Why did I get this book?
I saw a short review of it and thought it sounded interesting.
Is it what I thought it was?
Not really: the structure of the book is not what I would have expected. More in a bit.
What continuing uses might I have for it?
This is way afield from my own interests and expertise, so I can’t think of too many circumstances where I’d return to it. There is one question I retain after reading that it stimulated me to think about, so there’s that much that might draw me back to it, even just as a point of reference. (Also more in a bit.)
Quotes
“About 2,700 years ago, mounted Scythian warriors raced across the steppe zone of ancient Central Eurasia, southeast to the Yellow River and the region that became Chao in North China, southwest into Central Asia and Media, and west to the Danube and Central Europe. They created the world’s first huge empire. Though their feat was largely duplicated by the Hun Empire of Late Antiquity, the Turk Empire of the Early Middle Ages, and the Mongol Empire of the Central Middle Ages, the Scythians did it first.”
“The Scythians turn out to be more fascinating, creative and important than anyone, including this writer, ever suspected. They were unlike any other culture of Antiquity when they started out, but by the time they were done they had changed the world to be like them in many respects. It is time to rewrite the histories and revise the old maps.”
Commentary, asides, loose thoughts, unfair complaints
The introduction, quoted above, had me expecting a certain kind of organizational structure to the book that follows. It’s a common enough template, and I say that without even the slightest desire to disparage—it’s a good template. The template I have in mind is “Scholar is writing a new work of synthesis that summarizes a big range of existing highly specialized work, updates it with new findings and new interpretations, and argues for a major reconsideration of existing historical narratives. Task #1: describe the basic subject of the synthesis as it has been known up until relatively recently, give a basic rundown of the topic for non-specialists, put it in context. Task #2: lay out the historiography compactly, describing how previous consensus narratives about the subject developed. Task 3: discuss the development of new evidence and new interpretations in the last 20+ years. Task 4: the new synthesis described”. In that order.
This book, on the other hand, moves straight to a prologue that makes you feel as if you missed several previous chapters—it leaps right in to a description of the Scythians and their historical context as if all of that is already known to the reader. And yet it doesn’t read as a highly specialized monograph written primarily for other specialists in this history, either. I was expecting some overall evaluation of Herodotus as a source but he just jumps in and uses Herodotus relatively straightforwardly, except when he doesn’t, e.g., turns to some other source of evidence, not always fully described in the text itself. There’s almost no review in this opening section of the development of scholarly knowledge in more recent times—scholars who have written on the Scythians are footnoted (and sometimes discussed in footnotes) but not evaluated in this initial synthesis. If you aren’t already familiar with many places and names that are part of the 9th-6th Century Eurasian world, you will be lost very quickly. It’s a confusing book if you don’t come to it invested in the subject already, and at least some of that is rooted in the book’s structure, but also its reluctance to engage in a kind of introductory summary or narrate the intellectual history of knowledge about the Scythians.
The book reminds me in a curious way of late 19th and early 20th Century expert writing by historically knowledgeable scholars—and the scholarship of a certain kind of classicist who assumes some broad knowledge in his readers, doesn’t feel the need to make explicit statements about methodological or theoretical orientations, and intermingles classical sources with later writing almost as if they are peers. I didn’t entirely object to it as an approach, but I left the book knowing not that much more about the Scythians in relative terms because I have no idea how to weight Beckwith’s synthesis in relationship to any prior historiographical consensus, and there’s no clean summary narrative of Scythian history at any point in the book. (The initial prologue chooses instead to describe the Scythians in terms of a series of innovations in Eurasian history that he believes they deserve credit for that then diffused across the entire range of the continent into subsequent empires and smaller states.)
The emphasis on credit-where-credit’s-due did give me two things to think about that I could abstract away from the specifics of the Scythian case. The first is the wider intellectual history of arguments between historians over diffusion vs. divergence, e.g., the inclination of some historians to attribute important institutions to an originary culture whose ideas then descended in linear fashion to subsequent civilizations as opposed to seeing those institutions as developing in parallel or convergent fashion over time, or having multiple completely separate origins over time and space. The argument, or perhaps tendency is a better word for it, ostensibly echoes the difference in evolutionary history between organisms that have direct linear connections to one another where there are physical, behavioral and genetic connections that are obvious and observable, organisms that have diverged from one another to the point of appearing to be completely different from one another despite their historical relationship, and convergent evolution—organisms that resemble one another despite being almost entirely unrelated, because they operate in a similar ecological niche.
In evolution and in history, limited evidence, whether from the fossil record or a thin archival record, often make it hard to fully sort out those distinctions. But with history, there’s another thing at play, which is a kind of pseudo-nationalist argument about giving credit. There was a time where some historians furiously criticized a set of Afrocentrist scholars who asserted that Egypt was originally a fully Black culture and that Egypt and Nubia together were the originators of everything important about antiquity, that the Greeks “stole” African accomplishments. This was a maximalist kind of diffusionist argument—scholars following the work of Cheikh Anta Diop in particular tended to assert that all sub-Saharan African societies tied back to this African patrimony. It wasn’t a remotely good argument in evidentiary terms, but I would also cop to really disliking this kind of fundamentalist diffusionism wherever I come across it, precisely because it leads to these kinds of claims of origination and theft. (Some of the Afrocentrist writers, most particularly Martin Bernal, were perfectly right to point out that claims of Greek, Roman or Western invention of many institutions and ideas were just as dubious as many others.)
Beckwith seems to me to be a kind of proponent of Scythian originalism and thus a diffusionist. Even though that puts me on my guard right off the bat, I have to say that there is a point where you have to look at how institutions and concepts disseminate across time—it’s not quite linear, but an idea or a way of practice once put into play remains in circulation, sometimes obviously so, sometimes in less visible reservoirs and margins. The recurrence of highly mobile peoples from the Eurasian grasslands forming empires after moving into more sedentary agricultural societies could just be a kind of environmental determinism, though I’m even more skeptical of that proposition. But it could also be a deep idea that stayed in the sociopolitical imaginary of many societies across the continent—and if so, well, somebody had the idea first, whenever that might have been.