Sarmatians

From the fifth century BCE to the fourth century CE the grasslands north of the Black and Caspian Seas belonged to the Sarmatians, a loose confederation of Iranian-speaking mounted nomads. Emerging in the southern Urals, they displaced the Scythians as masters of the Pontic steppe by about 200 BCE, pressed on the Roman frontier along the Danube, and were finally broken up by Goths and Huns. Their descendants were absorbed into many later peoples, and one branch, the Alans, survives in the Ossetians of the Caucasus.

Greek writers called them Sauromatai and later Sarmatai, from a native name usually explained as "armed with darts", a parallel to the Scythians' name for themselves as archers. Modern archaeologists use Sauromatian for the earlier phase and Sarmatian for the later. Where they came from is debated: some scholars see them as an offshoot of the Scythians or a local Ural population, while most still favour an arrival from Central Asia. Genetic studies link them closely to the Bronze Age Sintashta, Srubnaya and Andronovo steppe cultures, with a small eastern Asian component perhaps gained through contact with the Saka of the Altai.

The Soviet archaeologist Boris Grakov, writing in 1947, divided their burial mounds into four phases, from the Sauromatian of the sixth to fifth centuries BCE to the Late Sarmatian ending in the fourth century CE. The Early Sarmatian or Prokhorovka culture moved out of the southern Urals, first to the lower Volga and later westward, in the fourth and third centuries BCE. As Scythian power weakened after defeats by Macedon, Sarmatian tribes crossed the Don. In the second century BCE the Royal Sarmatians, the Iazyges and the Roxolani moved onto the Pontic steppe, and the Scythians who remained were largely absorbed, with only pockets surviving in Crimea and Dobruja. Greek cities such as Olbia paid them tribute, and Sarmatian kings dealt with the Bosporan Kingdom and with Pontus.

Sarmatian groups fought for Mithridates VI of Pontus against Rome in the first century BCE. The Iazyges pushed west to settle in the Tisza valley of the Hungarian plain by the mid-first century BCE, and both they and the Roxolani raided across the Danube into Roman Moesia and Thrace. Further east the Aorsi and Siraces became powerful, and a newer group, the Alans, rose to dominate the steppe north of the Caucasus by the second century CE. Sarmatians also travelled far inside the Roman world: a burial in Cambridgeshire dated to around 126 to 228 CE held a man of Sarmatian-related ancestry far from home.

The Sarmatians were herders who moved with their animals and fought on horseback, the western tribes with hide armour and the eastern ones with scale armour and long lances. Their gold work, influenced by Persian and Chinese styles, survives in finds such as the Novocherkassk Treasure and the Demidov Gift, a Sarmatian gold collection prized by Peter the Great. About a fifth of the warrior burials along the lower Don and Volga, by one archaeologist's count, belonged to armed women, and some scholars think such women lie behind the Greek legends of the Amazons.

Goths from the Baltic overran the Pontic steppe around 200 CE, and the Huns conquered the eastern Sarmatian lands, absorbing most of the Alans east of the Don in 375. Many Sarmatians then joined Gothic or Vandal bands in the Roman West, others merged with the Greeks of the Bosporus, the Maeotians of the North Caucasus or the early Slavs. In the early modern Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, the nobility built an ideology called Sarmatism around a claimed descent from them.

Our 100 BCE map draws an approximate Sarmatian region, labelled Sarmates, on the steppe north of the Black Sea and the Caucasus. Its neighbours include the Bosporan Kingdom, the Dacians, the remaining Scythians and the expanding Roman Republic.