The Saka (Scythians)

The clearest single statement of the naming problem is in Herodotus' catalogue of the army Xerxes led to Greece:

The Sacae, who are Scythians, had on their heads tall caps, erect and stiff and tapering to a point; they wore breeches, and carried their native bows, and daggers, and axes withal, which they call "sagaris." These were Amyrgian Scythians, but were called Sacae; for that is the Persian name for all Scythians.

Herodotus 7.64, trans. Godley^[1]

"Saka" and "Scythian" are thus two blanket exonyms laid over the same human landscape: one Persian word and one Greek word, each covering a family of related Iranian-speaking nomad peoples that stretched, with local names and local differences, from the Danube delta to the Jaxartes and beyond. Neither empire of speech carved the steppe at the same joints, and neither carved it consistently. Herodotus himself repeatedly stumbles over the seams. The Massagetae of his Cyrus narrative are "said to be a great people and a mighty", dwelling "beyond the Araxes and over against the Issedones; and some say that they are a Scythian people";^[2] describing their marriage customs he pauses to correct his own countrymen: the Greeks call this a Scythian custom, yet "it is not so, but a custom of the Massagetae".^[2] Ctesias, the other main Greek witness, uses yet another naming system, with Saka kings and queens (Amorges, Sparetra, Zarina) who appear nowhere in Herodotus. The Persian lists, for their part, distinguish their Saka by epithet rather than ethnic name, by what a group drank, wore, or lay beyond. The popular picture of "the Scythians" as a single barbarian nation dissolves on contact with the sources; what the evidence shows is a broad steppe world of kindred peoples on which settled neighbours imposed, from opposite directions, two loose and overlapping labels.

The Persians did not discover the steppe threat; they inherited it. In the eighth and seventh centuries the Cimmerians, a nomad people whom the Assyrian records call Gimirri, broke into Anatolia and the Near East, and behind them came the Scythians proper. Herodotus preserves the tradition that "the Cimmerians in their flight from the Scythians into Asia" planted a colony at Sinope on the Black Sea coast, and that the pursuing Scythians missed their way, invaded Media, and for a time ruled "the upper country of Asia for twenty-eight years".^[3] The chronology and the number are legendary rather than exact, and the Assyrian record knows nothing of a Scythian conquest of Media, yet the memory itself is historical bedrock: for a century before Cyrus the settled Near East had known the steppe as a source of sudden, mounted, ungovernable war.^[3] The Median kingdom rose partly in that crucible, and the empire that swallowed Media inherited a northern frontier with no natural end. From the Danube to the Jaxartes the grasslands ran unbroken, peopled by herding societies whose wealth moved on the hoof, whose homes moved on wagons, and whose men, and sometimes women, fought as mounted archers. Persian kings would learn what Assyrian kings had learned before them, that against such neighbours conquest and defence are almost the same problem, and that neither is ever finished.

The first steppe people the empire fought at full scale were the Massagetae, east of the Caspian, beyond the river Herodotus calls the Araxes, in steppe country usually sought towards the Jaxartes (the modern Syr Darya).^[4][5] Herodotus closes his first book with a formal ethnography of them, the oldest surviving portrait of a Central Asian steppe people:

These Massagetae are like the Scythians in their dress and manner of life. They are both horsemen and footmen (having some of each kind), and spearmen and bowmen; and it is their custom to carry battle-axes.

Herodotus 1.215, trans. Godley^[2]

Their metalwork caught his eye: "all their spear-points and arrow-heads and battle-axes are of bronze, and gold is the adornment of their headgear and belts and girdles", for "iron and silver they never use; for there is none at all in their country, but gold and bronze abounds".^[2] The observation reads like a literary flourish until it is set beside the gold-covered burials of the eastern steppe, where the archaeology has borne it out handsomely. Of their society he reports that "each man marries a wife, but the wives are common to all",^[2] and of their old men a custom that plainly fascinated and appalled him:

Though they set no certain term to life, yet when a man is very old all his kin meet together and kill him, with beasts of the flock besides, then boil the flesh and feast on it. This is held to be the happiest death; when a man dies of a sickness they do not eat him, but bury him in the earth, and lament that he would not live to be killed.

Herodotus 1.216, trans. Godley^[2]

How much of this is observation and how much the standard furniture of Greek ethnography, the inverted world of the far barbarian, cannot now be separated. The theology, at least, has an authentic ring: "They never sow; their fare is their live-stock and the fish which they have in abundance from the Araxes. Their drink is milk. The sun is the only god whom they worship; to him they sacrifice horses", because to the swiftest of the gods "they give him the swiftest of mortal things".^[2] Horse-sacrifice to a sky- or sun-god is well attested across the Iranian and steppe worlds, and stands in quiet contrast to the Ahura Mazdā of the kings who claimed these peoples. Who the Massagetae were in the empire's own terms is a real question: a strong current in recent scholarship holds that they are the same people the royal inscriptions call the pointed-cap Saka, a point argued below.

In 530 BCE Cyrus the Great, master of Media, Lydia and Babylon, led his army across the Araxes against the Massagetae, and did not come back. Herodotus makes the decision itself a study in fatal confidence: a birth that made the king seem "something more than mortal man", and an unbroken run of victories from which no attacked nation had ever escaped, persuaded him that the steppe would fall like everything else.^[2] The war opens with a proposal: Cyrus offers marriage to the Massagetae's widowed queen Tomyris, who refuses it, seeing that the suit aimed at her kingdom.^[2] Her warning to him at the river, and the speeches with which she conducts the war, belong to her own story (see Tomyris); the campaign narrative concerns what the episode shows about fighting the steppe. On the advice of the captive Croesus, Cyrus baited a camp for an enemy who could not be caught: a lavish feast of slaughtered flocks was laid out with "many bowls of unmixed wine withal", and the army withdrew, leaving only its worst troops behind with the bait.^[2] The trap turned on the one weapon the settled world always had against the nomad, its goods, and on a detail his own ethnography supplies, for the milk-drinking Massagetae had never learned to handle wine. A third of their force took the camp, gorged itself on the food and the unfamiliar drink, and slept; the returning Persians killed many where they lay and took more alive, the queen's son Spargapises among the prisoners.^[2] Tomyris then raised her main strength and destroyed the Persian army in the battle Herodotus judged the hardest that non-Greek peoples had ever fought.^[2] His description of it is a tactical portrait of the steppe at war: the two hosts shot at each other from a distance until the arrows were spent, then closed "with their spears and their daggers" and fought on at grips.^[2] Cyrus fell with the greater part of his army; the queen's revenge on his corpse became the most famous single image of the steppe in classical literature (see Cyrus the Great for the death as an event of the reign, and Tomyris for the story told from her side). Briant draws the sober strategic lesson: "This new expedition in Central Asia attests at least to the difficulties faced by Persian power in maintaining its dominion there".^[6] The founder of the empire had met, at the end of a career without defeat, the one kind of enemy his way of war could not digest.

Herodotus closes his account with a caution that modern criticism has never improved on: many stories of Cyrus's death were in circulation, and the one he has told is simply the one he judged most credible (the passage is quoted at Herodotus as a specimen of his method).^[2] The other stories survive, and they are irreconcilable. In Ctesias the Saka are Cyrus's allies rather than his killers. Cyrus first wars on the Saka king Amorges and captures him, whereupon the king's wife Sparetra, "after the capture of her husband, gathered an army and fought Cyrus leading 300,000 men and 200,000 women", defeated him, and traded her prisoners for her husband; thereafter Amorges fights at Cyrus's side.^[7] Cyrus's death comes in a different war altogether, against the Derbices and their Indian allies with their elephants, from a javelin wound in the thigh; hearing of it, Amorges "came very quickly accompanied by 20,000 Sacae horsemen", the allies avenged the wound in a second battle, and "the country submitted to Cyrus", who died in camp after settling the succession.^[7] Kuhrt observes that the episode, for all its surface likeness to the Massagetae story, is "a quite different episode", and that warrior queens were a Ctesian habit: "The warlike nature of Scythian women figures already in his earlier story about the Scythian queen Zarina, who fought against the Medes".^[5] A third tradition, from the Babylonian historian Berossus, moves the fatal battle again: as Jacobs puts the dossier in the current Companion, "According to Herodotus, the king's last struggle took place north of a river called Araxes; according to Berossus in a region named Daas", the country of the Dahae; and in Xenophon's Cyropaedia the battlefield vanishes altogether and Cyrus dies serenely in his bed.^[8] The versions agree only on the length of the reign and on a Central Asian theatre. Jacobs has nonetheless ventured a cautious combination: an initial Persian success between the Oxus and the Jaxartes, a Massagetae withdrawal around the Aral, and the king's death beyond it, in Dahae country; on this reconstruction "Herodotus' Massagetae and Darius' Sacae who wear the pointed cap should be identified", which would make Cyrus's nemesis and Darius's later victims one and the same people.^[8] The identification is attractive and unprovable, and it illustrates the whole condition of the evidence: three named enemies, one dead king, and no way to choose except by weighing storytellers.

Darius's own empire counted its Saka with growing precision. The Behistun catalogue of about 520 names a single "Scythia" among the lands of the king; by the time of the later lists the entry has split into three (see the Peoples of the Empire for the catalogue as a genre). On his tomb at Naqsh-e Rostam the roll runs, in Kuhrt's rendering, through "Saca who drink hauma, Saca with pointed hats" among the eastern lands, and separately, out beyond Ionia, "Scythians beyond the sea".^[9] The three epithets are of three different kinds, a ritual practice, an item of dress, and a compass direction, which is itself a warning against reading them as a tidy tribal map. Dandamaev's concordance of the lists shows the two Central Asian groups, the haumavargā and the tigraxaudā, travelling together among the eastern satrapies in DSe and DNa, while the paradraya, "those across the sea", stand between Ionia and the European lands.^[10] The standard geography follows the placement: Amyrgian and pointed-cap Saka in Central Asia, towards the Aral, the Jaxartes and beyond, and the trans-marine Saka as the Scythians of the Black Sea steppe whom Darius invaded from the west.^[10][11] But the neatness is the cataloguer's, ancient and modern. Older scholarship already disputed whether the paradraya lay beyond the Black Sea or merely beyond the Aral; Jacobs has recently argued that they may be the Dahae under another description; and the diagnostic value of the famous hat collapses on inspection, since, as Miller's study of the reliefs warned, the types of headgear carved for Scythians do not sort into three exclusive kinds that could carry the three names.^[8] The lists prove that the chancellery distinguished its Saka; they do not securely tell where any of them lived.

The two Persian epithets reward unpacking. Haumavargā attaches the first group to hauma (Avestan haoma, Vedic soma), which Kuhrt's note describes as "an intoxicating drink ritually drunk in Iranian cult": the sacred pressed juice of Zoroastrian and older Indo-Iranian worship, prepared with mortar and pestle by priests of the very kind the Persepolis archive rations (see the Magi).^[12] The epithet therefore marks a religious habit, and quietly places these Saka inside the wider Iranian cultic world rather than beyond it. The same group answers to a Greek name: the royal inscriptions' hauma-drinkers, Kuhrt notes, "must be the Amyrgian Scythians" whom Herodotus put in Xerxes's army at 7.64.^[12] A connection has long been suggested, though it remains a conjecture of the older literature, between that Greek ethnic Amyrgioi and Amorges, Ctesias's Saka king.^[13] The second epithet is dress. Kent's lexicon derives tigraxaudā from tigra- "pointed" and xaudā- "cap", the compound meaning "wearing the pointed cap", "as is shown", he adds, "in the sculpture of Skunkha the Scythian at Behistan".^[14] Dandamaev reports the cap at "about 80 centimetres", a felt spire nearly a metre tall.^[10] The cap was real. A gold plaque from the Oxus Treasure shows a figure in "tunic, trousers and a soft cap with neck-guard" who "wears an akinakes and carries a barsom in his right hand", the bundle of ritual rods of Iranian worship (see the barsom plaque); the catalogue of the British Museum's 2005 exhibition notes that similarly dressed tribute-bearers appear on the Persepolis reliefs and that "an actual example of such a costume was found in the Issyk kurgan".^[15] Text, relief and excavated grave-goods converge on the same figure: a trousered, pointed-capped horseman with a short sword at his belt, and, in the plaque's case, the instruments of Iranian religion in his hand.

Under Xerxes the royal roster of the steppe grew again. The "daiva inscription" XPh runs, in Kuhrt's translation, through "Cappadocia, Dahae, Scythians (Saca) who drink haoma, Scythians (Saca) who wear pointed hats", the Dahae appearing in a royal list for the first time.^[16] The date sharpens the meaning: a list carved after the Greek war concedes nothing lost in the west and lengthens the roll in the east, a rhetorical enlargement of the paternal inheritance at the very moment the Aegean shore was slipping away (see the Daiva inscription).^[16] The Dahae were a nomad people west of the Aral, and they carry more weight in the Saka question than a late list-entry suggests. Jacobs locates Cyrus's death in their country on Berossus's evidence, and identifies Skunkha, the captive of Darius's eastern war, as "a leading figure among the Dahā"; on the same reasoning he would prefer to see the paradraya, the Saka "beyond the sea", as the Dahae across the Aral rather than the Scythians across the Black Sea.^[8] Nothing in the sources settles the point. What the Dahae's later history shows is that the steppe's political weather kept changing under the empire's fixed labels: from one of their tribes, the Parni, would come the Arsacid dynasty that built the Parthian empire on the Achaemenids' ruins.^[17]

Darius fought the Saka twice, and the two wars must be kept apart, for they had opposite outcomes and opposite kinds of evidence. The eastern war came first, in the king's third regnal year, 519, at the end of the great crisis of his accession (see the Accession of Darius). It is known from a single witness, the fifth column added to Behistun, in which Darius records that he marched against the pointed-cap Saka, that they "went from me", that he crossed a "sea" with his whole army, defeated them, and captured and executed one leader; "The chief of them, by name Skunkha", was taken, and "Then I made another their chief", as the king desired.^[18] The "sea" is best taken as the Syr Darya in flood or an arm of the Aral, crossed, the damaged text suggests, on rafts or tree-trunks; there is no Greek narrative of any of it.^[8] The victory plainly meant more to Darius than a frontier police action. The figure of Skunkha, his cap taller than the king, was added to the Behistun relief at the cost of destroying and re-carving the whole Elamite version of the text, a striking mutilation of a finished royal monument (see the Behistun inscription for the phases, and Darius I for the campaign in the reign's context).^[19] Waters suggests why: Cyrus had died fighting Central Asian nomads, so "he succeeded in the region where the great Cyrus had failed", a victory over the founder's own nemesis, though he flags the thought as speculation.^[20] Manning reads the strange "sea" crossing the same way, as the point of the boast: it "let him say he had gone even farther than the kings who went before him", to the water at the edge of the ordered world.^[21] The current scholarship has complicated the old picture of Skunkha as the beaten rebel king. Jacobs points out that the actual leader of the insurgent Saka is never named or said to be punished, whereas Skunkha led a separate group: "As this group of nomads is never accused of rebellion it must have been hitherto independent". Deposed but neither humiliated nor killed, Skunkha alone among the figures on the relief keeps his hat on.^[8] The added column also introduces a note absent from the whole accession narrative: the Saka of this campaign, like the Elamites beside them, are condemned as people who "were faithless and by them Ahuramazda was not worshipped", the first time a Persian king justifies a war by the enemy's failure to worship the right god.^[18][6]

The second war, about 513, went the other way in every sense. Darius crossed the Bosporus and the Danube into the country of the European Scythians, the paradraya of his lists. Herodotus, who narrates the expedition at length, gives the motive as revenge for the old invasion: Darius desired to punish "the Scythians for the unprovoked wrong they had done when they invaded Media" in the days before the Medes fell.^[3] Antiquity itself offered other reasons, a refused marriage alliance, a rupture of relations, and the variety is a warning that the motive was already being guessed at.^[22] What follows in Herodotus is the classic anatomy of a campaign against nomads. The Scythians refuse battle, retire before the advancing army, fill the wells and springs, and draw the Persians deep into the steppe. Darius, exasperated, sends their king Idanthyrsus a challenge:

Sir, these are strange doings. Why will you ever flee? … if you deem yourself strong enough to withstand my power, wander no further, but stand and fight; but if you know yourself to be the weaker, then make an end of this running to and fro, and come to terms with your master, sending him gifts of earth and water.

Herodotus 4.126, trans. Godley^[3]

The reply he gets is the steppe's whole strategic doctrine in a paragraph:

It is thus with me, Persian: I have never fled for fear of any man, nor do I now flee from you … we have the graves of our fathers; come, find these and essay to destroy them; then shall you know whether we will fight you for those graves or no. … Gifts I will send you, not earth and water, but such as you should rightly receive; and for your boast that you are my master, take my malison for it.

Herodotus 4.127, trans. Godley^[3]

A people with "no towns or planted lands" has nothing a conqueror can hold hostage except its ancestors' graves; the phrase became, as Godley notes, the proverbial "Scythian speech".^[3] The gifts duly arrive: "a bird, a mouse, a frog, and five arrows", delivered by a herald who says "no charge had been laid on him save to give the gifts and then depart with all speed".^[3] Darius reads the riddle as surrender, earth and water in animal form. Gobryas, one of the Seven, reads it correctly:

Unless you become birds, Persians, and fly up into the sky, or mice and hide you in the earth, or frogs and leap into the lakes, you will be shot by these arrows and never return home.

Herodotus 4.132, trans. Godley^[3]

The army escaped by the Danube bridge, held for the king by the Ionian tyrants after a Scythian attempt to have it cut, and the expedition ended with nothing conquered and nothing lost but time, men and prestige. How much of the story to believe is a fair question, on which Kuhrt's judgement carries the field: the narrative is patterned, and it "foreshadows in some respects Xerxes' later setbacks in Greece", with "the motif of overstepping a physical boundary leading to defeat at the hands of a free people" fully in play; and yet, "While we cannot take Herodotus' account at face value", "there is absolutely no reason to deny its historicity as such", for a show of force across the lower Danube fits Darius's consolidation of the empire's frontiers exactly.^[22] The campaign secured Thrace and the straits even as it failed on the steppe; the Persian foothold in Europe that mattered for the next thirty years was its real, unglamorous result (see Darius I).

Behind Herodotus's Scythian narrative stands a thesis, stated in his own voice, about why such peoples cannot be conquered:

the Scythian race has in that matter which of all human affairs is of greatest import made the cleverest discovery that we know … they have so devised that none who attacks them can escape, and none can catch them if they desire not to be found.

Herodotus 4.46, trans. Godley^[3]

Men with "no stablished cities or fortresses, but all are house-bearers and mounted archers", living from herds rather than fields, their homes on wagons, "how should these not be invincible and unapproachable?"^[3] The observation is genuinely acute, and it is also a literary construction with work to do. In the architecture of the Histories the ungraspable Scythian prefigures the unconquerable Greek: Hartog's study of the Scythian books argues that the Persian Wars, though they come later in the book, act as the matrix of the Scythian narrative, so that Darius pursuing an uncatchable enemy rehearses Xerxes among the Greeks; and the boundary-crossing king, Cyrus over the Araxes, Darius over the Danube, Xerxes over the Hellespont, is punished each time (see Herodotus for the "mirror" reading in full).^[23][22] At its far edge the same imagined Scythia shaded into fable, where Herodotus reports, on the authority of the poet Aristeas, that "beyond these (he said) dwell the one-eyed Arimaspians, beyond whom are the griffins that guard gold, and beyond these again the Hyperboreans, whose territory reaches to the sea".^[3] A category that runs from real trading partners to gold-guarding griffins is a category about distance, and its looseness is precisely why it mapped so easily onto the equally loose Persian "Saka". The Persian record tells against the topos where it can be checked. The empire beat steppe peoples when the ground allowed, held two Saka populations in some form of subjection for generations, and drew from them soldiers rather than tribute of any weight. On the evidence the steppe was less unconquerable than not worth conquering, its yield more cheaply had by clientage than by garrisons, and the kings, after 513, seem to have drawn exactly that conclusion.

What the empire took from the Saka was cavalry. The kit Herodotus itemises at 7.64, the tall stiff cap, the trousers, the native bow, the dagger and the sagaris battle-axe, is the light-horseman's panoply of the whole steppe, and pieces of it had already been naturalised into Iranian dress; the akinakes short-sword worn by Persians and Medes on the Persepolis reliefs is steppe kit by origin, the same weapon the European Scythians planted on their mounds and worshipped, in Herodotus's report, as the image of their war-god: "there is set for each people an ancient scimitar of iron, which is their image of Ares; to this scimitar they bring yearly sacrifice of sheep and goats and horses".^[3] In Xerxes's invasion army the Saka were brigaded with the Bactrians under a royal prince: "The commander of the Bactrians and Sacae was Hystaspes, son of Darius and Cyrus' daughter Atossa."^[1] Their fighting record in Greece was the best of any contingent the Greeks faced. At Marathon in 490 they held the place of honour: "the foreigners overcame the middle part of the line, against which the Persians themselves and the Sacae were arrayed; here the foreigners prevailed and broke the Greeks, pursuing them inland" (see the Battle of Marathon).^[24] At Plataea in 479 Herodotus gives them the palm outright: "Among the foreigners they that fought best were the Persian foot and the horse of the Sacae, and of men, it is said, the bravest was Mardonius" (see the Battle of Plataea and Xerxes' invasion of Greece).^[25] Across the two decisive land battles of the wars, the Saka are the troops the Greek tradition remembered as most dangerous. Their status in the army was distinctive. Head's study of the Achaemenid army concludes that Saka contingents served as allies or mercenaries rather than as conscripted subject levies, mostly as lightly armed horse-archers, and that the armoured cavalry of the Massagetae appears to have inspired the Persian adoption of horse-armour itself.^[26] The empire, in other words, did not merely defeat the steppe's way of war; it hired it, brigaded it with its best troops, and learned from it (see Warfare and the army).

What exactly the two Central Asian Saka peoples were to the empire is harder to say than the monuments suggest. The royal lists claim them flatly: the lands "bore tribute to me", says Darius's tomb text over the roll that includes both groups.^[9] The Greek fiscal picture is thinner. In Herodotus's catalogue of the tribute districts the Sacae appear yoked with the Caspians in a single district that "paid two hundred and fifty talents; this being the fifteenth district", a modest assessment beside Babylon's thousand and India's gold (see Tribute and taxation).^[27] And the fine grain of the evidence pulls towards clientage rather than administration. Jacobs argues that the Amyrgian country had not waited for Darius: "Their territory must have been conquered already by Cyrus the Great", so that the lists inherit rather than record conquest; and Skunkha's people, as seen above, were an independent group given a king of Darius's choosing, which is the vocabulary of protectorate rather than province.^[8] The Apadana reliefs stage the same ambiguity in stone: the Saka delegation comes before the king armed and bearing gifts, and whether those gifts are tribute owed or presents given is exactly what the sculpture declines to say (see the Apadana reliefs, which treats the delegations in full). The likeliest synthesis is a graded belt. The near steppe, Amyrgians and pointed-caps, stood inside the empire's system as subordinate allies, listed, honoured, levied for cavalry, and lightly assessed; the far steppe, the paradraya and the peoples beyond, stood on the monuments as a claim and nowhere else. The lists' firm ink drew no such distinction, which is one of the standing reasons for not reading them as administrative documents.

For peoples who wrote nothing, the Saka are remarkably visible in the empire's own art, always in the same costume and always in a posture of ordered service. On the façade of Darius's tomb at Naqsh-e Rostam, and on the tombs copied from it, the throne-platform on which the king stands is carried by thirty labelled bearers, and among the captions cut for them are "this is the Pointed-Cap Scythians", "this is the Amyrgian Scythians" and "this is the Scythians across the sea".^[28] All three Saka of the lists thus hold up the king's throne, the periphery literally bearing the centre. On the Apadana at Persepolis the pointed-cap Saka march in the procession of delegations with a stallion, rings and garments, armed where most delegations are not; a second, disputed delegation may be the Amyrgians.^[29] And at Behistun stands the one Saka the empire ever named in sculpture, Skunkha, added at the end of the row of defeated liar-kings yet unmistakably set apart from them by the great cap he was allowed to keep. The empire's picture and the Greek picture could hardly differ more. Greek art and ethnography made the Scythian the type of the wild man, drinker of unmixed wine, taker of scalps;^[3] the Persian monuments dress the same figure in his own costume and set him calmly among the ordered nations of the world, armed in the king's very presence. Both are ideology. Between the savage of the one tradition and the willing throne-bearer of the other, the Saka themselves left no comment.

The third witness is the ground, and it has spoken mostly from the graves of the steppe elite. In the Altai mountains, at the north-eastern extremity of the empire's world, the frozen kurgans of Pazyryk preserved organic material almost intact from about the fifth and fourth centuries. Brosius notes that "the spectacular find of the burials in Pazyryk in the Altai Mountains has uncovered unique examples of Achaemenising art", including "a carpet which shows riders wearing tunic and trousers alternatively riding on horseback or walking alongside their bridled horses", figures that have been compared to the horsemen of the Persepolis reliefs; of the same piece she records, "This is the oldest preserved carpet in the world, dating to the fifth or the fourth century".^[30] Stronach ventured that the carpet's twenty-eight horsemen "may represent the provinces of the Persian empire", which, if right, would make a knotted echo of the Apadana procession lying in a Saka chief's tomb three thousand kilometres from Persepolis.^[30] Whether or not the count is meaningful, the motifs are Achaemenid, and they show the far steppe inside the empire's artistic world, exchanging rather than merely raiding. The Saka tombs at Issyk in Kazakhstan belong to the same horizon; the Cambridge Ancient History lists them, with Pazyryk and other sites, among the burials containing objects with Achaemenid affinities.^[31] Issyk's principal burial, the so-called Golden Man, a young warrior interred in a costume sewn with thousands of gold plaques beneath a tall pointed headdress, is conventionally dated some way after the empire's fall and is known to scholarship largely through its excavation publication; the details are given here at the level of the general literature.^[32] Its value for the Achaemenid question is nonetheless direct, for it is the find the British Museum catalogue could set behind the pointed-capped figures of the Persepolis reliefs and the Oxus gold.^[15] Herodotus's gold-adorned, iron-poor Massagetae, the chancellery's tigraxaudā, and the man in the Issyk grave belong recognisably to one world. The steppe did not write, but it buried magnificently, and its graves have ended by corroborating details in both of the literate traditions that described it.