p. 6 “By the late 9th century BC, Central Eurasian speakers of Scythian, an Old Iranic language, developed horseriding and shooting from horseback and about a century later spread suddenly across the entire steppe zone of Eurasia, establishing an enormous empire. Partly because of the Scythian Empire;s brief unified existence, but mainly because of the linger prehjudice against pastoral peoples, the Scythians are not credited with any contributions to world civilisation, with the exception of better bows and arrows. Instead Herodotus credits many revolutionary changes in Ancient Near East civilisation to the Medes, mainly to their first historical king Cyaxares. However, close examination of these changes shows the Scythians were responsible to them.
p. 11 The usual rhetoric is that the Medes and Persians copied these weapons from the Scythians, but that is not correct. All evidence – including Herodotus – shows that the Medes were creaolized Scythians, or “scytho-Medes”, so their weapons were effectively native to them. The Persians were also partly crealized in the same way, though they remained distinct in language, as well as in many other respects, including their dress and weapons, which were identical to the Elamites at the time of Darius I.
p. 18 Perhaps the single most striking feature of the Empire under the Great King Darius I and his son Xerxes is their unprecedented, explicity belief in only one “Capital G” God, Ahura Mazda, whom they call Baga Vazarka “the (one) Great God. He was the God who created heave and earth – unlike the many “small g” gods or other Gods – and established the one Great King, the King of kings as ruler…. p. 19 Great God was the progenitor of the first king of the Scythians, whose lineage accordingly descended from God. It was the only legitimate royal line among Central Eurasian peoples for many centuries. “
p. 33 “Scythian culture did not spread by “influence” or “contact”, not to speak of “trade” or commerce along the “Silk Road”. These ideas, no matter hom popular they may be, do not conform to the data. The zone of Scythian culture did not expand in any of the ways many now think culture spreads. It spread beyond Scytia as a result of Scytian rule over large frontier areas at the edge of the steppe zone. … during the Persians’ rule of the Empire, they indirectly helped spread Scythian culture into neighbouring regions, increasing the territory where it was known and practices, because they continued to use the Scytho-Medes as the administrators of the Empire.”
p. 180 “The language of the Central Eurasian people near, and in, the crucially important ancient state of Chao in the Eastern steepe region on the northern Chinese frontier was Harya ‘Royal Scythian’… Chao was the home of Ch’in shih hunag ti, the First Emperor of China. He was born and raised in the capital Han-tan, the name of which is Scythian Agamatana… the name of Media’s capital.. The non-Chinese people of Chao and the region to the east of it, as well as the Hsiung-nu, whose homeland was in the Ordos steppe within the great bend of the Tellow River to the west of Chao, are all called Hu, Old Chinese Hara, in early Chinese sources, as are the Sai, Old Chinese Saka, ie Scythians, an East Scythian people licing to the west of Hsiung-nu territory in what is now Kazakhstan and the Ili River region of Jungaria and southwestward into Central Asia.. these people were contiguous neighbours and the arhcaeology has shown Hsiung-nu culture to be practically indeitical to western Scythian culture.
p. The single most famous shared feature of Classical culture in all of the nations that experienced a “Classical Age” is the appearance of philosophy in the strict sense, with a capital P: Philosophy. It was a new and unprecedented thing, and that particular period in the mid-1st century millennium BC is the only time in history that Philosophy flourished so spectacularly in those cultures…. Could Philosophy be a Scythian invention too? The first part of this chapter shows that the Greeks, Persians, Indians and Chinese were each taught by an early Scythian philosopher and thus experienced Scythian philosophy first-hand at about the same time, before there is any other sign of Philosophy per se in the lands where they taughter.
p 235 “The first great philsophers of Greece, China, India, Iran and Scythia who flourished between approximately 600 and 400BC were revolutionaries. They did something entirely new and unprecedented: all of them criticized and rejected the traditional beliefs and practices of the countries where they taught … Each one was arguably his adoptive culture’s earliest Philosopher … Chronologically they are
- Anacharsis the Scythian, a half-Greek Scythian who taught in Greece
- Zoroaster, a Scythian speaker who taught in the Scytho-Mede empire
- Gautama the Scytian Sage (who taught in northern India)
- Gautama (Lao-tan – Laotzu) who bears a Scythian name and taught in early China
each one is usually treated as if he belonged to a much later dominant local tradition, if he even existed. thus Anacharsis is supposed to have been a Greek cynic, Zoroaster a Late Zoroastrian Persian dualist, Buddha an Indiian pupil of Brahmanists and Hains, and Laotzu a mystical and inscrutable Chinese political theorist
p. 236 “Anacharsis was a Scythian prince who travelled to Greece in the 47th Olympiad (592-589BC) where he met Solon, a lawgiver considered to be one of the earliest pre-Socratic thinkers. The Greeks greatly esteemed Anacharsis, who is often listed as one of the Seven Sages of Antiquity, and Aristotle treats him as a major philosopher… indirect quotation “He wondered why among the Greeks the experts contend, but the non-experts decide.” The basic point of this comment is epistemological and sceptical, calling into question the basis of our entire cognitive ability, both individually and collectively. It is also a sceptical comment about the Greeks’ quasi-religious political belieg in “equality”. “
p. 242 Zoroaster… developed a perfectionistic, systematised version of steppe Scythian beliefs. Philosophiocally it is a unified religious-political system: virtuous monarchy both in Heaven and on Earth, valuing Truth and peaceful monarchistic Unity, while opposing Falsehood and warring polytheistic divisiveness. .. In the Achaemenid period Zoroaster’s teachings gradually merged with pre-Zoroastrian Mazdaidm to become Late Zoroastrianism, the first “world religion”.
p. 243 ” Hatama exounds a logical-epistemological system that denies the existence of a criterio to decide or judge between opposed absolute assertions or “views”… teachings are exclusively on ethics, particularly the problem of happiness of equanimity.”
p. 248 “There are other reasons for considering the Laotzu (the Tao te ching) to be inspired by Early Buddhism: its strictly philosophical teachings are traceable to the Buddha himself (not to the later, strictly religious forms of Buddhism, or Normative Buddhism, which contains much material foreign to Early Buddhism”… Laotzu’s core teachings are thus on logic, epistemology and ethics.He famously proposes to revolve conflicting antilogies by saying that they are bound to each other, that they are human creastions, that there are no inherent absolutes in nature: “When the whol world knows beauty as beautiful, ugly arises. When all know good, not-good arises. Existence and non-existence are born together. Long and short are mutually formed. High and low are mutually completed. Meaning and sound agree with each other. Before and after follow each other.”
p. 248 “It is easy to imagine that a Chinese who taught these exotic ideas would have been remember as ‘Guatama’ from the teacher’s frequent repetition of the name of the one who originally taught them, e.g. “Mast Gau(tama) says…)
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