SCYTHIANS
Dragon Lords, Dragon Fossils
Scythian Death mask
The meaning of the name of the ancestor of the Scythians was also a common characterization of his nation, his descendants. Truth and trustworthiness above advantage, which strongly reminds of the
de Vere family motto. "the prince of truth" "the defender of the side of the sun god" This tradition goes back to the ancient tradition of northern sunworship, where the sungod was the god of truth and protector of mankind and was represented by the light of the sun, which enlightens us. the Scythian name of God was TAR.
de Vere family motto. "the prince of truth" "the defender of the side of the sun god" This tradition goes back to the ancient tradition of northern sunworship, where the sungod was the god of truth and protector of mankind and was represented by the light of the sun, which enlightens us. the Scythian name of God was TAR.
Fierce Scythians were known as Dragons for their heavy, segmented armour; they were the forefathers of medieval knights.
The Silk Road, itself, can be envisioned as a vast dragon.
Why not make your tribe's totem the biggest, baddest creature who's bones are in your hillsides?
Naturally, myths of dragons, dragon bones and dragon lords arose in tandem.
The crested dragon is the grand-daddy of T-Rex
The Silk Road, itself, can be envisioned as a vast dragon.
Why not make your tribe's totem the biggest, baddest creature who's bones are in your hillsides?
Naturally, myths of dragons, dragon bones and dragon lords arose in tandem.
The crested dragon is the grand-daddy of T-Rex
THE SAKA
It seems that both nomadic and sedentary Iranians referred to themselves as Airyas; gradually, however, this word became a self-imposed designation for the settled Iranians only, who began to refer to their nomadic cousins in the East, i.e., Zoroaster's people, as the Saka, and some of those further west as SKUDRA [3][3]; the Saka probably did not call themselves exclusively by this name, some may have retained the use of the term Airya.
Many Saka tribes left the northern steppes intermittently to settle permanently in Central Asia, modern Afghanistan, and Persia; these tribes are the direct forebears of the imperial Western Iranians, the Medes, Persians and lastly, the Parthians;
Once converted to Zoroastrianism, however, such became their religious significance, that by the middle of the 1st millennium B.C., the centre of the faith was neither in the homeland of its founder, nor in any of the adjoining Eastern Iranian regions; it was firmly established on the western side of the great salt desert, amongst the people now called Western Iranians; from then onwards, Eastern Iran fades into the background; we now deal almost exclusively with Western Iran, and until very recently, were not even aware of the fact that Eastern Iran had played such a vital part in the genesis of the Iranian empires, and their great national faith; most scientific facts, such as, the recorded history and Near Eastern archaeological data, especially a large volume of deciphered inscriptions, relate to the four great Western Iranian empires of the Medes, Persians, Parthians & Sasanians; there is only a small volume of classical sources, and more recent archaeological data, which also deal with the nomadic Iranians of the northeast, i.e., those Saka warriors who remained in the steppes, and were never completely subdued by the settled Iranians of the imperial period; these warriors remained, nonetheless, a very formidable enemy of their settled cousins; not only did they conquer and rule the Median Empire for 28 years in the 7th century B.C., but they also defeated and killed Cyrus the Great, founder of the Achaemenian Empire, in the following century; a generation later, they were still engaging Darius the Great in many hard-fought battles; two hundred and fifty years later, however, they became the saviours of the Iranian culture and religion, and political integrity; they gradually pushed the Macedonians out of the Iranian homeland, and formed the Parthian Empire, which lasted for another 500 years.
The nomadic Iranians of the north western steppes, however, especially those settled in Europe, are extensively covered by the classical writers; they are also attested in a very large number of archaeological excavations in Eastern Europe; these Iranian peoples are known in the West as Cimmerians, Scythians, Sarmatians, Alans, and finally Ossets; it must be emphasised that all these names refer to the successive migratory waves of the same people, who probably called themselves by a name derived from the word Airya, as the Alans did, and the Ossets still do.
CIMMERIANS
The earliest recorded nomadic western Iranians are the Cimmerians; they make their first appearance in Assyrian annals at the beginning of the 8th century B.C., where they are referred to as Gimmiri; they came down from modern Ukraine, and conquered eastern Thrace, and most of modern Turkey, being pushed westwards by another nomadic Iranian people, the Scythians (see below); they left behind a wealth of archaeological material, including a vast number of mound-burials in western Asia Minor; they later allied themselves with the Medes against the Assyrian Empire; the word GIMMIRI is attested in the Old Testament (Genesis I.x.12), as GOMER, the name given to one of Japhet's sons (see below, Scythian/Ashkenaz[4][4]).
SCYTHIANS This is by far the most important, and enduring designation given by the classical sources to the nomadic Iranians of the steppes; the name refers to the entire non-sedentary Iranians, both in the West, and in the East (the Saka). Greek records place them in southern Russia in the 8th century B.C., however, recent archaeological evidence testifies that they, Cimmerians, and other Steppe Iranians may have been there far earlier. Greek geographers of the 4th century B.C. also credit the Scythians with inhabiting the largest part of the known world (map Red 16).
Like other Iranians, these nomads probably called themselves by the generic term "Airya"; this is testified inter alia by the native name of their descendants in the present day Europe (see below); it seems, however, that they, or at least some of their powerful clans, also called themselves "SAKA" in the East, and *SKUنA, SKUDA, or SKUDRA [5][5] in the West. SKUDA is believed to be related to the German word "SACHS", meaning a type of throwing-dagger which the eponymic Saxons used to carry and shoot with[6][6]; indeed, it is possible that like the historical Saxons, the Skuda derived their name from their ability to shoot. [cf. Franks].
Their first appearance in recorded history is again in the Assyrian annals, where they chase the Cimmerians, their own kinsmen, first out of Europe, then out of Asia Minor into the Median territory; in the 7th century B.C. they allied themselves with the Assyrians, and attacked the combined forces of the invading rebellious Median vassal king, Khshathrita (Phraortes in Greek, Kashtariti in Akkadian) and his Cimmerians allies; the Assyrians repelled the Medes, killing Phraortes, and routed the Cimmerians; the real victors, however, were the Scythians; for the next 28 years, now allied with their erstwhile enemy, the Cimmerians, they ravaged most of the Ancient Near East, including Media; later they allied themselves with Khshathrita's son, the Median emperor, Hvakhshathara II (Cyaxares in Greek, Uaksatar II in Akkadian), and the Babylonian king, Nabopolassar, taking Nineveh in 612 B.C. and destroying once and for all the mighty Assyrian Empire. (beginning of the Kurdish calendar)
The Scythians were called by the Assyrians Ashkuza or Ishkuza (A/Iڑ-k/gu-za-ai); as with the Gimmiri, this word also appears to have found its way into the Old Testament; one of Gomer's (Gimmiri) three sons, in Genesis I.x.12, is called Ashkenaz, which has given us the modern Hebrew word, Ashkenazi[7][7].
The Scythians were known by the Achaemenians, as SAKA and SKUDRA, by the Greeks, SKغTHIA (سê?èéل), by the Romans, SCYTHIAE (pron. SKITYAI), which has given us the English word SCYTHIAN; they lived in a wide area stretching from the south and west of the River Danube to the eastern and northeastern edges of the Taklamakan Desert in China; this vast territory includes now parts of Central Europe, the eastern half of the Balkans, the Ukraine, northern Caucasus, southern Russia, southern Siberia, Central Asia and western China.
Physiognomy
We know a great deal about their physical appearance; they were long-headed giants with blond hair and blue eyes; this well-known fact is attested by various classical sources [8][8], and by their skeletal and other remains in numerous archaeological excavations, which give a fairly detailed description of these ancient Iranians [9][9]; recently, a large number of their mummified corpses were discovered in western China; these mummies, which are extremely well-preserved in the arid conditions of the Taklamakan desert, are now on display at the museums of khotan, Urumchi, and Turfan in Sinkiang; they are dressed in Scythian costume, i.e., leather tunic and trousers, and are usually displayed in the sitting position, exactly as described by Herodotus; what is extra ordinary apart from their northern European features, however, is their gigantic heights, well over two metres as they are now, in spite of the natural shrinkage expected during the past thousands of years.
Equestrian skill
The Scythians, and other early steppe Iranians are believed to have been the first Indo-Europeans to use domesticated horses for riding (as opposed to eating); this theory has acquired fresh credibility after the recent discovery of horse skeletons at the Sredny Stog archaeological culture, east of the River Dniepr, a well-known pre-historical Scythian site in eastern Ukraine; these bones were identified as belonging to bitted, therefore, ridden horses dating to 4000 B.C., at least 2500 years older than the previously known examples.
More recent excavations east of the Ural Mountains credit them also with the invention of the first two-wheeled chariot [10][10]; such mobility, naturally, turned them into a formidable fighting force; they never willingly fought on foot, and used armour both for themselves and their mounts; they also developed the famous steppe tactic of faked retreat, and the "Parthian shot", shooting backwards while on mounted retreat; this tactic, named after their well-known descendants, the Parthians, requires an amazing skill and balance in the saddle, and a dazzling co-ordination of eyes, arms and breath without the support of stirrups.
Their women
In this unique pastoralist equestrian warrior society, women fought alongside their men; not only they were held in an equal status with men, but also periodically they actually ruled them;
this so called upside-down society both fascinated and horrified the male dominated Greek culture; later, the Romans expressed the same horror, when they encountered the Celtic and Germanic female warriors. Greek writers called the fighting Iranian women they met in the Ukrainian steppes, the Amazons; later Greek sources placed them further east, in northeastern parts of Iran.
This incredible social equality, at such an early age, is irrefutably attested, not only by a host of classical writers, but also by a wealth of archaeological evidence; in many mound- burials in the former Soviet Union, it is by no means unusual to find remains of women warriors dressed in full armour, lying on a war chariot, surrounded by their weaponry, and significantly, accompanied by a host of male subordinates specially sacrificed in their honour; nonetheless, these young Iranian warriors, as evidenced by the archaeological remains of their costumes and jewellery, do not seem to have lost their femininity; they remained "feminine as well as female" as a great contemporary German scholar puts it [11][11].
Archaeological excavations also testify to the amazing skill of these people in making jewellery; some of the finds are so dazzling in quality and advanced in technique that it is hard to imagine that they are produced by an unsettled, nomadic culture; we are indeed very fortunate that these early steppe Iranians practised elaborate funerary rituals and interred their treasures with their dead in huge impregnable burial mounds; hence, the vast majority of the steppe Iranians' artifacts known to the learned world is attributed to the Scythians. http://www.cais-soas.com/CAIS/Religions/iranian/Zarathushtrian/Oric.Basirov/origin_of_the_iranians.htm
It seems that both nomadic and sedentary Iranians referred to themselves as Airyas; gradually, however, this word became a self-imposed designation for the settled Iranians only, who began to refer to their nomadic cousins in the East, i.e., Zoroaster's people, as the Saka, and some of those further west as SKUDRA [3][3]; the Saka probably did not call themselves exclusively by this name, some may have retained the use of the term Airya.
Many Saka tribes left the northern steppes intermittently to settle permanently in Central Asia, modern Afghanistan, and Persia; these tribes are the direct forebears of the imperial Western Iranians, the Medes, Persians and lastly, the Parthians;
Once converted to Zoroastrianism, however, such became their religious significance, that by the middle of the 1st millennium B.C., the centre of the faith was neither in the homeland of its founder, nor in any of the adjoining Eastern Iranian regions; it was firmly established on the western side of the great salt desert, amongst the people now called Western Iranians; from then onwards, Eastern Iran fades into the background; we now deal almost exclusively with Western Iran, and until very recently, were not even aware of the fact that Eastern Iran had played such a vital part in the genesis of the Iranian empires, and their great national faith; most scientific facts, such as, the recorded history and Near Eastern archaeological data, especially a large volume of deciphered inscriptions, relate to the four great Western Iranian empires of the Medes, Persians, Parthians & Sasanians; there is only a small volume of classical sources, and more recent archaeological data, which also deal with the nomadic Iranians of the northeast, i.e., those Saka warriors who remained in the steppes, and were never completely subdued by the settled Iranians of the imperial period; these warriors remained, nonetheless, a very formidable enemy of their settled cousins; not only did they conquer and rule the Median Empire for 28 years in the 7th century B.C., but they also defeated and killed Cyrus the Great, founder of the Achaemenian Empire, in the following century; a generation later, they were still engaging Darius the Great in many hard-fought battles; two hundred and fifty years later, however, they became the saviours of the Iranian culture and religion, and political integrity; they gradually pushed the Macedonians out of the Iranian homeland, and formed the Parthian Empire, which lasted for another 500 years.
The nomadic Iranians of the north western steppes, however, especially those settled in Europe, are extensively covered by the classical writers; they are also attested in a very large number of archaeological excavations in Eastern Europe; these Iranian peoples are known in the West as Cimmerians, Scythians, Sarmatians, Alans, and finally Ossets; it must be emphasised that all these names refer to the successive migratory waves of the same people, who probably called themselves by a name derived from the word Airya, as the Alans did, and the Ossets still do.
CIMMERIANS
The earliest recorded nomadic western Iranians are the Cimmerians; they make their first appearance in Assyrian annals at the beginning of the 8th century B.C., where they are referred to as Gimmiri; they came down from modern Ukraine, and conquered eastern Thrace, and most of modern Turkey, being pushed westwards by another nomadic Iranian people, the Scythians (see below); they left behind a wealth of archaeological material, including a vast number of mound-burials in western Asia Minor; they later allied themselves with the Medes against the Assyrian Empire; the word GIMMIRI is attested in the Old Testament (Genesis I.x.12), as GOMER, the name given to one of Japhet's sons (see below, Scythian/Ashkenaz[4][4]).
SCYTHIANS This is by far the most important, and enduring designation given by the classical sources to the nomadic Iranians of the steppes; the name refers to the entire non-sedentary Iranians, both in the West, and in the East (the Saka). Greek records place them in southern Russia in the 8th century B.C., however, recent archaeological evidence testifies that they, Cimmerians, and other Steppe Iranians may have been there far earlier. Greek geographers of the 4th century B.C. also credit the Scythians with inhabiting the largest part of the known world (map Red 16).
Like other Iranians, these nomads probably called themselves by the generic term "Airya"; this is testified inter alia by the native name of their descendants in the present day Europe (see below); it seems, however, that they, or at least some of their powerful clans, also called themselves "SAKA" in the East, and *SKUنA, SKUDA, or SKUDRA [5][5] in the West. SKUDA is believed to be related to the German word "SACHS", meaning a type of throwing-dagger which the eponymic Saxons used to carry and shoot with[6][6]; indeed, it is possible that like the historical Saxons, the Skuda derived their name from their ability to shoot. [cf. Franks].
Their first appearance in recorded history is again in the Assyrian annals, where they chase the Cimmerians, their own kinsmen, first out of Europe, then out of Asia Minor into the Median territory; in the 7th century B.C. they allied themselves with the Assyrians, and attacked the combined forces of the invading rebellious Median vassal king, Khshathrita (Phraortes in Greek, Kashtariti in Akkadian) and his Cimmerians allies; the Assyrians repelled the Medes, killing Phraortes, and routed the Cimmerians; the real victors, however, were the Scythians; for the next 28 years, now allied with their erstwhile enemy, the Cimmerians, they ravaged most of the Ancient Near East, including Media; later they allied themselves with Khshathrita's son, the Median emperor, Hvakhshathara II (Cyaxares in Greek, Uaksatar II in Akkadian), and the Babylonian king, Nabopolassar, taking Nineveh in 612 B.C. and destroying once and for all the mighty Assyrian Empire. (beginning of the Kurdish calendar)
The Scythians were called by the Assyrians Ashkuza or Ishkuza (A/Iڑ-k/gu-za-ai); as with the Gimmiri, this word also appears to have found its way into the Old Testament; one of Gomer's (Gimmiri) three sons, in Genesis I.x.12, is called Ashkenaz, which has given us the modern Hebrew word, Ashkenazi[7][7].
The Scythians were known by the Achaemenians, as SAKA and SKUDRA, by the Greeks, SKغTHIA (سê?èéل), by the Romans, SCYTHIAE (pron. SKITYAI), which has given us the English word SCYTHIAN; they lived in a wide area stretching from the south and west of the River Danube to the eastern and northeastern edges of the Taklamakan Desert in China; this vast territory includes now parts of Central Europe, the eastern half of the Balkans, the Ukraine, northern Caucasus, southern Russia, southern Siberia, Central Asia and western China.
Physiognomy
We know a great deal about their physical appearance; they were long-headed giants with blond hair and blue eyes; this well-known fact is attested by various classical sources [8][8], and by their skeletal and other remains in numerous archaeological excavations, which give a fairly detailed description of these ancient Iranians [9][9]; recently, a large number of their mummified corpses were discovered in western China; these mummies, which are extremely well-preserved in the arid conditions of the Taklamakan desert, are now on display at the museums of khotan, Urumchi, and Turfan in Sinkiang; they are dressed in Scythian costume, i.e., leather tunic and trousers, and are usually displayed in the sitting position, exactly as described by Herodotus; what is extra ordinary apart from their northern European features, however, is their gigantic heights, well over two metres as they are now, in spite of the natural shrinkage expected during the past thousands of years.
Equestrian skill
The Scythians, and other early steppe Iranians are believed to have been the first Indo-Europeans to use domesticated horses for riding (as opposed to eating); this theory has acquired fresh credibility after the recent discovery of horse skeletons at the Sredny Stog archaeological culture, east of the River Dniepr, a well-known pre-historical Scythian site in eastern Ukraine; these bones were identified as belonging to bitted, therefore, ridden horses dating to 4000 B.C., at least 2500 years older than the previously known examples.
More recent excavations east of the Ural Mountains credit them also with the invention of the first two-wheeled chariot [10][10]; such mobility, naturally, turned them into a formidable fighting force; they never willingly fought on foot, and used armour both for themselves and their mounts; they also developed the famous steppe tactic of faked retreat, and the "Parthian shot", shooting backwards while on mounted retreat; this tactic, named after their well-known descendants, the Parthians, requires an amazing skill and balance in the saddle, and a dazzling co-ordination of eyes, arms and breath without the support of stirrups.
Their women
In this unique pastoralist equestrian warrior society, women fought alongside their men; not only they were held in an equal status with men, but also periodically they actually ruled them;
this so called upside-down society both fascinated and horrified the male dominated Greek culture; later, the Romans expressed the same horror, when they encountered the Celtic and Germanic female warriors. Greek writers called the fighting Iranian women they met in the Ukrainian steppes, the Amazons; later Greek sources placed them further east, in northeastern parts of Iran.
This incredible social equality, at such an early age, is irrefutably attested, not only by a host of classical writers, but also by a wealth of archaeological evidence; in many mound- burials in the former Soviet Union, it is by no means unusual to find remains of women warriors dressed in full armour, lying on a war chariot, surrounded by their weaponry, and significantly, accompanied by a host of male subordinates specially sacrificed in their honour; nonetheless, these young Iranian warriors, as evidenced by the archaeological remains of their costumes and jewellery, do not seem to have lost their femininity; they remained "feminine as well as female" as a great contemporary German scholar puts it [11][11].
Archaeological excavations also testify to the amazing skill of these people in making jewellery; some of the finds are so dazzling in quality and advanced in technique that it is hard to imagine that they are produced by an unsettled, nomadic culture; we are indeed very fortunate that these early steppe Iranians practised elaborate funerary rituals and interred their treasures with their dead in huge impregnable burial mounds; hence, the vast majority of the steppe Iranians' artifacts known to the learned world is attributed to the Scythians. http://www.cais-soas.com/CAIS/Religions/iranian/Zarathushtrian/Oric.Basirov/origin_of_the_iranians.htm
The royal scythians who ruled altaic, uralic, iranic elements were the
ugurs or yuezhi or tocharians (uyghurs,hungarians, bulgarians,
chuvashes, tatars)
They are from 5 scythian folks the sabir, daha,chus and hun, avar.
And these folks are from sumerian, subartuan and elamite expansions to Caspian Areas (Khwarezm-turán)
The Middle Eastern civilizations are from Europe (Vinca, Trypillia, Kurgan cultures)
Ugur realms: Bactria, Parthia, Xiongnu (in Xiongnu lived the mongolic and manchu elements too) Kushan and next White hunnic Empire, Euro hunnia.
They are from 5 scythian folks the sabir, daha,chus and hun, avar.
And these folks are from sumerian, subartuan and elamite expansions to Caspian Areas (Khwarezm-turán)
The Middle Eastern civilizations are from Europe (Vinca, Trypillia, Kurgan cultures)
Ugur realms: Bactria, Parthia, Xiongnu (in Xiongnu lived the mongolic and manchu elements too) Kushan and next White hunnic Empire, Euro hunnia.
Dragons have a long history in human mythology. How did the myth start?
No one knows the exact answer, but some myths may have been inspired by
living reptiles, and some "dragon" bones probably belonged to animals
long extinct — in some cases dinosaurs, in others, fossil mammals.
Starting in the early 19th century, scientists began to find a new kind
of monster, one that had gone extinct tens of millions of years before
the first humans evolved. Because the first fragments found looked
lizard-like, paleontologists assumed they had found giant lizards, but
more bones revealed animals like nothing on earth today. But early man most likely found plenty of fossils and stories arose around them.
http://www.strangescience.net/stdino2.htm
http://www.strangescience.net/stdino2.htm
Regarding mythical creatures, Herodotus believed that some legends he
heard preserved a kernel of genuine fact, and he played a role in
spreading the legend of the griffin. Griffins, according to the nomads
he interviewed, were four-legged and lion-sized, with wings and sharp
beaks. What might the nomads have seen that prompted these myths? Modern
paleontological digs in the region have revealed fossil skeletons of Protoceratops and Psittacosaurus
dinosaurs. The nomads of his time may have seen similar skeletons
eroding out of the sediments along the Silk Road. These weren't the only
potential fossils mentioned in Herodotus's works. When in Egypt, he
wrote, he was shown piles of "bones and spines." These may have belonged
to spinosaurs, large Cretaceous reptiles with dorsal membraned spines,
or to pterosaurs. And the giant skeletons of heroes he discussed may
well have belonged to fossil mammals from the Miocene, Pliocene and
Pleistocene epochs.
Herodotus mentioned at least one unambiguous fossil find. "I have seen shells on the hills," he wrote of Egypt. He reached a conclusion that is common today: The area "was originally an arm of the sea." Herodotus also ventured into the field of geology, guessing (inaccurately) that in the recent geologic past, Egypt had been a gulf of the sea. Although he was wrong about Egypt's geology, he was right in concluding that the world we live in changes over time, thanks to natural processes.
Scythians (skyty, skify). A group of Indo-European tribes that controlled the Southern Ukrainian steppe in the 7th to 3rd centuries BC. They first appeared there in the late 8th century BC after having been forced out of Central Asia. The Scythians were related to the *Sauromatians and spoke an Iranian dialect. After quickly conquering the lands of the *Cimmerians they pursued them into Asia Minor and established themselves as a power in the region. In the 670s BC they launched a successful campaign to expand into Media, Syria, and Palestine. They were forced out of Asia Minor early in the 6th century BC by the Medes, who had by then assumed control of Persia, and retreated to their lands between the lower Danube and the Don, known as *Scythia.
The bellicose Scythians were often in conflict with their neighbors, particularly the Thracians in the west and the *Sarmatians in the east. They faced their greatest military challenge around 513--512 BC, when the Persian king Darius I led an expeditionary force against them. By withdrawing and undertaking scorched-earth tactics rather than engaging in pitched battles, they forced the Persians to retreat in order to preserve their army. The event had a significant impact on subsequent Scythian development, for it confirmed their position as masters of the steppes and spurred on the political unification of the various tribes under the Royal Scythians. By the end of the 5th century BC the *Kamianka fortified settlement, near present-day Nykopil, had been established as the capital of Scythia.
The Scythians reached their apex in the 4th century BC under King Ateas, who eliminated his rivals and united all the tribal factions under his rule. He waged a successful war against the Thracians but died in 339 BC in a battle against the army of Philip 11 of Macedon. In 331 BC the Scythians defeated one of Alexander the Great's armies. Subsequently they began a period of decline brought about by constant Sarmatian attacks. They were forced to abandon the steppe to their rivals and re-established themselves in the 2nd century BC in the Crimea around the city of *Neapolis. There they regained part of their strength and fought several times against the *Bosporan Kingdom, and even managed to conquer Olbia and other Hellenic city-states on the northern Black Sea (Pontic) coast. Continued attacks from the Sarmatians, however, further weakened the Scythians, and an onslaught by the Germanic *Goths in the 3rd century AD finished them off completely. The Scythians subsequently disappeared as an ethnic entity through steady intermarriage with and assimilation into other cultures, particularly the Sarmatian.
The Scythians were divided into several major tribal groups. Agrarian Scythian groups lived in what is now Poltava region and between the Boh and the Dnieper rivers. The lower Boh region near *Olbia was inhabited by Hellenized Scythians, known as Callipidae; the central Dniester region was home to the Alazones; and north of them were the Aroteres. The kingdom was dominated by the Royal Scythians, a small but bellicose minority in the lower Dnieper region and the Crimea that had established a system of dynastic succession. Their realm was divided into four districts ruled by governors who maintained justice, collected taxes, and gathered tribute from the Pontic city-states. A separate coinage, however, was not developed by the Scythians until quite late in their history. Their administrative apparatus was in fact quite loose, and the various Scythian groups handled most of their affairs through a traditional structure of tribal elders. Over time Scythian society became increasingly stratified, with the hereditary kings and their military retainers gaining an increasing amount of wealth and power. Although most Scythians were freemen, slaves were common in the kingdom.
The Scythians inhabiting the steppe were nomadic herders of horse, sheep, and cattle. Those in the forest-steppe were more sedentary cultivators of wheat, millet, barley, and other crops. (Some scholars believe that those agriculturists may have been the predecessors of the Slavs.) Scythian artisans excelled at metalworking in iron, bronze, silver, and gold. The Scythians also engaged in hunting, fishing, and extensive trade with Greece through the Pontic city-states; they provided grains, livestock, fish, furs, and slaves in exchange for luxury goods, fine ceramics, and jewelry.
The Scythians' military prowess was in large measure the result of their abilities as equestrian archers. They raised and trained horses extensively, and virtually every Scythian male had at least one mount. They lavished care and attention on their horses and dressed them in ornate trappings. Saddles and metal stirrups were not used by the Scythians, although felt or leather supports may have been. The foremost weapon of a Scythian warrior was the double-curved bow, which was used to shoot arrows over the left shoulder of a mounted horse. Warriors commonly carried swords, daggers, knives, round shields, and spears and wore bronze helmets and chain-mail jerkins. The Scythians became a potent force not only because of their impressive array of weapons and training but also because they shared a strong underlying military ethos and belonged to a warrior society that bestowed honors and spoils on those who had distinguished themselves in battle. That ethos was reinforced by the common rite of adopting blood brothers and the use of slain foes' scalps or skulls as trophies or drinking cups.
Because of their generally nomadic or seminomadic existence the Scythians usually had relatively few possessions. Those they did have were often of exquisite quality and craftsmanship and established the Scythians' reputation in the ancient world as devotees of finery (see *Scythlan art).
The Scythians never developed a written language or a literary tradition. They had a well-defined religious cosmology, however. Their deities included the fire goddess Tabiti, followed by Papeus (the 'Father'), Apia (goddess of the earth), Oetosyrus (god of the sun), Artimpasa (goddess of the moon), and Thagimasadas (god of water). The Scythians did not build temples, altars, or idols to worship their deities, but they maintained a caste of soothsayers and believed strongly in witchcraft, divination, magic, and the power of amulets. Representations of Scythians and their gold ornaments suggest that they were the first people in history to wear trousers.
Scythian burial customs were elaborate, particularly among the aristocracy. A chieftain remained unburied for 40 days after his death. During that time his internal organs were cleansed, his body cavity was stuffed with herbs, and his skin was waxed. He was then parad'ed through his realm accompanied by a large retinue indulging in ostentatious lamentation. After 40 days he was interred in a large *kurhan (up to 20 m high) together with his newly killed favorite wife or concubine, household servants, and horses, as well as weapons, amphoras of wine, and a large cache of goods. Lesser personages had less elaborate funerals. A common practice was the erection of anthropomorphic statues (*stone babas) as grave markers.
For many years the memory of the Scythians was best preserved by Herodotus, who included a lengthy, basically factual account of them in his Histories. After the last Scythians had died out in the 3rd century AD, the tribes were largely forgotten. Interest in them was revived as a result of some spectacular finds in Scythian barrows, starting with the *Melgunov kurhan in 1763 The ensuing search for richer caches impeded archeological research on the more prosaic aspects of Scythian life until Soviet archeologists undertook work in that realm in the 2oth century. Scythian archeological sites in Ukraine include the *Bilske, *Kamianka, *Karavan, $Nemyriv, *Pastyrske, and *Sharpivka fortified settlements and the *Chortomlyk, *Haimanova Mohyla, *Kul Oba, *Krasnokutskyi, *Melitopil, *Oksiutyntsi, *Oleksandropil, *Solokha, *Starsha Mohyla, and *Zhabotyn kurhans.
Herodotus mentioned at least one unambiguous fossil find. "I have seen shells on the hills," he wrote of Egypt. He reached a conclusion that is common today: The area "was originally an arm of the sea." Herodotus also ventured into the field of geology, guessing (inaccurately) that in the recent geologic past, Egypt had been a gulf of the sea. Although he was wrong about Egypt's geology, he was right in concluding that the world we live in changes over time, thanks to natural processes.
Scythians (skyty, skify). A group of Indo-European tribes that controlled the Southern Ukrainian steppe in the 7th to 3rd centuries BC. They first appeared there in the late 8th century BC after having been forced out of Central Asia. The Scythians were related to the *Sauromatians and spoke an Iranian dialect. After quickly conquering the lands of the *Cimmerians they pursued them into Asia Minor and established themselves as a power in the region. In the 670s BC they launched a successful campaign to expand into Media, Syria, and Palestine. They were forced out of Asia Minor early in the 6th century BC by the Medes, who had by then assumed control of Persia, and retreated to their lands between the lower Danube and the Don, known as *Scythia.
The bellicose Scythians were often in conflict with their neighbors, particularly the Thracians in the west and the *Sarmatians in the east. They faced their greatest military challenge around 513--512 BC, when the Persian king Darius I led an expeditionary force against them. By withdrawing and undertaking scorched-earth tactics rather than engaging in pitched battles, they forced the Persians to retreat in order to preserve their army. The event had a significant impact on subsequent Scythian development, for it confirmed their position as masters of the steppes and spurred on the political unification of the various tribes under the Royal Scythians. By the end of the 5th century BC the *Kamianka fortified settlement, near present-day Nykopil, had been established as the capital of Scythia.
The Scythians reached their apex in the 4th century BC under King Ateas, who eliminated his rivals and united all the tribal factions under his rule. He waged a successful war against the Thracians but died in 339 BC in a battle against the army of Philip 11 of Macedon. In 331 BC the Scythians defeated one of Alexander the Great's armies. Subsequently they began a period of decline brought about by constant Sarmatian attacks. They were forced to abandon the steppe to their rivals and re-established themselves in the 2nd century BC in the Crimea around the city of *Neapolis. There they regained part of their strength and fought several times against the *Bosporan Kingdom, and even managed to conquer Olbia and other Hellenic city-states on the northern Black Sea (Pontic) coast. Continued attacks from the Sarmatians, however, further weakened the Scythians, and an onslaught by the Germanic *Goths in the 3rd century AD finished them off completely. The Scythians subsequently disappeared as an ethnic entity through steady intermarriage with and assimilation into other cultures, particularly the Sarmatian.
The Scythians were divided into several major tribal groups. Agrarian Scythian groups lived in what is now Poltava region and between the Boh and the Dnieper rivers. The lower Boh region near *Olbia was inhabited by Hellenized Scythians, known as Callipidae; the central Dniester region was home to the Alazones; and north of them were the Aroteres. The kingdom was dominated by the Royal Scythians, a small but bellicose minority in the lower Dnieper region and the Crimea that had established a system of dynastic succession. Their realm was divided into four districts ruled by governors who maintained justice, collected taxes, and gathered tribute from the Pontic city-states. A separate coinage, however, was not developed by the Scythians until quite late in their history. Their administrative apparatus was in fact quite loose, and the various Scythian groups handled most of their affairs through a traditional structure of tribal elders. Over time Scythian society became increasingly stratified, with the hereditary kings and their military retainers gaining an increasing amount of wealth and power. Although most Scythians were freemen, slaves were common in the kingdom.
The Scythians inhabiting the steppe were nomadic herders of horse, sheep, and cattle. Those in the forest-steppe were more sedentary cultivators of wheat, millet, barley, and other crops. (Some scholars believe that those agriculturists may have been the predecessors of the Slavs.) Scythian artisans excelled at metalworking in iron, bronze, silver, and gold. The Scythians also engaged in hunting, fishing, and extensive trade with Greece through the Pontic city-states; they provided grains, livestock, fish, furs, and slaves in exchange for luxury goods, fine ceramics, and jewelry.
The Scythians' military prowess was in large measure the result of their abilities as equestrian archers. They raised and trained horses extensively, and virtually every Scythian male had at least one mount. They lavished care and attention on their horses and dressed them in ornate trappings. Saddles and metal stirrups were not used by the Scythians, although felt or leather supports may have been. The foremost weapon of a Scythian warrior was the double-curved bow, which was used to shoot arrows over the left shoulder of a mounted horse. Warriors commonly carried swords, daggers, knives, round shields, and spears and wore bronze helmets and chain-mail jerkins. The Scythians became a potent force not only because of their impressive array of weapons and training but also because they shared a strong underlying military ethos and belonged to a warrior society that bestowed honors and spoils on those who had distinguished themselves in battle. That ethos was reinforced by the common rite of adopting blood brothers and the use of slain foes' scalps or skulls as trophies or drinking cups.
Because of their generally nomadic or seminomadic existence the Scythians usually had relatively few possessions. Those they did have were often of exquisite quality and craftsmanship and established the Scythians' reputation in the ancient world as devotees of finery (see *Scythlan art).
The Scythians never developed a written language or a literary tradition. They had a well-defined religious cosmology, however. Their deities included the fire goddess Tabiti, followed by Papeus (the 'Father'), Apia (goddess of the earth), Oetosyrus (god of the sun), Artimpasa (goddess of the moon), and Thagimasadas (god of water). The Scythians did not build temples, altars, or idols to worship their deities, but they maintained a caste of soothsayers and believed strongly in witchcraft, divination, magic, and the power of amulets. Representations of Scythians and their gold ornaments suggest that they were the first people in history to wear trousers.
Scythian burial customs were elaborate, particularly among the aristocracy. A chieftain remained unburied for 40 days after his death. During that time his internal organs were cleansed, his body cavity was stuffed with herbs, and his skin was waxed. He was then parad'ed through his realm accompanied by a large retinue indulging in ostentatious lamentation. After 40 days he was interred in a large *kurhan (up to 20 m high) together with his newly killed favorite wife or concubine, household servants, and horses, as well as weapons, amphoras of wine, and a large cache of goods. Lesser personages had less elaborate funerals. A common practice was the erection of anthropomorphic statues (*stone babas) as grave markers.
For many years the memory of the Scythians was best preserved by Herodotus, who included a lengthy, basically factual account of them in his Histories. After the last Scythians had died out in the 3rd century AD, the tribes were largely forgotten. Interest in them was revived as a result of some spectacular finds in Scythian barrows, starting with the *Melgunov kurhan in 1763 The ensuing search for richer caches impeded archeological research on the more prosaic aspects of Scythian life until Soviet archeologists undertook work in that realm in the 2oth century. Scythian archeological sites in Ukraine include the *Bilske, *Kamianka, *Karavan, $Nemyriv, *Pastyrske, and *Sharpivka fortified settlements and the *Chortomlyk, *Haimanova Mohyla, *Kul Oba, *Krasnokutskyi, *Melitopil, *Oksiutyntsi, *Oleksandropil, *Solokha, *Starsha Mohyla, and *Zhabotyn kurhans.
The people who lived in Steppes were overwhelmingly horsemen. Many were at least semi-nomadic with herds of livestock. Nomadism explains why there were waves of occupants. These Steppe people, Central Eurasians, traveled to and mated with people in the peripheral civilizations. Herodotus is one of our main literary sources for the Steppe tribes, but he isn't terribly reliable. The people of the ancient Near East recorded dramatic encounters with the people of the Steppe. Archaeologists and anthropologists have supplied more information about the Steppes people, based on tombs and artifacts.
1. CimmeriansThe Cimmerians (Kimmerians) were Bronze Age communities of horsemen north of the Black Sea from the second millennium B.C. The Scythians drove them out in the 8th century. Cimmerians fought their way into Anatolia and the Near East. They controlled the central Zagros in the early to mid 7th century. In 695, they sacked Gordion, in Phrygia. With the Scythians, the Cimmerians attacked Assyria, repeatedly.
Sources:
"Cimmerians" The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Archaeology. Timothy Darvill. Oxford University Press, 2008.
Marc Van de Mieroop's A History of the Ancient Near East
2. Huns .Contrary to contemporary standards, Hunnish women mingled freely with strangers and widows even acted as leaders of local bands. Hardly a great nation, they battled amongst themselves as often as with outsiders, and were as likely to fight for as against an enemy -- since such employment offered unaccustomed luxury.The Huns are best known for their fear-inspiring leader Attila, the Scourge of God.
3. Kushans"Mediaeval Commerce (Asia)" From The Historical Atlas by William R. Shepherd, 1926.Kushan describes one branch of the Yuezhi, an Indo - European group driven from northwestern China in 176–160 B.C. The Yuezhi reached Bactria (northwest Afghanistan and Tajikistan) around 135 B.C., moved south into Gandhara, and established a capital near Kabul.The Kushan kingdom was formed by Kujula Kadphises in c. 50 BC. He extended his territory to the mouth of the Indus so he could use the sea route for trade and thereby bypass the Parthians. The Kushans spread Buddhism to Parthia, Central Asia, and China. The Kushan Empire reached its peak under its 5th ruler, Buddhist King Kanishka, c. 150 A.D. Source:
Christopher I. Beckwith Empires of the Silk Road. 2009.
4. Parthians© http://www.cngcoins.com CNG CoinsThe Parthian Empire existed from about 247 B.C.-A.D. 224. It is thought that the founder of the Parthian empire was Arsaces I. The Parthian Empire was located in modern Iran, from the Caspian Sea to the Tigris and Euphrates Valley. The Sasanians, under Ardashir I (who ruled from A.D. 224-241), defeated the Parthians, thereby putting an end to the Parthian Empire.To the Romans, the Parthians proved a formidable opponent, especially after the defeat of Crassus at Carrhae. See: How did Crassus die?
5. Scythians(Sakans to the Persians) lived in the Steppes, from the 7th to the 3rd century B.C., displacing the Cimmerians in the area of the Ukraine. Scythians and Medes may have attacked Urartu in the 7th century. Herodotus says the language and culture of the Scythians was like that of nomadic Iranian tribes. He also says Amazons mated with Scythians to produce the Sarmatians. At the end of the fourth century, the Scythians crossed the Tanais or Don River, settling down between it and the Volga. Herodotus called the Goths Scythians.
Source:
Amazons in the Scythia: New Finds at the Middle Don, Southern Russia, by Valeri I. Guliaev World Archaeology © 2003 Taylor & Francis, Ltd.
More on the Scythians6. SarmatiansThe Sarmatians (Sauromatians) were a nomadic Iranian tribe related to the Scythians. They lived on the plains between the Black and Caspian Sea, separated from the Scythians by the Don River. Tombs show they moved west into Scythian territory by the mid-third century. They demanded tribute from Greek towns on the Black Sea, but sometimes allied with the Greeks in fighting the Scythians.
Source:
Jona Lendering
7. Xiongnu and Yuezhi of Mongolia The Chinese pushed the nomadic Xiongnu back across the Yellow River and into the Gobi desert in the 3rd century B.C. and then built the Great Wall to keep them out. It is not known where the Xiongnu came from, but they went to the Altai Mountains and Lake Balkash, where the nomadic Indo-Iranian Yuezhi lived. The two groups of nomads fought, with the Xiongnu triumphant. The Yuezhi migrated to the Oxus valley. Meanwhile the Xiongnu went back to harrass the Chinese in about 200 B.C. By 121 B.C. the Chinese had successfully pushed them back into Mongolia and so the Xiongnu went back to raid the Oxus Valley from 73 and 44 B.C., and the cycle began again. Source:
Library of Congress: Mongolia
Herodotus on the Cimmerians
1. CimmeriansThe Cimmerians (Kimmerians) were Bronze Age communities of horsemen north of the Black Sea from the second millennium B.C. The Scythians drove them out in the 8th century. Cimmerians fought their way into Anatolia and the Near East. They controlled the central Zagros in the early to mid 7th century. In 695, they sacked Gordion, in Phrygia. With the Scythians, the Cimmerians attacked Assyria, repeatedly.
Sources:
"Cimmerians" The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Archaeology. Timothy Darvill. Oxford University Press, 2008.
Marc Van de Mieroop's A History of the Ancient Near East
2. Huns .Contrary to contemporary standards, Hunnish women mingled freely with strangers and widows even acted as leaders of local bands. Hardly a great nation, they battled amongst themselves as often as with outsiders, and were as likely to fight for as against an enemy -- since such employment offered unaccustomed luxury.The Huns are best known for their fear-inspiring leader Attila, the Scourge of God.
3. Kushans"Mediaeval Commerce (Asia)" From The Historical Atlas by William R. Shepherd, 1926.Kushan describes one branch of the Yuezhi, an Indo - European group driven from northwestern China in 176–160 B.C. The Yuezhi reached Bactria (northwest Afghanistan and Tajikistan) around 135 B.C., moved south into Gandhara, and established a capital near Kabul.The Kushan kingdom was formed by Kujula Kadphises in c. 50 BC. He extended his territory to the mouth of the Indus so he could use the sea route for trade and thereby bypass the Parthians. The Kushans spread Buddhism to Parthia, Central Asia, and China. The Kushan Empire reached its peak under its 5th ruler, Buddhist King Kanishka, c. 150 A.D. Source:
Christopher I. Beckwith Empires of the Silk Road. 2009.
4. Parthians© http://www.cngcoins.com CNG CoinsThe Parthian Empire existed from about 247 B.C.-A.D. 224. It is thought that the founder of the Parthian empire was Arsaces I. The Parthian Empire was located in modern Iran, from the Caspian Sea to the Tigris and Euphrates Valley. The Sasanians, under Ardashir I (who ruled from A.D. 224-241), defeated the Parthians, thereby putting an end to the Parthian Empire.To the Romans, the Parthians proved a formidable opponent, especially after the defeat of Crassus at Carrhae. See: How did Crassus die?
5. Scythians(Sakans to the Persians) lived in the Steppes, from the 7th to the 3rd century B.C., displacing the Cimmerians in the area of the Ukraine. Scythians and Medes may have attacked Urartu in the 7th century. Herodotus says the language and culture of the Scythians was like that of nomadic Iranian tribes. He also says Amazons mated with Scythians to produce the Sarmatians. At the end of the fourth century, the Scythians crossed the Tanais or Don River, settling down between it and the Volga. Herodotus called the Goths Scythians.
Source:
Amazons in the Scythia: New Finds at the Middle Don, Southern Russia, by Valeri I. Guliaev World Archaeology © 2003 Taylor & Francis, Ltd.
More on the Scythians6. SarmatiansThe Sarmatians (Sauromatians) were a nomadic Iranian tribe related to the Scythians. They lived on the plains between the Black and Caspian Sea, separated from the Scythians by the Don River. Tombs show they moved west into Scythian territory by the mid-third century. They demanded tribute from Greek towns on the Black Sea, but sometimes allied with the Greeks in fighting the Scythians.
Source:
Jona Lendering
7. Xiongnu and Yuezhi of Mongolia The Chinese pushed the nomadic Xiongnu back across the Yellow River and into the Gobi desert in the 3rd century B.C. and then built the Great Wall to keep them out. It is not known where the Xiongnu came from, but they went to the Altai Mountains and Lake Balkash, where the nomadic Indo-Iranian Yuezhi lived. The two groups of nomads fought, with the Xiongnu triumphant. The Yuezhi migrated to the Oxus valley. Meanwhile the Xiongnu went back to harrass the Chinese in about 200 B.C. By 121 B.C. the Chinese had successfully pushed them back into Mongolia and so the Xiongnu went back to raid the Oxus Valley from 73 and 44 B.C., and the cycle began again. Source:
Library of Congress: Mongolia
Herodotus on the Cimmerians
Herodotus IV.6 lists the 4 tribes of the Scythians:
From Leipoxais sprang the Scythians of the race called Auchatae; from Arpoxais, the middle brother, those known as the Catiari and Traspians; from Colaxais, the youngest, the Royal Scythians, or Paralatae. All together they are named Scoloti, after one of their kings: the Greeks, however, call them Scythians. Lipoxais became the ancestor of the Auchatae, Arpoxais that of the Catiari and Traspians, and from Colaxais sprang the Royal Scythians or Paralatae.
From Leipoxais sprang the Scythians of the race called Auchatae; from Arpoxais, the middle brother, those known as the Catiari and Traspians; from Colaxais, the youngest, the Royal Scythians, or Paralatae. All together they are named Scoloti, after one of their kings: the Greeks, however, call them Scythians. Lipoxais became the ancestor of the Auchatae, Arpoxais that of the Catiari and Traspians, and from Colaxais sprang the Royal Scythians or Paralatae.
Sumerians, Scythians, and other Grail peoples
http://www.nexusmagazine.com/articles/starfire1.html
This is the article that got me interested in this subject in the first place!
http://www.whitestag.org/history/sumerian.html
and http://www.hunmagyar.org/hungary/myth/stag.html
The Hungarian White Stag Legends, and their connection to the Scythians, the land of Sumer,
and Enki, the Anunnaki lord who fathered humanity
http://www.giveshare.org/israel/arbroathdeclaration.html
The Declaration of Arbroath, in which St. Andrew speaks of the Scythian heritage of the Scottish people.
http://users.ev1.net/~gpmoran/mrn4.htm
A great site that discusses the archeological proof of the Scythian peoples' influence on the Celts.
http://www.electricscotland.com/history/wylie/vol1ch20.htm
Here is a site that also talks about the Scottish/Scythian connection,
and traces their possible migration path from their ancestral lands.
http://www.silk-road.com/artl/scythian.shtml
The expansion of the Scythians across Europe and Asia.
http://www.britam.org
This site discusses possible links between the Scythians and the Hebrews.
http://www.nexusmagazine.com/articles/starfire1.html
This is the article that got me interested in this subject in the first place!
http://www.whitestag.org/history/sumerian.html
and http://www.hunmagyar.org/hungary/myth/stag.html
The Hungarian White Stag Legends, and their connection to the Scythians, the land of Sumer,
and Enki, the Anunnaki lord who fathered humanity
http://www.giveshare.org/israel/arbroathdeclaration.html
The Declaration of Arbroath, in which St. Andrew speaks of the Scythian heritage of the Scottish people.
http://users.ev1.net/~gpmoran/mrn4.htm
A great site that discusses the archeological proof of the Scythian peoples' influence on the Celts.
http://www.electricscotland.com/history/wylie/vol1ch20.htm
Here is a site that also talks about the Scottish/Scythian connection,
and traces their possible migration path from their ancestral lands.
http://www.silk-road.com/artl/scythian.shtml
The expansion of the Scythians across Europe and Asia.
http://www.britam.org
This site discusses possible links between the Scythians and the Hebrews.
http://books.google.com/books?id=d83I2w3wbrIC&pg=PA13&lpg=PA13&dq=Paralatae&source=bl&ots=iqog5UnW_-&sig=nq8RVDHytVWfoRlz9nxTTd8rY3g&hl=en&ei=pQ2JTYW5DYHGsAOMy_CLDA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&sqi=2&ved=0CCYQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=Paralatae&f=false
As Iljinskaja and Terenozhkin have established, the transition to the Scythian period has taken place here during the evolution of the Zhabotyn culture approximately in the middle of 7-th B.C. Thus, that fact is very important that findings of the Early-Scytian time are excavated in the right-bank forest-steppe up to the upper Dniester land. Due to the regular annual researches of the Lvov archeologists under L.Krushelnitska’s management, numerous settlements and burial grounds of the Late-bronze and the Late-iron time are discovered on the middle and upper Dniester land and in the Vorcarpathian. Among them are such remains which evidently show the gradual transition from the Chornolis to the Scythian culture, for example, the complex in the village of Neporotovo on the river Dniester in Chernovtsy Region: “In the area 6000 sq. m were excavated four settlements (Neporotovo I, II, III, IV), numerous separate remains and the remains of a burial ground. The findings and also the layers of the objects overlaping each other, enabled allocation of three chronological horizons: the upper –the Early-Scythian, the transitive - from the Pre-Scythian to the Scythian, and the lower which is synchronous with the Chornolis culture"(L.1993-1, 7).
The finds of the Early-Scythian time are revealed also in the Lvov Region - near to the village of Krushelnitsa in Skole Area and near the town of Dobromil on the river San (Krushelnitska L.1993-2, 226, 236). Scythian influences reach considerably further:
"The presence of the artifacts of Scythian type in the Central Europe (the authentic and made on Scythian samples) has allowed researchers to draw a conclusion that this territory was under influence of Scythian culture. The biggest concentration of finds of the Scythian type is observed in Transylvania and Hungary "(Popovich And. 1993, 250-251).
The Ukrainian archeologists as a whole recognize that the cultural continuity from the Pre-Scythian to the Scythian time is observed in the Ukrainian Forest-steppe first of all in the area of the spreading of the Chornolis culture and the finds of the Zhabotyn type which are considered as its continuation (Archeology of Ukrainian SSR, V 2, 1986, 50). The opinion about the succession of the Scythian culture in the Forest-steppe of the Dnieper Right-bank from local cultures does not cause objections even at supporters of Asian origin of the Scythian culture as a whole:
“A plenty of remains of the pastoral-agricultural population of the Scythian culture, which roots deeply go in local cultures of the Bronze Age, are concentrated in the Forest-steppe of the Right bank to the West from Dnieper” (Iljinskaja V.A., Terenozhkin A.I., 1983, 11 ).
Thus the following observation is important:
"The Scythian-Siberian barrow burial was spread in the Right-bank Forest-steppe ... Such ceremony, peculiar to early Scythians, has held steady on in the Forest-steppe of Right-bank up to the end of Scythian period " (Iljinskaja V.A., Terenozhkin A.I., 1983, 365).
This and other facts give the grounds to think that the Scythian culture was widespread to the Left bank of the Dnieper from the west, instead of from the east. Iljinskaja and Terenozhkin, supporters of its Asian origins, contradicted themselves when they spoke that in the Left-bank Ukraine the earliest remains of the beginning of the Iron Age are the settlements and the burial places of the second step of the Chornolis culture. Their occurrence has been caused by the consequence of the migration of a part of the population from the Dnieper Right banks at the end of 9-th or in the beginning of 8-th centuries B.C. Later a local version of the Scythian culture has been created on this basis. Other territory of the Left-bank Forest-steppe, on their supervision, has been populated later, at the beginning of the first half of 6-th century AD, and Scythian remains appear here already in a completely generated shape after Scythians have come back from assumed campaigns to For Asia(Iljinskaja V.A., Terenozhkin A.I.,1983, 366).
However, even supporters of the aboriginal theory did not occur that the Scythian culture could develop integrally on the basis of local cultures of the Western Ukraine. The opinion that the Scythian culture was brought here by newcomers whence from steppes dominates among scholars. Penetration of these carriers of the Scythian culture is supposed even till the territory of modern Hungary (Popovich I.1993, 282) and Germany. Scythian golden fish of the sixth century B.C. has been found in province of Brandenburg. This fact gives scholars grounds to say:
“With other objects of treasure, mostly, of gold, it documents the influence, and possibly the invasion, of Scythians, nomadic horsemen from the steppes north of the Black Sea, around 500 B.C.” (Dietrich Sahrhage, Johannes Lundbeck, 1992, 17).
Such opinions look surprising if to pay attention that the eldest remains of the Scythian culture in the village of Lahodiv (near to the city of Lvov) are dated by 5-th B.C., and further the chronological break begins to 1-st century AD when the period of the Lipetsk culture appears (Krushelnytska L.1993-2, 238). By Krushelnytska’s words, one can notice the same situation also "on the countries of the whole the forest-steppe Ukraine "(Ib.). Practically it means that the Late-Scythian culture had no place on these lands, but only the Early-Scythian one. Consequently, it looks illogical that the Scythian penetration in the Fore-Carpathian and further beyond the Carpathian Mountains began before the fullest flower of the Scythian culture in the steppes of the Northern Black Sea Coast.
Herodotus asserted that Scythians, coming from Asia, have superseded Cimmerians from the Black Sea Coast and pursued them even beyond the Caucasus. The area of Cimmerian cultures reaches beyond the Right bank of the Dnieper up to the Danube, therefore it is doubtful that Scythians, having arrived from the east, have superseded Cimmerians in the Transcaucasia. If Cimmerians receded before Scythians, they should escape somewhere beyond the Dnieper and further beyond the Danube, to the Balkans, but not to make the way through Scythians to the Derbent pass and further. In this case, Cimmerians attacks to For Asia should occur through the Balkans. The historical data testify that Cimmerians came in the majority from the Caucasian ridge and only any their part together with Thracians arrived to Asia Minor from Balkan Peninsula. This can take place only when Scythians came from the west, but not from the east.
Solving the question of the ethnic belonging of Scythians, it is necessary to pay attention to the fact of existence in the steppes near the Azov and the Caspian Seas in second half 1-st thousand two big states created by Bulgars and related to them Khazars. Bulgarian tribes have been incorporated in Great Bulgaria by one of the tribe leaders Kubrat into 635 and approximately at the same time Khazarian Khaganat started to develop too. Soon after Kubrats death, intense relations between both states led to disorder of Great Bulgaria. One Bulgarian horde migrated beyond the Danube where its leader khan Asparuh has created a new state - Danube Bulgaria while the second horde was got a part of the Khaganat. To the beginning of 8-th century Khaganat already possessed the large territory including foothills of Dagestan, the steppes about the river Kuban, the Sea of Azov, and a part of the Black Sea Coast, the most part of the Crimea. The young state had to conduct heavy struggle for existence with Arabs and consequently the most part of Bulgars has gradually departed on the north, in the basin of the river Kama where they have formed own state Volga Bulgaria in due course. (Pletneva S.A., 1986, 20-41). As we see, Bulgars should be very numerous people which history is traced on the ways of their migration from the Western Ukraine through the seaboard steppes up to the banks of the Kama. This numerous people which have to stay in the steppes of Ukraine in days of Herodotus therefore could not to be remained without the attention of this Greek historian. Hence, it is necessary to assume that Bulgars, at least, were among those tribes which are mentioned by Herodotus in his "Histories".
We know, that Proto-Bulgars moved to the right bank of the Dnieper from the end of 3-rd mill. B.C. First they have occupied only the steppe, but have promoted also in the forest-steppe strip later. This fact can to be testified by lexical coincidences between German and Chuvash languages (Stetsyuk V.,1998, 85-86). The hypothetical territory of Bulgar’s settlement should be somewhere to the south of the area of ancient Tuetons, that is in the basin of the upper Dniester, the rivers Vereschitsia, Zolota Lypa, Strypa. Bulgars stay in this territory can be proved by numerous toponymics. This theme has been considered in corresponding work more detailed (Stetyuk V., 2002, 13-20). Here it is possible to specify only that one the of congestions of Scythian toponymics is in the territory of the Cherepyn-Lahodiv group of archaeological remains which L. Krushelnytska binds with the Early-Scythian culture. On the whole, the greatest congestion of Bulgarian toponymics has been revealed on territory of the Lvov Region and further to the east up to the river the Hnyla Lypa though it is certified on all territory forest-steppe Rightbank Ukraine where it adjoins to the toponymics of Kurdish type. Thus Bulgarian toponymics lasts as the expressed chain up to Dnieper, passes it in the area of the river Vorskla’s mouth, further goes upwards the Vorskla, and then gradually becomes sparse. Also what is the most surprising, that the general area of Bulgarian and Kurdish toponymics mostly coincides with area the of the Chornolis culture together with the characteristic tongue on the Vorskla (see Fig.3). There is no doubt that exactly on this territory ancient Bulgars and Kurds lived in the close neighbourhood and this can be been displayed confirmed by numerous lexical parallels between Chuvash and Kurdish languages (see the previous chapter). As other ethnic groups were not present at the Rightbank Ukraine at this time, one may believe that creators of the ethnically not identified Chornolis culture could be only Proto-Bulgars and Proto-Kurds. Estimating of the proportional contribution of both ethnoses into this culture is difficult at present, but on all signs it seems to be that the leading role played Proto-Bulgars. Having taken into account the fact and the chronological frameworks of evolution of the Chernolis cultures to the Early-Scythian culture, one may go further to assume that Scythians should be identified with Bulgars and Kurds as creators of Early-Scythian culture in the Ukrainian Forest-steppe down to the Carpathian Mountains and the river San. According to toponimics, the nucleus of the Scythian culture began to arise on the banks of the left tributaries of the Dniester – the rivers Vereschitsia, Hnyla Lypa, Zolota Lypa, Strypa, Seret. Obviously, the well-known Scythian gold was extracted in the basin of these rivers as the numerous toponymics, which can testify former rich deposits of this metal, concentrates here (the Ukrainian root “zoloto” (gold) may be find in the names of the rivers Zolota Lypa, Zolota, the settlements of Zolochev, two villages of Zolochivka, of Zolotniks, of Zoloty Potik, of Ivane-Zolote, of Bilche-Zolote, of Zolota Sloboda).
The finds of the Early-Scythian time are revealed also in the Lvov Region - near to the village of Krushelnitsa in Skole Area and near the town of Dobromil on the river San (Krushelnitska L.1993-2, 226, 236). Scythian influences reach considerably further:
"The presence of the artifacts of Scythian type in the Central Europe (the authentic and made on Scythian samples) has allowed researchers to draw a conclusion that this territory was under influence of Scythian culture. The biggest concentration of finds of the Scythian type is observed in Transylvania and Hungary "(Popovich And. 1993, 250-251).
The Ukrainian archeologists as a whole recognize that the cultural continuity from the Pre-Scythian to the Scythian time is observed in the Ukrainian Forest-steppe first of all in the area of the spreading of the Chornolis culture and the finds of the Zhabotyn type which are considered as its continuation (Archeology of Ukrainian SSR, V 2, 1986, 50). The opinion about the succession of the Scythian culture in the Forest-steppe of the Dnieper Right-bank from local cultures does not cause objections even at supporters of Asian origin of the Scythian culture as a whole:
“A plenty of remains of the pastoral-agricultural population of the Scythian culture, which roots deeply go in local cultures of the Bronze Age, are concentrated in the Forest-steppe of the Right bank to the West from Dnieper” (Iljinskaja V.A., Terenozhkin A.I., 1983, 11 ).
Thus the following observation is important:
"The Scythian-Siberian barrow burial was spread in the Right-bank Forest-steppe ... Such ceremony, peculiar to early Scythians, has held steady on in the Forest-steppe of Right-bank up to the end of Scythian period " (Iljinskaja V.A., Terenozhkin A.I., 1983, 365).
This and other facts give the grounds to think that the Scythian culture was widespread to the Left bank of the Dnieper from the west, instead of from the east. Iljinskaja and Terenozhkin, supporters of its Asian origins, contradicted themselves when they spoke that in the Left-bank Ukraine the earliest remains of the beginning of the Iron Age are the settlements and the burial places of the second step of the Chornolis culture. Their occurrence has been caused by the consequence of the migration of a part of the population from the Dnieper Right banks at the end of 9-th or in the beginning of 8-th centuries B.C. Later a local version of the Scythian culture has been created on this basis. Other territory of the Left-bank Forest-steppe, on their supervision, has been populated later, at the beginning of the first half of 6-th century AD, and Scythian remains appear here already in a completely generated shape after Scythians have come back from assumed campaigns to For Asia(Iljinskaja V.A., Terenozhkin A.I.,1983, 366).
However, even supporters of the aboriginal theory did not occur that the Scythian culture could develop integrally on the basis of local cultures of the Western Ukraine. The opinion that the Scythian culture was brought here by newcomers whence from steppes dominates among scholars. Penetration of these carriers of the Scythian culture is supposed even till the territory of modern Hungary (Popovich I.1993, 282) and Germany. Scythian golden fish of the sixth century B.C. has been found in province of Brandenburg. This fact gives scholars grounds to say:
“With other objects of treasure, mostly, of gold, it documents the influence, and possibly the invasion, of Scythians, nomadic horsemen from the steppes north of the Black Sea, around 500 B.C.” (Dietrich Sahrhage, Johannes Lundbeck, 1992, 17).
Such opinions look surprising if to pay attention that the eldest remains of the Scythian culture in the village of Lahodiv (near to the city of Lvov) are dated by 5-th B.C., and further the chronological break begins to 1-st century AD when the period of the Lipetsk culture appears (Krushelnytska L.1993-2, 238). By Krushelnytska’s words, one can notice the same situation also "on the countries of the whole the forest-steppe Ukraine "(Ib.). Practically it means that the Late-Scythian culture had no place on these lands, but only the Early-Scythian one. Consequently, it looks illogical that the Scythian penetration in the Fore-Carpathian and further beyond the Carpathian Mountains began before the fullest flower of the Scythian culture in the steppes of the Northern Black Sea Coast.
Herodotus asserted that Scythians, coming from Asia, have superseded Cimmerians from the Black Sea Coast and pursued them even beyond the Caucasus. The area of Cimmerian cultures reaches beyond the Right bank of the Dnieper up to the Danube, therefore it is doubtful that Scythians, having arrived from the east, have superseded Cimmerians in the Transcaucasia. If Cimmerians receded before Scythians, they should escape somewhere beyond the Dnieper and further beyond the Danube, to the Balkans, but not to make the way through Scythians to the Derbent pass and further. In this case, Cimmerians attacks to For Asia should occur through the Balkans. The historical data testify that Cimmerians came in the majority from the Caucasian ridge and only any their part together with Thracians arrived to Asia Minor from Balkan Peninsula. This can take place only when Scythians came from the west, but not from the east.
Solving the question of the ethnic belonging of Scythians, it is necessary to pay attention to the fact of existence in the steppes near the Azov and the Caspian Seas in second half 1-st thousand two big states created by Bulgars and related to them Khazars. Bulgarian tribes have been incorporated in Great Bulgaria by one of the tribe leaders Kubrat into 635 and approximately at the same time Khazarian Khaganat started to develop too. Soon after Kubrats death, intense relations between both states led to disorder of Great Bulgaria. One Bulgarian horde migrated beyond the Danube where its leader khan Asparuh has created a new state - Danube Bulgaria while the second horde was got a part of the Khaganat. To the beginning of 8-th century Khaganat already possessed the large territory including foothills of Dagestan, the steppes about the river Kuban, the Sea of Azov, and a part of the Black Sea Coast, the most part of the Crimea. The young state had to conduct heavy struggle for existence with Arabs and consequently the most part of Bulgars has gradually departed on the north, in the basin of the river Kama where they have formed own state Volga Bulgaria in due course. (Pletneva S.A., 1986, 20-41). As we see, Bulgars should be very numerous people which history is traced on the ways of their migration from the Western Ukraine through the seaboard steppes up to the banks of the Kama. This numerous people which have to stay in the steppes of Ukraine in days of Herodotus therefore could not to be remained without the attention of this Greek historian. Hence, it is necessary to assume that Bulgars, at least, were among those tribes which are mentioned by Herodotus in his "Histories".
We know, that Proto-Bulgars moved to the right bank of the Dnieper from the end of 3-rd mill. B.C. First they have occupied only the steppe, but have promoted also in the forest-steppe strip later. This fact can to be testified by lexical coincidences between German and Chuvash languages (Stetsyuk V.,1998, 85-86). The hypothetical territory of Bulgar’s settlement should be somewhere to the south of the area of ancient Tuetons, that is in the basin of the upper Dniester, the rivers Vereschitsia, Zolota Lypa, Strypa. Bulgars stay in this territory can be proved by numerous toponymics. This theme has been considered in corresponding work more detailed (Stetyuk V., 2002, 13-20). Here it is possible to specify only that one the of congestions of Scythian toponymics is in the territory of the Cherepyn-Lahodiv group of archaeological remains which L. Krushelnytska binds with the Early-Scythian culture. On the whole, the greatest congestion of Bulgarian toponymics has been revealed on territory of the Lvov Region and further to the east up to the river the Hnyla Lypa though it is certified on all territory forest-steppe Rightbank Ukraine where it adjoins to the toponymics of Kurdish type. Thus Bulgarian toponymics lasts as the expressed chain up to Dnieper, passes it in the area of the river Vorskla’s mouth, further goes upwards the Vorskla, and then gradually becomes sparse. Also what is the most surprising, that the general area of Bulgarian and Kurdish toponymics mostly coincides with area the of the Chornolis culture together with the characteristic tongue on the Vorskla (see Fig.3). There is no doubt that exactly on this territory ancient Bulgars and Kurds lived in the close neighbourhood and this can be been displayed confirmed by numerous lexical parallels between Chuvash and Kurdish languages (see the previous chapter). As other ethnic groups were not present at the Rightbank Ukraine at this time, one may believe that creators of the ethnically not identified Chornolis culture could be only Proto-Bulgars and Proto-Kurds. Estimating of the proportional contribution of both ethnoses into this culture is difficult at present, but on all signs it seems to be that the leading role played Proto-Bulgars. Having taken into account the fact and the chronological frameworks of evolution of the Chernolis cultures to the Early-Scythian culture, one may go further to assume that Scythians should be identified with Bulgars and Kurds as creators of Early-Scythian culture in the Ukrainian Forest-steppe down to the Carpathian Mountains and the river San. According to toponimics, the nucleus of the Scythian culture began to arise on the banks of the left tributaries of the Dniester – the rivers Vereschitsia, Hnyla Lypa, Zolota Lypa, Strypa, Seret. Obviously, the well-known Scythian gold was extracted in the basin of these rivers as the numerous toponymics, which can testify former rich deposits of this metal, concentrates here (the Ukrainian root “zoloto” (gold) may be find in the names of the rivers Zolota Lypa, Zolota, the settlements of Zolochev, two villages of Zolochivka, of Zolotniks, of Zoloty Potik, of Ivane-Zolote, of Bilche-Zolote, of Zolota Sloboda).
Scythian Vocabulary and Names
http://users.cwnet.com/millenia/scythwrd.html
Scythians and Druids
The Tocharians depicted in the cave shrines of Takla Makan are red haired and wear the same conical hat, sometimes called a Phrygian cap. A variant of this was worn by Mithras, the intermediary god adopted by the Persians and featured in the Indian pantheon of the Asuras.
In monarchical dualism he is depicted as balancing the forces of increase and decrease, represented by the gods Ahura Mazda and Ahriman and some classical authors identified him with Jesus Christ. His headgear is also depicted as the hat worn by gnomes and dwarves.
Accompanying the depictions of the Tocharian Lords in these cave temples are examples of the language attributed to them - Tocharian A script - which looks remarkably like one of the scripts that Tolkien attributes to his Elven peoples. That the Tocharians are Scythian-Aryans themselves means that the devotional language used by their High-Kings and Queens might justifiably be called an Elven language, the tongue of Tolkien’s Sundered Elves of the East.
The second Gaelic word for ’vampire’ is Sumaire, which is pronounced shimarie, with the accent on the middle syllable - shim AR ri. Sumaire is translated as ’vortex’, meaning a whirlpool or spiral, a labyrinth: a sucker, a reptile (serpent or Dragon).
There is a clear link here with Sumeria and Anu’s mother Tiamat, the Dragoness of the deeps, and with Anu’s children Samael and Lilith, the forebears of the fairies. Various pictures of the latter two depict them as entwined around a tree, often the tree is Lilith herself, with Samael as the serpent or dragon resting in her branches as in Hebraic Iconography where Lilith is the Tree of knowledge in the Garden of Eden.
The Sumerians appeared first in Mesopotamia in 3500 BC. Prior to their emergence they were preceded by the Ubaid migrants from what is now southern Romania, from Carpathia and Scythia, who had fled south to escape the Black Sea flood of 4000 BC. Dated to about 5000 BC, archaeologists working in Tartaria in the UbaidTransylvania, discovered a ’tepes’ or Rath under which they found a fire-pit.
territory of
Buried amongst the ashes were the human remains of a cannibalistic sacrificial victim and two clay tablets. On these were inscribed the name of Enki (Samael), the number of Anu - 60 - and the image of a goat, Enki again, and a Tree - Lilith. In Hinduism Siva is the Goatherd of the Mountains.
The pictographic nature of the inscriptions convinced the archaeologists that the language was the forerunner of Sumerian and so they called it proto-Sumerian. Making it fairly obvious that the Sumerians were originally Ubaid Overlords from Central Eurasia.
Sadly however, because a bunch of right-wing Hungarian nationalists then claimed Sumerian roots by virtue of a discovery made in a backyard they had only recently overrun, subsequent to the discovery in the 1960’s and the attendant madcap claim, no academic would give the proto-Sumerian theory house room, not wishing to accommodate the views of a collection of neo-nazi cranks and quite rightly so.
What a group of Mongoloids thought they had in common with the Aryan race the author doesn’t know. Having invaded the region as the Magyar at so late a period in history the author fails to see how any claim to Sumerian or proto-Sumerian origins, that an isolated group of Hungarian lunatics might make, could possibly hold up under even the most cursory scrutiny.
Nevertheless the author also finds the attitude of those academics who opposed the definition to be obstructive and misleading, especially as it is now conclusively proved that the culture responsible for the production of the Tartarian clay tablets and the Rath structure was Ubaid - the founders of civilized Mesopotamia and, as it turns out, the Overlords of the Indus valley civilization of Mohenjo Daro and Harrapa where Ishtar reigned as Queen.
Further east of Transylvania similar discoveries were made in the Ukraine or greater Scythia and the peoples who had settled the area were named after their dwellings, which in Russian were called Kurgans. They were mound houses exactly the same as the tepes of Tartaria and the Tells that the Ubaid built all the way down through Anatolia to Al’Ubaid and Sumeria.
To the Kurgan peoples, obviously the red-haired Aryan or proto-Aryan (if you must) horse lords, was attributed the invention of the chariot whose axle dimensions were copied on all horse drawn vehicles right up until the Victorian period, when they were incorporated into the axle width (4ft 8½ ins) of the standard gauge railways still in use today.
The influence that vampires have had on European culture should not be dismissed! They inspired modern wheeled transport, invented tourism in a big way and lent their images and their dress to the lids of every shortbread tin you’ve ever seen.
It seems fair to suggest, given the wealth of archaeological and anthropological evidence, that the Sumerians or Ubaid as we should call them, along with the pale-skinned and red-haired Lilith and her descendants, were the early Elven, Aryan-Scythian Dragon Overlords of what we know now as Transylvania and Greater Scythia.
This particularly in the light of the discoveries of bat winged, serpent-god statuary found in Dacia and Tibet (not too far from Takla Makan!) which is said to date back at least 5000 years, putting it into the period of the emergence of civilization in Sumeria.
Such figures we would readily identify as the Dragon or, in Gaelic - The Sumaire - whilst the Kurgans/Tells/Tepes that these early Transylvanian/Scythian Sidheans or Ubaid occupied were clearly duplicated in the Irish Raths of the Danaan, such as Newgrange with its spirally engraved stones, the Ziggurats of the Sumerians and the Pyramids of the Egyptians.
Whilst these ancient structures bore the marks of the sumaire, the spiral labyrinth or vortex design, thus emphasizing the creachaire - sumaire theme of the Dragon - witch - Vampire - Overlord theme, the Egyptians too adopted the labyrinth and used the spiral as a hieroglyph which they termed the ’Mer’, a symbol of irrigation associating it with water and, via weir spelt Vere and Mhaior, rendering Muir, returning once more to the Egyptian Mer - the fish trap or fish-woman trap, the enclosure of the mermaid, the maze or labyrinth and intimations of the wild hunt. (Muir and Mhaior name variants courtesy of Dr. Hugh Vere).
So at long last, having trudged through the backwaters of obscure knowledge we can now say that we know exactly who and what the Vampire was and is. A very rare individual, a God-King amongst the race of human kings, the Vampire descends from the supernatural Dragon Royalty of Sumeria back to the Ubaid Overlords of what was to become known as Transylvania and Greater Scythia.
The Vampire: the Dragon King or Queen was an Archdruid, a Witch Queen or King, a Fairy Princess or Prince amongst the race of Elphame. Consequently the Vampire, the Fairy, the Dragon and the Witch were all the same individual and far from being the characters of fable they were in fact very powerful, very real beings whose vampiric natures and rituals sustained their superconsciousness, transcendent vision which in its turn maintained their positions as the overlords of mankind.
These gods of flesh and blood were the only gods that ever actually existed: Myth, however, transformed them into the ethereal deities whom we are conditioned to think of as Gods now, and who came to be worshipped worldwide. Nevertheless flesh and blood they were and their bloodlines descend to the present day.
The Druids
The word Druid is said to be Greek in origin and, as ’drys’: means ’tree’. Some authorities like to think it means ’oak tree’ but no evidence exists to confirm this irrefutably. As we shall see later druid is also related to ’dru’ meaning ’run’ in Sanskrit and to Drys meaning a Wren - specifically the Goldcrest - one of the birds most sacred to the Druids. For the present however, we will concentrate on the Greek version of the word.
Though the Druids are associated with groves and, as some will insist, with oak trees, it is feasible to suggest that in the light of their Sumerian and Ubaid origins, the druids as priest kings of the Dragon, were connected specifically with the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge, rather than with any mundane or temporal shrubbery.
Accepting this we may further suggest that, as priests of these pre-eminent Trees of Life and Knowledge, they may be further identified with those magicians and scholars whose Transylvanian descendants, the Scythian Aryans or Sumerian Anunnaki - the Dragon God-Kings - were instrumental in establishing the Chakric system of Hindu and Buddhist Tantra and Hebrew, Arabic and Greek Qabalah whose magical systems, as we all know, contain a glyph called the Tree of Life.
Generally speaking this Tree, a system of pathways both macrocosmic and microcosmic in nature, links the various subtle energy centers which are said to exist both in the universe, as levels of density and emanation relating to the manifestation of cosmic power and being, and in the human body - on the microcosmic level - as energy centers corresponding to the glands in the endocrinal system. In Qabalah the spheres which do not relate to the glands may be seen as points in the meridian system adopted by the Chinese. On another level, the Qabalistic Tree of Life is a genealogical chart of the Gods.
The magical Tree is a universal symbol. As in the early Sumerian depiction of the Tree of Life; the abode of Lilith, many of the subsequent Arabic, Indian and European Holy Trees share common attributes. All have residing in their topmost branches some form of bird.
In Tantra it is the swan, whose head rests within the Ajna Chakra which corresponds to the pineal and pituitary glands and the corpus callosum. In Welsh druidic lore the bird is represented as the eagle, a typically shamanic, totem bird which symbolizes the ascendent spirit. Here the eagle is the god Lleu (in Ireland he is the Danaan king Lugh), the father of the elven Llewelyn kings of Gwynnedd.
In Arabic Sufism the bird is a peacock whilst in Viking lore the Sacred Tree Yggdrasil has at its base a coiled serpent by a pool and in its highest boughs the bird of the released spirit accompanied by a white hart.
What a deer is doing up a tree is anyone’s guess, but have a stab at it and I’ll tell you later. Yggdrasil is called the Axis Mundi and is seen as the tree which contains within its branches and roots the nine worlds of the Viking philosophical system, including their version of the Hebrew Qlipphoth or underworld. Immediately the similarity between it and the Qabalistic and Tantric Trees becomes quite apparent and this is no fluke.
In actual fact the druid’s most sacred tree wasn’t the oak, it was the apple tree, linked to which is the blue boar, both of which came originally, it was said, from the Otherworld. For this reason the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden was always depicted as the apple, but could be interchanged with the pomegranate for reasons which eventually will become apparent to the hardiest and most persistent reader.
The Mistletoe Bard, whom we will encounter later, cut the golden bough from the Apple prior to descending into the underworld. Where it has been suggested that the berries of the mistletoe represent the sperm of the Great Oak God (Jupiter/Thor/Jehovah/Enlil) and thus his fertility and life-force, this isn’t in fact the case.
The Mistletoe grew mainly on Apple trees which, as we shall see, are exclusively female. Therefore the berries of the Mistletoe represent the female and consequently the Goddess’ fluid, not the seminal fluid of a male deity.
The boar is sacred to both Mars and to Arduina or Diana. This link between the apple and the boar, and the boar and Mars and Diana or the Moon is identical with the association between the Apple Tree of Eden as Lilith (of the Moon) and Samael the Serpent or Dragon who embraces her. Essentially the symbols of the Boar and the Dragon have become interchangeable.
The Blue Boar is a druidic symbol of office and the Dragon is a symbol of bloodline descent, a clan badge of the druidic race. In the Scythian Dragon Tribe the individual totem animal badges vary from region to region and reflect the local fauna and the status of the clan or sept. As an example a high or archdruidic family badge would be the boar, whilst a junior sept of that clannad would have as its totem the hedgehog, which is rather amusing.
The symbol of Samael the Serpent reclining in the Branches of Lilith’s Apple Tree in the Garden of Eden actually depicts the concept of the Dragon eating the fruit itself. This can also be found slightly more abstractly but conversely and paradoxically more graphically at the same time, in the Tantric equivalent of the serpent
entwined around a female figure.
As the apple is also the favorite fruit of the boar in the wild, it is doubtless that the adoption of the Boar as a badge was because of this and further, that the identification of the boar with the dragon was through their mutual, actual and symbolic love of what the Irish druids called the apples of red-gold. The boar was also called Le Solitaire and for this reason has links with the Merlin which will be dealt with later.
The Apple Trees - either Lilith or her descendant scarlet priestesses - bore the fruit which symbolized the sephirah and the glands of the female body. These, the apples of red-gold, produce the enriched virginal womb blood that was consumed by both the male and female druids - the Boars in the Orchard and the Serpents or Dragons in the Trees. Red-Gold is also the Tantric Kaula term for womb blood: the Rtu or first flow of the womb.
In reinforcing the Uber-Oupire link - the identification between the witch (druidhe) and vampire - it is worth taking a look at the totem system of Mithraism, a close cousin of druidism. In the Mithraic initiatory grades there are 7 degrees.
The Highest is the Dragon and the penultimate is the wolf. Also included is the Raven and with variations across Europe these animals, along with Swans, Geese, Bears, Vipers, Hawks, eagles and so on, served as the tuadh or kingdom emblems for the various Scythian groups.
In Romania however, these grades with their animal totems or badges make up the degrees or conditions of vampirism. The most potent vampire is the Dracoi or female Dracoica, from whence the House of Drakul obtained its name, meaning ’Satan’ or ’Dragon’ whilst Drakulea or Dracula means ’son of Satan’ or ’son of the Dragon’. Lying at a close second place comes the Stregoi or female Stregoica, a being that manifests itself as either a wolf or a raven. We can see where this is leading, can’t we?
The Stregoi or Stregoica represents both the Morrighan or Morgana, the Valkyrie and the Werewolf or Verewolf, which is simply another manifestation of the vampire. Typically and especially where wolves were in short supply, the werewolf was represented variously by the Bear and the Fox; and elsewhere by the crocodile (the Sobekh of Egypt - patron and protector of Royalty - whose fat was used as the Messach or anointing oil of the pharoahs, the Messiahs or priest kings).
In this neck of the woods it was also common to replace the werewolf with the Panther who was sacred to the lunar goddess Diana and also to Bacchus. Panther was the clan name of Jesus, and much earlier, the Ubaid priests wore the skins of Panthers as their totem animal. The Panther’s feeding ritual involves it opening the jugular vein in its victims neck and drinking the blood prior to eating the carcass.
The association between werewolves and the moonlight which drove them loopy, according to fable, is repeated and reinforced by the traditional belief that witchesvampires) were sacred to Diana and worshipped her by the light of the full moon. The link between the full moon and the vampire of the Gothic Romance is also well represented in tradition.
(aka
The reason that moonlight drove werewolves round the twist and elicited devotion from witches was because the full moon was seen as the menstrual moon that signaled the impending flow and was worshipped particularly by the witches of Italy and the surrounding area.
These ladies were called Strega, that is the Italian name for a witch and rather than worshipping the full moon they were celebrating what the moon and Diana stood for - food for the soul - the blood of virgins! Give it a chance - it isn’t as gory or unsavory as it sounds.
This was the secret foundation for the High Romance and Courtly Love that initiated the exoteric Medieval Romantic Movement itself, so don’t get judgmental or picky. If you are health conscious and take supplements like HRT you might as well know that it comes in many cases either from the urine of Mares or French Nuns - yes the author did say: Nuns. It’s official. So don’t start turning your nose up at a bit of harmless but nevertheless profitable genital snogging. Its a lot more fun than taking the piss out of Catholics. Most of the time.
As Melatonin was the primary hormone extracted in the blood rites of Diana it’s your choice: would you have preferred the blood of beautiful virgins, romantically celebrating and giving joyously of their feminine power and status by moonlight then, or the urine of papists - in a pill - now? One type of melatonin is live whilst the other is stone dead and useless - guess which is which. And Melatonin is only the beginning of the story.
In addition to the Dragon Court’s research into DNA, over two years ago the author who, many years ago, was the first to pinpoint the potential chemicals indictated in the precise hormonal makeup of the Holy Grail and Grant’s Starfire phenomena (which information he subsequently passed, in part, on to Laurence Gardner), also commissioned the assay of various organic fluids in order to discover and prove the presence of a range of these vital psychotropic and restorative chemicals discharged by the human female system.
These included oxytocin, prolactin, melatonin, seratonin, adenosyne triphosphate, dopamine, telomerase and retinol. The results of these assays should be known soon. Richard Dufton had also been working independently on identifying the same chemical presences for some years and when he and the author met in 1995 they began to work closely on the Melatonin basis for the Holy Grail. Out of this joint research the author discovered the wider implications of the discovery and restructured the Kabalistic and Tantric systems with precise chemical indices for each sephiroth or chakra.
The association between Scythian Totem beasts, Romanian animal vampire types and Mithraic grades of Initiation indicates clearly that vampirism, far from being random or opportunist, was in fact part of an ancient system of elven rites manifest in Tantra, Mithraism and Druidism.
Having said that the symbol of the panther and the werewolf were apposite, as the Scythian warrior nobility were a tad bloody-minded at times and Roman reports from the early part of the first millennium state how the Pictish Danaan had been witnessed eating the flesh and drinking the blood of their defeated foes following victories in battle.
Undoubtedly this was a corruption of earlier ritual practice as we shall see later. Certainly going out and ’eating Italian’ had a unique and disturbing meaning for the Roman soldiery of the day, as the Ninth Legion in Albany discovered to their cost. Drinking the blood of friend or foe in battle was a common practice in Eire and Scotland, the former in remembrance of fallen comrades, the latter to obtain the strength of the enemy. Contrary to Royal Vampirism, the whole point of Martial Vampirism was to clog your arteries with someone else's adrenaline
Another ritual familiar to those who have read Stoker’s Dracula was the hauling of soil from the Scythian homelands in boxes. The Scythians initiated this practice with the idea that the earth was the source of sovereignty and power and that ones soul was linked to ones homeland.
This isn’t entirely daft because we are what we eat, and what we eat affects the ’soul’ (biochemically derived and mediated collection of responses and attachments called ’ME’, the ego, personality or whatever, dependant for its existence on the continuity of the mind-brain interface) through the body, both body and soul being inextricably linked as they are. What we eat comes from the land where we are born and so the soil of ones country and its inherent sovereignty and identity literally flow in the blood that courses through one’s veins.
Up until the last century, the displaced Scots who traveled to America would slip a little soil from their former Crofts into the soles of their boots in order that, wherever they went they would always be walking on the earth of their homeland.
The Scythian Overlords brought the dragon culture with them as they traversed the many regions of Europe and finally settled in the British Isles. All their kings, indeed all Scythians of the royal caste were dragons, particularly the druids and their high kings were called Pendragons or chief dragons and were picked by their druidic peers from druidic families.
Variant spellings for the name Druid include ’Draoi’ - thought to mean Dragon - which is close in spelling to the Romanian ’Dracoi’ and ’Dracoica’ which, if related to ’Drys’, associated with wood nymphs or tree spirits, suggests that the ’Drys’ or ’Dryads’ were the female druids who were symbolized by the apple tree of Lilith whilst the ’Draoi’ or ’Dracoi’ - the highest degree of the male druids - were represented by the serpent entwined in the branches of those apple trees.
The Priestess Queens and Priest Kings, as we have seen, dwelt in the holy places, the royal Raths that served as both temple and tomb. These subterranean palaces mimicked the the Bergs or mound houses of the Scythians’ ’proto’-Sumerian ancestors, who originated in Transylvania and Carpathia.
Similarly the Mithraic underground temples resembled places like Newgrange, in that they had an aperture above the doorway that allowed a shaft of sunlight into the building. This ray would hit the back wall of the temple where, in the case of Mithraic rituals, there were placed figurines, the sequential illumination of each in its turn, as the day progressed onwards, would tell an initiatory story, bathed in the dying light of the midwinter sun.
Beneath the doorways of various of these buildings have been discovered the remains of headless corpses whose skulls would have been secreted within these Sidhe Mounds. Their functions were to serve as Guardians of the Portals, spirit defenders of the power and sanctity of these shrines - the dwellings of the Dragons - the Goddess-Queens and God-Kings incarnate.
The cult of the severed head, as part of Celtic religious practice originated with the druids and therefore the Scythians. Examples of the head as the seat of the soul and the source of mystical wisdom, a bestower of gifts or cornucopia finds expression both in the legend of the head of Bran the Blessed or Bendigaid Fran, Archdruid of Britian, retold in the Mabinogion; and the Trial papers of the Templars, who owned a head which was said to speak words of transcendent wisdom. This head, along with that of Bran, have both been cited as being aspects of the Grail with whom both Bran and the Templars were connected.
The Knights Templars restructured by Baldwin of Bourcq in 1118 appended to their name "and of the Temple of Solomon" whilst the original Order of Templars, a Vere foundation which emerged in 1100 were called "Guardian Princes of the Royal Secret". However the original Temple Guard was founded 1500 years earlier in Jerusalem.
A close examination of the ’Song of Songs’ attributed to Solomon will reveal to the reader certain esoteric references to the Grail. It has been further revealed that Solomon’s bloodline had Scythian Dragon origins and therefore connections with the Cult of the Head. That a head, said to be that of the Magdalene, successor to Sheba, to turn up in the inventory attached to the Templar trial papers should therefore come as no surprise.
The Scythians believed that the head contained the immortal soul. Descartes, writing in the 1600’s, was of the same opinion and elaborated by asserting that the seat of the soul was the pineal gland. Others, writing later, have suggested that this organ is the mediator of inspiration and the translator of intuitive or cosmic information.
In Indian Tantric Yoga the Pineal is the physical seat or anchor of the Ajna Chakra which also corresponds to the Pituitary as well. In this philosophy the Pineal is symbolized as being the head of the swan, whose body comprises the various areas of the rest of the brain. As we have seen, the dove and the Raven also fulfill this symbolic function.
The Pineal Gland is specifically associated with Grail Lore and closely aspected to manifestations of the Grail in the forms of a Cup, a Stone, a Cauldron, a Well, Merelake; a fountain, (such as that found in certain kabalistic rituals) and an underground stream.
or
Within the theme of the severed head we also find the dressed head of Llewelyn, King of Gwynedd, which was severed from his body and garlanded with Ivy (sacred to Bacchus) before being dispatched to Edward I following the victory of his armies over the Welsh in the 1200’s.
Some two hundred years later, on his death in 1477, Prince Vlad Draculea’s body was taken to an Abbey he had built on an Island in the middle of a lake in Smyrna. Such a sanctuary has distinct Arthurian overtones and associations with the Isle of Avallon, upon which there was also built an abbey of the quasi-druidic Celto-Scythian Church.
This replaced the early Rath temple, grove and sanctuary of the Morganas, the ladies of the lake who were the Swan Maiden-Valkyries of the Scythian world, vampires and head hunters. In such sanctuaries headless corpses, as we have seen, were placed as portal guardians and it is in just such a condition that we discover that, according to local tradition, Draculea’s head was removed from his body and his corpse was buried beneath the stone flags beneath the doorway of the Abbey’s chapel.
A similar incident is reported to have occurred with the establishment of the Celtic Christian Shrine on the Island of Iona. Here it is St Columba who is said to have severed the head of one of his disciples and buried the blood drained corpse beneath the doorway of the chapel.
The blood of the victim was then consumed as a eucharist in thanksgiving for the monks’ safe arrival to the island. Here we can see that early Christianity was indeed tied up with the cult of the head, as was the collateral Johannite Cult of the Baptist, who himself was a sacrificial king of Dragon descent.
Draculea’s name means son of the Dragon as we have seen, and his burial replicates the Scythian burials in the Holy-Royal Sidhe or power mounds found in EireScotland. In Draculea’s case there are a number of symbols associated with him that connect him directly with the Scythian druidic tradition.
and
Furthermore these symbols, some of which we can also find, surprisingly enough, in Stoker’s novel, lead to the conclusion that Stoker knew a great deal about his subject. Much of the information in ’Dracula’ the novel, is of an esoteric and highly specialized psycho-biological nature, which does not detract from or conflict with, but rather elucidates upon, the character of the Draculea of history.
Bram Stoker was a close friend and associate of the Welsh magician and writer Arthur Machen who wrote numerous works, including a paper on the alchemical significance of the dragon and a novel on the Twllyth Teg - the fairies of Wales.
It is a common device to convey esoteric knowledge via the medium of supposed fiction and it appears that both Stoker and Machen involved themselves in such ventures. Stoker was also acquainted with Aleister Crowley and MacGregor Mathers, both of whom were leading lights in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Machen and Wilde were members of this organization which, it is said, had its roots in the ancient Rosicruciana Anglicae.
Oscar Wilde was one of only four people associated with The Golden Dawn and the later breakaway group: the Ordo Templi Orientis headed by Crowley, who himself undertook to perform the rituals leading to the accomplishment of a variant of the ancient "Mass of the Vampire".
The amazing Jack Parsons, OTO., attempted it in the 1940’s and joined Wilde in succumbing to the ruin and degradation that accompanies it. Jack died in an inexplicable explosion in the garage of his home in California.
Whilst Crowley accomplished the rite and walked away virtually unscathed, eventually dying of old age in Hastings, Wilde’s fate is known to all. Having said that ’Death in Hastings’ has none of the romantic je ne sais quoi of say, ’Death in Venice’, or even Paris. Perhaps Wilde, vilified as he was, had the better of it after all, at least in terms of style!
It has been suggested that Stoker was either a member of the OTO or the Golden Dawn and it would appear that the cohesion and integrity of the symbolism in his ’Dracula’ must therefore point to Stoker having a source of esoteric information far more informed in historical and alchemical terms than any that he might have obtained, as it has been suggested, purely from the folklore of Romanian peasants or from contemporary literary sources.
Historical accounts of Prince Draculea’s life confirm that he was born in and became Prince of Wallachia, not Transylvania. In linking Draculea with TransylvaniaStoker suggests to the reader that the origin of the vampire tradition was indeed linked to the Ubaid Homeland.
however,
Recent research has uncovered the fact that Draculea did indeed, like his Scythian Warrior ancestors, drink the blood of his impaled and decapitated victims. Decapitation is distinctly a Scythian practice and although it has been suggested that Draculea learnt the custom of impaling from his Turkish captors, this practice had been used as a punishment by the Aryans of Persia as early as 500 BC.
Although Stoker has Dracula impaled and decapitated at his castle when in fact Draculea was beheaded at the Abbey where he was buried, Stoker is rightly attempting to associate Dracula, via these rituals, with an entire vampiric cultural tradition of which his character was destined to become the definitive archetype.
This is no bad thing because the picture of Dracula and his accoutrements and behavior is not far from the actual truth of the matter. The finer details of the novel confirm that Stoker was probably being prompted by others in the writing of this work, which contains secret information that is still generally unknown outside certain circles.
It was generally thought that the only way to kill a vampire was to impale the body through the heart, in order to pin the wandering body to the earth, remove the head and cremate the remains. At that time cremation was forbidden in Christian Europe because it was believed that the bodily remains should be left intact to rise again on the Day of Judgment.
Obviously the Church thought that reconstituting the fetid and rotting remains of sinners on the Last Day would be a doddle for God, whereas he would be powerless to reconstruct the former human being from a handful of dust. Typically stunning christian logic in action here.
Cremation was practiced by Hindus, a race of people originally extracted from the Aryan Horse Lords. Considering this as a funerary practice in relation to decapitation and impaling, which was reserved as a royal punishment in Persia, perhaps the peasant memory, prompted by the church, recalled the link between royalty and these rituals and thence assumed that the only way to kill a vampire who was, after all exclusively a member of the Fairy or Royal Race, was to put the body through a series of ritual processes, some of which had been variously, components of Scythian royal sacrificial or funerary practice.
Royal decapitation we can see in the stories of Bran and Llewelyn, and although Celts buried their common dead, we might suggest, given the earliest evidence from Tartaria and other later sites, that Royal Scythians, like their Viking and Hindu cousins, cremated the sometimes decapitated remains of their sacred dead, depending on the requirements of specific ritual necessity. Perhaps to the peasantry, impaling was seen as poetic justice in dispatching one assumed to be of a race for whom impaling was a common punishment.
We have seen that impaling was thought to nail the body of the vampire to the earth and perhaps where the body wasn’t burnt, impaling was considered sufficient to keep in its grave, the body of one belonging to a race that the crows in cassocks said was so terrifying and seemingly so indestructible.
It will be remembered though that many of the stories concerning vampires were contrived by the church to encourage the flock to remain in fear for its life and thus faithful to its only means of protection and salvation, the fat scheming pervert in the black frock.
It was immaterial to them that vampirism was rarely committed against outsiders except when they were opponents in war. Nevertheless the vampire scare went on longer than the witch craze and was just as effective in keeping the poor peasant in bondage to the evil doctrines of a lying church.
As a Scythian custom, impaling would have been as common in Galatia, later Turkey, where the Cult of the Head thrived in Roman times; as it was in Persia where it was reserved for one royal in particular - Bress - who betrayed his brother Darius following the successful invasion by Alexander.
Essentially Stoker’s Dracula is as much a part of the Grail Cycle as the Druidic stories of King Arthur and of Eschenbach’s ’Parzifal’. In these stories as in most Druidic teaching fables, the Bards delighted in presenting material that could be read on several different but related levels which often have hermetic, macro and microcosmic components.
In particular where Stoker is concerned, an extract from Solomon’s ’Song of Songs’ features in a couple of obscure lines in his Dracula and these directly refer to the central alchemical theme of the Grail Cycle and put the seal on the book as being an esoteric work, rather than just simply a Gothic novel.
Historically Draculea himself attended the ’Solomon School’ in Hermannstadt, an alchemical, hermetic college that taught magic to the sons of Royalty. Two other schools like this existed in Europe, one was in Toledo in Spain and the other was said to be in Transylvania. At the ’Solomon’ only one person per class ever graduated, or ’rode the Dragon’ as it was termed.
Fanciful christian theory says that the rest of the students ended up with Satan in Hell! Reminiscent of a Druidic ’Bangor’ or university, the ’Solomon School’ finished Vlad’s education and fitted him to become a Dacian counterpart of the British Pendragon, with all the brutal wisdom of his fairy ancestors and predecessors who, as God-Kings of the specifically intermediary, guardian-class of Anunnaki deities, were inhumed in the same manner that Dracula himself was laid to rest.
Draculea the prince of Wallachia was little different in actuality from the Dracula character of Stoker’s novel. This Sacred Prince, a Hermetic scholar and initiate, a student of magic, Magus, Witch Lord and Dragon Prince, counterbalanced the bloodlust of his forebears with a refined knowledge and advanced practice of Grail procedure which, shining forth radiantly from the pages of Stoker’s little masterpiece, echoed the teachings that the historical Draculea would have received at the ’Solomon School’: teachings and encountered in the Dragon Court of which he was a member, teachings which were held in common by Archdruids, Alchemists, Tantric Yogis, Hermeticists and Qabalists alike, each discipline originating from one ancient Fairy Tradition in Sumeria and Transylvania - the heartlands of the Dragon Kings and Queens of the Sacred Danaan Peoples.
In Draculea’s day christian kings sent their sons to christian universities but still, true kingship, the Sobekh or Messiah kingship, symbolized since antiquity by the Dragon or Sacred Crocodile, required that the true kings’ sons learnt priest-kingship and in Draculea’s case, this education was still clearly of a Druidic nature, even as late as the 15th century.
In the Celtic British Isles after the Romans decamped, Princes were required to become priests or druids and as late as 660 AD we can find references concerning the education of the Merovingian Prince Dagobert at Slane University in Ireland where, up until the year 664 AD, Celtic, Druidic Christianity still held sway.
In those days and as late as 751 A.D. Kings still came exclusively from the King Tribe who supplied much of the Celtic world, as well as Eurasia, with Draconian offspring to serve as Royal Priests. This King Tribe, the Arya or Sidhe - the Scythians - included the Merovingian dynasty who, although it was an amalgam of Jesus’ Egyptian and Aryan blood, it was also closely related to the Irish and Scots Royal Danaan and the Druidic castes integral to these Houses still educated this dynastic progeny up until the Carolingian usurpation and the ascendance of the Church of Rome in 664 AD.
Gradually at first the Roman church replaced the true royal, elven blood with its own bloodless puppets and made christian education the norm for the sons of the new christian kings and nobles whom the church had created. The Solomons of Hermannstadt, Toledo and Transylvania became the hidden leftovers of an ancient, originally druidic educational system which necessarily went underground and became the subject of myth and fairytale, along with the bloodlines it once educated openly.
The Dragon Colleges produced the ’Uber’, the Overlords who, in Britain were called the Pendragons and in Transylvania the ’Dracoi’ or ’Dracoica’ - the ’vampires’. Only the highest graduates of the Druidic bangors would be thought of as true men or women of power, true Sidhe or Fairy Royalty and thus it was only the prince who ’rode the Dragon’ who could be said to fit the same criteria for inclusion in the bloodline of the vampire, the witch and the fairy families - The Dragon Kings.
The Tocharians depicted in the cave shrines of Takla Makan are red haired and wear the same conical hat, sometimes called a Phrygian cap. A variant of this was worn by Mithras, the intermediary god adopted by the Persians and featured in the Indian pantheon of the Asuras.
In monarchical dualism he is depicted as balancing the forces of increase and decrease, represented by the gods Ahura Mazda and Ahriman and some classical authors identified him with Jesus Christ. His headgear is also depicted as the hat worn by gnomes and dwarves.
Accompanying the depictions of the Tocharian Lords in these cave temples are examples of the language attributed to them - Tocharian A script - which looks remarkably like one of the scripts that Tolkien attributes to his Elven peoples. That the Tocharians are Scythian-Aryans themselves means that the devotional language used by their High-Kings and Queens might justifiably be called an Elven language, the tongue of Tolkien’s Sundered Elves of the East.
The second Gaelic word for ’vampire’ is Sumaire, which is pronounced shimarie, with the accent on the middle syllable - shim AR ri. Sumaire is translated as ’vortex’, meaning a whirlpool or spiral, a labyrinth: a sucker, a reptile (serpent or Dragon).
There is a clear link here with Sumeria and Anu’s mother Tiamat, the Dragoness of the deeps, and with Anu’s children Samael and Lilith, the forebears of the fairies. Various pictures of the latter two depict them as entwined around a tree, often the tree is Lilith herself, with Samael as the serpent or dragon resting in her branches as in Hebraic Iconography where Lilith is the Tree of knowledge in the Garden of Eden.
The Sumerians appeared first in Mesopotamia in 3500 BC. Prior to their emergence they were preceded by the Ubaid migrants from what is now southern Romania, from Carpathia and Scythia, who had fled south to escape the Black Sea flood of 4000 BC. Dated to about 5000 BC, archaeologists working in Tartaria in the UbaidTransylvania, discovered a ’tepes’ or Rath under which they found a fire-pit.
territory of
Buried amongst the ashes were the human remains of a cannibalistic sacrificial victim and two clay tablets. On these were inscribed the name of Enki (Samael), the number of Anu - 60 - and the image of a goat, Enki again, and a Tree - Lilith. In Hinduism Siva is the Goatherd of the Mountains.
The pictographic nature of the inscriptions convinced the archaeologists that the language was the forerunner of Sumerian and so they called it proto-Sumerian. Making it fairly obvious that the Sumerians were originally Ubaid Overlords from Central Eurasia.
Sadly however, because a bunch of right-wing Hungarian nationalists then claimed Sumerian roots by virtue of a discovery made in a backyard they had only recently overrun, subsequent to the discovery in the 1960’s and the attendant madcap claim, no academic would give the proto-Sumerian theory house room, not wishing to accommodate the views of a collection of neo-nazi cranks and quite rightly so.
What a group of Mongoloids thought they had in common with the Aryan race the author doesn’t know. Having invaded the region as the Magyar at so late a period in history the author fails to see how any claim to Sumerian or proto-Sumerian origins, that an isolated group of Hungarian lunatics might make, could possibly hold up under even the most cursory scrutiny.
Nevertheless the author also finds the attitude of those academics who opposed the definition to be obstructive and misleading, especially as it is now conclusively proved that the culture responsible for the production of the Tartarian clay tablets and the Rath structure was Ubaid - the founders of civilized Mesopotamia and, as it turns out, the Overlords of the Indus valley civilization of Mohenjo Daro and Harrapa where Ishtar reigned as Queen.
Further east of Transylvania similar discoveries were made in the Ukraine or greater Scythia and the peoples who had settled the area were named after their dwellings, which in Russian were called Kurgans. They were mound houses exactly the same as the tepes of Tartaria and the Tells that the Ubaid built all the way down through Anatolia to Al’Ubaid and Sumeria.
To the Kurgan peoples, obviously the red-haired Aryan or proto-Aryan (if you must) horse lords, was attributed the invention of the chariot whose axle dimensions were copied on all horse drawn vehicles right up until the Victorian period, when they were incorporated into the axle width (4ft 8½ ins) of the standard gauge railways still in use today.
The influence that vampires have had on European culture should not be dismissed! They inspired modern wheeled transport, invented tourism in a big way and lent their images and their dress to the lids of every shortbread tin you’ve ever seen.
It seems fair to suggest, given the wealth of archaeological and anthropological evidence, that the Sumerians or Ubaid as we should call them, along with the pale-skinned and red-haired Lilith and her descendants, were the early Elven, Aryan-Scythian Dragon Overlords of what we know now as Transylvania and Greater Scythia.
This particularly in the light of the discoveries of bat winged, serpent-god statuary found in Dacia and Tibet (not too far from Takla Makan!) which is said to date back at least 5000 years, putting it into the period of the emergence of civilization in Sumeria.
Such figures we would readily identify as the Dragon or, in Gaelic - The Sumaire - whilst the Kurgans/Tells/Tepes that these early Transylvanian/Scythian Sidheans or Ubaid occupied were clearly duplicated in the Irish Raths of the Danaan, such as Newgrange with its spirally engraved stones, the Ziggurats of the Sumerians and the Pyramids of the Egyptians.
Whilst these ancient structures bore the marks of the sumaire, the spiral labyrinth or vortex design, thus emphasizing the creachaire - sumaire theme of the Dragon - witch - Vampire - Overlord theme, the Egyptians too adopted the labyrinth and used the spiral as a hieroglyph which they termed the ’Mer’, a symbol of irrigation associating it with water and, via weir spelt Vere and Mhaior, rendering Muir, returning once more to the Egyptian Mer - the fish trap or fish-woman trap, the enclosure of the mermaid, the maze or labyrinth and intimations of the wild hunt. (Muir and Mhaior name variants courtesy of Dr. Hugh Vere).
So at long last, having trudged through the backwaters of obscure knowledge we can now say that we know exactly who and what the Vampire was and is. A very rare individual, a God-King amongst the race of human kings, the Vampire descends from the supernatural Dragon Royalty of Sumeria back to the Ubaid Overlords of what was to become known as Transylvania and Greater Scythia.
The Vampire: the Dragon King or Queen was an Archdruid, a Witch Queen or King, a Fairy Princess or Prince amongst the race of Elphame. Consequently the Vampire, the Fairy, the Dragon and the Witch were all the same individual and far from being the characters of fable they were in fact very powerful, very real beings whose vampiric natures and rituals sustained their superconsciousness, transcendent vision which in its turn maintained their positions as the overlords of mankind.
These gods of flesh and blood were the only gods that ever actually existed: Myth, however, transformed them into the ethereal deities whom we are conditioned to think of as Gods now, and who came to be worshipped worldwide. Nevertheless flesh and blood they were and their bloodlines descend to the present day.
The Druids
The word Druid is said to be Greek in origin and, as ’drys’: means ’tree’. Some authorities like to think it means ’oak tree’ but no evidence exists to confirm this irrefutably. As we shall see later druid is also related to ’dru’ meaning ’run’ in Sanskrit and to Drys meaning a Wren - specifically the Goldcrest - one of the birds most sacred to the Druids. For the present however, we will concentrate on the Greek version of the word.
Though the Druids are associated with groves and, as some will insist, with oak trees, it is feasible to suggest that in the light of their Sumerian and Ubaid origins, the druids as priest kings of the Dragon, were connected specifically with the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge, rather than with any mundane or temporal shrubbery.
Accepting this we may further suggest that, as priests of these pre-eminent Trees of Life and Knowledge, they may be further identified with those magicians and scholars whose Transylvanian descendants, the Scythian Aryans or Sumerian Anunnaki - the Dragon God-Kings - were instrumental in establishing the Chakric system of Hindu and Buddhist Tantra and Hebrew, Arabic and Greek Qabalah whose magical systems, as we all know, contain a glyph called the Tree of Life.
Generally speaking this Tree, a system of pathways both macrocosmic and microcosmic in nature, links the various subtle energy centers which are said to exist both in the universe, as levels of density and emanation relating to the manifestation of cosmic power and being, and in the human body - on the microcosmic level - as energy centers corresponding to the glands in the endocrinal system. In Qabalah the spheres which do not relate to the glands may be seen as points in the meridian system adopted by the Chinese. On another level, the Qabalistic Tree of Life is a genealogical chart of the Gods.
The magical Tree is a universal symbol. As in the early Sumerian depiction of the Tree of Life; the abode of Lilith, many of the subsequent Arabic, Indian and European Holy Trees share common attributes. All have residing in their topmost branches some form of bird.
In Tantra it is the swan, whose head rests within the Ajna Chakra which corresponds to the pineal and pituitary glands and the corpus callosum. In Welsh druidic lore the bird is represented as the eagle, a typically shamanic, totem bird which symbolizes the ascendent spirit. Here the eagle is the god Lleu (in Ireland he is the Danaan king Lugh), the father of the elven Llewelyn kings of Gwynnedd.
In Arabic Sufism the bird is a peacock whilst in Viking lore the Sacred Tree Yggdrasil has at its base a coiled serpent by a pool and in its highest boughs the bird of the released spirit accompanied by a white hart.
What a deer is doing up a tree is anyone’s guess, but have a stab at it and I’ll tell you later. Yggdrasil is called the Axis Mundi and is seen as the tree which contains within its branches and roots the nine worlds of the Viking philosophical system, including their version of the Hebrew Qlipphoth or underworld. Immediately the similarity between it and the Qabalistic and Tantric Trees becomes quite apparent and this is no fluke.
In actual fact the druid’s most sacred tree wasn’t the oak, it was the apple tree, linked to which is the blue boar, both of which came originally, it was said, from the Otherworld. For this reason the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden was always depicted as the apple, but could be interchanged with the pomegranate for reasons which eventually will become apparent to the hardiest and most persistent reader.
The Mistletoe Bard, whom we will encounter later, cut the golden bough from the Apple prior to descending into the underworld. Where it has been suggested that the berries of the mistletoe represent the sperm of the Great Oak God (Jupiter/Thor/Jehovah/Enlil) and thus his fertility and life-force, this isn’t in fact the case.
The Mistletoe grew mainly on Apple trees which, as we shall see, are exclusively female. Therefore the berries of the Mistletoe represent the female and consequently the Goddess’ fluid, not the seminal fluid of a male deity.
The boar is sacred to both Mars and to Arduina or Diana. This link between the apple and the boar, and the boar and Mars and Diana or the Moon is identical with the association between the Apple Tree of Eden as Lilith (of the Moon) and Samael the Serpent or Dragon who embraces her. Essentially the symbols of the Boar and the Dragon have become interchangeable.
The Blue Boar is a druidic symbol of office and the Dragon is a symbol of bloodline descent, a clan badge of the druidic race. In the Scythian Dragon Tribe the individual totem animal badges vary from region to region and reflect the local fauna and the status of the clan or sept. As an example a high or archdruidic family badge would be the boar, whilst a junior sept of that clannad would have as its totem the hedgehog, which is rather amusing.
The symbol of Samael the Serpent reclining in the Branches of Lilith’s Apple Tree in the Garden of Eden actually depicts the concept of the Dragon eating the fruit itself. This can also be found slightly more abstractly but conversely and paradoxically more graphically at the same time, in the Tantric equivalent of the serpent
entwined around a female figure.
As the apple is also the favorite fruit of the boar in the wild, it is doubtless that the adoption of the Boar as a badge was because of this and further, that the identification of the boar with the dragon was through their mutual, actual and symbolic love of what the Irish druids called the apples of red-gold. The boar was also called Le Solitaire and for this reason has links with the Merlin which will be dealt with later.
The Apple Trees - either Lilith or her descendant scarlet priestesses - bore the fruit which symbolized the sephirah and the glands of the female body. These, the apples of red-gold, produce the enriched virginal womb blood that was consumed by both the male and female druids - the Boars in the Orchard and the Serpents or Dragons in the Trees. Red-Gold is also the Tantric Kaula term for womb blood: the Rtu or first flow of the womb.
In reinforcing the Uber-Oupire link - the identification between the witch (druidhe) and vampire - it is worth taking a look at the totem system of Mithraism, a close cousin of druidism. In the Mithraic initiatory grades there are 7 degrees.
The Highest is the Dragon and the penultimate is the wolf. Also included is the Raven and with variations across Europe these animals, along with Swans, Geese, Bears, Vipers, Hawks, eagles and so on, served as the tuadh or kingdom emblems for the various Scythian groups.
In Romania however, these grades with their animal totems or badges make up the degrees or conditions of vampirism. The most potent vampire is the Dracoi or female Dracoica, from whence the House of Drakul obtained its name, meaning ’Satan’ or ’Dragon’ whilst Drakulea or Dracula means ’son of Satan’ or ’son of the Dragon’. Lying at a close second place comes the Stregoi or female Stregoica, a being that manifests itself as either a wolf or a raven. We can see where this is leading, can’t we?
The Stregoi or Stregoica represents both the Morrighan or Morgana, the Valkyrie and the Werewolf or Verewolf, which is simply another manifestation of the vampire. Typically and especially where wolves were in short supply, the werewolf was represented variously by the Bear and the Fox; and elsewhere by the crocodile (the Sobekh of Egypt - patron and protector of Royalty - whose fat was used as the Messach or anointing oil of the pharoahs, the Messiahs or priest kings).
In this neck of the woods it was also common to replace the werewolf with the Panther who was sacred to the lunar goddess Diana and also to Bacchus. Panther was the clan name of Jesus, and much earlier, the Ubaid priests wore the skins of Panthers as their totem animal. The Panther’s feeding ritual involves it opening the jugular vein in its victims neck and drinking the blood prior to eating the carcass.
The association between werewolves and the moonlight which drove them loopy, according to fable, is repeated and reinforced by the traditional belief that witchesvampires) were sacred to Diana and worshipped her by the light of the full moon. The link between the full moon and the vampire of the Gothic Romance is also well represented in tradition.
(aka
The reason that moonlight drove werewolves round the twist and elicited devotion from witches was because the full moon was seen as the menstrual moon that signaled the impending flow and was worshipped particularly by the witches of Italy and the surrounding area.
These ladies were called Strega, that is the Italian name for a witch and rather than worshipping the full moon they were celebrating what the moon and Diana stood for - food for the soul - the blood of virgins! Give it a chance - it isn’t as gory or unsavory as it sounds.
This was the secret foundation for the High Romance and Courtly Love that initiated the exoteric Medieval Romantic Movement itself, so don’t get judgmental or picky. If you are health conscious and take supplements like HRT you might as well know that it comes in many cases either from the urine of Mares or French Nuns - yes the author did say: Nuns. It’s official. So don’t start turning your nose up at a bit of harmless but nevertheless profitable genital snogging. Its a lot more fun than taking the piss out of Catholics. Most of the time.
As Melatonin was the primary hormone extracted in the blood rites of Diana it’s your choice: would you have preferred the blood of beautiful virgins, romantically celebrating and giving joyously of their feminine power and status by moonlight then, or the urine of papists - in a pill - now? One type of melatonin is live whilst the other is stone dead and useless - guess which is which. And Melatonin is only the beginning of the story.
In addition to the Dragon Court’s research into DNA, over two years ago the author who, many years ago, was the first to pinpoint the potential chemicals indictated in the precise hormonal makeup of the Holy Grail and Grant’s Starfire phenomena (which information he subsequently passed, in part, on to Laurence Gardner), also commissioned the assay of various organic fluids in order to discover and prove the presence of a range of these vital psychotropic and restorative chemicals discharged by the human female system.
These included oxytocin, prolactin, melatonin, seratonin, adenosyne triphosphate, dopamine, telomerase and retinol. The results of these assays should be known soon. Richard Dufton had also been working independently on identifying the same chemical presences for some years and when he and the author met in 1995 they began to work closely on the Melatonin basis for the Holy Grail. Out of this joint research the author discovered the wider implications of the discovery and restructured the Kabalistic and Tantric systems with precise chemical indices for each sephiroth or chakra.
The association between Scythian Totem beasts, Romanian animal vampire types and Mithraic grades of Initiation indicates clearly that vampirism, far from being random or opportunist, was in fact part of an ancient system of elven rites manifest in Tantra, Mithraism and Druidism.
Having said that the symbol of the panther and the werewolf were apposite, as the Scythian warrior nobility were a tad bloody-minded at times and Roman reports from the early part of the first millennium state how the Pictish Danaan had been witnessed eating the flesh and drinking the blood of their defeated foes following victories in battle.
Undoubtedly this was a corruption of earlier ritual practice as we shall see later. Certainly going out and ’eating Italian’ had a unique and disturbing meaning for the Roman soldiery of the day, as the Ninth Legion in Albany discovered to their cost. Drinking the blood of friend or foe in battle was a common practice in Eire and Scotland, the former in remembrance of fallen comrades, the latter to obtain the strength of the enemy. Contrary to Royal Vampirism, the whole point of Martial Vampirism was to clog your arteries with someone else's adrenaline
Another ritual familiar to those who have read Stoker’s Dracula was the hauling of soil from the Scythian homelands in boxes. The Scythians initiated this practice with the idea that the earth was the source of sovereignty and power and that ones soul was linked to ones homeland.
This isn’t entirely daft because we are what we eat, and what we eat affects the ’soul’ (biochemically derived and mediated collection of responses and attachments called ’ME’, the ego, personality or whatever, dependant for its existence on the continuity of the mind-brain interface) through the body, both body and soul being inextricably linked as they are. What we eat comes from the land where we are born and so the soil of ones country and its inherent sovereignty and identity literally flow in the blood that courses through one’s veins.
Up until the last century, the displaced Scots who traveled to America would slip a little soil from their former Crofts into the soles of their boots in order that, wherever they went they would always be walking on the earth of their homeland.
The Scythian Overlords brought the dragon culture with them as they traversed the many regions of Europe and finally settled in the British Isles. All their kings, indeed all Scythians of the royal caste were dragons, particularly the druids and their high kings were called Pendragons or chief dragons and were picked by their druidic peers from druidic families.
Variant spellings for the name Druid include ’Draoi’ - thought to mean Dragon - which is close in spelling to the Romanian ’Dracoi’ and ’Dracoica’ which, if related to ’Drys’, associated with wood nymphs or tree spirits, suggests that the ’Drys’ or ’Dryads’ were the female druids who were symbolized by the apple tree of Lilith whilst the ’Draoi’ or ’Dracoi’ - the highest degree of the male druids - were represented by the serpent entwined in the branches of those apple trees.
The Priestess Queens and Priest Kings, as we have seen, dwelt in the holy places, the royal Raths that served as both temple and tomb. These subterranean palaces mimicked the the Bergs or mound houses of the Scythians’ ’proto’-Sumerian ancestors, who originated in Transylvania and Carpathia.
Similarly the Mithraic underground temples resembled places like Newgrange, in that they had an aperture above the doorway that allowed a shaft of sunlight into the building. This ray would hit the back wall of the temple where, in the case of Mithraic rituals, there were placed figurines, the sequential illumination of each in its turn, as the day progressed onwards, would tell an initiatory story, bathed in the dying light of the midwinter sun.
Beneath the doorways of various of these buildings have been discovered the remains of headless corpses whose skulls would have been secreted within these Sidhe Mounds. Their functions were to serve as Guardians of the Portals, spirit defenders of the power and sanctity of these shrines - the dwellings of the Dragons - the Goddess-Queens and God-Kings incarnate.
The cult of the severed head, as part of Celtic religious practice originated with the druids and therefore the Scythians. Examples of the head as the seat of the soul and the source of mystical wisdom, a bestower of gifts or cornucopia finds expression both in the legend of the head of Bran the Blessed or Bendigaid Fran, Archdruid of Britian, retold in the Mabinogion; and the Trial papers of the Templars, who owned a head which was said to speak words of transcendent wisdom. This head, along with that of Bran, have both been cited as being aspects of the Grail with whom both Bran and the Templars were connected.
The Knights Templars restructured by Baldwin of Bourcq in 1118 appended to their name "and of the Temple of Solomon" whilst the original Order of Templars, a Vere foundation which emerged in 1100 were called "Guardian Princes of the Royal Secret". However the original Temple Guard was founded 1500 years earlier in Jerusalem.
A close examination of the ’Song of Songs’ attributed to Solomon will reveal to the reader certain esoteric references to the Grail. It has been further revealed that Solomon’s bloodline had Scythian Dragon origins and therefore connections with the Cult of the Head. That a head, said to be that of the Magdalene, successor to Sheba, to turn up in the inventory attached to the Templar trial papers should therefore come as no surprise.
The Scythians believed that the head contained the immortal soul. Descartes, writing in the 1600’s, was of the same opinion and elaborated by asserting that the seat of the soul was the pineal gland. Others, writing later, have suggested that this organ is the mediator of inspiration and the translator of intuitive or cosmic information.
In Indian Tantric Yoga the Pineal is the physical seat or anchor of the Ajna Chakra which also corresponds to the Pituitary as well. In this philosophy the Pineal is symbolized as being the head of the swan, whose body comprises the various areas of the rest of the brain. As we have seen, the dove and the Raven also fulfill this symbolic function.
The Pineal Gland is specifically associated with Grail Lore and closely aspected to manifestations of the Grail in the forms of a Cup, a Stone, a Cauldron, a Well, Merelake; a fountain, (such as that found in certain kabalistic rituals) and an underground stream.
or
Within the theme of the severed head we also find the dressed head of Llewelyn, King of Gwynedd, which was severed from his body and garlanded with Ivy (sacred to Bacchus) before being dispatched to Edward I following the victory of his armies over the Welsh in the 1200’s.
Some two hundred years later, on his death in 1477, Prince Vlad Draculea’s body was taken to an Abbey he had built on an Island in the middle of a lake in Smyrna. Such a sanctuary has distinct Arthurian overtones and associations with the Isle of Avallon, upon which there was also built an abbey of the quasi-druidic Celto-Scythian Church.
This replaced the early Rath temple, grove and sanctuary of the Morganas, the ladies of the lake who were the Swan Maiden-Valkyries of the Scythian world, vampires and head hunters. In such sanctuaries headless corpses, as we have seen, were placed as portal guardians and it is in just such a condition that we discover that, according to local tradition, Draculea’s head was removed from his body and his corpse was buried beneath the stone flags beneath the doorway of the Abbey’s chapel.
A similar incident is reported to have occurred with the establishment of the Celtic Christian Shrine on the Island of Iona. Here it is St Columba who is said to have severed the head of one of his disciples and buried the blood drained corpse beneath the doorway of the chapel.
The blood of the victim was then consumed as a eucharist in thanksgiving for the monks’ safe arrival to the island. Here we can see that early Christianity was indeed tied up with the cult of the head, as was the collateral Johannite Cult of the Baptist, who himself was a sacrificial king of Dragon descent.
Draculea’s name means son of the Dragon as we have seen, and his burial replicates the Scythian burials in the Holy-Royal Sidhe or power mounds found in EireScotland. In Draculea’s case there are a number of symbols associated with him that connect him directly with the Scythian druidic tradition.
and
Furthermore these symbols, some of which we can also find, surprisingly enough, in Stoker’s novel, lead to the conclusion that Stoker knew a great deal about his subject. Much of the information in ’Dracula’ the novel, is of an esoteric and highly specialized psycho-biological nature, which does not detract from or conflict with, but rather elucidates upon, the character of the Draculea of history.
Bram Stoker was a close friend and associate of the Welsh magician and writer Arthur Machen who wrote numerous works, including a paper on the alchemical significance of the dragon and a novel on the Twllyth Teg - the fairies of Wales.
It is a common device to convey esoteric knowledge via the medium of supposed fiction and it appears that both Stoker and Machen involved themselves in such ventures. Stoker was also acquainted with Aleister Crowley and MacGregor Mathers, both of whom were leading lights in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Machen and Wilde were members of this organization which, it is said, had its roots in the ancient Rosicruciana Anglicae.
Oscar Wilde was one of only four people associated with The Golden Dawn and the later breakaway group: the Ordo Templi Orientis headed by Crowley, who himself undertook to perform the rituals leading to the accomplishment of a variant of the ancient "Mass of the Vampire".
The amazing Jack Parsons, OTO., attempted it in the 1940’s and joined Wilde in succumbing to the ruin and degradation that accompanies it. Jack died in an inexplicable explosion in the garage of his home in California.
Whilst Crowley accomplished the rite and walked away virtually unscathed, eventually dying of old age in Hastings, Wilde’s fate is known to all. Having said that ’Death in Hastings’ has none of the romantic je ne sais quoi of say, ’Death in Venice’, or even Paris. Perhaps Wilde, vilified as he was, had the better of it after all, at least in terms of style!
It has been suggested that Stoker was either a member of the OTO or the Golden Dawn and it would appear that the cohesion and integrity of the symbolism in his ’Dracula’ must therefore point to Stoker having a source of esoteric information far more informed in historical and alchemical terms than any that he might have obtained, as it has been suggested, purely from the folklore of Romanian peasants or from contemporary literary sources.
Historical accounts of Prince Draculea’s life confirm that he was born in and became Prince of Wallachia, not Transylvania. In linking Draculea with TransylvaniaStoker suggests to the reader that the origin of the vampire tradition was indeed linked to the Ubaid Homeland.
however,
Recent research has uncovered the fact that Draculea did indeed, like his Scythian Warrior ancestors, drink the blood of his impaled and decapitated victims. Decapitation is distinctly a Scythian practice and although it has been suggested that Draculea learnt the custom of impaling from his Turkish captors, this practice had been used as a punishment by the Aryans of Persia as early as 500 BC.
Although Stoker has Dracula impaled and decapitated at his castle when in fact Draculea was beheaded at the Abbey where he was buried, Stoker is rightly attempting to associate Dracula, via these rituals, with an entire vampiric cultural tradition of which his character was destined to become the definitive archetype.
This is no bad thing because the picture of Dracula and his accoutrements and behavior is not far from the actual truth of the matter. The finer details of the novel confirm that Stoker was probably being prompted by others in the writing of this work, which contains secret information that is still generally unknown outside certain circles.
It was generally thought that the only way to kill a vampire was to impale the body through the heart, in order to pin the wandering body to the earth, remove the head and cremate the remains. At that time cremation was forbidden in Christian Europe because it was believed that the bodily remains should be left intact to rise again on the Day of Judgment.
Obviously the Church thought that reconstituting the fetid and rotting remains of sinners on the Last Day would be a doddle for God, whereas he would be powerless to reconstruct the former human being from a handful of dust. Typically stunning christian logic in action here.
Cremation was practiced by Hindus, a race of people originally extracted from the Aryan Horse Lords. Considering this as a funerary practice in relation to decapitation and impaling, which was reserved as a royal punishment in Persia, perhaps the peasant memory, prompted by the church, recalled the link between royalty and these rituals and thence assumed that the only way to kill a vampire who was, after all exclusively a member of the Fairy or Royal Race, was to put the body through a series of ritual processes, some of which had been variously, components of Scythian royal sacrificial or funerary practice.
Royal decapitation we can see in the stories of Bran and Llewelyn, and although Celts buried their common dead, we might suggest, given the earliest evidence from Tartaria and other later sites, that Royal Scythians, like their Viking and Hindu cousins, cremated the sometimes decapitated remains of their sacred dead, depending on the requirements of specific ritual necessity. Perhaps to the peasantry, impaling was seen as poetic justice in dispatching one assumed to be of a race for whom impaling was a common punishment.
We have seen that impaling was thought to nail the body of the vampire to the earth and perhaps where the body wasn’t burnt, impaling was considered sufficient to keep in its grave, the body of one belonging to a race that the crows in cassocks said was so terrifying and seemingly so indestructible.
It will be remembered though that many of the stories concerning vampires were contrived by the church to encourage the flock to remain in fear for its life and thus faithful to its only means of protection and salvation, the fat scheming pervert in the black frock.
It was immaterial to them that vampirism was rarely committed against outsiders except when they were opponents in war. Nevertheless the vampire scare went on longer than the witch craze and was just as effective in keeping the poor peasant in bondage to the evil doctrines of a lying church.
As a Scythian custom, impaling would have been as common in Galatia, later Turkey, where the Cult of the Head thrived in Roman times; as it was in Persia where it was reserved for one royal in particular - Bress - who betrayed his brother Darius following the successful invasion by Alexander.
Essentially Stoker’s Dracula is as much a part of the Grail Cycle as the Druidic stories of King Arthur and of Eschenbach’s ’Parzifal’. In these stories as in most Druidic teaching fables, the Bards delighted in presenting material that could be read on several different but related levels which often have hermetic, macro and microcosmic components.
In particular where Stoker is concerned, an extract from Solomon’s ’Song of Songs’ features in a couple of obscure lines in his Dracula and these directly refer to the central alchemical theme of the Grail Cycle and put the seal on the book as being an esoteric work, rather than just simply a Gothic novel.
Historically Draculea himself attended the ’Solomon School’ in Hermannstadt, an alchemical, hermetic college that taught magic to the sons of Royalty. Two other schools like this existed in Europe, one was in Toledo in Spain and the other was said to be in Transylvania. At the ’Solomon’ only one person per class ever graduated, or ’rode the Dragon’ as it was termed.
Fanciful christian theory says that the rest of the students ended up with Satan in Hell! Reminiscent of a Druidic ’Bangor’ or university, the ’Solomon School’ finished Vlad’s education and fitted him to become a Dacian counterpart of the British Pendragon, with all the brutal wisdom of his fairy ancestors and predecessors who, as God-Kings of the specifically intermediary, guardian-class of Anunnaki deities, were inhumed in the same manner that Dracula himself was laid to rest.
Draculea the prince of Wallachia was little different in actuality from the Dracula character of Stoker’s novel. This Sacred Prince, a Hermetic scholar and initiate, a student of magic, Magus, Witch Lord and Dragon Prince, counterbalanced the bloodlust of his forebears with a refined knowledge and advanced practice of Grail procedure which, shining forth radiantly from the pages of Stoker’s little masterpiece, echoed the teachings that the historical Draculea would have received at the ’Solomon School’: teachings and encountered in the Dragon Court of which he was a member, teachings which were held in common by Archdruids, Alchemists, Tantric Yogis, Hermeticists and Qabalists alike, each discipline originating from one ancient Fairy Tradition in Sumeria and Transylvania - the heartlands of the Dragon Kings and Queens of the Sacred Danaan Peoples.
In Draculea’s day christian kings sent their sons to christian universities but still, true kingship, the Sobekh or Messiah kingship, symbolized since antiquity by the Dragon or Sacred Crocodile, required that the true kings’ sons learnt priest-kingship and in Draculea’s case, this education was still clearly of a Druidic nature, even as late as the 15th century.
In the Celtic British Isles after the Romans decamped, Princes were required to become priests or druids and as late as 660 AD we can find references concerning the education of the Merovingian Prince Dagobert at Slane University in Ireland where, up until the year 664 AD, Celtic, Druidic Christianity still held sway.
In those days and as late as 751 A.D. Kings still came exclusively from the King Tribe who supplied much of the Celtic world, as well as Eurasia, with Draconian offspring to serve as Royal Priests. This King Tribe, the Arya or Sidhe - the Scythians - included the Merovingian dynasty who, although it was an amalgam of Jesus’ Egyptian and Aryan blood, it was also closely related to the Irish and Scots Royal Danaan and the Druidic castes integral to these Houses still educated this dynastic progeny up until the Carolingian usurpation and the ascendance of the Church of Rome in 664 AD.
Gradually at first the Roman church replaced the true royal, elven blood with its own bloodless puppets and made christian education the norm for the sons of the new christian kings and nobles whom the church had created. The Solomons of Hermannstadt, Toledo and Transylvania became the hidden leftovers of an ancient, originally druidic educational system which necessarily went underground and became the subject of myth and fairytale, along with the bloodlines it once educated openly.
The Dragon Colleges produced the ’Uber’, the Overlords who, in Britain were called the Pendragons and in Transylvania the ’Dracoi’ or ’Dracoica’ - the ’vampires’. Only the highest graduates of the Druidic bangors would be thought of as true men or women of power, true Sidhe or Fairy Royalty and thus it was only the prince who ’rode the Dragon’ who could be said to fit the same criteria for inclusion in the bloodline of the vampire, the witch and the fairy families - The Dragon Kings.
The Scythians
Encyclopedia Britannica http://www.xenophon-mil.org/crimea/cities/scythia/scythenc.htm
11th edition, vol 24, pp. 526-529
Ellis Hovell Minns Scythia (Gr, xx), originally (e.g. in Herodotus iv, 1. 142), the country of the Scythae or the country over which the nomad Scythae were lords, that is, the steppe from the Carpathians to the Don. With the disappearance of the Scythae as an ethnic and political entity, the name of Scythia gives place in its original seat to that of Sarmatia, and is artificially applied by geographers, on the one hand, to the Dobrudzha, the lesser Scythia of Strabo, where it remained in official use until Byzantine times; on the other, to the unknown regions of northern Asia, the Eastern Scythia of Strabo, the "Scythia intra et extra Imaum" of Ptolemy; but throughout classical literature Scythia generally meant all regions to the north and north-east of the Black Sea, and the Scythian (Scythes) any barbarian coming from those parts.
Herodotus (I.c.), to whom with Hippocrates (De aere, %c. 24, sqq) we own our earliest knowledge (Homer, Il. Xiii, 5, speaks of "mare-milkers," and Hesiod, ap. Strabo vii. 3 (7) mentions Scythae) of the land and its inhabitants, tries to restrict this merely geographical usage and to confine the word Scyth to a certain race or at any rate to that race and its subjects, but even he seems to slip back into the older use. Hence there is much doubt as to his exact meaning.
His account of the geography falls into two irreconcilable parts; one (iv. 99 sqq), in connexion with the tale of the invasion of Darius, makes of Scythia a kind of chessboard 4000 stades square on which the combatants can make their moves quite unhindered by the great rivers: the other (16-20), founded on what he learned from Greeks of Olbia and supplemented by the tales of the 7th century traveler Aristeas of Proconnesus, is not very far removed from first-hand information and can be made more or less to tally with the lie of the land. In accordance with this we can give the relative positions of the various tribes, and an excursus on the rivers (47-57) lets us define their actual seats. In western Scythia, starting from Olbia and going northwards, we have Callippidae on the lower Hypanis (Bug), Alazones where the Tyras (Dnister) and Hypanis come near each other in their middle courses, and Aroteres ("Ploughmen") above them.
These tribes raised wheat, presumably in the river valleys, and sold it for export; in the eastern half from west to east were Georgi (perhaps the same as Aroteres) between the Ingul and the Borysthenes (Dnieper), nomad Scyths and Royal Scyths between the Borysthenes and the Tanais (don). Above all these stretched a row of non-Scythian tribes from west to east: on the Maris (Maros) in Transylvania the Agathyrsi; Neuri in Podolia and Kiev, Androphagi and Melanchlaeni in Poltava, (Ryazan) and Tambov. On the lower Don and Volga we have the Sauromatae, and on the middle course of the Volga the Budini with the great wooden town of Gelonus and its semi-Greek inhabitants.
From this region started an important trade route eastward by the Thyssagetae among the southern Urals, the Iyrcae on the Tobol and Irtysh and the Kirghiz steppe, where dwelt other Scyths, regarded as colonists of those in Europe: then by the Argippaei in the Altai and the Issedones in the Tarym basis, to the one-eyed Arimaspi on the borders of China, who stole their gold from the watchful griffins, and who marched with goat-footed men and Hyperboreans reaching to the sea. To the south of Scythia the Crimean mountains were inhabited by a non-Scythic race, the Tauri. (See also articles on these tribes.)
Ethnology : - Herodotus expressly divides the Scythians into the Agriculturists, Callipidae, Alazones, Aroteres and Georgi in the western part of the country, and the Nomads with their Royal Scyths to the east. The latter claimed dominion over all the rest. The question arises whether we have to do with the various tribes of one race in different stages of civilization, or with a mixed population called by foreigners after the ruling tribe. The latter seems by far the more probable. The affinities of this tribe have been sought in various directions, and the evidence suggests that it was itself of mixed blood. We know that in the 2nd century A. D., when the steppes were dominated by the Sauromatae (q.v.), the majority of the barbarian names in the inscriptions of Olbia, Tanais, and Panticapaeum were Iranian, and can infer that the Sauromatae spoke an Iranian language.
Pliny speaks of their descent from the Medes. Now the Sauromatae are represented as half-caste Scyths speaking a corrupt variety of Scythian. Presumably, therefore, the Scyths also spoke an Iranian dialect. But of the Scythic words preserved by Herodotus some are Iranian, others, especially the names of deities, have found no satisfactory explanation in any Indo-European language. Indeed they rather suggest a Ugrian origin. Nevertheless, the general opinion has been that the Scyths were Iranian. The present writer believes that they were a horde which came down from upper Asia, conquered an Iranian-speaking people, and in time adopted the speech of its subjects.
The settled Scythians would be the remains of this Iranian population, or the different tribes of them, may have been connected with their neighbors beyond Scythian dominion - Thracian Getae and Arimaspi, Slavonic Neuri, Finnish Androphagi and such like. The Cimmerians who preceded the Scythians used Iranian proper names, and probably represented this Iranian element in greater purity. Herodotus gives three legends of the origin of the Scyths (iv. 5-12); these, though they contradict each other, can be reconciled with the view stated above. Two of them seem to be the same story; one is very strongly Hellenized, the other, in more or less native shape, is shortly this.
The tribe is autochthonous, claiming descent from a son of the river Borysthenes Targitaos, who lived a thousand years before. Of his three sons the youngest Colaxais, is preferred by an ordeal of picking up certain objects which fell from heaven, - a plough, a yoke, an axe, and a cup, - and becomes the ancestor of the ruling clan of Paralatae; from the other sons, Lipoxais and Harpoxais, are descended minor clans, and the name of the whole people is Scolotai, not Scythae, which is used by the Greeks alone. In this story the names make sense in Iranian, the tribes are not again mentioned except when this passage is copied, the objects are hardly such as would be held sacred by nomads, the form of ordeal is to be paralleled in Iranian legends, and the people say themselves that they are not really Scythae. Surely this is the national legend of the agricultural Scythians about Olbia, and the name Scoloti, by which careful modern writers designate the Royal Scyths, is the true designation of the subject race. The royal line of these is quite distinct from the true Royal Scyths, who, like most nomad conquerors, allowed their subjects to preserve their own organizations.
The third account fails chiefly in being too plausible, but there seems no reason to reject it as an artificial combination of unconnected facts. According to it the Scyths dwell in Asia, and were forced by the Massagetae over the Araxer(Volga?) Into the land of the Cimmerians. Aristeas says that the first impulse came from the Arimaspi, who displaced the Pasodones, who in turn fell upon the Scyths. This comes to much the same thing, as the Massagetae seem to have contained an element which had come in from the land of the Pasedones. The Scyths having fallen upon them from the north-east, the Cimmerians appear to have given way in two directions, towards the south-west, where the tombs of their kings were shown on the Tyras (Dniester) and one body joined with the Treres of Thrace in invading Asia Minor by the Hellespont; and towards the south-east where another body threatened the Assyrians, who called them Gimirrai (Hebrew Gomer; Gen. Xi.).
They were followed by the Scyths (Ashguzai, Heb. Ashkenax) whom the Assyrians welcomed as allies and used against the Cimmerians, against the Medes and even against Egypt. Hence the references to the Scyths in the Hebrew prophet (Jer. Iv.3, vi. 7). This is all put in the latter half of the 7th century B. C. Herodotus says that the Scyths ruled Media for twenty-eight years, and were then massacred or expelled. The Assyrian evidence is in the main a confirmation of Herodotus, though most writers think that the Scythians who troubled Asia were Sacae from the east of the Caspian (H. Winckler, Altorientalische Forschungen, p. 484 sqq.) If the Scyths came out of upper Asia, the Scythian colonists beyond the Iyrcae might be a division which had remained nearer the homeland, but in dealing with nomads were can suppose such a return as that of the Calmucks (Kalmuks) in the 18th century.
The physical features of the Scyths are not described by Herodotus, but Hippocrates (l.c.) Draws a picture of them wich makes them very similar to the Mongols as they appeared to the Franciscan missionaries in the 13th century. He says they are quite unlike any other race of men, and very like each other. The main point seems to be a tendency to slackness, fatness and excess of humours. The men are said to be in appearance very like eunuchs, and both sexes have a tendency to sexual indifference amounting in the men to impotence. When a man finds himself in this condition he assumes the women's dress and habits.
Herodotus mentions the existence of this class, called Enarees, and says that they suffer from a sacred disease owing to the wrath of the goddess of Ascalon whose shrine they had plundered. Reinegg describes a similar state of things in the Nogai in the 18th century. The whole account suggests a Tatar clan in the last stage of degeneracy. Hippocrates says that this only applies to the ruling class, not to the slaves, but gives as the reason the want of exercise among the former. The skulls dug up in Scythic graves throw no light on the question, some bring round and some long. The representations of nomads on objects of Greek art show people with full beards and shaggy hair, such as cannot be reconciled with Hippocrates; but the only reliefs which seem to be accurate belong to a late date when the ruling clan was Sarmatian rather than Scythic.
Customs. - Herodotus gives a good survey of the customs of the Scyths: it seems mostly to apply to the ruling race. Again the closest analogy is the state of the Mongols in the 13th century, but too much weight must not be put on this, as the natural conditions of steppe- ranging nomads dictated the greater part of them. Still the correspondence of religion and of funeral rites is very close. The Scyths lived upon the produce of their herds of cattle and horses, their main food being the flesh of the latter, either cooked in a cauldron or made into a kind of haggis, and the milk of mares from which they made cheese and kumiss (a fermented drink resembling buttermilk). This necessitated their constantly moving in search of fresh pasture, spending the spring and autumn upon the open steppe, the winter and summer by the rivers for the sake of moisture and shelter.
The men journeyed on horseback, the women in wagons with felt tilts. These were drawn by their cattle, and were the homes of each family. Hence the Greek names, Abii, Hippemolgi, Hamaxobii. The women were kept in subjection, and were far from enjoying the liberty granted them among the Sauromatae, among whom they rode on horseback and engaged in war. Polygamy was practices, the son inheriting his father's wives. Both men and women avoided washing, but there was something of the nature of a vapour bath, with which Herodotus has confused a custom of using the smoke of hemp as a narcotic. The women daubed themselves with a kind of cosmetic paste. The dress of the men is well shown upon the Kul Oba and Chertomlyk vases, and upon other Greek works of art made for Scythic use. It must not be confused with the fanciful barbarian costumes that are so common upon the Attic posts. They wore coats confined by belts, trousers tucked into soft boots, and hoods or tall pointed caps.
The women had flowing robes, tall pointed caps, and veils descending over most of the figure. Both sexes wore many stamped gold plates sewn upon their clothes in lines or seams. Their horses had severe bits, and were adorned with nose pieces, cheek pieces and saddle cloths. True stirrups were unknown. In war the nation was divided into three sub-kingdoms, and these into companies, each with its commander. The companies had yearly feasts, at which the commander honoured warriors who had slain one or more of the enemy. As evidence of such prowess, and as a token of his right to a share of any spoil.
The warrior was accustomed to scalp his enemy and adorn his bridle with the trophy. I n the case of a special enemy or an adversary overcome in a private dispute before the king, he would make a cup of the skull, mounting it in bull's hide or in gold. The tactics in war were the traditional nomad tactics of harassing the enemy on the march, constantly retreating before him and avoiding a general engagement. Their weapons consisted of bow and arrows, short swords, spears and axes. The government was a despotism, but a king who aroused the extreme dissatisfaction of his subjects was liable to be murdered.
Religion - The religion of the Scyths was nature worship. Herodotus (iv. 59) gives a list of their gods, with the Greek deities corresponding, but we cannot tell what aspect of the Greek deity is in question. He says they chiefly reverence Tabiti (Hestia), next Papaeus and his wife Apia (Zeus and Ge), then Oitosyros (Apollo) and Argimpasa (Aphrodite Urania). These are common to all the Scythians, but Thamimasadas (Poseidon) is peculiar to the Royal Scyths. They set up no images or altars or temples save to Ares only. To Ares they make a heap of faggots three stades square, with three sides steep and one inclined, and bring to it a hundred and fifty fresh loads of faggots every years. Upon the top is set up a sword which is the image of Ares; to this they sacrifice captives, pouring their blood over it. The account of the cult of Ares, for whom no Scythian name is given, appears to be an addition, and the mention of such masses of faggots suggests the wooded district of the agricultural Scythians, not the treeless steppe of the Royal tribe.
The Scythian pantheon is not distinctive, and can be paralleled among the Tartars and among the Iranians. The Scyths had a method of divination with sticks, and the Enarees, who claimed to be soothsayers by grant of the goddess who had afflicted them, used another method by splitting bast fibers. They intervened in case of the king's falling sick, when it was assumed that some man had sworn by the king's hearth and broken his oath. If a man accused of this denies it, other diviners are called, and if these concur, he is beheaded and his sons slain and his goods given to the diviners. But if a majority of diviners decide against the accusers, the latter are set upon a wagon-load of brushwood and burned to death. The burial rites are the most fully described. Private persons were merely carried about among their friends, who held wakes in their honour, and then buried forty days after death. But the funerals of the kings were much more elaborate. They exhibit the extreme development of the principle of surrounding the dead man with everything in which he found pleasure during his life.
The tombs of the kings were in the land of the Gerrhus near the great bend of the Dnieper where the chief tumuli have been excavated. The body was embalmed and filled with aromatic herbs, and then brought to this region, passing through the lands of various tribes. The Royal Scyths who followed the body were accustomed to cut about their faces and arms, and each tribe that the cortege met upon its way had to join it and conform ti this expression of grief. Arrived at the place of burial, the body was set in a square pit with spears marking out its sides and a roof of matting. Then one of the king's concubines and his cup-bearer, cook, groom, messenger and horses were strangled and laid by him, and roundabout offerings of all his goods and cups of gold 0 no silver or bronze. After this they raised a great mound, striving to make it as high as possible. A year later they strangled fifty youths of the dead man's servants (all Scyths born) and fifty of the best horses, stuffed them and mounted them in a circle about the tomb.
Tombs. - The description is generally born out by the evidence of the tombs opened in the Scythic area. None agrees in every point, but almost every detail finds a close parallel in some tomb or other. The chief divergence is in the presence of silver and copper objects, but the great quantity of gold is the most striking fact, and to say that there was nothing but gold seems merely an exaggeration. Tombs to which the name Scythic is generally applied form a well- defined class.
They are preceded over the whole area by a much simpler form of burial marked by the practice of staining the bones with red ochre, and the presence of one or two rude pots and nothing more; yet that some were tombs of great chiefs is shown by the great size of the barrows heaped over them. They have been referred to the Cimmerians, but for this there is no clear evidence. The Scythic tombs can be roughly dated by the objects of Greek art that they contain. They seem to begin about the 6th century B. C., and to continue til the 2nd century A. D.' that is, they cover the period of the Scythic domination according to the account accepted above, and that of the Sarmatian, and so suggest that, as far as the archaeological evidence goes, there was little more than a change of name and perhaps of substitution of one ruling clan for another - not a real change of population.
The finest of the class were opened about the bend of the Dnieper, where we should put land Gerrhus. Others are found to the south-west of the central area, and in the governments of Kiev and Poltava we have many tombs with Scythic characteristics, but a difference (e.g. the fewness of the horses) which makes us think of the settled tribes under Scythic domination. Others occur in the flat northern half of the Crimea, and even close to Kerch, where the famous Kul Oba seems to have held a Scythic chieftain who had adopted a veneer of Greek tastes, but remained a barbarian at heart. East of the Maeotis, especially along the river Kuban, are many groups of barrows showing the same culture as those of Gerrhus but in a purer form. Farther to the north and east the series seems to expend into Siberia, but in this region excavations have been few.
Unfortunately very few of these barrows have come down to us un-plundered, and we cannot find one complete example and take it as a type. Soon after they were heaped up, before the beams supporting the central chamber had rotted, thieves made a practice of driving a mine into the mound straight to where the valuables were deposited, and it is only by the collapse of this mine and the crushing of the robber after he had thrown everything into confusion that the treasures of the Chertomlyk barrow, on the whole the most typical, were preserved to us. This was 60 ft. Height and 1100 ft. Round' about it was a stone plinth, and it was approached by a kind of stone alley. A central shaft descended 35 ft. 6 in. Below the surface of the earth, and from each corner of it at the bottom opened out side chambers.
The north-west chamber communicated with a large irregular chamber into which the plunderer's mine opened. In the central pit all was in confusion, but here the king seems to have lain on a bier. His belongings, found piled up near the mine. Seem to have included a combined bow-case and quiver and a sword sheath, each covered with plates of gold of Greek work, there swords with gold hafts, a hone with gold mounting, a whip, many other gold plates and a heap of arrow-heads. In the north-west chamber was a woman's skeleton, and she had here jewels, mostly of Greek work. She was attended by a man, and three other men were buried in the other chambers. They were supplied with simpler weapons and adornments, but even so their clothes had hundreds of stamped gold plates and strips of various shapes sewn on to them.
By every skeleton were drinking vessels. Store of wine was contained in six amphorae, and in two bronze cauldrons were mutton-bones. The most wonderful object of all was a great two-handled vase standing 3 ft. High and made to hold kumiss. The greater part of its body is covered by a pattern of acanthus leaves, but on the shoulder is a frieze showing nomads breaking in wold mares, our chief authority for Scythian costume. To the west of the main shaft were three square pits with horses and their harness, and by them two pits with men's skeletons. In the heap itself was found an immense quantity of pieces of harness and what may be remains of a funeral car. The Greek work would seem to date the burial as of the 3rd century B. C.
At Alexandropol in the same district was an even more elaborate tomb. But its contents were in even greater confusion. Another tomb in this region, Melgunov's barrow, found as long ago as 1760, contained a dagger-sheath and pollen of Assyrian work and Greek things of the 6th century. In the Kul Oba tomb mentioned above the chamber was of stone and the contents, with one or two exceptions, of purely Greek workmanship, but the ideas underlying are the same - the king has his wife, his servant and his horse, his amphorae with wine, his cauldron with mutton-bones, his drinking vessels and his weapons, the latter being almost the only objects of barbarian style. One of the cups has a frieze with reliefs of natives supplementing that on the Chertomlyk vase.
East of the Maeotis on the Kuban we have many barrows; the most interesting are the groups called the Seven Brothers, and those of Karagodeuashkh, Kostromskaya, Ul and Kelermes, the latter remarkable for objects of Assyrian style, the others for the enormous slaughter of horses; on the Ul were four hundred in one grave.
Art .- Certain of the objects which occur in these Scythic graves are of special forms typical for the Scythic area. Most interesting of these is the dagger or sword, always very short, save in the latest graves, and distinguished by a heart-shaped guard marking the juncture of hilt and blade; its sheath is also characteristic, having a triangular projection on one side and usually a separate shape: these peculiar forms were necessitated by a special way of hanging the dagger from two straps that might not interfere with a rider's movements. Just the same form of short sword was used in Persia and is shown on the sculptures at Persepolis. Another special type is the bow-case, made to take a short curved bow and to accommodate arrows as well. Further, there is the peculiar cauldron on one conical foot, round which the fire was built, the cylindrical hone pierced for suspension, and the cup with a rounded bottom.
Assyrian and afterwards Greek craftsmen working for Scythic employers were compelled to decorate these outlandish forms, which they did according to their own fashion: but there was also a native style with conventionalized beast decoration, which was almost always employed for the adornment of bits and horses' gear, and very often for weapons. This style and the types of dagger, cauldron, bit and two-looped socketed axehead run right across from Hungary to the upper Yenisei, where a special Bronze Age culture seems to have developed them. But even here it seems impossible to deny some influence coming from the Aegean area, and Scythic beasts are very like certain products of Mycenaean and early Ionic art. Again, the Scythic style is interesting as being one element in the art of the barbarians who conquered the Roman Empire and the zoomorphic decoration of the early middle ages.
The dominance from the Yenisei to the Carpathians of a distinct style of art which, whatever its original elements may have been, seems to have taken shape as far east as the Yenisei basin is an additional argument in favour of a certain movement of population from the far north-east towards the south Russian steppes. It would correspond in time with the movement of the Scyths of which Herodotus speaks, and it may be inferred that immigrants coming from those regions were rather allied to the Tatar family of nations than to the Iranian. Similar movements from the same regions appear also to have penetrated Iran itself; hence the resemblance between the dress and daggers of certain classes of warriors on the sculptures of Persepolis and those shown on the Luk Oba vase. An Iranian origin would not account for the presence of analogous types on the Yenisei.
History . - To sum up the history of Scythia, the oldest inhabitants of whom we hear in Scythia were the Cimmerii; the nature of the country makes it probable that some of them were nomads, while others no doubt tilled some land in the river valleys and in the Crimea, where they left their name to ferries, earthworks and the Cimmerian Bosporus. They were probably of Iranian race; among the Persians Herodotus describes a similar mixture of nomadic and settled tribes.
In the 7th century B. C. these Cimmerians were attacked and partly driven out by a horde of newcomers from upper Asia called Scythae; these imposed their name and their yoke upon all that were left in the Euxine steppes, but probably their coming did not really change the basis of the population, which remained Iranian. The newcomers adopted the language of the conquered, but brought with them new customs and a new artistic taste probably largely borrowed from the metal-working tribes of Siberia. About the same time similar peoples harassed the northern frontier of Iran, where they were called Saka (Sacae), and in later times Saka and Scyths, whether they were originally the same or not, were regarded as synonymous. It is difficult always to judge whether given information applies to the Sacae or the Scyths.
About 512 B. C. Darius, having conquered Thrace, made an invasion of Scythia, which, according to the account of Herodotus, he crossed as far as the Oarus, a river identified with the Volga, burned the town of Gelonus and returned in sixty days. In this march he was much harassed by the nomads, with whom he could not come to close quarters, but no mention is made of his having any difficulty with the rivers (he gets his water from wells), and no reason for his proceedings is advanced except a desire to avenge legendary attacks of Scyths upon Asia.
After losing many men the Great King comes back to the place where he crossed the Danube, finds the Ionians still guarding the bridge in spite of the attempts of the Scyths to make them desert, and safely re-enters his own dominions. Ctesias says that the whole campaign only took fifteen days and that Darius did not get beyond the Tyras (Dniester). This is also the view of the reasonable Strabo; but it does not account for the genesis of the other story. It seems best to believe that Darius made an incursion in order to secure the frontier of the Danube, suffered serious reverses and retired with loss, and that this offered too good a chance to be missed for a moral tale about the discomfiture of the Great King by a few poor savages. The Greeks had been trading with the Scyths ever since their coming, and at Lobia there were other tales of their history.
We can make a list of the Scythian kings - Spargapeithes, Lycus, Gnurus, Saulius (whose brother, the famous Anacharsis (q.v.), traveled overall the world in search of wisdom, was reckoned a sage among the Greeks and was slain among his own people because they did not like his foreign ways). And Idanthyrsus, the lead king at the time of Darius, probably the father of Ariapeithes. This latter had three wives, a Greek woman from Istrus, Opoea a Scythian, and a Thracian daughter to the great chief Teres. Scyles, his son by the Greek mother, affected Greek ways, had a house in Olbia, and even took part in Bacchic rites. When this came to the knowledge of his subjects he was murdered, and Octamasadas, his son by the third wife, reigned in his stead. Herodotus adduces this to show how much the Scyths hated foreign customs, but with the things found in the graves it rather proves how strong was the attraction exercised upon the nomads by the higher culture of their neighbors.
Octamasadas did shortly before the time of Herodotus. We cannot place Ariantas, who made a kind of census of the nation by exacting an arrow-head from each warrior and cast a great cauldron out of the bronze, nor Taxacis and Scopasis, the under-kings in the time of Idanthyrsus. After the retreat of Darius the Scythians made a raid as far as Abydos, and even sent envoys to King Cleomenes III of Sparta to arrange that they should attack the Persian Empire from the Phasis while the Spartans should march up from Ephesus. The chief result of the embassy was that Cleomenes took to the Scythian habit of drinking his wine neat and went mad therefrom (Herodotus vi. 84). Hence forward the Scyths appear as a declining power: by the middle of the 4th century their eastern neighbors the Sarmatae have crossed the Tanais (Don) and the pressure of the Scyths is felt on the Danube.
Here Philip II, of Macedon defeated and slew their king Ateas in 339 B. C., and from this time on the representatives of the old Scythic power are petty chieftains in the western part of the country about Olbia, where they could still be dangerous, and about Tomi. Towards the second half of the 2nd century B. C. this kingdom seems to have become the nucleus of a great state under Scilurus, whose name appears on coins of Lobia, and who at the same time threatened Chersonese in the Crimea. Here, however, he was opposed by the might of Mithradates VI of Pontus and his power was broken.
Henceforward the name "Scythian" is purely geographical. Meanwhile Scythia had become the land of the Sarmatae (q.v.). These, as has been seen, spoke a cognate dialect, and the tombs which belong to their period show exactly the same culture with Greek and Siberian elements. It is probable that the Iranian element was stronger among the Sarmatae, whose power extended as the ruling clan of the Scyths became extinct; but it is quite likely that they in their turn were officered by some new horde from upper Asia. Like the Scyths they were pressed towards the west by yet newer swarms, and with the coming of the Huns Scythia enters upon a new cycle, though still keeping its owl name in the Byzantine historians.
AUTHORITIES - (1) Ancient: Herodotus iv, 1 - 142 (editions of Blakesley, Rawlinson, Macan); Hippocrates, De Aere, &c., c. 24 sqq.; for geography alone : Strabo vii. Cc.3,4; xi.cc.1,2,6; Pliny iv. 75 sqq.; Ptolemy, Sarmatia; Diodorus Sic. Ii, 2, 45-47; and Justin in. cc.1, 4, do not seem to add anything of which we can be certain. (2) Modern: E. H. Minns, Scythians and Greeks (Cambridge, 1909), gives a summary of various opinions and a survey of the subject from all points of view. See also for ethnological questions, Mongolian hypothesis: K. Neumann, Die Hellene im Skythenlande (Berlin, 1855). Iranian hypothesis: K. Mullenhoff, "Uber Herkunft und Sprache der Pontischen Skythen und Sarmaten," in Monatsber. D. Berl. Ak. (1866), reprinted in Deutsche Altertumskunde, vol. Iii. For the archaeology; Kondakoff, Tolstoi and Reinach, Antiquitesde la Russie Meridionale (Paris, 1892); more fully in Antiquites de la Russie d'Herodote and Compte rendu de la commission archeologique de St-Petersbourg, passim.
11th edition, vol 24, pp. 526-529
Ellis Hovell Minns Scythia (Gr, xx), originally (e.g. in Herodotus iv, 1. 142), the country of the Scythae or the country over which the nomad Scythae were lords, that is, the steppe from the Carpathians to the Don. With the disappearance of the Scythae as an ethnic and political entity, the name of Scythia gives place in its original seat to that of Sarmatia, and is artificially applied by geographers, on the one hand, to the Dobrudzha, the lesser Scythia of Strabo, where it remained in official use until Byzantine times; on the other, to the unknown regions of northern Asia, the Eastern Scythia of Strabo, the "Scythia intra et extra Imaum" of Ptolemy; but throughout classical literature Scythia generally meant all regions to the north and north-east of the Black Sea, and the Scythian (Scythes) any barbarian coming from those parts.
Herodotus (I.c.), to whom with Hippocrates (De aere, %c. 24, sqq) we own our earliest knowledge (Homer, Il. Xiii, 5, speaks of "mare-milkers," and Hesiod, ap. Strabo vii. 3 (7) mentions Scythae) of the land and its inhabitants, tries to restrict this merely geographical usage and to confine the word Scyth to a certain race or at any rate to that race and its subjects, but even he seems to slip back into the older use. Hence there is much doubt as to his exact meaning.
His account of the geography falls into two irreconcilable parts; one (iv. 99 sqq), in connexion with the tale of the invasion of Darius, makes of Scythia a kind of chessboard 4000 stades square on which the combatants can make their moves quite unhindered by the great rivers: the other (16-20), founded on what he learned from Greeks of Olbia and supplemented by the tales of the 7th century traveler Aristeas of Proconnesus, is not very far removed from first-hand information and can be made more or less to tally with the lie of the land. In accordance with this we can give the relative positions of the various tribes, and an excursus on the rivers (47-57) lets us define their actual seats. In western Scythia, starting from Olbia and going northwards, we have Callippidae on the lower Hypanis (Bug), Alazones where the Tyras (Dnister) and Hypanis come near each other in their middle courses, and Aroteres ("Ploughmen") above them.
These tribes raised wheat, presumably in the river valleys, and sold it for export; in the eastern half from west to east were Georgi (perhaps the same as Aroteres) between the Ingul and the Borysthenes (Dnieper), nomad Scyths and Royal Scyths between the Borysthenes and the Tanais (don). Above all these stretched a row of non-Scythian tribes from west to east: on the Maris (Maros) in Transylvania the Agathyrsi; Neuri in Podolia and Kiev, Androphagi and Melanchlaeni in Poltava, (Ryazan) and Tambov. On the lower Don and Volga we have the Sauromatae, and on the middle course of the Volga the Budini with the great wooden town of Gelonus and its semi-Greek inhabitants.
From this region started an important trade route eastward by the Thyssagetae among the southern Urals, the Iyrcae on the Tobol and Irtysh and the Kirghiz steppe, where dwelt other Scyths, regarded as colonists of those in Europe: then by the Argippaei in the Altai and the Issedones in the Tarym basis, to the one-eyed Arimaspi on the borders of China, who stole their gold from the watchful griffins, and who marched with goat-footed men and Hyperboreans reaching to the sea. To the south of Scythia the Crimean mountains were inhabited by a non-Scythic race, the Tauri. (See also articles on these tribes.)
Ethnology : - Herodotus expressly divides the Scythians into the Agriculturists, Callipidae, Alazones, Aroteres and Georgi in the western part of the country, and the Nomads with their Royal Scyths to the east. The latter claimed dominion over all the rest. The question arises whether we have to do with the various tribes of one race in different stages of civilization, or with a mixed population called by foreigners after the ruling tribe. The latter seems by far the more probable. The affinities of this tribe have been sought in various directions, and the evidence suggests that it was itself of mixed blood. We know that in the 2nd century A. D., when the steppes were dominated by the Sauromatae (q.v.), the majority of the barbarian names in the inscriptions of Olbia, Tanais, and Panticapaeum were Iranian, and can infer that the Sauromatae spoke an Iranian language.
Pliny speaks of their descent from the Medes. Now the Sauromatae are represented as half-caste Scyths speaking a corrupt variety of Scythian. Presumably, therefore, the Scyths also spoke an Iranian dialect. But of the Scythic words preserved by Herodotus some are Iranian, others, especially the names of deities, have found no satisfactory explanation in any Indo-European language. Indeed they rather suggest a Ugrian origin. Nevertheless, the general opinion has been that the Scyths were Iranian. The present writer believes that they were a horde which came down from upper Asia, conquered an Iranian-speaking people, and in time adopted the speech of its subjects.
The settled Scythians would be the remains of this Iranian population, or the different tribes of them, may have been connected with their neighbors beyond Scythian dominion - Thracian Getae and Arimaspi, Slavonic Neuri, Finnish Androphagi and such like. The Cimmerians who preceded the Scythians used Iranian proper names, and probably represented this Iranian element in greater purity. Herodotus gives three legends of the origin of the Scyths (iv. 5-12); these, though they contradict each other, can be reconciled with the view stated above. Two of them seem to be the same story; one is very strongly Hellenized, the other, in more or less native shape, is shortly this.
The tribe is autochthonous, claiming descent from a son of the river Borysthenes Targitaos, who lived a thousand years before. Of his three sons the youngest Colaxais, is preferred by an ordeal of picking up certain objects which fell from heaven, - a plough, a yoke, an axe, and a cup, - and becomes the ancestor of the ruling clan of Paralatae; from the other sons, Lipoxais and Harpoxais, are descended minor clans, and the name of the whole people is Scolotai, not Scythae, which is used by the Greeks alone. In this story the names make sense in Iranian, the tribes are not again mentioned except when this passage is copied, the objects are hardly such as would be held sacred by nomads, the form of ordeal is to be paralleled in Iranian legends, and the people say themselves that they are not really Scythae. Surely this is the national legend of the agricultural Scythians about Olbia, and the name Scoloti, by which careful modern writers designate the Royal Scyths, is the true designation of the subject race. The royal line of these is quite distinct from the true Royal Scyths, who, like most nomad conquerors, allowed their subjects to preserve their own organizations.
The third account fails chiefly in being too plausible, but there seems no reason to reject it as an artificial combination of unconnected facts. According to it the Scyths dwell in Asia, and were forced by the Massagetae over the Araxer(Volga?) Into the land of the Cimmerians. Aristeas says that the first impulse came from the Arimaspi, who displaced the Pasodones, who in turn fell upon the Scyths. This comes to much the same thing, as the Massagetae seem to have contained an element which had come in from the land of the Pasedones. The Scyths having fallen upon them from the north-east, the Cimmerians appear to have given way in two directions, towards the south-west, where the tombs of their kings were shown on the Tyras (Dniester) and one body joined with the Treres of Thrace in invading Asia Minor by the Hellespont; and towards the south-east where another body threatened the Assyrians, who called them Gimirrai (Hebrew Gomer; Gen. Xi.).
They were followed by the Scyths (Ashguzai, Heb. Ashkenax) whom the Assyrians welcomed as allies and used against the Cimmerians, against the Medes and even against Egypt. Hence the references to the Scyths in the Hebrew prophet (Jer. Iv.3, vi. 7). This is all put in the latter half of the 7th century B. C. Herodotus says that the Scyths ruled Media for twenty-eight years, and were then massacred or expelled. The Assyrian evidence is in the main a confirmation of Herodotus, though most writers think that the Scythians who troubled Asia were Sacae from the east of the Caspian (H. Winckler, Altorientalische Forschungen, p. 484 sqq.) If the Scyths came out of upper Asia, the Scythian colonists beyond the Iyrcae might be a division which had remained nearer the homeland, but in dealing with nomads were can suppose such a return as that of the Calmucks (Kalmuks) in the 18th century.
The physical features of the Scyths are not described by Herodotus, but Hippocrates (l.c.) Draws a picture of them wich makes them very similar to the Mongols as they appeared to the Franciscan missionaries in the 13th century. He says they are quite unlike any other race of men, and very like each other. The main point seems to be a tendency to slackness, fatness and excess of humours. The men are said to be in appearance very like eunuchs, and both sexes have a tendency to sexual indifference amounting in the men to impotence. When a man finds himself in this condition he assumes the women's dress and habits.
Herodotus mentions the existence of this class, called Enarees, and says that they suffer from a sacred disease owing to the wrath of the goddess of Ascalon whose shrine they had plundered. Reinegg describes a similar state of things in the Nogai in the 18th century. The whole account suggests a Tatar clan in the last stage of degeneracy. Hippocrates says that this only applies to the ruling class, not to the slaves, but gives as the reason the want of exercise among the former. The skulls dug up in Scythic graves throw no light on the question, some bring round and some long. The representations of nomads on objects of Greek art show people with full beards and shaggy hair, such as cannot be reconciled with Hippocrates; but the only reliefs which seem to be accurate belong to a late date when the ruling clan was Sarmatian rather than Scythic.
Customs. - Herodotus gives a good survey of the customs of the Scyths: it seems mostly to apply to the ruling race. Again the closest analogy is the state of the Mongols in the 13th century, but too much weight must not be put on this, as the natural conditions of steppe- ranging nomads dictated the greater part of them. Still the correspondence of religion and of funeral rites is very close. The Scyths lived upon the produce of their herds of cattle and horses, their main food being the flesh of the latter, either cooked in a cauldron or made into a kind of haggis, and the milk of mares from which they made cheese and kumiss (a fermented drink resembling buttermilk). This necessitated their constantly moving in search of fresh pasture, spending the spring and autumn upon the open steppe, the winter and summer by the rivers for the sake of moisture and shelter.
The men journeyed on horseback, the women in wagons with felt tilts. These were drawn by their cattle, and were the homes of each family. Hence the Greek names, Abii, Hippemolgi, Hamaxobii. The women were kept in subjection, and were far from enjoying the liberty granted them among the Sauromatae, among whom they rode on horseback and engaged in war. Polygamy was practices, the son inheriting his father's wives. Both men and women avoided washing, but there was something of the nature of a vapour bath, with which Herodotus has confused a custom of using the smoke of hemp as a narcotic. The women daubed themselves with a kind of cosmetic paste. The dress of the men is well shown upon the Kul Oba and Chertomlyk vases, and upon other Greek works of art made for Scythic use. It must not be confused with the fanciful barbarian costumes that are so common upon the Attic posts. They wore coats confined by belts, trousers tucked into soft boots, and hoods or tall pointed caps.
The women had flowing robes, tall pointed caps, and veils descending over most of the figure. Both sexes wore many stamped gold plates sewn upon their clothes in lines or seams. Their horses had severe bits, and were adorned with nose pieces, cheek pieces and saddle cloths. True stirrups were unknown. In war the nation was divided into three sub-kingdoms, and these into companies, each with its commander. The companies had yearly feasts, at which the commander honoured warriors who had slain one or more of the enemy. As evidence of such prowess, and as a token of his right to a share of any spoil.
The warrior was accustomed to scalp his enemy and adorn his bridle with the trophy. I n the case of a special enemy or an adversary overcome in a private dispute before the king, he would make a cup of the skull, mounting it in bull's hide or in gold. The tactics in war were the traditional nomad tactics of harassing the enemy on the march, constantly retreating before him and avoiding a general engagement. Their weapons consisted of bow and arrows, short swords, spears and axes. The government was a despotism, but a king who aroused the extreme dissatisfaction of his subjects was liable to be murdered.
Religion - The religion of the Scyths was nature worship. Herodotus (iv. 59) gives a list of their gods, with the Greek deities corresponding, but we cannot tell what aspect of the Greek deity is in question. He says they chiefly reverence Tabiti (Hestia), next Papaeus and his wife Apia (Zeus and Ge), then Oitosyros (Apollo) and Argimpasa (Aphrodite Urania). These are common to all the Scythians, but Thamimasadas (Poseidon) is peculiar to the Royal Scyths. They set up no images or altars or temples save to Ares only. To Ares they make a heap of faggots three stades square, with three sides steep and one inclined, and bring to it a hundred and fifty fresh loads of faggots every years. Upon the top is set up a sword which is the image of Ares; to this they sacrifice captives, pouring their blood over it. The account of the cult of Ares, for whom no Scythian name is given, appears to be an addition, and the mention of such masses of faggots suggests the wooded district of the agricultural Scythians, not the treeless steppe of the Royal tribe.
The Scythian pantheon is not distinctive, and can be paralleled among the Tartars and among the Iranians. The Scyths had a method of divination with sticks, and the Enarees, who claimed to be soothsayers by grant of the goddess who had afflicted them, used another method by splitting bast fibers. They intervened in case of the king's falling sick, when it was assumed that some man had sworn by the king's hearth and broken his oath. If a man accused of this denies it, other diviners are called, and if these concur, he is beheaded and his sons slain and his goods given to the diviners. But if a majority of diviners decide against the accusers, the latter are set upon a wagon-load of brushwood and burned to death. The burial rites are the most fully described. Private persons were merely carried about among their friends, who held wakes in their honour, and then buried forty days after death. But the funerals of the kings were much more elaborate. They exhibit the extreme development of the principle of surrounding the dead man with everything in which he found pleasure during his life.
The tombs of the kings were in the land of the Gerrhus near the great bend of the Dnieper where the chief tumuli have been excavated. The body was embalmed and filled with aromatic herbs, and then brought to this region, passing through the lands of various tribes. The Royal Scyths who followed the body were accustomed to cut about their faces and arms, and each tribe that the cortege met upon its way had to join it and conform ti this expression of grief. Arrived at the place of burial, the body was set in a square pit with spears marking out its sides and a roof of matting. Then one of the king's concubines and his cup-bearer, cook, groom, messenger and horses were strangled and laid by him, and roundabout offerings of all his goods and cups of gold 0 no silver or bronze. After this they raised a great mound, striving to make it as high as possible. A year later they strangled fifty youths of the dead man's servants (all Scyths born) and fifty of the best horses, stuffed them and mounted them in a circle about the tomb.
Tombs. - The description is generally born out by the evidence of the tombs opened in the Scythic area. None agrees in every point, but almost every detail finds a close parallel in some tomb or other. The chief divergence is in the presence of silver and copper objects, but the great quantity of gold is the most striking fact, and to say that there was nothing but gold seems merely an exaggeration. Tombs to which the name Scythic is generally applied form a well- defined class.
They are preceded over the whole area by a much simpler form of burial marked by the practice of staining the bones with red ochre, and the presence of one or two rude pots and nothing more; yet that some were tombs of great chiefs is shown by the great size of the barrows heaped over them. They have been referred to the Cimmerians, but for this there is no clear evidence. The Scythic tombs can be roughly dated by the objects of Greek art that they contain. They seem to begin about the 6th century B. C., and to continue til the 2nd century A. D.' that is, they cover the period of the Scythic domination according to the account accepted above, and that of the Sarmatian, and so suggest that, as far as the archaeological evidence goes, there was little more than a change of name and perhaps of substitution of one ruling clan for another - not a real change of population.
The finest of the class were opened about the bend of the Dnieper, where we should put land Gerrhus. Others are found to the south-west of the central area, and in the governments of Kiev and Poltava we have many tombs with Scythic characteristics, but a difference (e.g. the fewness of the horses) which makes us think of the settled tribes under Scythic domination. Others occur in the flat northern half of the Crimea, and even close to Kerch, where the famous Kul Oba seems to have held a Scythic chieftain who had adopted a veneer of Greek tastes, but remained a barbarian at heart. East of the Maeotis, especially along the river Kuban, are many groups of barrows showing the same culture as those of Gerrhus but in a purer form. Farther to the north and east the series seems to expend into Siberia, but in this region excavations have been few.
Unfortunately very few of these barrows have come down to us un-plundered, and we cannot find one complete example and take it as a type. Soon after they were heaped up, before the beams supporting the central chamber had rotted, thieves made a practice of driving a mine into the mound straight to where the valuables were deposited, and it is only by the collapse of this mine and the crushing of the robber after he had thrown everything into confusion that the treasures of the Chertomlyk barrow, on the whole the most typical, were preserved to us. This was 60 ft. Height and 1100 ft. Round' about it was a stone plinth, and it was approached by a kind of stone alley. A central shaft descended 35 ft. 6 in. Below the surface of the earth, and from each corner of it at the bottom opened out side chambers.
The north-west chamber communicated with a large irregular chamber into which the plunderer's mine opened. In the central pit all was in confusion, but here the king seems to have lain on a bier. His belongings, found piled up near the mine. Seem to have included a combined bow-case and quiver and a sword sheath, each covered with plates of gold of Greek work, there swords with gold hafts, a hone with gold mounting, a whip, many other gold plates and a heap of arrow-heads. In the north-west chamber was a woman's skeleton, and she had here jewels, mostly of Greek work. She was attended by a man, and three other men were buried in the other chambers. They were supplied with simpler weapons and adornments, but even so their clothes had hundreds of stamped gold plates and strips of various shapes sewn on to them.
By every skeleton were drinking vessels. Store of wine was contained in six amphorae, and in two bronze cauldrons were mutton-bones. The most wonderful object of all was a great two-handled vase standing 3 ft. High and made to hold kumiss. The greater part of its body is covered by a pattern of acanthus leaves, but on the shoulder is a frieze showing nomads breaking in wold mares, our chief authority for Scythian costume. To the west of the main shaft were three square pits with horses and their harness, and by them two pits with men's skeletons. In the heap itself was found an immense quantity of pieces of harness and what may be remains of a funeral car. The Greek work would seem to date the burial as of the 3rd century B. C.
At Alexandropol in the same district was an even more elaborate tomb. But its contents were in even greater confusion. Another tomb in this region, Melgunov's barrow, found as long ago as 1760, contained a dagger-sheath and pollen of Assyrian work and Greek things of the 6th century. In the Kul Oba tomb mentioned above the chamber was of stone and the contents, with one or two exceptions, of purely Greek workmanship, but the ideas underlying are the same - the king has his wife, his servant and his horse, his amphorae with wine, his cauldron with mutton-bones, his drinking vessels and his weapons, the latter being almost the only objects of barbarian style. One of the cups has a frieze with reliefs of natives supplementing that on the Chertomlyk vase.
East of the Maeotis on the Kuban we have many barrows; the most interesting are the groups called the Seven Brothers, and those of Karagodeuashkh, Kostromskaya, Ul and Kelermes, the latter remarkable for objects of Assyrian style, the others for the enormous slaughter of horses; on the Ul were four hundred in one grave.
Art .- Certain of the objects which occur in these Scythic graves are of special forms typical for the Scythic area. Most interesting of these is the dagger or sword, always very short, save in the latest graves, and distinguished by a heart-shaped guard marking the juncture of hilt and blade; its sheath is also characteristic, having a triangular projection on one side and usually a separate shape: these peculiar forms were necessitated by a special way of hanging the dagger from two straps that might not interfere with a rider's movements. Just the same form of short sword was used in Persia and is shown on the sculptures at Persepolis. Another special type is the bow-case, made to take a short curved bow and to accommodate arrows as well. Further, there is the peculiar cauldron on one conical foot, round which the fire was built, the cylindrical hone pierced for suspension, and the cup with a rounded bottom.
Assyrian and afterwards Greek craftsmen working for Scythic employers were compelled to decorate these outlandish forms, which they did according to their own fashion: but there was also a native style with conventionalized beast decoration, which was almost always employed for the adornment of bits and horses' gear, and very often for weapons. This style and the types of dagger, cauldron, bit and two-looped socketed axehead run right across from Hungary to the upper Yenisei, where a special Bronze Age culture seems to have developed them. But even here it seems impossible to deny some influence coming from the Aegean area, and Scythic beasts are very like certain products of Mycenaean and early Ionic art. Again, the Scythic style is interesting as being one element in the art of the barbarians who conquered the Roman Empire and the zoomorphic decoration of the early middle ages.
The dominance from the Yenisei to the Carpathians of a distinct style of art which, whatever its original elements may have been, seems to have taken shape as far east as the Yenisei basin is an additional argument in favour of a certain movement of population from the far north-east towards the south Russian steppes. It would correspond in time with the movement of the Scyths of which Herodotus speaks, and it may be inferred that immigrants coming from those regions were rather allied to the Tatar family of nations than to the Iranian. Similar movements from the same regions appear also to have penetrated Iran itself; hence the resemblance between the dress and daggers of certain classes of warriors on the sculptures of Persepolis and those shown on the Luk Oba vase. An Iranian origin would not account for the presence of analogous types on the Yenisei.
History . - To sum up the history of Scythia, the oldest inhabitants of whom we hear in Scythia were the Cimmerii; the nature of the country makes it probable that some of them were nomads, while others no doubt tilled some land in the river valleys and in the Crimea, where they left their name to ferries, earthworks and the Cimmerian Bosporus. They were probably of Iranian race; among the Persians Herodotus describes a similar mixture of nomadic and settled tribes.
In the 7th century B. C. these Cimmerians were attacked and partly driven out by a horde of newcomers from upper Asia called Scythae; these imposed their name and their yoke upon all that were left in the Euxine steppes, but probably their coming did not really change the basis of the population, which remained Iranian. The newcomers adopted the language of the conquered, but brought with them new customs and a new artistic taste probably largely borrowed from the metal-working tribes of Siberia. About the same time similar peoples harassed the northern frontier of Iran, where they were called Saka (Sacae), and in later times Saka and Scyths, whether they were originally the same or not, were regarded as synonymous. It is difficult always to judge whether given information applies to the Sacae or the Scyths.
About 512 B. C. Darius, having conquered Thrace, made an invasion of Scythia, which, according to the account of Herodotus, he crossed as far as the Oarus, a river identified with the Volga, burned the town of Gelonus and returned in sixty days. In this march he was much harassed by the nomads, with whom he could not come to close quarters, but no mention is made of his having any difficulty with the rivers (he gets his water from wells), and no reason for his proceedings is advanced except a desire to avenge legendary attacks of Scyths upon Asia.
After losing many men the Great King comes back to the place where he crossed the Danube, finds the Ionians still guarding the bridge in spite of the attempts of the Scyths to make them desert, and safely re-enters his own dominions. Ctesias says that the whole campaign only took fifteen days and that Darius did not get beyond the Tyras (Dniester). This is also the view of the reasonable Strabo; but it does not account for the genesis of the other story. It seems best to believe that Darius made an incursion in order to secure the frontier of the Danube, suffered serious reverses and retired with loss, and that this offered too good a chance to be missed for a moral tale about the discomfiture of the Great King by a few poor savages. The Greeks had been trading with the Scyths ever since their coming, and at Lobia there were other tales of their history.
We can make a list of the Scythian kings - Spargapeithes, Lycus, Gnurus, Saulius (whose brother, the famous Anacharsis (q.v.), traveled overall the world in search of wisdom, was reckoned a sage among the Greeks and was slain among his own people because they did not like his foreign ways). And Idanthyrsus, the lead king at the time of Darius, probably the father of Ariapeithes. This latter had three wives, a Greek woman from Istrus, Opoea a Scythian, and a Thracian daughter to the great chief Teres. Scyles, his son by the Greek mother, affected Greek ways, had a house in Olbia, and even took part in Bacchic rites. When this came to the knowledge of his subjects he was murdered, and Octamasadas, his son by the third wife, reigned in his stead. Herodotus adduces this to show how much the Scyths hated foreign customs, but with the things found in the graves it rather proves how strong was the attraction exercised upon the nomads by the higher culture of their neighbors.
Octamasadas did shortly before the time of Herodotus. We cannot place Ariantas, who made a kind of census of the nation by exacting an arrow-head from each warrior and cast a great cauldron out of the bronze, nor Taxacis and Scopasis, the under-kings in the time of Idanthyrsus. After the retreat of Darius the Scythians made a raid as far as Abydos, and even sent envoys to King Cleomenes III of Sparta to arrange that they should attack the Persian Empire from the Phasis while the Spartans should march up from Ephesus. The chief result of the embassy was that Cleomenes took to the Scythian habit of drinking his wine neat and went mad therefrom (Herodotus vi. 84). Hence forward the Scyths appear as a declining power: by the middle of the 4th century their eastern neighbors the Sarmatae have crossed the Tanais (Don) and the pressure of the Scyths is felt on the Danube.
Here Philip II, of Macedon defeated and slew their king Ateas in 339 B. C., and from this time on the representatives of the old Scythic power are petty chieftains in the western part of the country about Olbia, where they could still be dangerous, and about Tomi. Towards the second half of the 2nd century B. C. this kingdom seems to have become the nucleus of a great state under Scilurus, whose name appears on coins of Lobia, and who at the same time threatened Chersonese in the Crimea. Here, however, he was opposed by the might of Mithradates VI of Pontus and his power was broken.
Henceforward the name "Scythian" is purely geographical. Meanwhile Scythia had become the land of the Sarmatae (q.v.). These, as has been seen, spoke a cognate dialect, and the tombs which belong to their period show exactly the same culture with Greek and Siberian elements. It is probable that the Iranian element was stronger among the Sarmatae, whose power extended as the ruling clan of the Scyths became extinct; but it is quite likely that they in their turn were officered by some new horde from upper Asia. Like the Scyths they were pressed towards the west by yet newer swarms, and with the coming of the Huns Scythia enters upon a new cycle, though still keeping its owl name in the Byzantine historians.
AUTHORITIES - (1) Ancient: Herodotus iv, 1 - 142 (editions of Blakesley, Rawlinson, Macan); Hippocrates, De Aere, &c., c. 24 sqq.; for geography alone : Strabo vii. Cc.3,4; xi.cc.1,2,6; Pliny iv. 75 sqq.; Ptolemy, Sarmatia; Diodorus Sic. Ii, 2, 45-47; and Justin in. cc.1, 4, do not seem to add anything of which we can be certain. (2) Modern: E. H. Minns, Scythians and Greeks (Cambridge, 1909), gives a summary of various opinions and a survey of the subject from all points of view. See also for ethnological questions, Mongolian hypothesis: K. Neumann, Die Hellene im Skythenlande (Berlin, 1855). Iranian hypothesis: K. Mullenhoff, "Uber Herkunft und Sprache der Pontischen Skythen und Sarmaten," in Monatsber. D. Berl. Ak. (1866), reprinted in Deutsche Altertumskunde, vol. Iii. For the archaeology; Kondakoff, Tolstoi and Reinach, Antiquitesde la Russie Meridionale (Paris, 1892); more fully in Antiquites de la Russie d'Herodote and Compte rendu de la commission archeologique de St-Petersbourg, passim.
They vigorously pursued breeding their horses for equine perfection,
and essentially purebred themselves the same noble way.
and essentially purebred themselves the same noble way.
The Akhal-Teke is a desert breed of horse that is thought to have
descended from an ancient Scythian type. It is thought that four
principal types of ancient horse served as the progenitors for all of
today's modern breeds, with a fifth type being represented by
Przywalski's horse. The Akhal-Teke's heritage is thought to be from the
fourth, almost gazelle like and light bodied horse of the arid deserts
of Central Asia.
http://www.mhref.com/breeds/akhal-teke/history.html
The grasses of this region were sparse, although nutritious and along with the extreme heat, a light bodied yet wiry horse had a better chance for survival than slower thicker horse types. The landscape was treeless and open, so a swift horse with stamina, capable of outrunning predators had again the best chance for survival. These desert types were built for speed, they had a "hot" temperament and very quick reactions, and a long body ensured plenty of room for long periods of deep athletic breathing.
These adaptations to the environment served the ancient peoples of the area very well. The Akhal-Teke horses were originally bred as war and raiding, or "Alaman" (translates to raiding) horses which was also naturally suited as a race horse. Its lineage and breeding was kept pure through an oral tradition of maintaining bloodlines and due to the relative isolation of the Teke tribes. "Akhal" translates to "pure". The horse was so named to identify with the Teke tribe, "Pure Teke". Akhal is also the name of an isolated oasis located in Turkmenistan on the Northern slope of the Kopet-Dag mountain, center for the nomadic Akhal-Teke tribe.
The Scythians were renowned as warriors and as early as 700 BC, had huge cavalries. Their horses were known under a variety of names, Turanian, Bactrian, Median and Parthian horses. They eventually came to be known as Turkmene horses after the tribes who kept them. An ancient royal Scythian frozen gravesite was found to contain slaves, pack animals and supplies for the king to take with him in the afterworld, much like the Egyptian tombs. It is estimated that this site dates back to 500 B.C. and because it was frozen, much of its contents were found in good relative condition for its age. Horse skeletons and even some frozen skin has been examined which bears a high resemblance to today's Akhal-Teke horse.
The Tekes were a nomadic people descended from the ancient Scythians who regularly traveled between summer and winter ranges. The region is frequently subject to drought however, so in order to survive, people traveled from place to place to find arable land. This frequently displaced other tribes already settled the few irrigated areas. To provide for the shortfalls of an unreliable environment, the Tekes took to routinely invading neighboring tribes or countries to take what was of necessity and value then quickly leaving on their swift horses. Or they hired themselves as mercenaries for others to accomplish similar missions.
The Teke tribes built on the natural proclivities of the ancient Scythian horse to breed horses of imposing height, incredible stamina and fiery temperament in order to withstand long distance raiding journeys. The pride the Tekes had in their horses became intertwined with their reliance upon them to support their way of life.
The Teke people revered their prized horses and were highly devoted to them. Their horses were brought into the family tents, the horses were blanketed against the cold desert nights and winter winds. They were given the best foods that could be found, including grains, animal proteins and fat.
Horses were valued as the single measure of true wealth. From as young as two, Teke children learn to ride and then care for the family's horse or if wealthy enough, more than one horse. When Russia took over Central Asian areas and prevented customary raiding, the Turkmene focused on racing their prized Akhal-Tekes. Today, racing Akhal-Tekes and maintenance of the breed itself is a principal source of national and cultural pride.
Traditional and Common Uses
Historical Anecdotes
It has been accepted as a fact generally that the Arabian horse is the oldest of the purebred horse breeds. This may be a fact to many in the West, but to those of the upper Middle East and Central Asia, the Akhal-Teke is just as or an older purebred horse breed. As is described below, Akhal-Teke owners will state as a fact that these horses contributed to the development of today's Arabian breed among many others.
"Blood Sweating"
The fame of the Akhal-Teke in the ancient world spread very far, and they were highly desired by ancient Chinese emperors. One emperor in particular, Emperor Wu Ti of 141 B.C. single-mindedly pursued acquisition of the Parthian "blood sweating" horses, as the Akhal-Tekes were then known in the Chinese court. He was relentless. He sent an initial expedition including large amounts of gold to exchange for these horses. His offer was refused and the treasure was captured. Several years later, he sent another expedition this time of 60,000 soldiers, 30,000 horses and 10,000 cattle. He accomplished a coup and was presented with 10 "elite" horses and 3,000 average horses. Only 1,000 survived the return trip. It is believed that the "elite" horses were horses of Akhal-Teke type.
The reference to "blood sweating" horses has received some recent scientific study. Emperor Wu Ti believed the blood sweating horses to be touched with a divine grace and the blood sweating set them apart as a special breed touched by Heaven. They were worth it to him to expend an enormous fortune to obtain.
Horses of the region today also "sweat blood". It was thought for many years that this was due to their thin skin and when heavily exercised, that blood burst through their skins. It has been discovered however that the bleeding is due to a parasite that is picked up in drinking water. The rivers that are known to carry the parasite are the Gorgan and Fergana rivers. At a certain point in the lifecycle of the parasite, it breaks through the skin causing the bleeding. This bleeding is known to occur in other animals such as donkeys and cattle, but not people.
Outstanding Stamina and Endurance
One of the most outstanding exhibitions of equine endurance ever recorded occurred in 1935 with the Akhal-Teke horse. The Turkmene people took a group of Akhal-Teke stallions over 2,500 miles from the capital of Turkmenistan, Ashkabahad to Moscow in 1935 in 84 days. 225 miles of the journey crossed the KaraKum desert, which was covered in 3 days with almost no water available. Temperatures of the desert can reach 149° Fahrenheit during the heat of the day. They rode from 4:00 in the morning to 9:00 am, rested during the day, then rode again from 5pm to 10pm. They rode up to 75 km per day. This endurance ride was repeated in 1988. This extreme long distance trek served to put the world, (most importantly, Russian officials), on notice that the Akhal-Teke was a rare and valuable breed of horse worthy of preservation and devotion to keep pure. In addition, it was pointed out that the Akhal-Teke could provide refinement, stamina and athletic ability to crosses with other breeds of horses.
The Akhal-Teke Influence on Other Breeds
Horses of Turkmene type were known to Alexander the Great. A great many horses from the Turkmenistan region were taken or imported by both Alexander and his father into ancient Greece. Some even suppose that Bucephalus was actually of Turkmene breeding rather than Thessalonian, however this is disputed.
Draft Breeds
Taller and faster than other breeds of horses of this time, Akhal-Tekes were valued by the Romans to develop large and strong war horses from the small yet stocky European breeds. And of course, these Roman war horses are supposed to have become the progenitors of many today's heavy draft horse breeds. Enthusiasts of Akhal-Tekes refer to ancient historical texts in which within 200 years A.D., there is no mention of horses to be found as war booty of defeated Arab tribes. There is no mention of horses or horse traditions in Arabia by writers of the time who do however, write of horses of other contemporaneous peoples. At this time, Arab tribes principally relied upon camels for transportation and wealth, not horses.
The Arabian
Mohammad in 600 AD is generally credited with "starting" the Arabian purebred lines and his beliefs for the necessity of purity of the Arabian are mentioned in the Koran. Horses of Akhal-Teke type however pre-date Mohammad by many centuries. In fact, it is suggested that Akhal-Tekes played a role in developing the modern Arabian breed, particularly the Muniqui line of Arabians, known as the "racing type" of Arabian horse. Many people in fact assume that the finest Arabian horses were developed on the Saudi Arabian peninsula. This is not at all correct, and is substantiated by the Saudi's themselves. As Bonnie Hendricks reports in her book, "International Encyclopedia of Horse Breeds", pp 40: "despite the legends, I was told, the Arab horse did not originate on the Arabian Peninsula, but with the "Arab" peoples of Iran (Persia), Iraq, Syria and Turkey – countries all referred to as "Arab" before Saudi Arabia existed as a country." These regions are all where the Akhal-Teke was well known for hundreds of years. Turkmene horses were used extensively in Russian tsar's stables from the 14th to the 17th centuries. They were found in the ancient city of Baghdad in the 8th to 10th centuries. It is a given that these elite horses contributed to local breeds of horses.
The Thoroughbred
In addition to development of large draft breeds, Arabians and others, Akhal-Tekes perhaps have their strongest link and more recent influence over the development of today's Thoroughbred. Everyone knows that the three foundation stallions of the modern Thoroughbred to be the Godolphin Arabian, the Byerly Turk and the Darley Arabian with the Darley Arabian's lineage the most prevalent in today's horses. These have always been simply called "Arabian" horses. Turkmene imports were included automatically by Europeans as "Arabian" horses, and many European breeders dealt directly with Arab people rather than Teke tribes. The Europeans of the 17th and 18th centuries frankly generally did not care to precisely identify the nationality of the people they dealt with or the precise breeding of the horses. They were simply interested in acquiring the fastest running horses with the most stamina that could be had, and those were said to be "Arabians". All horses of Oriental type were "Arabians" and they were purchased from "Arab" traders. So there while there was not a verbally defined distinction between Akhal-Tekes and Arabians at the time the English Thoroughbred was being developed, it is believed that the rather sloppy reference to "Arabians" actually includes Akhal-Teke horses. A comparison between the Arabian and the Thoroughbred, and the Akhal-Teke and the Thoroughbred reveals a closer morphological appearance between Akhal-Tekes and Thoroughbreds, rather than to Arabians. There were many "Turkish" horses imported to Europe around the time of the original development of the Thoroughbred breed. Through these factors along with the tradition of breeding Akhal-Tekes for speed as well as stamina, it is thought that the Godolphin Arab, (or Barb as he is sometimes known), the Darley Arabian and the Byerly Turk were actually Akhal-Tekes, or of at least Turkmene descent. The Darley Arabian's breeding is the best known of the three. He was from the Muniqui strain of Arabians which carries ancestors to Turkmene type horses.
The grasses of this region were sparse, although nutritious and along with the extreme heat, a light bodied yet wiry horse had a better chance for survival than slower thicker horse types. The landscape was treeless and open, so a swift horse with stamina, capable of outrunning predators had again the best chance for survival. These desert types were built for speed, they had a "hot" temperament and very quick reactions, and a long body ensured plenty of room for long periods of deep athletic breathing.
These adaptations to the environment served the ancient peoples of the area very well. The Akhal-Teke horses were originally bred as war and raiding, or "Alaman" (translates to raiding) horses which was also naturally suited as a race horse. Its lineage and breeding was kept pure through an oral tradition of maintaining bloodlines and due to the relative isolation of the Teke tribes. "Akhal" translates to "pure". The horse was so named to identify with the Teke tribe, "Pure Teke". Akhal is also the name of an isolated oasis located in Turkmenistan on the Northern slope of the Kopet-Dag mountain, center for the nomadic Akhal-Teke tribe.
The Scythians were renowned as warriors and as early as 700 BC, had huge cavalries. Their horses were known under a variety of names, Turanian, Bactrian, Median and Parthian horses. They eventually came to be known as Turkmene horses after the tribes who kept them. An ancient royal Scythian frozen gravesite was found to contain slaves, pack animals and supplies for the king to take with him in the afterworld, much like the Egyptian tombs. It is estimated that this site dates back to 500 B.C. and because it was frozen, much of its contents were found in good relative condition for its age. Horse skeletons and even some frozen skin has been examined which bears a high resemblance to today's Akhal-Teke horse.
The Tekes were a nomadic people descended from the ancient Scythians who regularly traveled between summer and winter ranges. The region is frequently subject to drought however, so in order to survive, people traveled from place to place to find arable land. This frequently displaced other tribes already settled the few irrigated areas. To provide for the shortfalls of an unreliable environment, the Tekes took to routinely invading neighboring tribes or countries to take what was of necessity and value then quickly leaving on their swift horses. Or they hired themselves as mercenaries for others to accomplish similar missions.
The Teke tribes built on the natural proclivities of the ancient Scythian horse to breed horses of imposing height, incredible stamina and fiery temperament in order to withstand long distance raiding journeys. The pride the Tekes had in their horses became intertwined with their reliance upon them to support their way of life.
The Teke people revered their prized horses and were highly devoted to them. Their horses were brought into the family tents, the horses were blanketed against the cold desert nights and winter winds. They were given the best foods that could be found, including grains, animal proteins and fat.
Horses were valued as the single measure of true wealth. From as young as two, Teke children learn to ride and then care for the family's horse or if wealthy enough, more than one horse. When Russia took over Central Asian areas and prevented customary raiding, the Turkmene focused on racing their prized Akhal-Tekes. Today, racing Akhal-Tekes and maintenance of the breed itself is a principal source of national and cultural pride.
Traditional and Common Uses
- Race horses and war horses as described above.
- Improvement of other lineages of horses for height, stamina, refinement and animation
- Currently, Akhal-Tekes are promoted in a number of equine
sports to make the world aware of this ancient and unique breed
including dressage, jumping, endurance, eventing and the Olympics. In
1960, an Akhal-Teke purebred stallion, Absent, won the dressage gold
medal and by the end of his career, had won 6 Olympic medals. Akhal-Teke
crossbreds are competed as warmbloods in a number of sports.
- The desirable characteristics of the breed are many and therefore crossbreeding them was and is vigorously pursued. This came to such an extreme however that as recently as 1973, there were only 18 purebred mares and 3 purebred stallions known to exist in Russia. Since that time, the Akhal-Teke has been bred for purity, while still contributing its outstanding qualities to cross-breeding efforts.
Historical Anecdotes
It has been accepted as a fact generally that the Arabian horse is the oldest of the purebred horse breeds. This may be a fact to many in the West, but to those of the upper Middle East and Central Asia, the Akhal-Teke is just as or an older purebred horse breed. As is described below, Akhal-Teke owners will state as a fact that these horses contributed to the development of today's Arabian breed among many others.
"Blood Sweating"
The fame of the Akhal-Teke in the ancient world spread very far, and they were highly desired by ancient Chinese emperors. One emperor in particular, Emperor Wu Ti of 141 B.C. single-mindedly pursued acquisition of the Parthian "blood sweating" horses, as the Akhal-Tekes were then known in the Chinese court. He was relentless. He sent an initial expedition including large amounts of gold to exchange for these horses. His offer was refused and the treasure was captured. Several years later, he sent another expedition this time of 60,000 soldiers, 30,000 horses and 10,000 cattle. He accomplished a coup and was presented with 10 "elite" horses and 3,000 average horses. Only 1,000 survived the return trip. It is believed that the "elite" horses were horses of Akhal-Teke type.
The reference to "blood sweating" horses has received some recent scientific study. Emperor Wu Ti believed the blood sweating horses to be touched with a divine grace and the blood sweating set them apart as a special breed touched by Heaven. They were worth it to him to expend an enormous fortune to obtain.
Horses of the region today also "sweat blood". It was thought for many years that this was due to their thin skin and when heavily exercised, that blood burst through their skins. It has been discovered however that the bleeding is due to a parasite that is picked up in drinking water. The rivers that are known to carry the parasite are the Gorgan and Fergana rivers. At a certain point in the lifecycle of the parasite, it breaks through the skin causing the bleeding. This bleeding is known to occur in other animals such as donkeys and cattle, but not people.
Outstanding Stamina and Endurance
One of the most outstanding exhibitions of equine endurance ever recorded occurred in 1935 with the Akhal-Teke horse. The Turkmene people took a group of Akhal-Teke stallions over 2,500 miles from the capital of Turkmenistan, Ashkabahad to Moscow in 1935 in 84 days. 225 miles of the journey crossed the KaraKum desert, which was covered in 3 days with almost no water available. Temperatures of the desert can reach 149° Fahrenheit during the heat of the day. They rode from 4:00 in the morning to 9:00 am, rested during the day, then rode again from 5pm to 10pm. They rode up to 75 km per day. This endurance ride was repeated in 1988. This extreme long distance trek served to put the world, (most importantly, Russian officials), on notice that the Akhal-Teke was a rare and valuable breed of horse worthy of preservation and devotion to keep pure. In addition, it was pointed out that the Akhal-Teke could provide refinement, stamina and athletic ability to crosses with other breeds of horses.
The Akhal-Teke Influence on Other Breeds
Horses of Turkmene type were known to Alexander the Great. A great many horses from the Turkmenistan region were taken or imported by both Alexander and his father into ancient Greece. Some even suppose that Bucephalus was actually of Turkmene breeding rather than Thessalonian, however this is disputed.
Draft Breeds
Taller and faster than other breeds of horses of this time, Akhal-Tekes were valued by the Romans to develop large and strong war horses from the small yet stocky European breeds. And of course, these Roman war horses are supposed to have become the progenitors of many today's heavy draft horse breeds. Enthusiasts of Akhal-Tekes refer to ancient historical texts in which within 200 years A.D., there is no mention of horses to be found as war booty of defeated Arab tribes. There is no mention of horses or horse traditions in Arabia by writers of the time who do however, write of horses of other contemporaneous peoples. At this time, Arab tribes principally relied upon camels for transportation and wealth, not horses.
The Arabian
Mohammad in 600 AD is generally credited with "starting" the Arabian purebred lines and his beliefs for the necessity of purity of the Arabian are mentioned in the Koran. Horses of Akhal-Teke type however pre-date Mohammad by many centuries. In fact, it is suggested that Akhal-Tekes played a role in developing the modern Arabian breed, particularly the Muniqui line of Arabians, known as the "racing type" of Arabian horse. Many people in fact assume that the finest Arabian horses were developed on the Saudi Arabian peninsula. This is not at all correct, and is substantiated by the Saudi's themselves. As Bonnie Hendricks reports in her book, "International Encyclopedia of Horse Breeds", pp 40: "despite the legends, I was told, the Arab horse did not originate on the Arabian Peninsula, but with the "Arab" peoples of Iran (Persia), Iraq, Syria and Turkey – countries all referred to as "Arab" before Saudi Arabia existed as a country." These regions are all where the Akhal-Teke was well known for hundreds of years. Turkmene horses were used extensively in Russian tsar's stables from the 14th to the 17th centuries. They were found in the ancient city of Baghdad in the 8th to 10th centuries. It is a given that these elite horses contributed to local breeds of horses.
The Thoroughbred
In addition to development of large draft breeds, Arabians and others, Akhal-Tekes perhaps have their strongest link and more recent influence over the development of today's Thoroughbred. Everyone knows that the three foundation stallions of the modern Thoroughbred to be the Godolphin Arabian, the Byerly Turk and the Darley Arabian with the Darley Arabian's lineage the most prevalent in today's horses. These have always been simply called "Arabian" horses. Turkmene imports were included automatically by Europeans as "Arabian" horses, and many European breeders dealt directly with Arab people rather than Teke tribes. The Europeans of the 17th and 18th centuries frankly generally did not care to precisely identify the nationality of the people they dealt with or the precise breeding of the horses. They were simply interested in acquiring the fastest running horses with the most stamina that could be had, and those were said to be "Arabians". All horses of Oriental type were "Arabians" and they were purchased from "Arab" traders. So there while there was not a verbally defined distinction between Akhal-Tekes and Arabians at the time the English Thoroughbred was being developed, it is believed that the rather sloppy reference to "Arabians" actually includes Akhal-Teke horses. A comparison between the Arabian and the Thoroughbred, and the Akhal-Teke and the Thoroughbred reveals a closer morphological appearance between Akhal-Tekes and Thoroughbreds, rather than to Arabians. There were many "Turkish" horses imported to Europe around the time of the original development of the Thoroughbred breed. Through these factors along with the tradition of breeding Akhal-Tekes for speed as well as stamina, it is thought that the Godolphin Arab, (or Barb as he is sometimes known), the Darley Arabian and the Byerly Turk were actually Akhal-Tekes, or of at least Turkmene descent. The Darley Arabian's breeding is the best known of the three. He was from the Muniqui strain of Arabians which carries ancestors to Turkmene type horses.
TRAKEHNER BREED
http://books.google.com/books?id=CdJg3qXssWYC&pg=PA422&lpg=PA422&dq=scythian+horse+breeding&source=bl&ots=cjzcYX3M3_&sig=5jW31EYyEF40Mk5Ti-KOsul_UIo&hl=en&ei=qjyBTYLJIYGasAO4yOyBAg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CDIQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=scythian%20horse%20breeding&f=false
|
|
|
Scythians
The Scythians expanded into the West in several major waves (see map 2). The first, which Gimbutas describes as "proto-Scythian," originated well east of the Urals. Known archaeologically as the Timber-Grave Culture, this wave began expanding westward as early as 1800 B.c.E. A second wave, this time of Scythian mounted nomads who buried their dead in timber-lined tumuli, swept across the more settled, agricultural communities of the north Pontic steppes and incorporated some of the indigenous cultivators, who became known as "Agricultural Scythians" (ca. 1100 B.C.E.).S Then, ca. 600-550 B.C.E., a third wave migrated westward out of southern Siberia. These latecomers, who eventually pushed west along the north coast of the Black Sea as far as Bulgaria and who invaded northeast Iran as well, bore several ethnic labels (see map 3). Among them were the Massagetae (southeast of the Aral Sea), the Saka (northeastern Iran, western Afghanistan), the Thyssagetae (the central Urals), and a people Herodotus calls the "Sauromatae," who seem to have been the immediate ancestors (or earliest known example) of the Sarmatians.
Although all of these subtribes seem to have shared a similar way of life, the westernmost group, which roamed the Pontic steppes in the fifth century B.C.E. (ca. 450 B.C.E.), provided most of our nonarchaeological information about Scythian culture. According to Herodotus there were three major social strata (or tribes): "Royal Scythians," pastoral nomads who formed the ruling elite; "Warrior Scythians," also nomads, who maintained and extended the power of the former group; and "Agricultural Scythians," most likely comprising conquered, "Scythianized," indigenous peoples.
The Scythian economy was a mixture of pastoralism and settled cultivation, although the former seems to have taken precedence, as it still does among the Kazakhs and other modern inhabitants of the eastern portion of this region. As among those Altaic peoples who came to the region in more recent "mes, the horse was the primary, or at least the most prestigious, animal herded. The Scythians were the first great cavalry nation. Unlike the ancient Celts, who still relied on horse-drawn chariots as late as the first century C.E., the Scythians were mounted warriors who fought with both lances and bows, as well as long, slashing swords. These steppe nomads also wore trousers, overlapping scale armor, and conical helmets.
A millennium and a half later this warfare pattern, which was also characteristic of the Sarmatians and the Alans, was to have a fundamental impact on medieval European society; as Nickel points out, it was the basis upon which the concept of chivalry developed.
Unlike the Romans and, for the most part, the Celts, Arthur's people, as they are depicted in the medieval chivalric romances, seem to have preferred to fight from horseback and to have relied primarily upon a long slashing sword rather than upon a heavy thrusting spear and a javelin (or pilum) characteristic of the foot-slogging legionnaires. This, together with their relatively heavy body armor, which consisted of overlapping scales attached to a leather tunic, tallies well with what evidence we have of Sarmatian military technology, such as the images on Trajan's Column (see plate I). Even the custom of designating warriors by means of an emblem, which eventually evolved into the medieval concept of the heraldic device, may have its roots in the Sarmatian and Alanic practice of identifying clans and other kinship units by means of tamgas ("sacred symbols") emblazoned on helmets, shields, and other pieces of equipment (see fig. 2), many examples of which have been found in south Russian sites associated with the cultures in question.
As with the Alans draft animals and carts also played an important part in the Scythian economy, and we have evidence that while on the move they lived in wagons: indeed Herodotus said that they had no other homes. These carts were covered by felt tents that functioned like the yurts still to be found among the steppe nomads of central Asia.
The role of women in Scythian society, and in Northeast Iranian society as a whole, also needs to be noted, as it not only differed markedly from that played by women in the Greco-Roman world but also has implications for the role of women in the Arthurian tradition. The Greek legends about the Amazons are almost certainly derived from their observations of this culture. Scythian wives were expected to fight alongside their husbands when the occasion demanded, and Herodotus went far as to assert that among their eastern cousins, the "Sauromatae,... [there is] a marriage law which forbids a girl to marry until she has killed an enemy in battle."
According to Herodotus the Scythian religion centered on seven divinities, chief among them a goddess called Tabiti, whom he glosses as "Hestia." Another was a war-god whom he refers to as the "Scythian Ares," who was symbolized by a sword thrust into a pile of wood. Yet another major divinity seems to have been called Don Bettyr, who most likely was associated with the Don River (known to the Greeks as the Tanais) and who presided over plant and animal fertility.
The way the Scythians conceived of their own origins also has important implications for our thesis. According to Herodotus the primeval being, whose name he transliterates as "Targitaos," had three sons. When three burning golden objects fell from the sky—a cup, a battle-ax, and a yoked plow—each son in turn attempted to gather them. Only the youngest, whom Herodotus calls "Kolaxais," was successful. From him were descended the "Royal Scythians" (the Paralatai), who had sovereignty over all. From the second son, "Lipoxai's," descended the "Warrior Scythians" (the Aukhatai), while from the eldest, "Arpoxai's," sprang the "Agricultural Scythians" (the Katiaroi and the Traspies). While there is still some argument as to whether these were separate tribes or social classes within a single tribe, one aspect of this myth is extremely important for our purposes: the emphasis placed on cups (see chaps. 8, 9, and 10).
Golden objects figure prominently in Scythian expressive culture, that is, graphic art, particularly in the so-called "animal style": highly realistic depictions of both wild and domestic animals on buckles, harnesses, brooches, and other objects (see plate 2). Often these pieces were made of the gold that is still to be found in the region, especially in the streams that issue from the northern foothills of the Caucasus Mountains.
Although the Scythians dominated the steppe region for several centuries, trading furs and gold for the manufactured products of the civilized world to the south and the west, by the beginning of the fourth century B.C.E. the western part of Scythia, or at least the territory controlled by the "Scythians proper", had been invaded by their eastern cousins, the Sarmatians. http://ossetians.com/eng/print.php?newsid=370
(c) 2013, Iona Miller, All Rights Reserved, Sangreality Trust; GenIsis Genealogy
[email protected]
http:ionamiller.weebly.com
Fair Use Notice
This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
[email protected]
http:ionamiller.weebly.com
Fair Use Notice
This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
