Sons of Japheth Part III: Magog (No. 46C)

Introduction

In Genesis 10, Magog is given as the second son of the patriarch Japheth, son of Noah.

Genesis 10:1-2 These are the generations of the sons of Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japheth; sons were born to them after the flood. ² The sons of Japheth: Gomer, Magog, Madai, Javan, Tubal, Meshech, and Tiras. (RSV)

Apart from this text and its parallel in 1Chronicles 1:5, Magog is mentioned in only three other verses, all of which have prophetic significance, namely Ezekiel 38:2-3 and 39:6 (as those who dwell securely in the isles) and Revelation 20:8.

No sons of Magog are recorded in the Bible, although the Book of Jasher gives them as Elichanaf and Lubal (Ch. 7, 4).

The Milesian Ancestry or Genealogy records the son of Magog (who was twelfth in line from Adam), from whom the Milesians are descended as being:

13.

Boath, one of the sons of Magog; to whom Scythia came as his lot, upon the division of the Earth by Noah amongst his sons, and by Japhet of his part thereof amongst his sons.

14.

Phœniusa Farsaidh (or Fenius Farsa) was King of Scythia, at the time when Ninus ruled the Assyrian Empire; and, being a wise man and desirous to learn the languages that not long before confounded the builders of the Tower of Babel, employed able and learned men to go among the dispersed multitude to learn their several languages; who sometime after returning well skilled in what they went for, Phœniusa Farsaidh erected a school in the valley of Senaar, near the city of Æothena, in the forty-second year of the reign of Ninus; whereupon, having continued there with his younger son Niul for twenty years, he returned home to his kingdom, which, at his death, he left to the oldest son Nenuall; leaving to Niul no other patrimony than his learning and the benefit of the said school.

The record is from the Lineage of the Geoghegans as recorded on Abraham’s Legacy at http://www.ccg.org/_domain/abrahams-legacy.org/geoghegans.html. The stem of the Milesians from Adam to Milesius of Spain is also at Appendix A, with cross-links to the Library of Ireland. From that text it is obvious that the Milesians claim the Picts to be Scythians as well who followed them to Ireland but could not remain there. However, they refer in actual fact to the Scots. The Picts arrived earlier than the Scots in Alba or what became Scotland. The histories indicate that it was in fact before the Milesians entered Ireland, as we will later examine. The Scots went to Ireland from Gaul in the 5^th century CE and went onward into Scotland with the aid of the Milesian Irish. It is these that are Magogites.

We may have to face the possibility that the lineage commencing with Boath, Fenius Farsa, and Niul was of the element of the sons of Magog from Scythia. The Milesians claim descent from Niul the youngest son of Fenius Farsa, who married the Egyptian princess Scota. The Milesian Genealogies place this in the time of Moses. That was from the Ashmosid 18^th Dynasty of Egypt. From that time-frame Boath may not have been born earlier than the time of Abraham at 1995 BCE. However, the account sets the time of Fenius Farsa in his old age as being in the forty-second year of Ninus, who is identified as Nimrod. Fenius is recorded as going to the plain of Shinar and establishing a school to study the linguistics that resulted from the destruction and scattering of Babel. He is recorded as remaining there for twenty years and then returned to Scythia where he died and left the kingdom to his eldest son Nenuall.

Nimrod

Nimrod or Ninus constructed Nineveh, which itself is sometimes called Ninus.

Nimrod was a Cushite from Cush, son of Ham, and the land there was called Khus from that fact. Nineveh as capital of Assyria had to have come after Assyrian occupation and the dispersal of the later Cushites that remained there with Nimrod. Most had already gone into Asia and along the South Asian coast from India to Vietnam.

The spread is listed in the paper Sons of Ham Part II: Cush (No. 45B) and The Genetic Origin of the Nations (No. 265).

Greek mythology says Ninus was king of Assyria and the eponymous founder of the city of Nineveh. He was said to have been the son of Belos, or Bel, and to have conquered in seventeen years all of western Asia with the help of Ariaeus, king of Arabia. During the siege of Bactra he met Semiramis, the wife of one of his officers, Onnes; he then took her from Onnes.

(cf. Encyc. Britannica article ‘Ninus’ (http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9055893/Ninus)

Bel simply means Lord and is a way of attributing ancestor worship to Cush.

Semiramis was the legendary wife of Nimrod and the origin of the ‘Queen of Heaven’ religious mythology.

The explanation of the names can be seen from the ancient Babylonian religion and the ancestor worship that came from them.

The gods of Assyria actually came from the Babylonian system established by Nimrod and this is seen from the later Assyrian and Babylonian religious system.

Bel (or Lord) was carried throughout the Japhethite-language systems of both Gomer and Magog. The Great- or High-king of Britain before the Romans was Beli Mawr, meaning simply Great Lord.

The line of the kings from the Trojan occupation of Britain records that the Magogites were in Britain when they arrived in the 10^th century BCE and the Trojan British subjugated them. Both Geoffrey of Monmouth and Nennius are authorities on this history.

The same names appear in the religious pantheon of the Middle East.

The Assyrians had many gods and goddesses (many carried over from the times of Ancient Sumeria) which are listed below:

Adramelech	Form of sun god
Anasas	God of medicine
Anshar (Assur, Ashur)	The national god of Assyria (god of farming); consort of Belit
Anu	God of the heavens; originally worshipped at the city of Erech before Ishtar^[36].
Bel (Merodach)(Induru)(Belis by Greeks)(Indara by Hittites)^[39]*	God of the visible world; Beltis was the wife of Bel; Zirat-banit his consort^[37].
Ea (Hea)(Oannes by Greeks)	God of humanity and water; regarded to have come out of what we know as the Persian Gulf (half man, half fish) and imparted the Babylonians with the arts of civilized life^[34]. Davkina was the consort of Hea.^[36]
Gubaba	Associated with Samnuha
Ishtar (Nana, Ninmakh)	The goddess of love
Nabu (Nebo)	God of wisdom and writing; his consort was Tasmit^[37].
Nimrod^[13]	Deified king who founded the Babylonian Empire (who was the great-grandson of Noah^[14] (Note: Noah, or Noah's lineage associated to Cush?))**
Nina	Goddess of fish
Ninip	God of war (similar to Nergal)
Nisroch	God of agriculture
Samnuha (shapsh)	the god's torch; also associated to Gubaba
Shalla	Goddess of grain

cf. http://www.virtualsecrets.com/assyrian.html

Note that the Greek mythology has Oannes as husband of Semiramis, but the later mythology has Davkina as wife of Oannes or Hea and he is the god of civilisation. These famous ancestors became gods and were not in fact all of the one genetic structure.

This conquest of Western Asia may well explain why Fenius Farsa of the Scythians became interested in Ninus and the Tigris-Euphrates basin and Shinar itself.

Fenius Farsa, son of Boath, was the great-great-grandson of Noah and one step further removed than Ninus or Nimrod, his second cousin twice removed. Niul was his son and not as distant as Abraham was from Noah. Thus it is very unlikely that his son Goadhal was a young man at the time of Moses. The term “son” may refer to the line of Niul that was summoned to Egypt by the King of Egypt from the school in Shinar.

He was given the land of Campus Cyrunt on the Red Sea and Pharaoh’s daughter Scota in marriage.

The descendant of Magog through Niul, named Gaodhal, presented to Moses for snakebite was named after the linguist Gaodhal or Gael, son of Ethor, who served Niul and from whom the Scythian and other Celtic and Cymmery or Cimmerian languages were termed Gaodhilg or Gaelic. The Gaelic in Britain is in two specific languages, which are in fact now termed P and Q Brythonic in the UK.

The Milesians record that they were persecuted and continually attacked under the sons of Gaodhal, Asruth and his son Sruth by the Egyptians for their support of the Israelites in the Exodus. They were reduced to a small number and ultimately were forced to leave for the island of Creta (Candia), but after a year and the death of Sruth they moved to Scythia and fought with the descendents of Nenuall. The Milesians then ruled Scythia for a number of generations but ultimately were forced out to the Black Sea and into Iberia and on to the renamed Iberian Peninsula (now Spain). They moved ultimately into Ireland and to Lancashire in England (as the tribe of the Brigantes) (see Appendix A).

Nineveh fell to the Medes and Babylonians in 612 BCE. The Assyrian Sennacharib retired there as prophesied in Isaiah, and it was where he was murdered twenty years later by his sons (see the paper Commentary on Isaiah Part IV: Messianic Prophecy through Isaiah to Hezekiah (No. 157D).

The school of Fenius was near the city of Æothena and was set up to systematise the languages that came from the tower of Babel. The ancient cuneiform in Asia Minor was both ideographic and syllabic. In the movement into Asia, the Chinese developed the monosyllabic, ideographic language whereas the Japanese language became syllabic but used some of the Chinese script, among others.

The Hittite equivalent of Bel was Indara and this went into India with the Aryans as the god Indra. The Aryan Sanskrit in India was related to the Chaldean language of the Babylonians and the Hittites. We have to examine the possibility that the Scythians that entered India were Hittites of Magogite origin or an alliance of Gomer and Magog comprising the Hittite alliance. We will see that at one stage the Hittites were comprised of Gomer, Magog and also of the Tirasians at Troy and the later Phrygians in Anatolia. They were aided by the Southern Hittites of Palestine and the Cushites of Ethiopia.

The Haplogroups of the Irish and Scots contain a significant element of Hamitic Haplogroups A, B and E as well as Phoenician Japhethite K2 found among the Welsh. The probability is that they were from Phoenician traders from the Formorian or later Feinean lines, who were Phoenicians from Carthage or Getulia. However, some may have come from later Roman influence (see Appendix A).

The Milesian understanding was that the Parthians were descended from Magog but it is more probable that the Parthians were composite, having Magogites and Tirasians combined with other elements. The Parthians and Scythians shared some common burial customs the further north from Persia they went. We will deal with these aspects later.

The Irish seem to have kept their records and are among the most ancient records.

Ancient Historians

In the ancient historians, other than the Milesians, it is from Hesiod the Greek poet in the 7^th century BCE that we first hear of the possible connection between Magog and a people known as the Scythians.

Herodotus gives detailed accounts of the origins of the Scythians. The first is a fable regarding their kings’ descent from Hercules. They themselves at the time of Herodotus stated that they and their kingdom were no more than a thousand years old from the time of their origin to the time of Darius Hystaspes. Thus their kingdom in Asia was founded ca. 1500 BCE after they took it from the sons of Gomer or the Cimmerians.

Herodotus says:

[4.11] There is also another different story, now to be related, in which I am more inclined to put faith than in any other. It is that the wandering Scythians once dwelt in Asia, and there warred with the Massagetae, but with ill success; they therefore quitted their homes, crossed the Araxes, and entered the land of Cimmeria. For the land which is now inhabited by the Scyths was formerly the country of the Cimmerians. On their coming, the natives, who heard how numerous the invading army was, held a council. At this meeting opinion was divided, and both parties stiffly maintained their own view; but the counsel of the Royal tribe was the braver. For the others urged that the best thing to be done was to leave the country, and avoid a contest with so vast a host; but the Royal tribe advised remaining and fighting for the soil to the last. As neither party chose to give way, the one determined to retire without a blow and yield their lands to the invaders; but the other, remembering the good things which they had enjoyed in their homes, and picturing to themselves the evils which they had to expect if they gave them up, resolved not to flee, but rather to die and at least be buried in their fatherland. Having thus decided, they drew apart in two bodies, the one as numerous as the other, and fought together. All of the Royal tribe were slain, and the people buried them near the river Tyras, where their grave is still to be seen. Then the rest of the Cimmerians departed, and the Scythians, on their coming, took possession of a deserted land.

[4.12] Scythia still retains traces of the Cimmerians; there are Cimmerian castles, and a Cimmerian ferry, also a tract called Cimmeria, and a Cimmerian Bosphorus. It appears likewise that the Cimmerians, when they fled into Asia to escape the Scyths, made a settlement in the peninsula where the Greek city of Sinope was afterwards built. The Scyths, it is plain, pursued them, and missing their road, poured into Media. For the Cimmerians kept the line which led along the sea-shore, but the Scyths in their pursuit held the Caucasus upon their right, thus proceeding inland, and falling upon Media. This account is one which is common both to Greeks and barbarians.

Philo, the 1^st century BCE writer, identified Magog with the region we know today as southern Russia/Ukraine. In the 1^st century CE, Josephus wrote in his Antiquities: “Magog founded those that from him were named Magogites, but who are by the Greeks called Scythians” (I, vi, 1).

The Scythians or Scyths were among the most famous and feared of all ancient peoples. It is a source of confusion, however, that the name Scythian was often applied to many nomadic peoples, irrespective of tribal affiliations and whether or not they were actually descendants of Magog. The Elamites and the Persians called the Scyths closest to them, Sakâ or Sakka; and to the Greeks they were the Skythai of Skythia. The Assyrians referred to them as the Ashguzai or Ishguzai, although this name appears to be derived from Ashkenaz, son of Gomer, who was a brother of Magog (see the paper Sons of Japheth Part II: Gomer (No. 46B)). The Gomerites and the Magogites were often found in close proximity, hence the understandable confusion with respective identities. The confusion was compounded as the Parthian Empire and the Scythians waxed and waned, and tribes of each formed sections of the one and then the other dependent upon alliances and fortunes of war.

We see from Herodotus that the Scyths were pushed out of the north in Asia by the Massagetae or Greater Goths. They crossed the Araxes river, now called the Aras, which also happens to be the region to which the ‘Lost’ Ten Tribes of Israel went after their release from Assyrian captivity (i.e. “beyond the Araxes”).

The sons of Gomer were finally forced into Western Europe after this invasion of the Scythians. We will deal with these movements of the Celts in the text Sons of Japheth Part II: Gomer (No. 46B).

After this event the Assyrians were sometime allies of the Scythians, and perhaps as a guide to the importance and power of the latter, it is recorded that one of the Scythian kings, Bartatua/Protothyes, married the daughter of the famous Assyrian king, Asarhaddon, in ca. 674 BCE.

The Scythians were at the height of their power in Hesiod’s time, around the mid-seventh century BCE (hence the poet’s more immediate and accurate knowledge of them), although some modern authors speak of the fourth century BCE as being a Scythian ‘golden age’.

An early history of the Scythians is provided by Diodorus (I, 55; II, 43).

Land and Peoples of Scythia

The Steppe occupied by the descendants of Magog is an enormous grass belt, mostly treeless, that stretches for 4350 miles (~7000 km) from the foot of the Carpathian Mountains to Mongolia.

Their mummified bodies have been found in graves in the Uygur Autonomous Region of NW China and are dated to the first half of the second millennium BCE. Their garments closely resemble the ancient hunting tartans and plaids of the Scots.

The most easterly tribes were classed merely as the Eastern Scythians, for want of a better title. In the mid-region of the Steppe, between the Aral Sea and Lake Balkhash, were the Sakas/Sacae and Massagetae. A third major group was located in the Pontic steppes to the north of the Black Sea, and it appears that these were the ones known properly to the early historians as the Scythians. From Herodotus’ record, they apparently displaced the Cimmerians (sons of Gomer) from the South-western areas beginning as early as 1500-300 BCE and then were pushed over the Araxes by the Massagetae.

In his Geography, Strabo says that in Homeric times the Black Sea was called the Axenos Pontos, meaning inhospitable sea, “because of its wintry storms and the ferocity of the tribes that lived around it, and particularly the Scythians in that they sacrificed strangers … but later it was called Euxeinos [friendly to strangers] when the Ionians [Greeks] founded cities on the seaboard” (Bk. VII, iii, 6). Ovid called it the Scythian Sea.

Herodotus gives the location of the Scyths and the physical size of ‘Scythia’.

[W]e find the Scythians again in possession of the country above the Tauri and the parts bordering on the eastern sea, as also of the whole district lying west of the Cimmerian Bosphorus and the Palus Maeotis, as far as the river Tanais, which empties itself into that lake at its upper end. As for the inland boundaries of Scythia, if we start from the Ister, we find it enclosed by the following tribes, first the Agathyrsi, next the Neuri, then the Androphagi, and last of all, the Melanchaeni.

Scythia then, which is square in shape, and has two of its sides reaching down to the sea, extends inland to the same distance that it stretches along the coast, and is equal every way. For it is a ten days' journey from the Ister to the Borysthenes, and ten more from the Borysthenes to the Palus Maeotis, while the distance from the coast inland to the country of the Melanchaeni, who dwell above Scythia, is a journey of twenty days. I reckon the day's journey at two hundred furlongs. Thus the two sides which run straight inland are four thousand furlongs each, and the transverse sides at right angles to these are also of the same length, which gives the full size of Scythia (Bk. IV, 100-101).

In Histories IV, 17ff., Herodotus appears to separate the Scyths into at least four distinct groups in his time. The Callipidae and Alazonians were the agricultural Graeco-Scyths who lived in the lower Bug and Dnieper river regions; north of them were the ‘Scythian cultivators’, who grew corn as a commercial venture; east of them were the so-called Dnieper nomads, who “neither plough nor sow”; while farther east still were the Royal Scyths, whom Herodotus calls “the largest and bravest of the Scythian tribes, which look upon all the other tribes in the light of slaves” (IV, 20).

Asgard/Kiev became the capital of the central Scythians. The identification of the Aesar or Asens will prove to be important to this issue and will be examined with that of the sons of Tiras. Kiev is now the capital of the Ukraine.

Also in the Histories, Herodotus makes a clear distinction between the Scythians and the Sauromatae by saying they are neighbours of the Scyths, along with their allies the Tauri, Budini, Geloni et al; and that their northern neighbours were the Androphagi, Melanchlaeni and Arimaspians (IV, 102).

Polyhistor (62) said that the tribe of Assaei was “among the most distinguished of Scythia”.

The Scythian territory adjoined that of the Thracians, descendants of another son of Japheth (see the paper Sons of Japheth Part VIII: Tiras (No. 46H)), with whom they intermarried, as noted below.

The late Prof. Vasile Pârvan, a Romanian historian and archaeologist, stated that the Scyths needed at least three centuries to cover the distance from the Volga and the Caspian Sea area to the Dniester-Carpathian zone.

In his work Scythians and Greeks, Ellis Minns states: “The greater part of the information as to manners and customs given by Herodotus and the physical details in Hippocrates evidently refer to the Royal Scyths” (CUP, Cambridge, 1913, p. 36). Herodotus includes the Moesi amongst the Royal Scyths. Minns confirms that the Scythians were allied to the Assyrians against the Cimmerians, and they once attempted to lift the siege of Nineveh set by the Medes. However, to highlight the temporary nature of alliances in those days, it is also known that in 612 BCE ‘Scythian nomads’ materially assisted with the destruction of Nineveh. The Scyths are also said to have overrun Media, homeland of the sons of Madai, another son of Japheth. Thus there appeared to be no love lost between the various cousins. Minns writes:

We find the Cimmerians, Gimirrai, first North of Urartu (Ararat). Hence they are driven out by As-gu-za-ai (Asarhaddon) or Is-ku-za-ai (Sun Oracle). … The Cimmerians driven south from Urartu attacked Man a kingdom under Assyrian suzerainty. The Assyrians supported their vassals and found allies in the Scythians who were already enemies of the Cimmerians.

… Scyths also made their appearance further to the SW., apparently being sent by Assyria against Egypt, but bought off by Psammetichus. Thus they are referred to by the Hebrew Prophets and engaged in the sack of Ascalon where some contracted a disease ascribed by Herodotus (I. 105) to the hostility of Aphrodite. A colony of them is said to have settled at Beth-shean hence called Scythopolis [Jos. Ant. Jud. XII. viii. 5]. (ibid., p. 42)

The Cimmerians mentioned here were descendants of another son of Japheth, Gomer, with the obvious link being the name Gimmirrai. They were referred to as Gamirk in the older Armenian writings. In the Welsh, the word Cymro means a Cymry, expressed as “un sy’n perthyn i Gymru” meaning “a Welshman”. The Welsh language is Y Gymraeg, meaning in effect the Gomerite (cf. Christopher Davies, Y Geiriadur Mawr, A Gwasg Gomer, 1989).

Montgomerie of the French Norman invasion means of the Mountain of Gomer. We will deal with these aspects in the Sons of Japheth Part II: Gomer (No. 46B).

A German archaeologist, Renate Rolle, also relates certain Scyths to the modern-day Ossetes of Ossetia, while Klaproth and others state that the Ossetes are descended from Caucasian Alans. If both are correct, then the Alans may also be a Scythian tribe (see below under the heading ‘The Sarmatians’).

In European Scythia, including the Caucasus regions, we are dealing with Europids [Caucasians] in Scythian times who betray no Mongol characteristics but who do divide into long- and round-skulled types. The physical characteristics of the Scythians correspond to their cultural affiliation: their origins place them within the group of Iranian peoples. … The language of the Scythians is closely related to that of the ancient Ossetes (the remainder of the Ossetes tribe today live in the Terek region of the northern Caucasus).

Further east, the Mongol characteristics of the skulls of the indigenous Sauromatian peoples become more apparent. Nevertheless we must remember that we are dealing with a period in which huge areas of Siberia far into Mongolia were still inhabited by ancient Europids. It was only gradually -- in the first millennium BC -- that Mongol characteristics became apparent in this area, characteristics which are today almost universal in that region; at the same time the fifth or fourth century must have represented a certain turning point (The World of the Scythians, Renate Rolle: orig. publ. in German, 1980: trans. G. Walls, Batsford, London, 1989, p. 56).

Herodotus claimed that the headquarters of the ruling Scythians – the Royal Scyths – was in the vicinity of Tanais and Maetis (Hist., IV, 20).

By the time Herodotus wrote, in the middle of the fifth century B.C., the Scythians of the Black Sea area were grouped into a large confederation of separate tribes. In its most precise form, the term “Scythians” refers to some tribes who lived on the northern shores of the Black Sea, but the “Scythian culture” was shared by various tribes spread over a large territory, with similar ways of life and close interrelations, promoted by nomadic cattle-breeding (From the Lands of the Scythians, ibid., p. 21).

To add to the confusion of nomenclature, the Romans (cf. Pliny and Strabo) called the Scythians Sarmatae and Germani (from germanus, Lat. genuine). Interestingly, the Anglo-Saxons were also known as Germani. Strabo further refers to a people known as the Keltoskythai or Celtic-Scythians (XI, 6, 2), again suggesting intermarriage between the different tribes as they were brought into contact through invasion or migration.

There were also the Sakai, who Herodotus said were the Amurgioi Skuthai – the Scythians from Ammyurgia, while Arrian referred to the Sakai as Skuthon, “a Scythian people” (Amb. Alex., III, 8, 3). In her book The Scythians, Tamara Talbot Rice gives one explanation as to how these people became the Sacae or Saka.

Herodotus refers to a group of rebel Scyths who had broken away from the main clan and migrated to the north-west of Lake Balkash [directly east of Aral Sea], settling in an area which he called Sacae. It seems probable that pockets of other equally independently-minded Scyths existed elsewhere in the steppe, and it may even have been dissenters similar to those who penetrated to Prussia, thus accounting for burials of what appear to be single warriors such as that of Vettersfield (Thames & Hudson, London, 1961, p. 55).

The historian Pliny claimed that Armenia’s most fertile region was called Sacasina (vi, 11), with a probable link to the Sacae. There was also a Saka kingdom located in the upper Indus valleys between Afghanistan and Kashmir. Possibly even before 500 BCE, a tribe called the Sakyas inhabited the region in which Buddha was supposedly born. Guatma or the Buddha was also known as Sakyashina or Sakyamuni, meaning Sakya sage or Sakya the teacher. He was a Kshatryan knight of the warrior class and his teachings broke the stranglehold the Brahmins had on the priesthood from the Aryan invasion of India ca. 1000 BCE. The majority of Aryan YDNA Haplogroup in India is R1a and is not the dominant R1b Haplogroup of the Western-European Magogites. These YDNA divisions into R1a and R1b therefore must have occurred just prior to 1000 BCE from the original RxR1 basic found in India and Australia and North Africa. The RxR1 YDNA is found among the Dravidians and the Northern Aryans are predominantly R1a.

It is known that the Scythian Sakas also went east from the northern Caucasus and reached the borders of China in ca. 175 BCE. They were referred to by the indigenous Chinese as the Sai-wong or Sak-wong. The name Wong in Chinese is a Hakka name. Hakka means visitor or sojourner in Chinese. Hakka YDNA is a derivative of Hg O at O3. Thus it is part of the Great Hun and Han split of N and O and would not be Magogite based on our known YDNA groups. If Sak-wong means Saka princes, as has been suggested by some, then we might assume that the name refers to the ruling clan of the Saka.

Scythians and Sarmatians were later replaced by Slavs in the European section of the Eurasian plain.

The only mention of the Scythians (SGD 4658) by name in the Bible is in Colossians 3:11, where they are juxtaposed with barbarians, i.e. those who spoke neither Greek nor Latin and therefore “babbled”.

Colossians 3:11 Here there cannot be Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free man, but Christ is all, and in all. (RSV)

In this usage Scythian is of foreign origin and means by implication a savage. The Greek Skotoo (SGD 4656) means to obscure or blind, from Skotos (SGD 4655): to be in darkness. Skotia (SGD 4653) simply means dark (from 4655).

Blinding was the principle practice of Scythians with captive slaves and they were known for that practice by the Greeks. That may explain the origin of the applications of the form of the word in Greek.

Scythian society and culture

Under the heading The Scythian Culture regarding the treasures of the Scythian burial mounds, the authors of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Museum’s lavishly illustrated publication, From the Lands of the Scythians, give details on the cultures that developed systematically in the region later known as Scythia.

In 1902 the archaeologist V.A. Gorodtzov, on the basis of his excavations, suggested that the most ancient peoples of the northern shores of the Black Sea could be divided into three cultures, according to the strikingly different ways in which they built their tombs: the pit-grave culture, the catacomb-grave culture, and the timber-grave culture. This theory has been supported and made more precise by later archaeological work. The tombs of the catacomb culture date from the beginning and middle of the second millennium B.C.; they belonged to a Bronze Age people with a developed bronze metallurgy, whose economy was based on semi-nomadic cattle-breeding and agriculture. They had already established relations with other cultures.

In the middle of the second millennium B.C., the catacomb people were replaced on the north shore of the Black Sea by the timber-grave people, whose tombs were built like log cabins. This culture had developed to the east, in the region around the Volga river and the southern Urals, and had spread over a vast territory, remaining in existence until the mid-eighth century B.C. Again, its characteristics were a highly developed bronze metallurgy and semi-nomadic cattle-breeding, but with special emphasis on horse-breeding. Recent studies have convincingly suggested that the Cimmerians represent tribes of a late stage of the timber-grave culture; they were well-armed horsemen who could move easily over long distances.

The tribes of the Scythian culture developed on the foundation of the late timber-grave culture of the eighth century B.C. This could explain the two ancient ideas of Scythian origins, the one involving migration and the local one, since the timber-grave culture had been spread by peoples moving westward into the Black Sea region from Asia (op. cit., p. 17).

In The Scythians, Talbot Rice explains that these people, although unquestionably warlike, also had a highly-developed appreciation of the artistic.

The Scythians formed well-organized communities, responding to their chiefs with ready discipline. But they were a turbulent lot, delighting in warfare, predatory raids and the scalping of their enemies. On more than one occasion their military prowess in battle caused real concern to the infinitely more powerful kingdoms of Assyria, Media, Parthia and Greece.

In the seventh century B.C. the Scythians were feared throughout Asia Minor, but at the same time their wealth and love of finery won them the good will of the great Hellenic merchants established along the shores of the Black Sea, as well as of the Greek artists and craftsmen who had settled in the Bosphoran kingdom, and more especially at Panticapaeum. Even at this early date in their history, the Scythians already displayed an extraordinary ability to appreciate and assimilate the best in the art of their day, regardless of its origin, and they were quick to turn to the highly skilled Greek artists working in the Pontic towns which had sprung up on their southern border in the seventh century B.C., for objects of outstanding quality (op. cit., p. 22).

As with most other ancient peoples, there appeared to be a great deal of intermarriage for political and dynastic reasons among the Scyths.

Royal Scyths at times intermarried with Greeks or Thracians from neighbouring regions in the west. The union of weak and powerful tribes by marriage was often the only way of ensuring the security of the smaller clan (ibid., p. 41).

This has been borne out by relatively recent archaeological finds which suggest that the royal tombs of Brezovo, Panagyurishte (near Philippopolis), Bedniacovo and Radyuvene (all in modern-day Bulgaria) were the final resting-places of either Scythian, Thracian or mixed Thraco-Scythian princes of the 4^th century BCE.

Rather surprisingly perhaps, the historian Strabo had some very positive comments to make about the Scyths.

Aeschylus, too, is clearly pleading the cause of the poet when he says about the Scythians: "But the Scythians, law-abiding, eaters of cheese made of mare's milk." And this assumption even now still persists among the Greeks; for we regard the Scythians the most straightforward of men and the least prone to mischief, as also far more frugal and independent of others than we are (Geography, VII, iii, 9).

A particularly famous Scythian was Anacharsis, a prince and philosopher of the late-sixth century BCE, who was known as one of the Seven Sages of the Greeks (see Hist., IV, 76).

Agriculture and trade

Scythia was an important grain-producing region of the ancient world, just as it is today as the Ukraine. The Scyths involved with grain growing were basically sedentary tribes, unlike the nomadic and ‘superior’ Royal Scyths.

Scythia served as one of Greece’s granaries, and in southern Russia the corn grown by the settlers was transmitted by the nomadic overlords to the Greek colonists of the Pontus, who in their turn acted as middlemen in selling it to Greece. The Scythians in the Kuban, on the other hand, traded direct with the masters of vessels coming to their ports from Ionia. In addition, the Scyths as a whole supplied the Pontic Greeks with valuable consignments of salt, sturgeon and tunny-fish, with honey, meat and milk, hides and furs, and not least important, with slaves. The latter, though described by the Greeks as ‘Scythians’, were probably conquered enemies or local agriculturalists rather than nomad freemen. In return for this merchandise the Scythians received Greek jewellery, metalwork and pottery of the finest quality (The Scythians, Tamara Talbot Rice, Thames & Hudson, London, 1961, p. 51).

When Darius the Persian came against Greece, the first thing he did was to cut off her vital supplies, in particular, timber from the Balkans and consignments of grain from Scythia.

The Royal Scyths were relatively few in number, but they were such efficient rulers and such fearless fighters that they had no difficulty in governing a large territory and controlling with ease a population consisting of their own husbandmen and the indigenous agriculturalists whom they had found established in the region, and who greatly outnumbered them. Regardless of the disparity in numbers, by the sixth century B.C., and possibly even as much as a hundred years earlier, the Royal Scyths were already firmly established in the area bounded by the Don and the Dniepr, and virtually controlled the steppe as far west as the Bug [a river south of Kiev, Ukraine] and the productive lands in the neighbourhood of Poltava (ibid. pp. 52-53).

In English, the word scythe is used for a two-handed implement for reaping grain and linguistically appears to dreive from the agricultural Scyths.

Language and art

To the Greeks most non-Greeks were ‘barbarians’, not necessarily because they were considered less civilised but rather because of their unintelligible speech, as one author explains.

The term ‘barbarian’ began as an onomatopoeic Greek word about foreign language: the ‘bar-bar babble’ sound of an incomprehensible tongue. It occurs once in the Iliad, when the Carian army is described as ‘barbarophonos’ -- barbar-speaking. … But it is fairly clear that at the time of the Iliad and for long afterwards the Greeks did not lump all foreigners together under the linguistic definition ‘barbarians’. Still less did they use the term as a catalogue of inferior ‘otherness’ comprising all that the Greeks were not. Victorian scholars in the age of empire misread the Iliad as an account of the triumph of civilisation over ‘barbarous’ and morally inferior Trojans But there is nothing remotely like that in the text of the poem, in which the Greeks are if anything more cruel and treacherous -- epithets later heaped into the tray of ‘barbarism’ -- than the Trojans. … But in the fifth century BC Athens … constructed a single barbarian world, squeezing peoples as distinct as Scythian nomads and Mesopotamian city-dwellers into a single new species, and opposed it to the image of a single and united Hellenic world (Black Sea, Neal Ascherson, Random House, London, 1996, pp. 60-61).

Talbot Rice is of the opinion that there was one (Iranian-based) language spoken by all the so-called Scythian peoples.

The only indubitable fact which emerges is that the tribes of the entire plain all spoke the same language, in much the same way that many present-day nomads throughout Asia all speak the Turki dialect of Turkish. The language spoken by the nomads was basically an Iranian tongue, but it may have been more closely allied to Avestic than to ancient Persian. …

[S]ince all the mounted nomads of the Scythian age spoke the same Iranian tongue, whether they came from the Dniestr or the banks of the Oxus, there seems reason to think that at any rate the majority were linked by some sort of racial tie. A definite affinity is indeed suggested by the nature of their art, which shows well-nigh identical features over so wide an area (The Scythians, op. cit., pp. 39, 42).

Art

The Director of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art made the following comment in From the Lands of the Scythians:

Herodotus’ portrait of the Scyth is not particularly complimentary: the Scyth was a nomad, a fierce hunter and fighter, a tough, indomitable barbarian addicted to strong wine, hashish, and violence, wandering, always wandering, uncivilized and rootless. But one must be cautious. A Greek historian of the fifth century B.C. would look upon any people who did not speak the mother tongue as barbarians, and would judge any group of mankind without cities as beyond the pale. However, as one examines the uniquely beautiful art made by and for the Scyths, one must acknowledge that, stereotyped concepts of civilization aside, these anonymous peoples were connoisseurs of supreme taste (Thomas Hoving, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, Vol. XXXII, New York, 1975, p. 1).

Having left no written records, the most significant legacy of the Scythians is the golden treasures recovered from their numerous burial mounds. Photographs of many of the pieces found are in the aforementioned book.

Between the fifth and third centuries B.C., the Scythians not only were in contact with the civilizations of Greece, Egypt, and the Near East, but shared a cultural unity with many other tribes living in the steppe region of eastern Europe and Asia. In art, an indication of such unity is the so-called animal style. Powerful, stylised, and decorative, this style is characteristic of a wide territory stretching from Hungary to China. It portrays animals and birds with their most important attribute … exaggerated or accentuated. … These images probably had religious or magic significance: (ibid., p. 21).

As Talbot Rice suggested, the Scythians were linked by common artistic designs.

The most characteristic single motif in Scythian art is provided by the stag. Originally an object of worship among Siberian tribesmen, it had probably lost much of its earlier religious significance by Scythian times, but it is more than likely that the belief that stags transported the souls of the dead to the world beyond was still generally current in Eurasia throughout the first millennium. It persisted with the Buriats until quite recently (op. cit., p. 158).

She makes another interesting observation that seems more than coincidental and could indicate where the westward migration of some of the Scyths finally ended: “A resemblance to Scythian art can often be recognized in the sculptures and illuminations of the Celtic school in Britain” (ibid., p. 192).

The epitome of Scythian art is seen in the treasures of the ubiquitous Royal Scyth burial mounds; however, the majority of objects were thought to have been created by Greek craftsmen rather than the Scythians themselves.

Gold featured very heavily in the treasures. The archaeologist Renate Rolle says that there were basically three areas from which Scythian gold came: Transylvania in the west (where the Agathyrsi, relatives of the Scyths, were found); the Caucasus, especially Colchis, the place from which the legend of the Golden Fleece originated; and Kazakhstan and the Altai mountains. A comment in From the Lands of the Scythians reads: “In Kazakhstan, as in the Altaic immediately to the east, gold was mined from Bronze Age times (c. 1500 BC) at the very latest, in both opencast and underground mines” (op. cit., p. 52). The word Altai appropriately means mountains of gold. There are no known gold deposits in the Ukraine, hence all Scythian gold must have been imported.

Religious practices and burials

Talbot Rice provides an overview of Scythian religion.

Like all primitive peoples, the Scythians were exceedingly superstitious. They believed in witchcraft, magic and the power of amulets. Their soothsayers foretold the future by means of bundles of twigs and by splitting bast fibres in much the same way as did certain groups of Germans in the Middle Ages. The most highly honoured of the Scythian magicians came from certain specific families. …

The Scythians worshipped the elements. Their main devotions were paid to the Great Goddess, Tabiti-Vesta, the Goddess of Fire and perhaps also of beasts. She alone figures in their art, presiding at the taking of oaths, administering communion or anointing chieftains. Rostovtzeff found that she had been worshipped in southern Russia long before the Scythians appeared there. Pottery statuettes of her were common in the Bronze Age in the country lying between the Urals and the Dniepr, even more along the Bug and Donetz rivers. There is a marked resemblance between these little figures and those representing the same deity in Elam, Babylonia and Egypt made centuries earlier (The Scythians, op. cit., p. 85).

Among the various practices which the Slavs inherited from the Scythians, the most important consisted in the worship of their ancestors (ibid., p. 181).

This appeared to be a prevalent practice among many diverse peoples at the time, as we noted earlier with Cush and Semiramis.

The Scythian gods were listed as: Tabiti/Tabitha; Papeaus (Zeus) and his wife Api; Oetosyrus (Apollo); Argimpasa (Aphrodite); Thagimasadas (a ‘Poseidon’); Heracles, and an unnamed god of war. The sacred emblems of the Scyths were: the serpent; the ox (representing Nimrod/Taurus); Tho/Theo (Egyptian Pan); and fire (representing the sun and knowledge).

Burials

Presumably as a result of belief in the immortality of the soul, the Scythian dead were expected to ascend to another world in which they would maintain their former wealth and social position. For an understanding of the Immortal Soul doctrine see the paper The Soul (No. 92).

In general, and as an obvious means of differentiation between the tribes, the Getic and Celtic tombs were flat, whereas those of the Scythians were almost invariably raised tumuli known as kurgans. This factor alone would tend to suggest that the Scyths and Getae were distinct peoples, or had separated quite early. Also, from archaeological evidence, the remains of pigs, chickens and wild boar as food dedicated to the dead were found in Gaulish tombs, as well as in the Celtic ones in north-west Dacia. This is in direct contrast to the Scythians, who Herodotus said never ate pig. It is now known that the Gauls were in fact Gomerites. Another distinguishing feature of the Celts was that, despite their close contact with the Scythians, they did not generally use the bow as a weapon of war; they were noted swordsmen instead.

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