Christopher Beckwith, The Scythian Empire: Central Eurasia and the Birth of the Classical Age from Persia to China (2024)

This is an audacious book. Beckwith claims that the Scythians 1) created the first great empire, spanning much of the central Asian steppe from the 8th century BC on, 2) pioneered a feudal structure of decentralized rule that was later copied by numerous others, including the Persians. 3) spawned the Median and then Persian Empires in the west, the Mauryans in south Asia and, most shocking to me, the earliest unified Chinese empire, the Qin 4) were monotheists and sparked the Axial Age in Eurasia's disparate civilizations. Any one of these claims would be striking on its own; together, they are nothing short of gobsmacking. Beckwith's main evidence is linguistic - for example, that words in all of these languages (which this astonishingly erudite man knows) for royal house and language are cognates (Hariya, Ariya, etc.). I can't judge the soundness of these claims, and I know Beckwith has faced criticism. I would love to know what evidence there is from the other two pillars of ancient studies - archeology and ancient DNA. Beckwith spends much more time on the impact of the Scythian Empire than on the Empire itself, about which there is perhaps little linguistic evidence. Again, I'd love to learn what archeologists and ancient DNA scholars have to say about the ostensible source of so much innovation. According to Beckwith, what probably allowed the empire to arise and expand was the mastering of horse-borne fighting, which he thinks first became possible around 900 BCE. Apparently, there's a debate about when this happened, as horse domestication occurred much earlier, around 3000 BCE. And as I understood it, the reason for the initial success of the Yamnaya/proto-Indo-Europeans in spreading was precisely their domestication of the horse and use of it for riding, which allowed them to control much larger herds of animals and thus gain wealth. Did it take 2000 years to go from riding for the sake of herding to riding for the sake of fighting? Also, though this was not of central interest to Beckwith, I was surprised by the fact that the Scythians were Indo-Europeans but originally came from the Altai mountains deep in central Asia. That is, some IEs first went east, far east, but then came back to the west.