The Agathyrsi were an ancient people belonging to the Scythian cultures who lived in 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 , 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 westwards movement of Central Asian Iranic nomads towards Southeast and Central Europe which lasted from the 1st millennium BC to the 1st millennium AD, and to which also later participated other Iranic nomads such as the Cimmerians, Scythians, Sauromatians, and Sarmatians. The archaeological and historical records regarding these migrations are however scarce, and permit to sketch only a very broad outline of this complex development.
Beginning of steppe nomadism
The formation of genuine nomadic pastoralism itself happened in the early 1st millennium BC due to climatic changes which caused 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, and therefore led 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.
The 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 achaeological 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.