Massagetae were an Iranian people of antiquity. According to Herodotus, Cyrus of Persia met his death in a battle with the Massagetae living beyond Araxes river, a people from the southern deserts of Kwarezm in today Uzbekistan, Bukhara. The queen of the Massagetae, Tomyris, prevailed after Cyrus previously defeated Tomyris's son Spargapises.
Ammianus Marcellinus considered the Alans to be the former Massagetae : "iuxtaque Massagetae Halani et Sargetae", "per Albanos et Massagetas, quos Alanos nunc appellamus" , "Halanos pervenit, veteres Massagetas".
In old iranian "massa" means "big".
The following informations about the Massagetae is based on Herodotus Histories.
The Massagetae lived on their herds and fishing, milk being their chief drink. They employed gold and brass in decorating their war equipment, having neither iron or silver in their country.
Society
They were similar to the Scythians in their dress and mode of living. Each man had but one woman, yet their wives were held in common, this custom differetiating the Massagetae from the Scythians. Queen Tomyris succeeded her dead husband, the former king of the Massagetae.
Religion
The Massagetae worshiped only one god, the sun, and sacrificed a horse in its honour.
Army
They fought both on horseback and on foot, neither method being strange to them: they used bows and lances, but their favourite weapon was the battle-axe. Their spears were made of brass.
Therefore, Scythians could be pressed by Massagets from the near-Aral steppes, where the earliest pra-Turk culture once originated.
In the Scythian epoch, the boundless spaces of Eurasian steppes was dominated by three cognate tribes, Kimmerians, Massagets and Scythians.
As Herodotos notes, Scythians were forced to migrate to the Black Sea area being pressed by their Asian kinsmen, Massagets; as a result, they encountered their other kinsmen, Kimmerians, living in the steppes near the Black Sea and Kuban, including the territory of modern Karachai.
To understand who the modern Ossetians are, one should go back in time for thousands of years, to the period when, as it is now believed, some part of those who made up the Indo-European race separated from the rest of their tribesmen and headed for the Middle Asia and Northern Iran.
Part of this people, conspicuous for it's belligerence and recalcitrance, in the course of time became known under the common name of the Massagets.
Later on, starting to move back into the Continent of Europe, the ancient Iranian-speaking people of the Massagets apparently split up into several ethnic branches, thus forming most closely related tribes of the Yazygs, the Sarmatians, the Roxolans (or Ruslans), the Aorses, the Alans, the Saks or the so called Sarmatian tribes.
Feeds |
Contact