Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 21.djvu/602

Rh 576 S C Y T H I A through the steppe from exhausted to fresh pasture- grounds, their women in waggons roofed with felt and drawn by oxen, the men on horseback, the droves of sheep, cattle, and horses following. They lived on boiled flesh, mare's milk, and cheese ; they never washed, but enjoyed a narcotic intoxication in combination with a vapour bath by shutting themselves up within curtains of felt and strew- ing hemp seed on heated stones. The women, in place of washing, daubed themselves with a paste containing dust of fragrant woods and removed it on the second day. Like many other barbarians, the Scythians, at least in Hippo- crates's time (ed. Littr6, ii. 72), were not a specially hardy race ; they had stout, fleshy, flabby bodies, the joints con- cealed by fat, their countenances somewhat ruddy. The observation of Hippocrates that they all looked alike is one that has often been made by travellers among lower races. They were liable to dysentery and rheumatism, which they treated by the actual cautery; impotence and sterility were common, and, though the accounts vary, it is probable that the race was not very numerous (Herod., iv. 81). Hippocrates's description has led many writers to view the Scythians as Mongolian ; but the life of the steppe impresses a certain common stamp on all its nomad in- habitants, and the features described are not sufficiently characteristic to justify the assumption of so distant a Mongol migration. What remains of the Scythian lan- guage, on the other hand, furnished Zeuss with clear proofs that they were Aryans and nearly akin to the settled Iranians. The most decisive evidence is found in Herodotus (iv. 117), viz., that Scythians and SARMATIANS (q.v.) were of cognate speech ; for the latter were certainly Aryans, as even the ancients observed, supposing them to be a Median colony (Diod., ii. 43; Pliny, vi. 19). The whole steppe lands from the Oxus and the Jaxartes to the Hungarian pusztas seem to have been held at an early date by a chain of Aryan nomad races. The Scythian deities have also an Aryan complexion. The highest deity was Tabiti, goddess of the hearth ; next came the heaven-god Papaeus, with his wife the earth-goddess Apia; a sun-god, OEtosyrus; a goddess of fecundity, Arippasa, who is compared with the Queen of Heaven at Ascalon; and two gods to whom Herodotus (iv. 59) gives the Greek names of Heracles and Ares. These deities were common to all Scythians. The royal horde had also a sea -god, Thamimasadas. In true Iranian fashion the gods were adored without images, altars, or temples, save only that Ares had as his symbol a sabre (Herod., iv. 62), which was set up on a huge altar piled up of faggots of brushwood. He received yearly sacrifices of sheep and oxen, as well as every hundredth captive. Ordinarily victims were strangled. Diviners were common, and one species of them, who came only from certain families, the Enarians or Anarians, were held in high honour. These supposed their race to have offended the goddess of heaven, who in revenge smote them with impotence; they assumed the dress and avocations of women and spoke with a woman's voice. 1 Divination was practised with willow withes as among the Old Germans ; the Enarians, however, used lime-tree bark. False pro- phets were tied on a waggon with burning brushwood, and the frightened team was driven forth. Oaths were sealed by drinking of a mixture of wine with the blood of the parties into which they had dipped their weapons. When the king was sick it was thought that some one had sworn falsely by the deities of his hearth, 2 and the man 1 Reineggs in 1776 observed the same symptoms, with the same consequence of relegation among the women, in certain Nogai Tatars on the Kuban. 2 The plural (Herod., iv. 69) reminds us of the Fravashi of the king in the Avesta. was beheaded whom the diviners, or a majority of them, pronounced to be the culprit. When the king commanded the death of a man all his male offspring perished with him (for fear of blood-revenge). He who gained a suit before the king had the right to make a drinking-cup of his adversary's skull. Actions at law thus stood on the same footing with war, for this is what one did after slay- ing a foe. The Scythians fought always on horseback with bow and arrow, and the warrior drank the blood of the first man he slew in battle, probably deeming that his adversary's prowess thus passed into him. No one shared in booty who had not brought the king a foeman's head ; the scalp was then tanned and hung on the bridle. Cap- tive slaves were blinded on the absurd pretext that this kept them from stealing the mare's-milk butter they were employed to churn. The government was strictly despotic, as appears most plainly in the hideous customs at the burial of kings. The corpse of an ordinary Scythian was carried about among all the neighbours for forty days, and a funeral feast was given by every frjend so visited. But the royal corpse was embalmed and passed in like manner from tribe to tribe, and the people of each tribe joined the procession with their whole bodies disfigured by bloody wounds, till at length the royal tombs at Gerrhi were reached. Then the king was buried along with one of his concubines, his cupbearer, cook, groom, chamberlain, and messenger, all of whom were slain. Horses, too, and golden utensils were buried under the vast barrow that was raised over the grave. Many such tumuli (called in Tatar Icurgaii) have been found between the Dnieper and the sources of the Tokmak, a tributary of the Molotchnaya. Then, on the first anniver- sary, yet fifty horses and fifty free-born Scythian servants of the king were slain, and the latter were pinned upright on the stuffed horses as watchmen over the dead. The Scythians deemed themselves autochthonous ; their patriarch was Targitaus, a son of the god of heaven by a daughter of the river Dnieper. This legend, with the site of the royal graves, points to the lower Dnieper as the cradle of their kingdom. The further legend (Herod., iv. 5) of the golden plough, yoke, battle-axe, and cup (tokens of sovereignty over husbandmen and warriors) that fell from heaven, and burned when the two eldest sons of Targitaus approached them, but allowed the youngest son to take them and become king, has been well compared by Duncker with the Iranian conception of hvareno, the halo of majesty, which refused to be grasped by the Turanian Franrac.6, but attached itself to pious kings like Thra6ta6na. The eldest brother, Lipoxais, was ancestor of the Auchatee ; the second, Arpoxais, of the Catiari and Traspians ; the youngest, Colaxais (whose name seems to be mutilated), was father of the royal tribe of Paralatse, and from him, too, the whole nation had the name of Scolots. Pliny (H.N., iv. 88) places the Auchatae on the upper Bug, so this seems to be the proper name of the agricultural Scythians ; if so, the Catiari and Traspians will be the Borysthenian and nomad Scythians who dwelt between the husbandmen and the royal horde. Colaxais divided his kingdom among his three sons, the chief kingdom being that in which the golden relics were kept ; and these three sons correspond to the three kings of the Scythians in the time of Darius's invasion, viz., Scopasis, whose realm bordered on the Sarmatians ; Idan- thyrsus, sovereign of the chief kingdom; andTaxacis, the last two being neighbours of the Budini and the Geloni. According to the Scythians, Targitaus lived just a thousand years before the year 513 B.C., a legend which, taken with the tradition of autochthonism, indicates a much earlier date for the immigration of the Scythians than we should deduce from other narratives.