Нас - тьмы, и тьмы, и тьмы (WE are MYRIADS, MYRIADS)

Scythian Art

Scythians: Underestimated Civilisation.

Скифы:  недооцениваемая цивилизация

Gli Sciti: una civiltà misconosciuta
Les Scythes: une civilisation sus-évaluée

Die Skythen: eine unterschaetzte Zivilisation

 

The “Russian” melting pot described in the former paragraph has always fascinated intellectuals. First of all, it has been the inspiring motive of the Spring Festival of Diaghilev, on the music of Stravinsky, subtitled as “Dances of Heathen Russia”. This ballet constitutes a milestone in the history of European ballets, and the most famous presentation of Pre-Slavonic Russia, which also “presented”, so to say, Russia to Paris, opening up the knowledge, by European public, of the current Russian cultural movements.

Another famous topic on ancient Russia in European culture  is the image of the Scythians, a people, likely of Iranian origin, which inhabited Russia at the times of Greeks and Romans. Scythians are referred to by all Greek and Roman authors. Already at that time, Scythia disoriented geographers, because it did not fit well inside the “classical” tripartition of Continents: Europe / Asia / Africa”. Therefore, they started to subdivide it in two parts: “Scythia before Imaus” and “Scythia beyond Imaus”, which corresponded, roughly speaking, to European Russia and to Siberia respectively . and traveled from Crimea to Kiev and Novgorod.

Herodotus conveys to us a very positive picture of Scythians, notwithstanding their renown as a wild people, living in the inhospitable steppes of the North. In his “Histories”, he describes with many details the Scythians’ homeland, history and civilisation. Under a general point of view, Herodotus is strongly sympathetic to Scythians, since they, albeit being a wild nomadic population of Persian origin, were very similar, culturally, to Greeks, because of their warlike spirit ant their love for liberty. The German baron and revolutionary Anacharsis Cloots chose his nickname from a character of Herodotus’ stories,the one of  a Scythian prince which had reneged his fatherland in order to choose the Athenian citizenship, and for this reason was sentenced to death (what ironically happened also to Cloots during the French Revolution, because Robespierre denied that “a German Baron may not be a French Revolutionary”).

Similarly to Greeks, Scythians lived on the borderland of the huge Persian Empire, and even shared, with Persian, some ethnic characteristics, such as linguistic ones. According to somebody, they came even from Persia. They bore even the risk, at a certain time, to be subdued by Persians. In fact, at the same time when, during the Persian Wars, Ionia, the North of Greece and the Greek coasts of the Black Sea were part of the Persian Empire, also the South-Western part of Scythia, including Moldova and the Southern parts of Ukraine, constituted Persian Provinces. According to Herodotus, Scythians tried even to invade Persia (like what the Greek Alexander the Great would have done a few centuries later).

During the Romantic and Post-Romantic Periods, a strong interest for Scythians and for the connected peoples arose in Russia’s cultural circles.

Also Ivanov-Razumnik and Blok would have baptized their cultural movement: “Skify” (the “Scythians”).

Recent Chinese researches are showing that Scythians had a higher cultural impact than the one we are used to attribute to them. According to those researches, Scythian civilization, stretching from Berlin up to Syberia, Manchuria and Shaansi, was characterize by a very tight unitarian character, and had given rise to highly sophisticated settlements. As an example, the Chinese and Xin Jiang settlements, present since the 10 Century BCE, showed examples of a civilization very similar to the Mycenean and to the ancient Greek, even anticipating them by some centuries.

The city of CheShi, near Turfan, which existed already in the 10^th Century BCE, shows striking similarities with Myceanean acropolis. It was the center of the long lastingh wars between the Han Dynasty and the Hun at the times of the Roman Empire (“the Seven CheShi Wars”).