Overview

Reimagines the Scythians as highly mobile cultural innovators. The Scythians offers a bold new take on the horse-riding peoples who once inhabited the vast steppe lands from the Black Sea to the Siberian Altai. Drawing on archaeological finds, ancient texts, and comparative insights, Caspar Meyer shows how these communities forged dynamic networks rooted in art, mobility, and interspecies relationships. He brings ancient and modern encounters with the Scythians into dialogue - from Herodotus' ethnography to modernist art and contemporary national imagination - revealing how their literary and visual afterlives continue to shape our understanding. Long reduced to barbarian stereotypes, the Scythians emerge as cultural innovators and co-creators of Eurasian history. Lively, accessible, and thought-provoking, this book opens up a world where people and things move together in unexpected and transformative ways.

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9781836391937

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Reviews

This bold and ambitious book brings to life the horse-riding peoples of the Eurasian steppe while also exploring the political conditions that have shaped their discovery and study from Imperial Russia to the present. It offers a nuanced account of Western, Russian, and Ukrainian scholarship, presenting major anthropological theories accessibly and vividly illustrating how textual sources and archaeology together illuminate the past. * Karen S. Rubinson, Research Associate, Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York University *

""This bold and ambitious book brings to life the horse-riding peoples of the Eurasian steppe while also exploring the political conditions that have shaped their discovery and study from Imperial Russia to the present. It offers a nuanced account of Western, Russian, and Ukrainian scholarship, presenting major anthropological theories accessibly and vividly illustrating how textual sources and archaeology together illuminate the past.""--Karen S. Rubinson, New York University ""Highly evocative, insightful and utterly compelling, Caspar Meyer's fascinating reassessment of Scythian civilization reshapes our understanding of how Scythian nomads experienced their world. A masterful and often intimate portrait of steppe nomad society, Meyer's book challenges modern preconceptions and assumptions concerning both their way of life and our own. An astonishing tour de force."" --Joseph Skinner, Newcastle University

Author Information

Caspar Meyer is professor of classical archaeology and material culture at Bard Graduate Center, New York. He has published widely on ancient Greek and Scythian art, including Greco-Scythian Art and the Birth of Eurasia.

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