The Scythians

Nomad Warriors of the Steppe

By: Barry Cunliffe

Narrated by: Matthew Waterson

The Scythians were nomadic horsemen who ranged wide across the grasslands of the Asian steppe from the Altai mountains in the east to the Great Hungarian Plain in the first millennium BC. Their steppe homeland bordered on a number of sedentary states to the south and there were, inevitably, numerous interactions between the nomads and their neighbours. The Scythians fought the Persians on a number of occasions, in one battle killing their king and on another occasion driving the invading army of Darius the Great from the steppe.

Relations with the Greeks around the shores of the Black Sea were rather different - both communities benefiting from trading with each other. It is from the writings of Greeks like the historian Herodotus that we learn of Scythian life: their beliefs, their burial practices, their love of fighting, and their ambivalent attitudes to gender. It is a world that is also brilliantly illuminated by the rich material culture recovered from Scythian burials, where all the organic material is amazingly well preserved.

Barry Cunliffe here marshals this vast array of evidence - both archaeological and textual - in a masterful reconstruction of the lost world of the Scythians, allowing them to emerge in all their considerable vigor and splendor for the first time in over two millennia.

©2019 Barry Cunliffe (P)2020 Tantor

complete central steppe history 1500BC-430CE

I was very pleased with this book and will keep it as a treasured part of my library. The author goes from the early Andronovo 1500BC to the final days of the Alans as they absorb within the Vandals of northern Africa in 430. Great detail of culture, religion, government structure, military achievements and migration. It covers Eastern Asia including Xiongnu, Tocharians and many cultures I had not heard of before. I would highly recommend this book for anyone interested in early central Asian history.

archaeologically based

Informative to a degree but not up to date and somewhat disappointing due to a confusing order of dissemination. In other words the data set was incomprehensive and ineffectively compounded.

Important Information

The presentation was very well done. I was impressed by the content and its organization.

a must listen for ancient history enjoyers

pair this book up with the the greater courses lectures about people of the step. it's titled, the barbarian empires of the steppe.
by professor Kenneth W. Harl

this book gives more in-depth and fascinating cultural insight into the scythians, than you get from the lectures. though at the very end of the book the description of the artifacts is a little odd for audiobook. still every enjoyable .

Sounds more like an academic paper

than something written for the well educated lay person. However, once past the endless lists of who excavated what, and when,
the author links interesting quotations from ancient sources about the Scythians with corroborating physical evidence.

The narrator also uses some odd pronunciations that I haven't heard before, and I don't think it's just the British accent.

If you don't need this for research purposes, or a handy soporific, you may want to pass on this one.