“The Scythian Empire: Central Eurasia and the Birth of the Classical Age from Persia to China” by Christopher I Beckwith

Christopher Beckwith likes to shake up the staid world of archeologists, philologists and historians with big claims. In his Empires of the Silk Road, he argued the debt of world civilization to unfamiliar peoples from inner Asia, changing a Euro-centric or Sino-Centric approach to history into steppe-centricity. The Scythian Empire takes this one step forward by attributing many of the contributions from the steppe to a single people, the Scythians. In Beckwith’s telling, the Wusun, the Xiongnu, the Yuezhi, the Tokharians and the Soghdians are all Scythians, as are the Medes.

This is a big, simplifying explanation, which, if widely accepted, would make the heretofore complicated history of Central Asia a lot more accessible. What is unsure is how many readers will be convinced by Beckwith’s arguments.

 

The Scythian Empire: Central Eurasia and the Birth of the Classical Age from Persia to China, Christopher I Beckwith (Princeton University Press, January 2023)
The Scythian Empire: Central Eurasia and the Birth of the Classical Age from Persia to China, Christopher I Beckwith (Princeton University Press, January 2023)

The very title of the book is sure to provoke. The prevailing view of the Scythians (Masters of the Steppe, Pankova, Simpson, 2021) is that they did not organize themselves into a recognizable empire. The first people to have mastered mounted combat, the pastoralist Scythians migrated, during the first millennium BCE into the territories of settled peoples, including the Assyrians, the Chinese and the Mauryas in India. Acting as mercenaries, tribal auxiliaries and occasionally as warlords, they spread their culture from the Yellow River to the Danube, leaving behind in tumulus graves their characteristic three-bladed arrows, horse sacrifices, and magnificent gold jewelry, now the pride of museums like the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg. Their intangible legacy included the adoption of cavalry by the major empires of Eurasia. Modern survivors of their original stock include the Ossetes in the northern Caucasus and probably the Pashtuns of the Hindu Kush.

Beckwith sees both the impact and the legacy of the Scythians on a far bigger scale. For him the Scythians are the founders of the Median and Persian empire, of the Zhao kingdom in China’s Warring States era, and ultimately the Qin dynasty of China’s first emperor. In his telling, the Scythian raiders in the Middle East are identical to the Medes who served as allies of the Assyrians and then supplanted them. Depictions of Medes and Scythians in Assyrian and Persian bas-reliefs indeed suggest a close affinity. Cyrus the Persian and Darius are both Medic-Scythians. Darius’s monotheism arises from steppe Tengrism (belief in a sky God), whose prophet Zoroaster writes in a language we call Avestan, but is actually Scythian. The boldness of these assertions takes one’s breath away, while at the same time providing explanations for many previously murky turns in Herodotus’s narrative of Persian history.

Turning to China, Beckwith is no less bold. King Zhao Wuding, who proclaimed the necessity of “dress like the barbarians and shooting from horseback (胡服骑射)”, is not a Han Chinese with a radical program of cultural appropriation, but rather a Scythian prince Sinicized by later Chinese historians. Zheng, the future Shi Huangdi, grew up as a hostage in the Zhao court, but he too is  shown as a Scythian, which is why his cavalry ultimately prevailed to end the Warring States period and create the Chinese empire. Even the name for China itself, 華 (huá), reflects Scythian “Arya”, “noble”. The great steppe empire of the Xiongnu is also seen as a Scythian polity, with ethnic intermixtures of Turkic, Mongolic or Tungusic elements.

 

While many of Beckwith’s arguments are plausible, if not ultimately provable, he tests his readers’ acquiescence when he argues that the Buddha and Laozi were Scythians, together with Zoroaster and the Greek Anacharsis. All were noted figures in the great period of intellectual ferment between 500 and 100 BCE, dubbed the Axial Age by Karl Japers. The German philosopher could not account for the mysterious synchronicity of this ferment across Greece, India and China. Beckwith’s explanation is that the wide-ranging Scythians invented philosophy. This reviewer pumps for the explanation of Eric Havelock (Preface to Plato, Harvard, 1963), who argued that philosophy resulted from wide-spread literacy, itself the product of increasing exchange and social specialization. Did this happen as a result of the Scythian trading and empire building? That is entirely plausible.

Crucial to Beckwith’s sweeping narrative is the assumption that the Scythians maintained their identity over centuries and throughout their migrations. He claims that the Scythians conquered other nations and “creolized” them, without defining what this means. Other instances of migration and conquest suggest that identities can be fluid. The Russians are named for a Swedish tribe, the English and the French for German tribes. The steppe Magyars managed to impose their language in Hungary, the Turkic Bulgars adopted the Slavic language of their subjects. The Tatars of Russia started off as Shamanistic Mongolian-speakers and wound up as Muslim Turkish speakers. It is problematic to say that an ancient Persian or Zhao person identified as a Scythian.

Beckwith will have none of this. He argues that the tradition of divine kingship and the royal tribe, as defined by the Scythians, kept a hold on the peoples of the steppe, such that later successors of the Scythians, the Xiongnu, the Turks and even the Mongols, could only imagine having a ruler of the seed of the royal tribe (cf The Horde). Beckwith argues extensively for the persistence of this notion in the identity of many steppe dynasties, along with the associated term “Arya”, meaning noble.

 

Beckwith displays a mastery of philology and epigraphy across a number of languages, including old Chinese and old Tibetan, cuneiform inscriptions and Greek manuscripts. He insists on reexamining the interpretation of ancient texts, since the received translations may lead us astray. As an example, he points out that a scribal error in Herodotus had historians looking for the “Colaxai” people, when “Scolaxai” were intended, a dialect variant of the name Scythian. The edition conveniently replicates all the ancient text for students and scholars to make their own judgements.

The significance and persistence of the Scythians’ impact on history should not be underestimated. Their contribution to the founding of the first empires in the Middle East, India and China is hard to dispute. Did they actually rule over the Persian and the Chinese empires themselves? Beckwith’s readers will be torn between the attraction of his big, simplifying theory, and the stretch of imagination that full acceptance of his arguments require.


David Chaffetz is the author of Three Asian Divas: Women, Art and Culture in Shiraz, Delhi and Yangzhou (Abbreviated Press, November 2019) and Raiders, Rulers, and Traders: The Horse and the Rise of Empire (WW Norton, July 2024).