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The Ossetians: Descendants of the Scythians?
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The Ossetians of the northern Caucasus Mountains have a widely accepted claim to be called the enduring remnant of the Scythians.
The Eurasian steppes have always been something of a melting-pot of peoples, who came in successive waves and each imposed something of their own culture and language on the way through. After the Scythians came the Sarmatians, the Alans, the Huns and Mongols from the East, Slavs from the West and Goths from the North. However, the Ossetians of the northern Caucasus Mountains have a widely accepted claim to be called the enduring remnant of the Scythians.
The larger and more northern part of the Ossetian homeland, now called Alania, lies within Russia and the southern part, South Ossetia within Georgia, but according to their own traditions, the Ossetians came there from the region of the Don River in southern Russia. They claim descent from the Alans, a tribe that displaced the Scythians and Sarmatians but incorporated the genes of both. They say that when the Huns invaded their lands, those who could escape found shelter and security in the hard to reach slopes of the Caucasus mountains. Many scholars accept the Ossetian mother language to be a dialect descended from Western Scythian. The word "don" used by the Ossetians to describe water or a river is from the ancient eastern branch of the Iranian* language used by both Scythians and Sarmatians - the names of the major rivers that flow to the Black Sea: the Danube, Dniester, Dnieper, Donets and the Don, are of Scythian origin. Although the Scythians themselves had no written language, Scythian words preserved in Greek texts have been used to prove other linguistic connections to the Ossetian language. Folk tradition also suggests links between Ossetia and Scythia. For example, both share a special reverence for fire. No true Ossetian would douse a blaze; it must be allowed to die by itself. Scythians purified graves with torches; Ossetians kindle a blaze beside the grave. Other burial customs are stringly reminiscent of the Scythians too: in an article in National Geographic Sept 1996 "Searching for the Scythians" the reporter Mike Edwards visits the home of an old Ossetian and records this conversation: "Horse sacrifice at a funeral was done if the man was a good rider," [the old Ossetian] related, "But usually we'd take the horse to the grave and say, 'We want you to have this horse in heaven.' Then we'd walk it three times round the grave and set it free to roam. I do remember when we killed a horse at a burial. It was about 15 years ago." I asked, "Didn't the state farm object to this as wasting a horse?" "Who was going to ask them?" he shot back, "It was our tradition, from our ancestors."*The whole issue of whether the Scythian language was Iranian or not is almost as much of a political hot potato as the question of their ethnicity, but seems to accepted by most scholars. Note: I wrote this brief article in 1993 for another now-defunct site, and haven't updated it since. |
Ameyalli
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