Scythian Warrior

In antiquity, Scythian or Scyths (Greek: Σκύθαι) were terms used by the Greeks to refer to heterogeneous groups of horse-riding nomadic pastoralists who dwelt on the Pontic steppe. However, the name "Scythian", and the related word Saka (in Persian), was also used to refer to various peoples seen as similar to the Scythians, or who lived anywhere in a vast area covering present-day Central Asia, Russia, and Ukraine—known until medieval times as Scythia. They have been described as "a network of culturally similar tribes." The historic European Scythians spoke an ancient Iranic[4] language, and throughout Classical Antiquity dominated the Ponto-Caspian steppe, known at the time as Scythia. By Late Antiquity the closely-related Sarmatians came to dominate the Scythians in the west. Much of the surviving information about the Scythians comes from the Greek historian Herodotus (c. 440 BC) in his Histories and Ovid in his poem of exile Epistulae ex Ponto, and archaeologically from the depictions of Scythian life shown in relief on exquisite goldwork found in Scythian burial mounds in Ukraine and Southern Russia. The ultimate "origins" of, both, Scythian culture and historic groups remains a focus of academic discourse, however, the rise of the Scythians was likely to have been multifactorial and polycentric. What is certain is that, during the Iron Age, a broadly similar "Scythian culture" flowered in a vast zone from the eastern European steppe to the Altai Mountains.

(From Wikipedia)