Authors: Neal Ascherson
It is not hard to see reasons why Taylor could be right. The symbiosis with the Greeks transformed a large part of Scythian society into a wheat-farming export economy, in which the muscle-power of paid labourers was decisive. At the same time, Greek prejudices and inhibitions about women — their astonishing invention of a society in which women actually had no power or civic participation at all - may have exercised a growing and fashionable influence on Scythian male elites.
One Scythian myth of origin, which has come down to us in a queer, Grecianised form, tells how Hercules went searching for his lost mares in the Hylaea. This was a region of dense forest, now entirely vanished, which seems in classical times to have covered the left bank of the lower Dnieper, near the modern city of Kherson.
There, in a cave, Hercules met the Mixoparthenos, a creature who (as Herodotus put it) was a woman above the buttocks and below them a snake. She insisted that Hercules must make love to her before she returned his horses, and when he was gone, she bore three sons. The youngest, Scythes, being the only one who could bend the bow which Hercules had left behind him, became king in the land and ancestor of the Scythians.
The Mixoparthenos became a symbol. In spite of the Hercules element in her story, she belonged originally to Iranian rather than to Hellenic spirituality, and her effigies have turned up on the metal decorations of horse-harnesses in Scythian nomad burials. But then the Mixoparthenos reached the cities of the coast. She became, in the end, the crest of the rich, hybrid culture which arose in the Bosporan Kingdom, where the ruling families and dynasties were descendants of Sarmatian and Thracian chieftains while the merchants were Greeks and the soldiers Scythians, Sindians or Maeotians.
She is always full-face. Below her navel, her body splits into two serpent-trunks which coil up either side of her; she grasps the two coils with outstretched hands as if to keep her balance. On her head is a many-tiered oriental crown. Her pubis, thrust forward by the separation of her snake-thighs, is covered by a vine-leaf.
In a cave, under a shaggy wood, a female monster entraps a male hero to drag seed from him. It was blatantly not a woman who imagined the tale of Hercules and the Mixoparthenos, but neither was it a male 'barbarian'. As Herodotus takes care to point out, the details of how and why the snake-woman coupled with the hero were grafted onto an originally Scythian story which was processed and repackaged in the imagination of Greek colonial settlers - 'the story of the Greeks who dwell in Pontus'. (No doubt different Scythian communities had different, even competing, myths of origin. The one Herodotus tells as 'the Scythians' account' is a beautiful, mystifying story of how a golden plough, yoke, sword and flask fall from heaven. When the three sons of Targitaus go to pick them up, the gold bursts into flame at the approach of the first two. The third son, Coloxais, takes them safely, and becomes the founder of the Scythian 'kingly' line.)
The Mixoparthenos, Mother of Scythia, was present in the Scythian mind long before the 'Greeks who dwell in Pontus' embroidered her into the pattern of their own fear and dislike of women. In the centuries which followed, she slowly lost whatever function she may have had in the rites of steppe nomads and turned into the badge and protectress of the whole Bosporan Kingdom and
the city of Panticapaeum. 'Scythia' as a Greek term ceased to mean one particular language-group of Indo-Iranian nomads: it expanded to denote a whole region of the world and a mixed Iranian-Hellenic culture which embraced the Black Sea Greeks, the Thracians, the Scythians and the Sarmatians alike.
At Panticapaeum, capital of the Bosporan Kingdom and the richest and most successful of all the Black Sea colonies, two statues of the Mixoparthenos flanked the main gate of the city (one of them is now in the museum of Kerch). But her effigy turns up in large and small versions, in stone but also in gold, silver or bronze, all round the north-eastern shore of the Black Sea. She was the patroness of the first genuinely and freely multi-ethnic culture on the Black Sea (for the Bosporan Kingdom was plural and iranianiscd' in a way that even Olbia was not). She was the Mother of Scythia as the place where, for a time, the old Athenian polarity of 'civilised' and 'barbarian' appeared to be growing obsolete.
But the Mixoparthenos lived on in another, entirely practical way. She became a handle. Her slender body, curving outwards but held in again at head and serpent-legs, became an ornamental lug baked onto the rims of pottery cups, riveted or welded to the necks, of bronze and glass vessels. She remained nameless but useful long after her city had burned down and her children had left history.
No longer recognised, the Mother of the Scythians still lives among us. The other day, in one of the old Habsburg railway stations in Budapest, I felt something unusual as I pulled open the heavy double-door of a ticket-office. There in my hand, in worn-away brass polished by millions of travellers, was a naked woman divided below her navel into two coiled serpents.
Renate Rolle, the German archaeologist who is now the best-known Western interpreter of Scythian research in Russia and Ukraine, is a true believer: she uses the word 'Amazon' without qualification. She has looked at the bones of the young women warriors, and she recognises them with joy. But after writing of their skill and balance in the saddle, of the dazzling co-ordination of eye, arm and breath required to shoot from a reflex bow without the support of stirrups, Rolle suddenly and touchingly feels that her readers require to be reassured that these warriors were feminine as well as female. She is an intellectual German woman of the late twentieth century; she wants women who are free physically and socially and politically but who have in no way modified their 'femininity'.
When she wrote her book
The World of the Scythians,
she was also a West German in a still-divided nation. Rolle evidently felt that her image of Scythian girls trained to muscular and nervous perfection had to be walled-off from the contemporary triumphs of East German women athletes, hardened and unsexed by anabolic steroids. 'Because their physical training was so varied, the physique of these fighting women would in no way have resembled that of the "mannish" women sometimes produced nowadays by intensive training for one particular competitive sport ... These "man-killers" were, however, for all that no less aware of their femininity and wished to retain their charms in the land of the dead .. . they all have jewellery and mirrors, decorated according to the women's individual social rank; those interested in cosmetics also have make-up of various colours and also scent bottles.'
Amazons, if that is what we call them, belonged to the unmodified steppe life of pastoralism. When the symbiosis with Greek colonies began to change that way of life, the women warriors seem to fade away as a caste or institution. But something survived; the Greeks and later the Romans were constantly reminded of the Amazon tradition by the confidence and militancy of queens and princesses in these more settled societies. In
529
BC, Tomyris, queen of the Iranian-speaking Massagetae, was said to have killed Cyrus the Great of Persia and to have taken his head home as a trophy. Tirgatao, a Maeotian princess, raised and led an army which defeated Satyrus, tyrant of the Bosporan Kingdom. Amage, wife of a Sarmatian king near the Sea of Azov, seized power from her own husband and led a cavalry commando into the Crimean Scythian kingdom next door, where she seized the palace, killed the king and imposed a peace settlement between the Scythians and the Greek city of Chersonesus (now Sevastopol). A few years later, the Emperor Augustus was forced to compromise with Dynamis, queen of the Bosporan Kingdom, who was supposed to be a Roman vassal: she gathered a Sarmatian army in order to overthrow and kill the man whom Augustus had proposed as her husband.
But beyond the Amazon problem, which is about what femininity may have meant to the Indo-Iranian nomads, there is an altogether more unsettling question. WTiat did masculinity mean to them?
How 'male', by the standards of our own culture, were masculine Scythians or Sarmatians?
The Hippocratic manuscript
Airs, Waters, Places,
written in the fifth or fourth century BC, claims that Scythian men had low fertility and an equally low libido, in part because of their 'constitution' (in terms of humours) and in part because of their way of life. 'The men have no great desire for intercourse because of the moistness of their condition and the softness and chill of their abdomen ... moreover, the constant jolting on their horses unfits them for intercourse.' A little later, the pseudo-Hippocrates returns to the subject of Scythian impotence, which is 'also because they always wear trousers and spend most of their time on their horses, so that they do not handle the parts, but owing to cold and fatigue forget about sexual passion, losing their virility before any impulse is felt.'
Whatever this may mean, the Hippocratic authors are much more interesting about the mysterious Enareis or Anaries, who are also mentioned by Herodotus. The manuscripts portray them as a category of Scythian men who have become - in their social behaviour - women. 'The great majority among the Scythians become impotent, do women's work, live like women and converse accordingly.' These men are explicitly described as cross-dressers: they 'put on women's clothes, holding that they have lost their manhood'. They take this step after finding that they are unable to have sexual intercourse, thinking that 'they have sinned against Heaven'.
Herodotus, in the first book of his
Histories,
retails a legend that the Enareis were originally members of a Scythian war-party which sacked a temple of Aphrodite at Ascalon, on a retreat after raiding Egypt. The goddess retaliated by afflicting them and their descendants with menstruation which endures to this day: 'those who come to Scythia can see the plight of the men they call Enareis.' In the fourth book, he remarks that 'the Enareis, who are androgynous, say that Aphrodite gave them the art of divination which they practise by means of lime-tree bark. They cut this bark into three portions, and prophesy while they plait and unplait them between their fingers.'
Representations of magical androgynous figures do appear on Scythian, Sarmatian and Indo-Iranian decorations. A tiara from a grave in the Kuban shows such a figure serving the Great Goddess, and another occurs on a drinking-horn found in Romania. A third — Timothy Taylor is convinced — appears on the Gundestrup Cauldron, that stupendous silver mystery covered with repousse scenes of unknown gods and rituals which was found in a Danish bog a hundred years ago, but which was probably made in Thrace during the second century BC. This is the beardless but male 'Horned God', cross-legged and crowned with antlers.
Here is a belief-world in which men can acquire the power of prophecy and become spirit-possessed mediums only by relinquishing their masculinity. Timothy Taylor refers to 'gender-crossing shamanism', something 'well-documented among recent Siberian pastoralists'. He suggests that, for men no longer able to ride to war, the abandonment of virility to become a shaman was an escape from the expectation that a man ought to die in battle.
All this means that the time has come for a new Count Bobrinskoy. In his own day of revelation, the count realised that so many of the young warriors at the end of his spade were not men (his predecessors had been so sure of the warriors' maleness that they had not bothered to examine or, often, even to keep their bones) but women. Now it is time to take a much closer look at the bones of queens, priestesses and important women in general, lying among their cosmetics and the remains of expensive dresses and tiaras. Some of them could turn out to be men: Enareis transvestites and gender-crossing mediums who have deceived another generation of far more sophisticated archaeologists.
Volodya and Yura Guguev are still young men. They were brought up as children at Alexandrovka, a new housing scheme on the north-eastern fringes of the city of Rostov. In those days, the 1960s, some green open space was still left there, and the boys used to play on the mounds of Kobiakov, a few hundred yards from their home, on the road to the old Don ferry at Aksai.
They both became archaeologists. Volodya was introduced to his career at Tanais, where he used to join the visiting expeditions each summer, but the burial mounds at Kobiakov never let his imagination rest. He went back to them after graduating, mapped the whole site and obtained permission to begin formal excavation.
It was the last possible moment to do so. Rostov was expanding again; the Kobiakov site was to be levelled for a new riverside expressway, and it was already being destroyed by garbage-tipping and temporary barracks for construction workers. Volodya did what rescue-archaeology he could: he found traces of settlements and kitchen-middens as well as several hundred graves dated between the Bronze Age and the Roman period. In the summer of 1988 he started work on 'Kobiakov 10', a burial site which had been flattened out in recent times but which had once been covered by a small
kurgan
three metres high.
Almost all
kurgans
have been robbed, some repeatedly, some within a year or so of the burial, but Kobiakov 10 had been left alone or overlooked. Volodya Guguev found a square pit - a room cut into the earth — and on its floor lay the skeleton of a young woman on her back.