Place:Iškuza

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Iškuza, or Scythian kingdom (Akkadian: 𒆳𒀾𒄖𒍝𒀀𒀀 mat Ášguzaya, Ancient Greek: Skúthēs, Hebrew: אשכוז‎ ʾAškūz) was a military and political entity created by the Scythians in the 7th-6th centuries BCE in Western Asia. The exact boundaries and form of statehood (kingdom, military-political association, or Scythian support base) remain uncertain. The center is usually given as Transcaucasia, the western part of modern Azerbaijan or northwestern Iran, specifically in the Lake Urmia region.

History

Origins

In the 8th and 7th centuries BCE, a significant movement of the nomadic peoples of the Eurasian Steppe brought the Cimmerians and the Scythians into Western Asia. According to Herodotus, this movement started when the Massagetae migrated west, forcing the Scythians to the west across the Araxes river,[1] where they displaced the Cimmerians.[1] The Cimmerians fled to the south along the coast of the Black Sea and reached Anatolia; the Scythians in turn pursued the Cimmerians, but followed the coast of the Caspian Sea and arrived in the region of present-day Azerbaijan, where they settled around today's Mingachevir, Ganja and the Mugan plain, and turned eastern Transcaucasia into their centre of operations until the early 6th century BCE.[2][3][4] While the earlier modern view of the Scythian presence in Southwest Asia held that a separate group of Scythians had migrated there,[5] the more recent view is that the Scythians in Southwest Asia never lost contact with the Scythian kingdom of the steppes, and their activities in fact constituted a series of lengthy military expeditions in Southwest Asia rather than an attempt at permanent conquest.[6]

Rise

The first mention of the Scythians in the records of the Neo-Assyrian Empire is from between 680/679 and 678/677 BCE,[6] when their king Išpakaia joined the Mannaeans[7] and the Cimmerians in an attack on Assyria and was killed in battle by the Assyrian king Esarhaddon.[8]

Išpakaia was succeeded by Bartatua, perhaps his son.[8] Unlike Išpakaia, Bartatua sought a rapprochement with the Assyrians, and in 672 BCE[6] asked for the hand of Esarhaddon's daughter Serua-eterat in marriage, which is attested to in Esarhaddon's questions to the oracle of the Sun-god Shamash.[9] Whether this marriage did happen is not recorded in the Assyrian texts, but the close alliance between the Scythians and Assyria under Bartatua's reign suggested that it did, and perhaps Serua-eterat was the mother of Bartatua's son Madyes;[10] henceforth, the Scythians remained allies of the Assyrian Empire until it started unravelling after the death of Esarhaddon's son Ashurbanipal.[9]

Bartatua's marriage to the Assyrian princess required that he pledge allegiance to Assyria as a vassal, and in accordance with Assyrian law, the territories ruled by him were his fief granted by the Assyrian king, which made the Scythian presence in Western Asia a nominal extension of the Neo-Assyrian Empire.[9] Under this arrangement, the power of the Scythians in Western Asia heavily depended on their cooperation with the Assyrian Empire.[11]

Bartatua was succeeded by his son, Madyes, who brought Scythian power in Western Asia to its peak.[9] In 653 BCE, Madyes invaded the Medes, an Iranian people engaged in a war against Assyria, and the Median king Phraortes was killed in battle, either against the Assyrians or against Madyes. Madyes then imposed Scythian hegemony over Media for twenty-eight years on behalf of the Assyrians, thus starting a period which Herodotus called the "Scythian rule over Asia".[12][4][13] Madyes soon expanded the Scythian hegemony to the states of Mannae and Urartu.[12]

In 637 BCE, the Thracian Treri, who had migrated across the Thracian Bosporus and invaded Anatolia[14] under their king Kobos and in alliance with the Cimmerians and the Lycians, attacked the kingdom of Lydia during the seventh year of the reign of the Lydian king Ardys. They defeated the Lydians and captured Sardis, the capital city of Lydia, except for its citadel. Ardys may have been killed in this attack.[15] Ardys's son and successor, Sadyattes, may possibly also have been killed in another Cimmerian attack on Lydia in 635 BCE.[15] Soon after 637 BCE, with Assyrian approval[16] and in alliance with the Lydians,[17] the Scythians under Madyes entered Anatolia, expelled the Treri from Asia Minor, and defeated the Cimmerians so that they no longer constituted a threat again, following which the Scythians extended their domination to Central Anatolia[4] until they were expelled by the Medes from Western Asia in the 590s BCE.[18]

Decline and end

By the 620s BCE, the Assyrian Empire began unravelling after the death of Ashurbanipal. In addition to internal instability within Assyria itself, Babylon revolted against the Assyrians in 626 BCE.[19] The following year, in 625 BCE, Cyaxares, the son of Phraortes and his successor to the Median kingship, overthrew the Scythian yoke over the Medes by inviting the Scythian rulers to a banquet and then murdering them all after getting them drunk; Madyes was likely killed during this massacre.[20][19][13]

Shortly afterwards, some time between 623 and 616 BCE, the Scythians took advantage of the power vacuum created by the crumbling of the power of their former Assyrian allies and overran the Levant. They reached as far south as Palestine before the Egyptian pharaoh Psamtik I met them and convinced them to turn back by offering them gifts.[21] The Scythians retreated, passing through Ascalon largely without incident, although some stragglers looted the temple of Astarte in the city, which was considered to be the most ancient of all temples to that goddess. According to Herodotus, the goddess punished the perpetrators of the sack of her temple and their descendants with a "female disease", due to which they became a class of transvestite diviners called the Enarees in Scythian, *anarya, meaning "unmanly"[6]).[4]

According to Babylonian records, starting around 615 BCE, the Scythians were operating as allies of Cyaxares and the Medes in their war against Assyria,[11] and were finally expelled from Southwest Asia by the Medes in the 590s BCE, after which they retreated to the Pontic Steppe.[11] Some splinter Scythian groups nevertheless remained in Southwest Asia. One such splinter group likely joined the Medes and participated in the Median conquest of Urartu,[5] while some other Transcaucasian Scythian splinter groups perhaps retreated northward to join the Scythians, who had previously moved into the Kuban Steppe.[5] One group formed a kingdom in what is now Azerbaijan under Median overlordship, but eventually hostilities broke out between it and Cyaxares, so they left Transcaucasia and fled to the kingdom of Lydia as refugees,[22] although a number of these Scythians still remained in the southeast Caucasus, and were later mentioned by Livy under the name of Sacassani, while the country was called the Land of the Skythenoi by Xenophon and Sakasene by Ptolemy.[3] By the middle of the 6th century BCE, the Scythians who had remained in Southwest Asia had completely assimilated culturally and politically into Median society and no longer existed as a distinct group.[23]

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 Sulimirski & Taylor 1991, p. 553.
  2. ↑ Diakonoff 1985, p. 97.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 Sulimirski & Taylor 1991, p. 562.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 Phillips, E. D. (1972). "The Scythian Domination in Western Asia: Its Record in History, Scripture and Archaeology". World Archaeology 4 (2): 129-138. https://www.jstor.org/stable/123971. Retrieved 5 November 2021. 
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 Sulimirski & Taylor 1991, p. 568.
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 Ivantchik 2018.
  7. ↑ Grayson 1991, p. 128.
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 Sulimirski & Taylor 1991, p. 564.
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 9.2 9.3 Sulimirski & Taylor 1991, p. 564-565.
  10. ↑ Sulimirski & Taylor 1991, p. 566-567.
  11. ↑ 11.0 11.1 11.2 Sulimirski & Taylor 1991, p. 567.
  12. ↑ 12.0 12.1 Diakonoff 1985, p. 117-118.
  13. ↑ 13.0 13.1 Sulimirski & Taylor 1991, p. 565.
  14. ↑ Diakonoff 1985.
  15. ↑ 15.0 15.1 Dale, Alexander (2015). "WALWET and KUKALIM: Lydian coin legends, dynastic succession, and the chronology of Mermnad kings". Kadmos 54: 151-166. doi:10.1515/kadmos-2015-0008. https://www.academia.edu/29719834/WALWET_and_KUKALIM_Lydian_coin_legends_dynastic_succession_and_the_chronology_of_Mermnad_kings. Retrieved 10 November 2021. 
  16. ↑ Grousset, René (1970). The Empire of the Steppes. Rutgers University Press. pp. 9. ISBN 0-8135-1304-9. https://archive.org/details/empireofsteppesh00prof. "A Scythian army, acting in conformity with Assyrian policy, entered Pontis to crush the last of the Cimmerians" 
  17. ↑ Diakonoff 1985, p. 126.
  18. ↑ Spalinger, Anthony J. (1978). "The Date of the Death of Gyges and Its Historical Implications". Journal of the American Oriental Society 98 (4): 400-409. doi:10.2307/599752. https://www.jstor.org/stable/599752. Retrieved 25 October 2021. 
  19. ↑ 19.0 19.1 Diakonoff 1985, p. 119.
  20. ↑ Diakonoff 1993.
  21. ↑ Spalinger, Anthony (1978). "Psammetichus, King of Egypt: II". Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt 15: 49-57. doi:10.2307/40000130. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40000130. Retrieved 2 November 2021. 
  22. ↑ Diakonoff 1985, p. 125-126.
  23. ↑ Boardman, John; Hammond, N. G. L.; Lewis, D. M. et al., eds (1988). "The early history of the Medes and the Persians and the Achaemenid empire to the death of Cambyses". The Cambridge Ancient History. 4. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 1-52. ISBN 978-0-521-22804-6. 

Sources




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