If you’ve never heard of the Scythians, you won’t be alone. An ancient civilisation that roamed across Europe and Asia around 2,500 years ago, very little is known about them.
But we do now know they made leather using the skin of their enemies. Yikes.
There had long been rumours of their bloodthirsty behaviour, mainly stemming from a single book about them written by Herodotus – aka the Father of History.
However, with passages like ‘A Scythian drinks the blood of the first man whom he has taken down’, and ‘Many flay the skin from the whole body, and carry it about on horseback stretched on a wooden frame’, modern historians had suspected Herodotus may have been overexaggerating just a tad.
Now however, a new study has discovered they really did make leather out of human skin.
The team, led by Luise Ørsted Brandt of the University of Copenhagen, analysed 45 scraps of leather from 14 burial sites across Ukraine, and found two items containing human skin.
‘Our results demonstrate that Scythians primarily used domesticated species such as sheep, goat, cattle, and horse for the production of leather, while the furs were made of wild animals,’ the authors write.
‘The surprise discovery is the presence of two human skin samples, which for the first time provide direct evidence of the ancient Greek historian Herodotus’s claim that Scythians used the skin of their dead enemies to manufacture leather trophy items.’
The skin appears to have been used to make quivers, long bags used to hold arrows.
Previously it had been hard to identify the exact origin of skin found in such samples, because the process of tanning leather destroys the DNA.
But new techniques developed in recent years now allow scientists to pick out proteins from the leather and match those to different species.
Alongside humans, the Scythians also made leather from goats, sheep, cows, horses, foxes, big cats and squirrels – so really it seems absolutely anything was fair game.
Being a nomadic society, they have left little behind for future archaeologists and historians to build a picture of Scythian society. Most artefacts have been recovered from burial mounds, and alongside leather goods, include sculptures, headdresses and a famous golden pectoral – basically a very chunky necklace.
Living between around 700 BCE and 300 BCE, the Scythians roamed the Eurasian Steppe, stretching from Eastern Europe to northern China.
And while Herodotus would have us believe they were simply barbarians, drinking blood and scalping the dead, the world today would have looked very different without them.
‘For over three centuries, Scythians served as the mobile bridge that linked the various sedentary societies of Europe and Asia and played a fundamental role in the creation and transfer of technologies, languages, ideologies, commodities, and pathogens between “East” and “West”,’ write the authors.
Not only that, but it seems they were also very fair when it came to mutilation.
Evidence from other burial sites has shown that when a Scythian king died, mourners would cut off their own fingers.
A tad over dramatic possibly, but it does make Herodotus’s accounts even more believable.
Speaking of, here’s one more: ‘Many Scythians even make garments to wear out of these scalps, sewing them together like coats of skin.’
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