Feared, loathed, admired …and then forgotten

A major new exhibition tells the story of the Scythians – a race of fierce warriors who were all but written out of history. Alastair Sooke reports

‘Barbarian is such an unfortunate term,” says St John Simpson, an archaeologist and curator at the British Museum, “because the Greeks devised it for anyone who wasn’t Greek. So, for them, even the ancient Persians, who were the height of sophistication between the fifth and third centuries BC, were barbarians.”

We are sitting in a corner of the museum’s Sainsbury gallery, while, around us, members of Simpson’s team prepare for an exhibition devoted to another civilisation written off by the Greeks as barbarians: the Scythians. An Iranian-speaking nomadic culture that flourished for centuries in the ancient world, the Scythians had a terrifying reputation. Their archers were renowned both for their skill and for dipping their arrows in poison. Scythian soldiers were said to drink from the skulls of their enemies.

“No one who invades their country can escape destruction,” wrote the fifth- century BC Greek historian Herodotus.

The Scythians’ “country” had its epicentre in southern Siberia, but, beginning in 900 BC, the mounted warriors spread out until, eventually, they controlled vast swathes of grassland in Central Asia, stretching from the edge of northern China right through to the Black Sea.

They were the first great nomadic power, forerunners to the Mongols, and outlasted several famous civilisations, including both the Greeks and Persians, as well as the Assyrians. Indeed, the Scythians exited history only at the start of the second century BC, when they were overwhelmed by other Eurasian nomadic tribes.

But, while they were indeed formidable fighters – a kind of real-life counterpart to the nomadic “horse lords” of the Dothraki, in HBO’s fantasy series Game of Thrones – the Scythians were also “highly sophisticated”, says Simpson. To make his point, the curator gestures over his shoulder, where, it so happens, an actual Scythian appears to be staring straight at me. Inside a display case are the mummified remains of a Scythian chieftain, on loan from the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg.

Discovered in a tomb in the Altai Mountains of southern Siberia, where, for millennia, they were preserved by permafrost, these human remains consist of the chief ’s embalmed and decapitated head – which was severed from his corpse not during some barbaric funerary ritual but later, by tomb robbers – and tattooed skin from his chest, back, and left upper arm.

The head bears evidence of a violent death – three blows from a battle-axe, puncturing his skull. Yet the face is far from the stereotype of a warrior-savage, with wild, gnarly features and unkempt beard and hair. Rather, this trim fellow, who died early in the third century BC, when he was around 60 years old, was clean-shaven, with short hair and an attractive face.

Moreover, the intricate designs on his body, tattooed using soot, which was sterile and easily available, are typical of the so- called “animal style”, a “highly developed visual language”, as Simpson describes it, featuring ever- changing combinations of