Agathyrsi


The Agathyrsi were an ancient people belonging to the Scythian cultures who lived in Pryazovia before being later displaced by the Scythians into the Transylvanian Plateau, in the region that later became Dacia. The Agathyrsi are largely known from Herodotus of Halicarnassus's description of them in the 5th century BC.

Name

The name is the Latinisation of the Ancient Greek name , which was itself the Hellenized form of a Scythian name whose original form is not attested.
The linguist Alexis Manaster Ramer has reconstructed the original Scythian form of this name as *Haxāϑrauš, meaning "prospering the friend/", with the final part modified into, referring to the composite vegetal wand of Bacchus, in Greek because the ancient Greeks associated Scythian peoples with Bacchic rites.

History

Origins

The arrival of the Agathyrsi in Europe was part of the larger process of westward movement of Central Asian Iranic nomads towards Southeast and Central Europe which lasted from the 1st millennium BC to the 1st millennium AD, and later included other Iranic nomads such as the Cimmerians, Scythians, Sauromatians, and Sarmatians. The archaeological and historical records regarding these migrations are however scarce, and permit only a very broad outline of this complex development to be sketched.

Beginning of steppe nomadism

The formation of genuine nomadic pastoralism happened in the early 1st millennium BC due to climatic changes causing the environment in the Central Asian and Siberian steppes to become cooler and drier than before. These changes caused the sedentary mixed farmers of the Bronze Age to become nomadic pastoralists, so that by the 9th century BC all the steppe settlements of the sedentary Bronze Age populations had disappeared, leading to the development of population mobility and the formation of warrior units necessary to protect herds and take over new areas.
These climatic conditions in turn caused the nomadic groups to become transhumant pastoralists constantly moving their herds from one pasture to another in the steppe, and to search for better pastures to the west, in Ciscaucasia and the forest steppe regions of western Eurasia.

Chernogorovka-Novocherkassk complex

The Agathyrsi originated as a section of the first wave of the nomadic populations who originated in the parts of Central Asia corresponding to eastern Kazakhstan or the Altai-Sayan region, and who had, beginning in the 10th century BC and lasting until the 9th to 8th centuries BC, migrated westwards into the Pontic-Caspian Steppe regions, where they formed new tribal confederations which constituted the Chernogorovka-Novocherkassk complex.
Among these tribal confederations were the Agathyrsi in the Pontic Steppe, as well as the Cimmerians in the Caspian Steppe, and possibly the Sigynnae in the Pannonian Steppe. The archaeological and historical records regarding these migrations are however scarce, and permit to sketch only a very broad outline of this complex development.
The Agathyrsi thus corresponded to a part of the Chernogorovka-Novocherkassk complex, to whose development three main cultural influences contributed to:
  • present in the development of the Chernogorovka-Novocherkassk complex is a strong impact of the native Bilozerka culture, especially in the form of pottery styles and burial traditions;
  • the two other influences were of foreign origin:
  • *attesting of the Inner Asian origin, a strong material influence from the Altai, Aržan and Karasuk cultures from Central Asia and Siberia is visible in the Chernogorovka-Novocherkassk complex of Inner Asian origin were especially dagger and arrowhead types, horse gear such as bits with stirrup-shaped terminals, deer stone-like carved stelae and Animal Style art;
  • *in addition to this Central Asian influence, the Kuban culture of Ciscaucasia also played an important contribution in the development of the Chernogorovka-Novocherkassk complex, especially regarding the adoption of Kuban culture-types of mace heads and bimetallic daggers.
The Chernogorovka-Novocherkassk complex thus developed natively in the North Pontic region over the course of the 9th to mid-7th centuries BC from elements which had earlier arrived from Central Asia, due to which it itself exhibited similarities with the other early nomadic cultures of the Eurasian steppe and forest steppe which existed before the 7th century BC, such as the Aržan culture, so that these various pre-Scythian early nomadic cultures were thus part of a unified Aržan-Chernogorovka cultural layer originating from Central Asia.
Thanks to their development of highly mobile mounted nomadic pastoralism and the creation of effective weapons suited to equestrian warfare, all based on equestrianism, these nomads from the Pontic-Caspian Steppes were able to gradually infiltrate into Central and Southeast Europe and therefore expand deep into this region over a very long period of time, so that the Chernogorovka-Novocherkassk complex covered a wide territory ranging from Central Europe and the Pannonian Plain in the west to Caucasia in the east, including present-day Southern Russia.
This in turn allowed the Chernogorovka-Novocherkassk complex itself to strongly influence the Hallstatt culture of Central Europe: among these influences was the adoption of trousers, which were not used by the native populations of Central Europe before the arrival of the Central Asian steppe nomads.

In the Pontic Steppe

Within the western sections of the Eurasian Steppe, the Agathyrsi lived in the part of the Pontic Steppe situated on the northern shore of the Maeotian Sea corresponding to Pryazovia, while their neighbours to the east, in the Ciscaucasian Steppe and the steppe regions to the north of the Caspian Sea were the Cimmerians, who themselves also belonged to the grouping of Iranic nomads of Central Asian origin belonging to the Chernogorovka-Novocherkassk complex.

Displacement of the Agathyrsi

A second wave of migration of Iranic nomads corresponded arrival of the early Scythians from Central Asia into the Caucasian Steppe, which started in the 9th century BC, when a significant movement of the nomadic peoples of the Eurasian Steppe started after the early Scythians were expelled out of Central Asia by either the Massagetae, who were a powerful nomadic Iranic tribe from Central Asia closely related to the Scythians, or by another Central Asian people called the Issedones, thus forcing the early Scythians to the west, across the Araxes river and into the Caspian and Ciscaucasian Steppes.
This western migration of the early Scythians lasted through the middle 8th century BC, and archaeologically corresponded to the movement of a population originating from Tuva in southern Siberia in the late 9th century BC towards the west, and arriving in the 8th to 7th centuries BC into Europe, especially into Ciscaucasia, which it reached some time between and, thus following the same migration general path as the first wave of Central Asian Iranic nomads who had formed the Chernogorovka-Novocherkassk complex.
The westward migration of the Scythians brought them to the lands of the Cimmerians, after which the Scythians settled between the Araxes river to the east, the Caucasus mountains to the south, and the Maeotian Sea to the west, in the Ciscaucasian Steppe where were located the Scythian kingdom's headquarters.
The arrival of the Scythians corresponded to a disturbance of the development of the Cimmerian peoples' Chernogorovka-Novocherkassk complex, which was thus replaced over the course of to by the early Scythian culture in southern Europe, which itself nevertheless still showed links to the Chernogorovka-Novocherkassk complex.
From their base in the Ciscaucasian Steppe, the Scythians over the course of the 8th to 7th centuries BC conquered the Pontic and Crimean Steppes to the north of the Black Sea up to the Istros river, whose mouth henceforth formed the western boundary of Scythian territory.
The conquest of their territories by the Scythians from the east pushed the Agathyrsi westwards, out of the Pontic Steppe, with the Scythians themselves replacing them as the main population of the Pontic Steppe, thus completing the process of the Scythians becoming the main dominant population of the Pontic-Steppe over the course of to. The Agathyrsi henceforth became the immediate neighbours of the Scythians to their west and the relations between these two tribes remained hostile.

In the Balkans

After their displacement, the Agathyrsi settled in the regions surrounding the Eastern Carpathian Mountains corresponding to the territories presently called Moldavia, Oltenia and Transylvania, although they also may have been one of the peoples who had free access to the Wallachian and Moldavian Plains along with the Scythians.
In these regions, the Agathyrsi established themselves as a ruling class over the indigenous population, who were Geto-Thracians, and intermarried with these local peoples and gradually assimilated into these local peoples' culture. And, beginning in the 6th century BC, the Agathyrsi were organising into fortified settlements, such as the ones at Stâncești and Cotnari, which acted as important centres of the Getae.
A section of the displaced Agathyrsi might also have migrated more southwards into Thrace proper, where a group of this people was located on the Haemus Mons by Stephanus of Byzantium.

The Trausi

Stephanus of Byzantium also suggested that a section of the Agathyrsi were present on the Rhodope Mountains by his mention that the Greeks referred to the Trausi tribe who lived there as being Agathyrsi.
On the Rhodopes, the Trausi initially lived to the north-east of the Thracian tribe of the Bistones. By the early 2nd century BC, the Trausi had migrated to the east of the Hebrus river in the hinterland of Maroneia and Aenus, and they soon disappeared from history after being conquered by the kingdom of the Sapaei.