The Scythians

The Scythians were a large group of loosely connected people who lived in Russia, and also further south around the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. We don't know when they first formed a group, but by 600 BC they were certainly already well established,and took over some of the land to their south (modern Turkey) for a while. The Medes pushed the Scythians back to the Black Sea again, and after the establishment of the Persian Empire the Persian king Darius mounted another campaign against the Scythians in the Black Sea area. But this time the Persians lost, and the Scythians kept on living around the Black Sea. The Scythians remained identifiable as a group for another eight hundred years, until around 200 AD another very similar group, the Sarmatians, overran them and took over their territory. Descendants of the Scythians and the Sarmatians still live in that area (modern Georgia and Ukraine) today.

A lot of what we know about the Scythians comes from the Greek historian Herodotus, who wrote a long description of Scythian religious rituals, lifestyles, and principles as part of his history of the Persian Wars. Herodotus wrote in the 400's BC. Herodotus tells us that the Scythians liked to make drinking cups out of the skulls of their enemies. But Herodotus is trying to show how the Greeks are more civilized than the barbarians (which explains why the Greeks won the Persian Wars) and so he naturally tends to emphasize the Scythians' bloodiest traditions.