TL;DRWhy This Matters
We tend to measure civilisation by its ruins — temples, aqueducts, libraries, walls. The Scythians had none of these, and so for centuries they were filed under "barbarian" and largely forgotten, a footnote between the great sedentary empires. That filing tells us more about our own assumptions than about them. Here was a culture that dominated the largest continuous landmass on earth for roughly five hundred years, that traded from the Black Sea to China, that influenced Persian metalwork and Greek mythology, and that developed a ritual relationship with cannabis sophisticated enough to make modern ethnobotanists pause. They were not a footnote. They were a different answer to the question of what civilisation can look like.
That answer feels newly urgent. We live in an era of accelerating nomadism — of remote work and climate displacement, of identities untethered from geography — and the Scythians offer a kind of ancient mirror. They proved that complexity, beauty, and spiritual depth do not require fixed addresses. Their gold is dazzling, yes, but it is the ideas encoded in that gold — cosmological, shamanic, ecological — that deserve our attention.
There is also something philosophically challenging about a culture we know almost entirely through its enemies and its dead. The Greeks described the Scythians. The Persians fought them. The burial mounds, called kurgans, hold what was left behind. But the Scythians themselves never wrote a word we can read. Everything we think we know is mediated, filtered, posthumous. That should give us interpretive humility — and it should also sharpen our curiosity about what slips through those filters anyway.
And then there is the cannabis. Herodotus described Scythian steam-bathing rituals involving hemp so vividly, and so specifically, that scholars dismissed him for centuries as an imaginative fabulist. Then archaeologists began opening kurgans and finding braziers, hemp seeds, and leather pouches exactly where he said they would be. When the ancient sources and the physical evidence align that precisely, it is worth asking what else we might have been too quick to dismiss.
Who Were the Scythians
The name "Scythian" is itself a complication. Ancient Greek writers used it loosely to describe a broad constellation of nomadic and semi-nomadic Iranian-speaking peoples who occupied the Pontic-Caspian steppe — the vast grassland stretching from the northern shores of the Black Sea east across what is now Ukraine, Russia, and Kazakhstan. Modern scholars sometimes distinguish between the "Royal Scythians" of the western steppe and related groups further east: the Saka of Central Asia, the Massagetae beyond the Caspian, and others. For our purposes, we will use "Scythian" in the broader cultural sense, as a family of related peoples who shared language roots, artistic conventions, burial practices, and an unmistakable way of being in the world.
They emerge into the historical record around the 9th or 8th century BCE, though their origins are older and murkier — likely descended from the Bronze Age steppe cultures that had been breeding horses and moving across the grasslands for millennia. By the 7th century BCE, they had exploded westward into the Near East, raiding deep into Anatolia and the Levant, reportedly dominating the region for nearly three decades before being expelled or bought off by the Medes. They appear in Assyrian records. They are mentioned, obliquely, in the Hebrew Bible. The ancient world noticed them.
Their homeland, the Pontic steppe, is a landscape of almost surreal openness. In every direction the land flattens to a horizon that seems impossibly far away, the sky enormous, the grass in summer a moving sea of gold and green. It is a landscape that produces a particular kind of consciousness — alert, panoramic, attuned to distance and weather and the behaviour of animals. The Scythians were products of this landscape, and it shaped everything about them, from their military tactics to their theology.
The Horse as Axis Mundi
Before the gold, before the cannabis, before any of it — there is the horse. The Scythians' relationship with horses was so total, so intimate, so structurally central to their existence that it is almost impossible to overstate. They ate horse meat, drank koumiss (fermented mare's milk), and their social hierarchies were partly measured in horses. They fought from horseback with a compound bow that gave them a range and rate of fire not equalled in European warfare for centuries. When a great chieftain died, his horses were killed and buried with him — dozens of them, sometimes, arranged in poses of arrested motion around the burial chamber, as if the hunt had simply paused.
The Scythians were not the first people to ride horses, but they were among the first to make cavalry — true cavalry, with the bow and the speed and the tactics — into a dominant military technology. Persian armies, which could field hundreds of thousands of infantry, repeatedly failed to defeat Scythian forces on the steppe, not because the Scythians had more soldiers, but because the nomads simply refused to stand and fight. They retreated, drew the enemy in, cut supply lines, and melted back into the grass. Darius I of Persia launched a massive campaign against them around 513 BCE and came home with nothing. The Scythians sent him a bird, a mouse, a frog, and five arrows — an enigmatic message that Herodotus records and that scholars still debate.
The horse in Scythian cosmology was more than a tool or a status symbol. Across the kurgan excavations, the horse appears as a psychopomp — a guide between worlds. The elaborate horse burials, the horse-shaped finials on weapons, the golden horse plaques that decorated clothing: all of this suggests an animal understood as a mediator between the living and the dead, between earth and sky, between the human and the divine. The great sky god of the Scythian pantheon, whom the Greeks identified with Apollo, was associated with the solar horse. To ride was, in some sense, to participate in cosmic motion.
Gold That Thinks
Here is where the Scythians confound every expectation we have of nomads: the gold. Not just the quantity of it — though the quantity is astonishing, kurgan after kurgan yielding objects of extraordinary craftsmanship — but the quality of thought embedded in it. Scythian goldwork is not decoration. It is a visual language.
The dominant aesthetic mode is what scholars call the Scythian Animal Style: a flowing, dynamic representation of animals — stags, eagles, big cats, horses, fish, griffins — often shown in combat, in motion, or contorted into impossible spiral poses where limbs become other animals, where the body of a predator contains within it the image of its prey. These images are found on belt plaques, sword sheaths, horse harnesses, drinking vessels, arm torques, and clothing ornaments. They appear across the entire steppe world, from Hungary to the Altai mountains, with a consistency that speaks to shared cosmological grammar rather than simple trade.
The combat scenes are particularly charged. A griffin tears at a horse. An eagle sinks talons into a stag. These are not mere hunting trophies frozen in metal — the same scenes repeat too precisely, too universally for that. Most scholars now read them as cosmological statements: the eternal cycle of predation and renewal, the interpenetration of the upper world (birds, sky animals) and the lower world (terrestrial prey), the violent generativity that keeps the cosmos turning. In this reading, every Scythian warrior who wore a gold plaque on his chest was carrying a compressed theological argument.
The craft itself deserves acknowledgment. Scythian goldsmiths — and it remains a genuine question whether these were Scythian craftsmen, Greek craftsmen working to Scythian commission, or some collaboration — achieved technical and artistic effects that stunned ancient observers and continue to stun museum visitors today. The Pectoral of Tovsta Mohyla, found in Ukraine in 1971, is perhaps the most famous single object: a massive gold collar nearly a foot wide, depicting in extraordinary detail scenes of everyday Scythian life on one register and animal combat on another. It is simultaneously domestic and cosmic — a man sewing a shirt in one panel, a griffin ripping apart a horse in the next. The juxtaposition is not accidental.
The Kurgans: Architecture of the Dead
The Scythians built no temples we have found, no permanent cities, no monuments to their own power in the way that empires typically do. What they built were kurgans — burial mounds that rise from the steppe in their hundreds of thousands, scattered across the grassland like slow explosions, some reaching fifteen metres in height and a hundred metres in diameter. These were their architecture, and they were built for the dead.
A royal kurgan burial was an event of enormous social and cosmological significance. When a Scythian king died, Herodotus tells us — and here the archaeology has again vindicated him — his body was embalmed and carried in a wagon from tribe to tribe across the steppe, each group paying its respects before the procession arrived at the burial site. A pit was dug, sometimes elaborately chambered. The king was laid out with his weapons, his gold, his food and drink for the journey ahead. Then his concubines, servants, and horses were sacrificed and arranged around him. The mound was raised. And then, Herodotus says, a year later, fifty more young men and fifty more horses were killed, stuffed, mounted on wooden frames, and arranged in a circle around the mound — a ghostly cavalry riding eternal guard.
This account was long treated as dramatic exaggeration. Excavations in Ukraine, Russia, and Kazakhstan have confirmed its essential accuracy in astonishing detail. At Arzhan, in the Tuvan steppe of Siberia, a kurgan dating to around 800 BCE contained over 160 horse burials arranged in precise radiating patterns around the central burial chamber. The horses had been killed with a single blow to the skull. Their equipment was intact, their positions deliberate.
The kurgan is not simply a tomb. It is a cosmogram — a physical model of the universe. The central burial is the axis, the mound is the cosmic mountain, the surrounding ring of horses or stones marks the boundary between worlds. In the shamanic cosmology that appears to have underlain Scythian religious practice, death was not an ending but a transition requiring navigation, provision, and escort. The kurgan was the architecture of that navigation.
The permafrost kurgans of the Altai — particularly those at Pazyryk, excavated in the mid-20th century — preserved things that the southern kurgans could not: textiles, wood, leather, tattooed human skin. The Pazyryk burials revealed a world of astonishing visual richness: the oldest pile carpet known (the Pazyryk carpet, approximately 500 BCE, still vivid in its reds and blues), elaborate wooden furniture, felt wall hangings with mythological scenes, and bodies bearing tattoos of extraordinary complexity — stags, fish, birds, and fantastical creatures flowing across shoulders and arms in the same Animal Style that appears on the gold. The tattoos suggest that the Scythian cosmological language was written on the body as well as on metal and stone.
Herodotus, Hemp, and the Steam Tent
In Book IV of his Histories, Herodotus describes what happens after a Scythian chieftain is buried. The mourners, he writes, purify themselves — not with water, but in a particular way:
"They make a booth by fixing in the ground three sticks inclined towards one another, and stretching around them woollen felts... inside this booth a dish is placed upon the ground, into which they put a number of red-hot stones, and then add some hemp-seed... immediately it smokes, and gives out such a vapour as no Grecian vapour-bath can exceed; the Scythians, delighted, shout for joy."
He is describing a cannabis sweat lodge. This passage was written in the 5th century BCE. For most of European intellectual history, it was either ignored or treated as Herodotean fantasy — the old historian was known to embellish, after all, and the idea of ancient Greeks reporting on ritual drug use among barbarians seemed... too colourful to be quite true.
Then, in 1929, a Scythian burial site in the Altai region yielded a leather pouch containing cannabis seeds and a brazier for heating stones. Other excavations followed. At multiple kurgan sites across the steppe, archaeologists found the physical apparatus Herodotus described: shallow bronze or ceramic bowls, heated stones, hemp seeds. In 2020, a study of residues in braziers from a 2,400-year-old burial site at Jirzankal cemetery in western China — the eastern edge of the Scythian cultural world — found chemical evidence of cannabis burning at temperatures high enough to produce psychoactive effects, with the highest THC concentrations found near high-altitude wild cannabis plants, suggesting deliberate selection for potency.
This is significant for several reasons. First, it confirms that cannabis was used not recreationally but ritually — the context is always funerary or ceremonial, the apparatus always found in sacred or liminal spaces. The Scythians were not getting high for entertainment. They were, apparently, using cannabis as a technology of consciousness — a means of crossing the boundary between the living and the dead, between the ordinary and the sacred.
Second, it raises the question of what role cannabis played in Scythian shamanism. The evidence for a shamanic religious tradition among steppe peoples is strong: the cosmological worldview of upper, middle, and lower worlds; the centrality of animal spirits and soul journeys; the role of particular individuals as mediators between worlds. The Scythians appear to have had religious specialists — the Greeks called them Enarei — who occupied an unusual social position, sometimes described as gender-liminal, sometimes associated with divination and healing. Whether these figures used cannabis in their practice is not proven, but the structural parallel to documented shamanic traditions elsewhere is suggestive.
Third — and most deliciously — this means that Herodotus was right. One of ancient history's most reliable sources on the Scythians turns out to be more reliable than his critics assumed. It is a lesson about the archaeology of disbelief: sometimes the "too strange to be true" is simply true.
The Goddess at the Centre
The Scythian pantheon, as reported by Herodotus, was complex — seven major deities, including equivalents of Hestia, Zeus, Apollo, Aphrodite, and others. But the figure who seems to stand at the centre of Scythian religious life, particularly in relation to the earth, fertility, and sovereignty, is the great goddess the Greeks identified with Gaia or sometimes Aphrodite: in Scythian, something approximating Tabiti for the hearth goddess and Api for the earth deity. She appears in the gold — often as a central enthroned figure approached by mounted warriors, a scene repeated across dozens of objects that has been read as a sovereignty ritual, a king receiving legitimacy from the feminine sacred.
The motif of the Great Goddess of the Steppe is ancient, predating the Scythians by millennia. Figurines of female forms appear in the steppe's Neolithic layers; the idea of the earth as a feminine generative power seems to have been a continuous presence across the grassland cultures. What the Scythians did was encode it in gold — specifically, in imagery associated with royal power. The king does not simply inherit authority; he receives it from the sacred feminine. Drinking vessels with the scene of a warrior receiving a cup from a goddess — a motif scholars call the investiture scene — appear across the Near East and the steppe as a persistent archetype of legitimate rule.
This has interesting implications. For a culture often characterised as hyper-masculine — warriors, horses, weapons — the ritual centrality of the feminine divine complicates the picture considerably. Scythian women, too, were not simply passive figures. The Amazons of Greek mythology are now widely understood by scholars as a cultural memory — or distortion — of the real phenomenon of armed Scythian and Sarmatian women. Burial archaeology has confirmed this: women buried with weapons, with horse equipment, with the marks of combat. Not all of them, not most of them, but enough — and specifically enough — to suggest that the warrior identity was not strictly gendered in the way Greek observers assumed.
The Steppe as Connective Tissue
It is tempting to view the Scythians in isolation — as a dramatic, exotic episode in the vast pageant of ancient history. But this would be to miss their most historically significant role: as the connective tissue of Eurasia.
The steppe is not a barrier. It is a highway. A rider on a good horse can cover enormous distances in ways that wheeled transport through forest or mountain cannot match. The Scythians and their cultural relatives maintained networks of exchange across the full breadth of the continent — networks along which moved gold, horses, textiles, ideas, and probably diseases. The Silk Road that we associate with a later era was not created from nothing; it was formalised and commercialised, but the routes and the relationships had existed, in nomadic form, for centuries before.
Scythian objects have been found in Greece and in China. Chinese sources describe peoples of the western steppe. Persian royal art shows Scythian tribute-bearers. The Animal Style that originated on the steppe appears in Scandinavian metalwork, in Thracian gold, in Chinese bronzes. When archaeologists find a Scythian-style horse plaque in a burial in what is now Hungary and an almost identical one in the Altai, they are looking at the outline of an ancient information network that spanned the continent.
This connectivity had spiritual dimensions too. The horse sacrifice, the soma ritual described in the Vedas, the cannabis ceremonies of the steppe — these may be related manifestations of a widespread complex of Indo-Iranian sacred practice that spread with the steppe peoples as they moved. The debate about the identity of Soma — the sacred plant of early Vedic religion — remains open, but cannabis is among the serious candidates, and the Scythians' geographic and temporal position places them at a plausible intersection between the steppe rituals and the spread of Indo-Iranian religious ideas toward India and Iran.
The Disappearance and the Echoes
The Scythians did not simply vanish. Cultures rarely do. Beginning in the 3rd century BCE, the Sarmatians — a related steppe people from further east — pushed the Scythian heartland westward and eventually absorbed or displaced much of the Scythian population. The last identifiable Scythian polity, a reduced kingdom in Crimea, survived until around the 3rd century CE before being absorbed into the tumult of the migration period. By then, the Goths and the Huns were beginning their own westward movements across the same grasslands, following the same ancient highways.
What the Scythians left behind was more diffuse than a ruin. Their genetic legacy, reconstructed in recent years through ancient DNA studies, shows considerable complexity — they were not a single ethnic group but a diverse population united by culture and language. Their artistic legacy is everywhere once you start looking: in the interlace patterns of early medieval European art, in the animal combat motifs that appear in Viking metalwork, in the persistent steppe-derived elements of Siberian and Central Asian shamanic traditions that continue today.
In Ukraine and Russia, kurgans still punctuate the landscape in their thousands. Most have never been excavated. Many have been looted — in antiquity and in modernity. Each one is a sealed chamber of information, a frozen moment from a world we have barely begun to understand. The ongoing conflict in that region has made the preservation of these sites more difficult and more urgent simultaneously.
The Scythians also live in language. The Greek word Skuthes gave us "Scythian." The ancient tribal name that appears in Greek as Skolotoi may be the source of "Slav," though this is debated. The Iranian languages of the Ossetic people of the Caucasus are the closest living descendants of Scythian speech — a living thread connecting the modern world to the gold-draped horsemen of the steppe.
Shamanism, the Soul, and the Edge of the World
Any serious engagement with the Scythians eventually arrives at the question of their inner life — what they believed the world was, where the soul went, what the sacred meant. And here the evidence, necessarily fragmentary, points consistently in one direction: toward a cosmology that is fundamentally shamanic in structure, one in which the visible world is only a thin layer over a much larger reality, in which certain individuals can move between layers, and in which death is not an ending but a relocation.
The cosmological model implicit in Scythian burial practice imagines at least two worlds: this one, and another one on the other side of a threshold marked by death. The kurgan is the threshold. The objects placed in the burial — the weapons, the gold, the food, the horses — are not symbolic; they are provisioning for an actual journey. The sacrificed servants and concubines are not mere displays of power; they are, within this logic, companions for the road. This is not casual superstition. It is a fully developed metaphysical system expressed in practice rather than text.
The Animal Style gold takes on deeper resonance in this context. The animals that appear in it — particularly the stag and the eagle — are classic shamanic figures: the stag as a guide to the lower world, the eagle as a vehicle of the upper world, the griffin as a guardian of the boundary between worlds. When a Scythian warrior wore a golden griffin on his quiver, he was not simply advertising wealth. He was, in some sense, claiming a relationship with the powers that governed the boundary between life and death.
This is the dimension of Scythian culture that feels most remote to modern secular consciousness, and perhaps most worth sitting with. A people who built their entire material culture — the gold, the graves, the horse burials, the hemp ceremonies — around the reality of a world that extends beyond the visible one. A people for whom the sacred was not a department of life but its entire atmosphere. Whatever we make of their specific beliefs, there is something in the seriousness of that orientation — the resource invested, the craft devoted, the life organised around it — that commands more than anthropological curiosity.
The Questions That Remain
The kurgans have not told us everything. They may never tell us everything. But the questions they leave open are some of the most interesting questions archaeology can ask:
What did the Scythians call themselves? The name their own language gave to their world, their gods, their dead — we have fragments, approximations through Greek and Persian transliteration, but never the word in their own mouth. A whole cosmology named in a language we cannot fully read.
Were the Enarei — those enigmatic, gender-liminal ritual specialists — something like shamans in the technical sense, and if so, was cannabis the vehicle by which they travelled? The archaeology has confirmed the hemp. It has not yet confirmed the journey.
What was the relationship between the Animal Style and actual spiritual practice? Were these images cosmological statements, clan markers, protective symbols, or all three at once? Does the stag on a warrior's comb mean something different from the stag on his sword, or is the meaning carried by the animal itself, independent of context?
How far did Scythian religious ideas travel? The convergences between steppe shamanism, early Vedic religion, and Iranian Zoroastrianism are suggestive but unresolved. If the Scythians were indeed part of the mechanism by which Indo-Iranian ideas spread westward and southward, how much of what became Greek, Persian, and Indian sacred thought passed through the smoke of a hemp brazier on the Eurasian steppe?
And perhaps most hauntingly: what happened in those ceremonies that we cannot excavate? The gold survives. The seeds survive. The bones survive. But the songs, the visions, the specific texture of what it felt like to be a Scythian soul crossing into whatever world they believed lay beyond the kurgan wall — that is lost entirely, scattered on the same wind that carries everything else across the steppe, into the enormous, patient, uncaring sky.
What does it mean that a civilisation this sophisticated, this connected, this spiritually serious, left no writing? And what does the fact that we keep finding them anyway — in the gold, in the grass, in the residue on ancient stones — tell us about the different ways a culture can choose to speak to the future?