Scythians

Scythians, Germans, and others: Pliny the Elder on peoples on the western and northern coasts of the Black Sea (first century CE)

Comments: As Pliny the Elder approaches where the Danube empties into the Black Sea (in what is now Romania), he turns to a brief ethnographic description of the peoples nearby, including both “Scythians” and Germanic peoples. Pliny briefly suggests that the peoples known as “Scythians” had spread far and wide but that “Scythians” was no longer the name used for most of them. Pliny is also helpful for some other terminological issues, as he claims to know what varying designations actually refer to the same people (e.g. Sarmatians are Sauromatians), but we do not know if he is right on these. His theoretical interest in ethnic identification and categorization is noteworthy nonetheless. His suggestion that there were Troglodytes (here spelled without the “L”) in this region shows just how widely applied that designation for “Cave-dwellers” was (on which see many other Troglodytes, particularly in the deserts of Egypt and Ethiopia at this link). In other words, Troglodytes were not a people but rather a label (much like “barbarians”) that others put on particular groups for living a supposedly uncivilized lifestyle.

 

Pliny’s Roman military career focussed at first on service near the Rhine (see Syme 1969), so it is understandable that he shows interest in northern peoples and particularly Germanic ones, as here. Pliny also wrote a now lost work precisely on Germanic Wars.

 

Works consulted: Ronald Syme, “Pliny the Procurator,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 73 (1969):.

 

Scythians, Getians, Sarmatians, Alanians, and Rhoxolanians

From this point [where the Danube empties into the Black Sea] all the peoples (gentes) in general are Scythian. However, various peoples have occupied the lands adjacent to the coast: in one place are the Getians, who are called “Dacians” by the Romans; at another place are the Sarmatians, called the “Sauromatians” by the Greeks, including the section of them called Hamaxomians (“Wagon-dwellers”) or Aorsians; and, at another place are the low-born Scythians descended from slaves or else the Troglodytes (Trogodytes here; “Cave-dwellers”), and then the Alanians and Rhoxolanians.

 

Sarmatian Iazygians, Basternians and other Germanic peoples

The higher parts between the Danube and the Herkynian forest as far as the winter quarters of Pannonia at Carnuntum [Petronell-Carnuntum, Austria] and the plains and level country of the German frontiers. These are occupied by the Sarmatian Iazygians, while the Dacians whom they have driven out hold the mountains and forests as far as the Pathissum [Tisa] river. From the river Maros [Mureș] (or else the Duria [Dora Riparia] river, if it is that one which separates them from the Suebians and the kingdom of Vannius), the opposite side of the country is occupied by the Basternians and then other Germans. Agrippa describes the whole of this area from the Danube to the sea as being 1200 [Roman] miles long and 396 wide, as far as the river Vistula [now in Poland] in the direction of the Sarmatian desert.

 

Comment on the use of the designation “Scythians"

 

The name of Scythians has spread in every direction, as far as the Sarmatians and the Germans. However, this old designation [i.e. “Scythians”] has not continued for any except the most remote sections of these peoples, living almost unknown to the rest of humankind.

 

Peoples moving north and east along the coast of the Black SeaAfter the Danube come the towns of Kremniskoi (Cremniscoi) and Aipolion (Aepolium), the Makrokremnian mountains, and the famous river Tyras [Dniester], which gives its name to the town on the site which previously was called Ophiusa. A large island in the Tyras river which is inhabited by the Tyragetians (Tyragetae) is one hundred and thirty [Roman] miles from the False-mouth of the Ister [Danube]. Then come the Axiakians (Axiacae) named from the river Axiakes. Beyond them are the Krobyzians, the river Rhode, the Sangarian gulf, the port of Ordesos, and one hundred and twenty miles from the Tyras the river Borysthenes [Dnieper] and the lake and people (gens) of the same name, and the town fifteen miles inland from the sea, the old names of which were Olbiopolis and Miletopolis. Returning to the coast, we come to the port of the Achaians and the island of Achilles, famous for the tomb of that hero. One hundred and twenty-five miles from this is a peninsula stretching out at a slant in the shape of a sword, and called the “Racecourse of Achilles” from having been his exercising ground. Its length is given by Agrippa as eighty miles. The whole of this stretch is occupied by the Scythian Sardians and Sirakians.

 

Then there is a wooded region that has given its name to the Forest Sea that washes its coast. The inhabitants are called Enoikadians (Enoecadioe). Beyond is the river Pantikapes [Somara], which forms the boundary between the nomadic and agricultural peoples, and then the Akesinos. Some authorities say that below Olbia the Pantikapes flows into the Borysthenes. However, those who are more accurate make the Hypanis [Bug] a tributary of the Borysthenes, so it is erroneous to put the latter in a region of Asia.

 

 

Comments: The present oracles are among the earliest of the so-called Sibylline Oracles produced by Judeans / Jews (sometimes including Jesus adherents) posing as a non-Judean Sibyl or prophetess. The consistent mention of a seventh Egyptian king (3.193, 318, and 608) suggests an Egyptian Judean author who is identifying God’s special end-time royal functionary as one of the Ptolemaic kings, most likely Ptolemy Philometer, Neos Philopater, or Physkon (all between 180-117 BCE). This expectation of installment of a native Egyptian king in some (imminent) future time has some commonalities with the Egyptian Oracle of the Lamb and the Oracle of the Potter (link). Parts of Sibylline Oracle 3 that are excluded here (1-96, 350-488) date from a later time.

 

The oracles (in Greek dactylic hexameter verse) translated below are important evidence for ethnic relations in a variety of ways, three of which I will briefly mention. First of all, the focus on characterizing other peoples makes this an excellent source for understanding how an Egyptian Judean who speaks Greek would view and stereotype those of other ethnic groups. In this respect, here we encounter Judean stereotypes about “the peoples” (traditionally rendered “the gentiles”) much like those of Paul (link) and the Wisdom of Solomon (link): Our author caricatures peoples (beyond God’s people) as (1) tending towards worshipping inappropriate things (“idolatry” in Judean terms) and (2) engaging in perverted sexual customs. The latter point – that those considered “foreigners” engage in upside down sexual customs – is widespread in Greek ethnographic discourses as well (see category eight). But in this case the stereotype is interpreted in Judean moralistic terms as one of the key causes of the Israelite or Judean god’s judgment on and destruction of certain peoples.

 

Second, in these oracles non-Israelite peoples are not merely clumped together as a monolith. The author spells out an awareness of numerous named peoples. In doing so, the author incidentally engages in ethnographic descriptions and demonstrates to the Greek-speaking listener of the oracles the author’s attention to or knowledge about these numerous peoples. There are too many peoples to discuss here, but a couple are worth highlighting. Particularly noteworthy is the attention to Chaldeans (sometimes interchangeable with Babylonians), who are directly critiqued despite – or perhaps because of – the fact that the Israelites or Judeans are here portrayed as descendents of Abram from Ur of the Chaldees. Judeans are, in a sense, Chaldeans but as “God’s people” are imagined to be completely set apart, as you’ll see. Also worth noting is that the Egyptians are both associated with the Israelite god’s action in saving the righteous Israelite people via the seventh king, on the one hand, and worthy of condemnation like other peoples, on the other. In this world of Assyrians, Chaldeans, Egyptians, Phrygians, Lycians, Libyans, and many others, the oracles of the Sibyl seem aimed primarily at portraying the Israelite or Judean people as superior to all others. Although this might seem like an obvious point when dealing with Israelite or Judean characterizations of themselves, it is particularly noteworthy in connection with the ethnic hierarchies that come through in many other sources on this site. Many Greek or Roman ethnographic discussions give Judeans a very low rung on the ethnic ladder (e.g. Tacitus at this link). Assertion of superiority might at times (though not always) relate to this Greek and Roman denigration.

 

Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, these oracles are framed as the product of a foreign, non-Israelite Sibyl or prophetess (in other words, sort of a wise barbarian figure). Although a favourite persona to employ among Judean authors, the figure of the Sibyl herself is, most often, expressly a non-Israelite or non-Judean figure. Although one option is to speak of a “Hebrew” Sibyl, in most cases she is a foreigner, a non-Hebrew, non-Israelite or non-Judean (in our cases employed by a Greek-speaking Egyptian Judean author or authors). In fact, by the time of Varro (first century BCE), attempts to enumerate the Sibyls might present at least ten different well-known Sibyls of this type: Persian, Libyan, Delphian, Kimmerian (from Scythian territory north of the Black Sea), Erythrean, Samian, Kumean, Hellespontian, Phrygian, and Tiburtine (as cited by Lactantius, Divine Institutions 1.6). Incidentally not mentioned by Varro this time is our present Assyrian, or Babylonian Sibyl, which is clearly identified at the very end of our oracles. (Powerful eastern peoples are at times interchangeable or confused by Greek-speaking outsiders, as is the case with the use of Assyrian for what we might call a Babylonian figure here). Therefore the usage of this foreign figure by Judeans has many affinities with Greeks who emphasize foreign (non-Greek) or “barbarian” sources of wisdom or truth, or who appeal to such sources of superior knowledge as a way of claiming superiority over others.