenary army of ten thousand men passed the ruins of Nineveh unaware of what they were passing,” reports Richard Gabriel. “Not a single vestige of the Assyrian power remained. A people who had lived on the Tigris for more than two thousand years had literally disappeared from the face of the earth.” The ruin of Nineveh was the turning point in the unmitigated collapse of Assyria, with the mantle of power passing to the Scythians and Persians.
By pressing their borders and prowling northward to procure horses for their daunting cavalry, the Assyrians had collided with the advance guard of nomadic Indo-European Cimmerian and Scythian riders driving south from the steppe. By 700 BCE, the northern kingdom of Urartu, a favorite target for Assyrian horse raids, lost its frontier lands to the Cimmerians, who had encircled the Black Sea, breached the Caucasus, and usurped large portions of Anatolia.
During the early seventh century BCE, the Cimmerians were quickly chased off by semi-cohesive bands of nomadic predatory Scythians, who charged southward through the Caucasus from the Pontic-Caspian Steppe in search of pastures, plunder, and adventure. These skilled mounted warriors entered the fray with lightning speed. “The Scythians prefer mares as chargers,” wrote the Roman historian and philosopher Pliny the Elder, “because they can urinate without checking their gallop.” After a brief pause in the fertile grazing grounds in central Anatolia, brazen groups of Scythians continued southwest across the biblical rivers, growing fat off the decaying carcass of the Assyrian Empire en route to the Levant and Egypt.
From their homeland on the Pontic-Caspian Steppe, smaller columns of Scythians also trotted west toward Europe. They penetrated the Carpathian Mountains and punched through Romanian Transylvania to pasture on the Hungarian Plain. In his comprehensive account The Scythians: Nomad Warriors of the Steppe, Barry Cunliffe portrays these roving groups as “a pioneer force of Scythians riding westward…following routes already opened up by horse riders from the steppe two or three centuries before.” Scythian-style military artifacts from the sixth and fifth centuries BCE have been found as far west as Austria and Germany.
While seldom mentioned in popular narratives or textbooks, the Scythians, and their multidimensional impact on the historical and cultural trajectory of Eurasia from Europe through China, deserve better. With the wonders of their culture and through their hobby of war, they changed the world from the back of a horse. “In fact,” stresses Christopher Beckwith in The Scythian Empire: Central Eurasia and the Birth of the Classical Age from Persia to China, “the Scythian Empire is one of the least known but most influential realms in all of world history.” While they are relatively absent from our modern literary record, they did inspire the imagination and ink of the ancients.
According to Greek mythology, the Scythians were the descendants of the hero Scythes. When the demigod adventurer Hercules was driving cattle through what later became known as Scythia (Pontic-Caspian Steppe), his horses went missing. While searching a cave, he found them in the possession of an echidna (she-viper), a creature with the upper portion of a woman and the lower portion of a snake. She promised to return the horses upon his completing one simple request: Hercules had to fornicate with her. Of course, he consented, and their serpentine passion produced three sons.
When asked what should become of them, Hercules handed her a bow and a belt. When they came of age, he explained, whichever son could string and draw the bow and wear the belt should be raised, while the other two were to be banished.[*5] The youngest son, Scythes, fulfilled the prophecy and became the founder and eponym of the Scythians. “From Scythes, the son of Heracles,” declares Herodotus, “the kings of Scythia descend.” The mythical story is telling for its inclusion of the two central pillars of Scythian culture and military power: the combination of the horse and the bow.
Prior to Herodotus, earlier Greek historians were fascinated by the mysterious Scythians. In his book Journey Around the Earth, Hecataeus (c. 550–476 BCE), the first known Greek historian, described both the fierce Celts of southeastern France and the barbarian Scythian “mare-milking nomads” of the steppe beyond the Black Sea, as did Hellanicus of Lesbos (c. 490–405 BCE) in the chapter on Skythika in his volume Barbarika Nomina.[*6] As Barry Cunliffe explains, “Scythian archers were frequently depicted on Attic Black-Figured pottery, and historians like Herodotus recorded stories from their history exploring, with undisguised delight, their unusual behavior and beliefs…. Yet to the Greeks, it was just this that made them so fascinating. And rightly so.”
Herodotus possessed a relatively knowledgeable understanding of the homeland of the Scythians, describing it as “level, well-watered, and abounding with pasture.” It was intersected by eight major rivers, which he names, all flowing into the Black Sea. Traditional Scythian territory extended from the Danube River in the west, across the Pontic-Caspian Steppe, to the Don River in the east.
In southern Siberia, at the international crossroads of Russia, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, and China, the multi-tomb kurgan complexes of Arzhan and Pazyryk reveal the geographical extent, cross-cultural steppe trade, and intricacies of Scythian society shaped by the evolving revolution in equine transport and mounted warfare. These earthen and timber vaults, spanning roughly five hundred years, run like braille dots across the map of the Eurasian Steppe, extending west through Ukraine into Romania.
Scythian trading caravans also trundled and clattered east toward Mongolia, and, seemingly, vanished into the misty void for the next two hundred years. They reemerged around 300 BCE as the Xiongnu, a revamped nomadic civilization based on expert mounted raiding and, as we will see, introduced themselves to the neighborhood by climbing the steppes and violently knocking on the door of northern China.
These Scythian burial mounds are literal gold mines, containing sizable collections of stunningly beautiful and artistically crafted gold artifacts, from belt buckles, hair combs, and vessels, to plaques, sculptures, and weapon ornaments. Many of these relics were salvaged in the wake of Tzar Peter the Great’s imperial expansion into the sprawling region of historical Scythia between 1682 and 1725.
Although Russian penetration into these areas began during the mid-1500s under the legendary reign of Ivan the Terrible, it was Peter who consolidated Russian rule over these fringe outposts of empire. The kurgans and rotunda burial mounds stimulated the curiosity (and grave robbing) of Russian migrants and rambling explorers. For example, Nicolaes Witsen, the Dutch ambassador to Tzar Alexis I (Peter’s father), amassed a stunning collection—and a fortune—of golden Scythian grave goods. “How civilized must have been the people who buried these rarities,” he remarked in 1664. “The gold objects are so artfully and sensibly ornamented that I do not think European craftsmen could have managed better.”
Peter was an intellectual, erudite man who sought to refashion Russia into a modern empire through a series of reforms, including the establishment of a formidable navy. As an educated man and a rabid student of the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution, Peter was also an avid and eclectic collector of art, curiosities, and ancient artifacts—notably those crafted by the Scythians from his newly annexed territories.
Dying hero with horses under the tree of life: A Scythian gold belt buckle from the collection of Peter the Great, fourth century BCE. Notice the bow case/quiver hanging from the tree. (State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg, Russia/Alamy Stock Photo)
To curry favor, politicians and wealthy patrons flooded Peter’s inbox with golden Scythian and Siberian treasures, and he quickly amassed a striking collection. He also passed edicts to protect and secure Scythian relics, including a death sentence for anyone “searching for golden stirrups and cups.” He ordered all regional governors and administrators to collect “from earth and water…old inscriptions, ancient weapons, dishes, and everything old and unusual.”
Scythian warrior: Gold plaque from the Kul’-Oba kurgan, Ukraine, fourth century BCE. (State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg, Russia/Alamy Stock Photo)
After a series of homes, since 1860 his trove of over 250 Scythian objects has been displayed as the Siberian Collection of Peter the Great in the Gold Room of the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, the city he established in 1703 to serve as Russia’s cultural capital. Peter’s contribution, along with several excavated Scythian graves—among them those at Arzhan and Pazyryk—provides invaluable historical context to the events unfolding across Eurasia and the Middle East in the centuries after the fall of the Assyrian Empire.
The Arzhan valley contains more than three hundred kurgans of various sizes arranged in parallel chains, styling it as the Siberian “Valley of Kings” to rival that of Luxor (Thebes), Egypt. The largest, 360 feet in diameter and over 13 feet high, was constructed at the turn of the ninth and eighth centuries BCE (roughly a century before Homer wrote the Iliad and the Odyssey) with more than six thousand larch logs. These trees were roughly a hundred years old when felled and were carefully shaped and trimmed. It would have taken three hundred people over a month just to process this timber! Within a labyrinth of seventy chambers, the central grave contained the remains of a man and a younger woman, presumably a sacrificed consort or wife, positioned on a bedding of twenty horse tails.
This massive tomb also contained the remains of fifteen attendants and 160 horses. These sacrificed companions were saddled, bridled, and outfitted in full regalia, with a dazzling assortment of antlered masks and gold, bronze, and turquoise ornaments. The style and cultural attributes of the horse gear and other grave goods suggest that they were tributes from considerable distances, indicating that the king commanded sway and allegiance over a vast domain. Another three hundred horses (along with cattle, sheep, and goats) were eaten in a lavish feast for a large, diverse contingent of mourners from the far reaches of the Scytho-Siberian realm.
A slightly smaller kurgan dating to the mid-seventh century BCE held the bodies of a royal couple adorned in ornate clothing decorated with golden beads, cuffs, and panther figurines. The sprawling, multichambered barrow contained more than 9,300 objects—of which 5,700 were made of gold weighing a combined forty-five pounds. Other grave goods were made of turquoise, garnet, malachite, and more than 400 beads fashioned from Baltic amber originating 2,500 miles to the west. The interment also contained sacrificed horses and servants, customary to Scythian burials—including those farther west at Pazyryk, where the breadth of horse-powered international trade and cultural fusion is on full display.
Straddling the fifth to third centuries BCE, the twenty-five kurgans at Pazyryk contain an impressive array of imported artifacts and goods. Inside were: silk, cloth, and a striking canopied carriage from China; mirrors and cotton fabrics from India; masks and a harp of Greek origin or design; and finely crafted carpets, tapestries, and felt hangings from Persia and Armenia, including the often-depicted, pants-wearing Pazyryk Horseman and the handmade Pazyryk Carpet.[*7]
Pazyryk horseman: A felt wall hanging from a kurgan burial depicting an elegant pants-wearing man riding a well-groomed horse, circa 300 BCE. (State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg, Russia/Alamy Stock Photo)
These kurgans were initially excavated by Soviet archaeologist Sergei Rudenko between 1947 and 1949. According to M. W. Thompson, the translator of Rudenko’s book Frozen Tombs of Siberia: The Pazyryk Burials of Iron Age Horsemen, “the Persian and Chinese textiles at Pazyryk are older than any surviving examples in Persia or China…. [T]he horses which had been buried adjoining them in the same shaft, together with their saddlery, were in all cases undisturbed, and thus constitute far and away the richest archeological remains throwing light on the early history of horse-riding.”
The cluster of kurgans at Pazyryk, including that of the tattooed Ice Maiden mentioned earlier, also contain cannabis seeds and smoking paraphernalia. An additional five bodies, all wearing pants, are also tattooed to varying degrees. The “Pazyryk Chief” is inked across his entire body with intricate circular shapes and elaborately drawn animals both real and imaginary. Personal possessions uncovered include a pair of leopard-skin boots and stringed musical instruments!
The magical mystery tour of Scythian song and dance, which Herodotus associated with marijuana use, was not welcomed by everyone. One Scythian king grumbled that he greatly preferred the neighing, nickering, and snorting of his horse to the strumming music and stoned caterwauling of his companions.
The numerous entombed Pazyryk horses are represented by two types, suggesting that many had been acquired, like those at Arzhan, through trade and tribute from a wide berth. Some are stocky local horses (resembling the Przewalski’s horse) standing twelve to fourteen hands. Others are the prized, long-legged Turkoman horses standing fifteen to sixteen hands.
Possessing a shiny coat with a glistening, metallic sheen, giving them the nickname “Golden Horses,” Turkomans are tough and hardy mounts, gaining a reputation for both speed and endurance. Russian records reveal that a Turkoman horse covered sixty-six miles of desert terrain in 4 hours and 30 minutes, while another traveled thirty-three miles in 1 hour and 58 minutes. With careful selective breeding, the Turkoman horse has influenced several modern breeds, including the Akhal-Teke and the Thoroughbred. This extraordinary international mosaic of horses and items found in Scythian kurgans on the remote steppe of Siberia was corollary to the widespread shift from chariotry to cavalry.
The increasing demand for steppe horses by the imperial armies and urbanized centers of China and the Middle East generated extensive transcontinental trade. Contemporary records indicate that at the height of the horse trade, between fifty thousand and one hundred thousand animals per year were being exported from the steppe to China and India, and through the Nisaean Plain of Persia to the Middle East. The tomb of Duke Jing of Qi (roughly modern-day Shandong Province) in China, dating to 490 BCE, for instance, contains the sacrificial remains of more than six hundred imported horses. This lavish burial is easily the largest horse sacrifice site discovered in China and represents what would have been a vast fortune in equine capital. Steppe horses were shipped and swapped across Eurasia in exchange for exotic goods. The modern world was beginning to take shape.
The natural by-product of heightened trade was war, which was progressively being carried out by men on horseback, or, in the case of the Scythians, men and women on horseback. “The horse was the great equalizer of males and females on the steppes, probably one of the chief reasons for the nomads’ noteworthy gender equality,” writes Adrienne Mayor in The Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Women Across the Ancient World. “A skilled archer horsewoman could hold her own against men in battle. Riding horses liberated women…. [T]he steppe culture was the perfect environment for women to become mounted hunters and fighters.” Accordingly, Scythian graves are also occupied by esteemed female warriors.
A revealing Scythian crypt from 500 BCE in southwest Russia contained four women with weapons, golden headdresses, and other jewelry representing three generations of female warriors. The youngest was twelve to thirteen; two were in their prime, between twenty-five and thirty-five; and the fourth was between forty and fifty years old, a “respectable age” for the time. “Such conditions of relative female empowerment existed,” explain Indo-European linguists Asya Pereltsvaig and Martin Lewis. “It is clear that we cannot simply assume overwhelming male domination based on pastoralism and military prowess.”
Roughly 30 percent of all excavated Scythian female burials, which number more than three hundred, contained horses and various weapons. Several women bore unmistakable battle wounds, including battle-axe cleaves and sword slashes. The Scythians “were notable for the great prominence of women in general and especially for the presence among them of women warriors,” says Beckwith. “The unusual status of women…was noticed by Herodotus and has received solid confirmation by archeology.”
These Scythian women are the famed “Amazon” horse warriors that captivated—and perhaps confused—Homer, Herodotus, and their fellow Greeks among other ancient scribes and artisans. As the Greek orator Lysias reminded the Athenians in 392 BCE, “Amazons were the first people to ride horses.”[*8] A mid-fifth-century BCE Greek medical textbook, On Airs, Waters, and Places, often attributed to Hippocrates but likely written by a conversant contemporary, reveals:
In Europe there is a Scythian race…different from all other races. Their women mount on horseback, use the bow, and throw the javelin from their horses, and fight with their enemies as long as they are virgins; and they do not lay aside their virginity until they kill three of their enemies, nor have any connection with men until they perform the sacrifices according to law. Whoever takes to herself a husband, gives up riding on horseback unless the necessity of a general expedition obliges her. They have no right breast; for while still of a tender age their mothers heat strongly a copper instrument constructed for this very purpose, and apply it to the right breast, which is burnt up, and its development being arrested, all the strength and fullness are determined to the right shoulder and arm.[*9]
Herodotus calls these women Amazons (a-mazos in Greek means “without breast”) but warns that in the Scythian tongue they are known as Oiorpata (“man-slayers”). As we will see, Cyrus the Great, founder of the Persian Empire, would eventually suffer the fatal wrath and fury of a Scythian warrior-queen. There is no evidence, however, that they mutilated their breasts in any way. Nevertheless, 2,500 years later, this myth persists as fact in cocktail-party conversations.
The ancient Greek historian also tells us that many of these women died unmarried at an old age, suggesting that they were not willing to forsake their lifestyle and assume more traditional female gender roles within Scythian society. According to Mayor:
In a nutshell: Amazons, the women warriors who fought Heracles and other heroes in Greek myth, were long assumed to be an imaginative invention. But Amazon-like women were real—although of course the myths were made up. Archaeological discoveries of battle-scarred female skeletons buried with weapons prove that warlike women really did exist among nomads of the Scythian steppes of Eurasia. So Amazons were Scythian women—and the Greeks understood this long before modern archaeology. And the Greeks were not the only ones to spin tales about Amazons. Thrilling adventures of warrior heroines of the steppes were told in many ancient cultures besides Greece…. Dramatic excavations of tombs, bodies, and artifacts illuminate the links between the women called Amazons and the warlike horsewomen archers of the Scythian steppes.[*10]
While the self-righteous, patronizing Greeks pretty much labeled everyone as barbarians, including the Amazons, four groups were held in higher barbaric esteem than the remainder of the great unwashed masses: Celts, Persians, Libyans, and, of course, the Scythians.
There was also a sharp distinction between sedentary civilization and nomadic barbarism. As William Honeychurch explains:
This dichotomy of cultures, often referred to as “steppe versus sown,” is a powerful and implicit concept even today…. These stereotypes still support divisive and shortsighted government policies in traditional nomadic regions…. It is important to note, however, that both in the present and past, these ideas reflect not just cultural bias but real political concerns about the military power of nomadic groups in what were often politically important borderlands. If for nothing else, nomadic people are known for military capabilities that centralized states and empires, even in the twenty-first century, have found difficult to contend with…. For combatants acculturated in a tradition of one-on-one warfare, the nomadic use of hit-and-run tactics was considered devious, deceitful, and even cowardly—as well as highly effective.[*11]
Mirroring the colonizing European attitude toward nomadic Indigenous peoples in the Americas, in the minds of Greeks, Persians, and Chinese, civilization (and its perceived advantages) was tied to fixed agriculture and static city-states. Peripatetic drifters and mounted nomads equated to barbarism.
Ancient Greeks also stereotyped the Scythians as drunkards—as well as obese, bow-legged, cannibals, eunuchs, impotent, and infertile.[*12] In addition to their habit of smoking cannabis, Scythians preferred to drink their wine undiluted. In Greek culture, this was uncouth and distasteful behavior. This distinction between civilized Greeks and uncivilized Scythians found its way into common lyrical prose written by the poet Anacreon (c. 582–485 BCE), who gained renown through his popular drinking songs and erotic passages: “Let’s not fall into riot and disorder with our wine like the Scythians. But let us drink in moderation listening to lovely hymns.” While these depictions of the savage, drunken Scythian were the product of Greek xenophobia, Scythians were, in fact, present across Greece in the flesh.
Small numbers of Scythian slaves trickled into Greece by the late sixth century, supplied to Black Sea emporiums by Scythian elites as a compelling reminder to their own people of their ability to wield power. Rogue Scythians were hired as mercenary mounted archers to augment Athenian infantry. Distinguished Scythian veterans were then mustered into special urban police detachments courtesy of the Athenian taxpayer.
Within Athens, Scythian officers also acted as capital guards to the popular assembly, or ecclesia. One story has these constables using ropes to corral reluctant citizens to vote. Scythian police also make an appearance in the dramatist Aristophanes’s comedy Lysistrata, debuting in 411 BCE at the height of the Peloponnesian War, where their cowardice and drunkenness in the face of an angry mob of women yields easy laughs.
While the Scythians were scorned and mocked, the Greeks were savvy enough to afford them a begrudging martial respect. Thucydides makes it perfectly clear in his History of the Peloponnesian War (c. 410 BCE) that they were, in fact, no joke: “The Scythians, with whom indeed no people in Europe can bear comparison, there not being even in Asia any nation singly a match for them if unanimous, though of course they are not on a level with other races in general intelligence and the arts of civilized life.”
Herodotus illustrates in blood-curdling detail the dangers of underestimating the Scythians:
Here is how they conduct themselves in war. When a Scythian kills his first man, he drinks some of his blood. He presents the king with the heads of those he kills in battle, because his reward for doing so is a share of the spoils they have taken in the battle, but no head means no spoils. The way a Scythian skins a head is as follows: he makes a circular cut around the head at the level of the ears and then he picks it up and shakes the scalp off the skull…which he proudly fastens to the bridle of the horse he is riding. The reason for his pride is that the more of these skin rags a man has, the braver he is counted. Many of them make coats to wear by sewing the scalps together into a patchwork leather garment like leather coats…. As for the actual skulls—the skulls of their enemies, that is, not all skulls—they saw off the bottom part…he gilds the inside and then uses it as a cup…. They also often skin the whole of a corpse and stretch the skin on a wooden frame, which they then carry around on their horses.[*13]
As the Scythians encountered the Cimmerians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Medes, Israelites, and Egyptians, they quite literally carved out a ferocious reputation. The Persian armies of Cyrus and Darius I and the Macedonian forces under Philip II and his son Alexander the Great would soon observe the reality of this martial status at the sharp end of battle.
The Old Testament prophet Jeremiah issued a direct warning (c. 600 BCE) about the viciousness of these mounted warriors just as they were beginning their push through the Levant toward Egypt: “Behold, a people shall come from the north, And a great nation and many kings Shall be raised up from the ends of the earth. They shall hold the bow and the lance; They are cruel and shall not show mercy. Their voice shall roar like the sea; They shall ride on horses, Set in array, like a man for the battle.” It did not take long for mounted Scythian archers to fulfill the prophecy. “Their insolence and oppression spread ruin on every side,” declares Herodotus. While their quick-strike forays and whirlwind of chaos across the biblical landscape were fleeting, within the long view of history, their shock waves and influence were not.
Using their hit-and-run tactics honed on the steppe, they quickly obliterated the Cimmerians as an identifiable people, completed the annihilation of Urartu, and arrived in full command at the gates of Assyria.[*14] Egypt saved itself for the time being with large tribute payments, Media was overrun after weakening itself against Assyria, and the Scythians marched on the Assyrian capital of Nineveh in 612 BCE.
Two years later, the vassal king of Media, Cyaxares (625–585 BCE), lured his overlord Scythian leaders to an extravagant banquet, where he wined and dined them, and, after they were properly drunk, murdered them, initiating a full-scale rebellion against Scythian rule. In his view, the Scythians got their just deserts for previously killing and serving up a local boy on his dining table after he’d ridiculed them for returning empty-handed from a hunt.
With a lack of central authority to coalesce the various factions and clans, and having already conquered and pillaged, the bulk of the grizzled Scythian veterans rode north over the mountains and plains, returning to their steppe homeland. While they left a trail of wreckage in their wake, including the destruction of the Assyrian Empire, they also left behind their expert knowledge of horsemanship and mounted warfare—including a piece of technology that would change the world: the saddle.
The earliest structured saddles are found in Scythian tombs dating to the early fourth century BCE. Prior to this, blankets and animal skins were used to reduce chafing and shield the rider from horse sweat, but these lacked any scaffolding or support. Intricately decorated early Scythian saddles consisted of two leather cushions stuffed with horse or deer hair, reinforced with thick “sweat padding” felt, attached to both sides of a wooden frame.
These innovations provided increased comfort and safety to both rider and horse, and a more even distribution of weight across the dorsal muscles and ribs, alleviating wear and tear on the spine. The saddle greatly improved the stability and security of riders as they delivered (or received) more powerful blows with handheld weapons, while boosting velocity, accuracy, and distance with projectile weapons, including spears and composite bows.
This rudimentary but effective saddle also provided the ability to execute what later came to be known as the legendary “Parthian shot.” Essentially, while performing a real or feigned retreat at full gallop, the mounted archer would turn their body around with the wind at their back to shoot at the pursuing enemy. “In fact, because of the direction of the propulsive forces,” explains Juliet Clutton-Brock, “it may be easier to stay on a galloping horse’s back, without stirrups, when shooting an arrow backwards rather than forwards.”
With both hands engaged with the bow and arrow, this contortion and twisting of the body while maintaining control of the horse without reins required dazzling equestrian skills and tremendous lower-body and core strength. The horse was controlled by squeezing pressure from the legs as stirrups were not yet invented. Over time, the term “Parthian Shot” was bastardized and corrupted into the phrase “parting shot” meaning “an insult or barbed comment issued as the speaker departs, walks away, or the conversation comes to an end.”
The Scythians are also credited with the tactical invention of the wedge or V battle formation. This tight configuration was beautifully suited to the shock action of Scythian cavalry because it covers a narrow but piercing front with concentrated striking power and is easier to maneuver in close combat at top charging speed. The cavalry wedge punches through the center or anchor of the enemy line, widening the breach for follow-on forces while preparing the ground for flanking and enveloping pincer movements.
This indispensable alignment crafted by the Scythians on the Eurasian Steppe was perfected by Alexander’s elite Companion Cavalry during his quest to realize immortality by reaching the eastern “ends of the world,” and remains a standard military configuration. It is also applied by civilian police for “snatch squad” riot control. This Scythian battle formation even found its way onto your Sunday living-room television screens, from the grasses of the steppe to the turf of the gridiron stadium. Applying this military principle to contact sports, wedge blocking was used in American football before its recent ban under revised concussion protocols.
Parthian shot: Statue of a female Amazon warrior adorning an Etruscan cinerary urn, circa 500 BCE. (Smith Archive/Alamy Stock Photo)
In addition to modern sports, the mounted legacy of the Scythians would be taken up by the Persians and subsequently by Alexander, both of whom had run-ins with the Scythians during their imperial ventures. “The Scythians, who were influential in the downfall of the Assyrians, rose to prominence in their place,” says military historian at the US Army Command and Staff College Louis DiMarco. “In fact, they became the first of the steppe nomadic horse peoples to organize their significant military skills to undertake offensive operations against the sedentary empires of Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Though they were the first, they would not be the last…. Cavalry would prove to be a crucial element in these historical confrontations.”
In the wake of Assyria’s downfall, western Eurasia and the greater Middle East were divided into three competing spheres of power: the Greeks/Macedonians, the Persians, and the Scythians. Farther east, the Warring States of China faced a troubling threat from the highly skilled mounted Xiongnu nomads from the northern steppe. As Xiongnu raids and tributary payments escalated, the Chinese, like the Greeks in the face of a Persian onslaught, were forced to put aside their differences to turn and face a more dangerous enemy with a united national front. The frontiers of Eurasia from Greece to China became decisive horse-dominated battlegrounds that forever changed history.
*1 Chosen in homage to Sargon of Akkad.
*2 It is thought that the Assyrians were the first to use the camel for military purposes. The two-humped Bactrian camel, domesticated around 4,500 years ago in Afghanistan/Turkmenistan, is an evolutionary marvel, able to withstand temperature extremes from -40°F (-40°C) to 109°F (43°C). In frigid cold and snow, it is protected by its thick, woolly coat, it can “drink” snow, and it can fuel itself from the fat stored in its humps. A 1,300-pound camel can drink 50 gallons, or 417 pounds (190 liters) of water in three minutes! They can lose up to 25 percent of their body weight to dehydration before potential negative effects set in, compared with 12 percent for most mammals. In blistering summer climates, a camel can go for months without water, and seal its nostrils with a skin flap during frequent desert sandstorms, while a third eyelid and two sets of eyelashes dislodge sand and dust from each eye. Its feet are made of durable, tough soles and can splay widely to accommodate both sand and rock, allowing it to navigate the desert floor with ease, stability, and impressive, albeit clumsy, dexterity. Camels can carry loads of more than 550 pounds over distances of twenty-five to thirty miles a day. The dromedary, or Arabian camel, possesses one hump and was domesticated (independent of the Bactrian camel) farther south in Somalia or the Arabian desert between four thousand and five thousand years ago.
*3 One of the earliest hydraulic machines used to transport water up a gradient to higher elevation.
*4 The first remnants of the library were uncovered in 1850. The vast collection of tablets is now housed in the British Museum. Unfortunately, many of the excavated, standing Assyrian sites in Iraq, including Nineveh, were systematically destroyed by the terrorist organization ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria), in 2015. To fund its militant campaign, ISIS also illicitly sold priceless Assyrian artifacts to unscrupulous private collectors.
*5 According to medieval Irish chroniclers, the exiled sons gave rise to the Picts of Scotland.
*6 The term lesbian is derived from the Greek island Lesbos, home to the sixth-century BCE poet Sappho, whose name survives in the English word sapphic. Her poetry often depicted the lives, rituals, and beauty of women as well as her admiration, love, and attraction toward females.
*7 Measuring six by six feet, it is woven with images and stylized designs, including warriors on horses. Hand stitched around 400 BCE, it is likely the oldest surviving pile-style carpet in the world, with knot density higher than most modern luxury productions.
*8 Many of the Greek names assigned to Amazons contain the roots hipp- or -ippe for horse: Alkippe (Powerful Horse), Ainippe (Swift Horse), Melanippe (Black Horse), Lysippe (Lets Loose the Horses), Philippis (Loves Horses), Hipponike (Victory Horse), Hippomache (Horse Warrior), Hippothoe (Mighty Mare), and Hippolyte (Releases the Horses). Other Amazon names reflect gender equality: Antibrote (Equal of Man), Isocrateia (Equal Power), Atalanta (Equal Balance), Antianeira (Man’s Match), Andromache (Manly Fighter), and Polemusa (War Woman).
*9 Hippocrates: Hippos (horse) and Kratos (power).
*10 Female warriors were not limited to the Scythians. Fu Hao was a top-ranking general in the army of her husband, Wu Ding, emperor of the Chinese Shang dynasty from 1250 to 1192 BCE. In command of more than thirteen thousand soldiers, including six hundred women, she was responsible for numerous military campaigns against neighboring mounted nomads.
*11 Recent NATO, American-led coalition, and Russian campaigns in Vietnam, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Ukraine highlight the inability of superior technology and fighting strengths to combat nomadic asymmetric warfare fought by small units of largely independent guerilla forces and decentralized quick-strike “Scythian-style” insurgents. Inexpensive, homemade improvised explosive devices (IED) and cheap, readily available rocket-propelled grenades (RPG) are extremely effective weapons against the most sophisticated adversary and armaments.
*12 There may be some truth to these stereotypes. Routine and prolonged horseback riding can cause the testes to overheat, lowering sperm count. Recent studies have also shown that men who use marijuana more than once a week have a 30 percent reduction in sperm count, significantly less seminal fluid, and abnormalities in sperm production and performance through testicular atrophy. Chronic marijuana use can also cause erectile dysfunction, including impotency and flaccidity. It also increases food cravings by stimulating appetite receptors in the brain as well as triggering hunger hormones, leading to weight gain. The Scythians also rode horses or were pulled in traditional covered wagons instead of walking and had a high milk- and meat-based diet. It is also known that certain groups of Scythians practiced ritual cannibalism of their deceased male elders in an elaborate spiritual banquet ceremony.
*13 This account has been corroborated by later Chinese sources and through a substantial collection of archaeological evidence. Serving a similar cultural function to that of the Scythians, scalping existed among many pre-Columbian Indigenous nations of the Americas. For example, of the five hundred bodies of the Crow Creek massacre along the Missouri River in South Dakota dating to 1325 CE, roughly 90 percent of the skulls show evidence of scalping.
*14 The Cimmerians, however, left a modern legacy in place names such as Cimmeria (the Crimea).