Category: Massagetai

It can be inferred that the Massagetai were described in the Arimaspeia from a story told by Herodotos that described them as directly neighboring the Issedones, a people who were apparently known to the Greeks exclusively from the Arimaspeia and traditions of interpreting it. Herodotos described them living north of the Araxes (modern Aras) near to its joint delta with the Kura river. The poet Simias, in a short excerpt quoted by the Byzantine Classicist Ioannis Tzetzes, located them by the river Kampasos, apparently related to the region later called Kampisene north of the lower Kura, and also implied they were near a river delta. Strabo told a similar account, citing Herodotos and Hellanikos, another Classical historian known to have relied on the Arimaspeia.

Herodotos identified the Massagetai with a nation that opposed the Persian king Kyros in a story told both by him and the later historian Ktesias, who relied on Persian oral accounts heard while serving the Persian queen mother as her doctor. In Herodotos’ version these ‘Massagetai’ defeated and killed Kyros, but in Ktesias’ version these people were called Sakai and did not victor. Strabo referred to a region on the lower Araxes called Sakasene, and medieval Armenians used the name Shaki to describe a broader region in what is now the state of Azerbaijan.

Despite locating the Massagetai near the lower Araxes, Herodotos and Strabo both described them as living on the east side of the Caspian Sea, a geographical confusion that has persisted into modern times and that has led most modern scholarship to assume Herodotos and Strabo had in mind some other river. However Herodotos’ and Strabo’s descriptions of the Araxes very clearly match the modern Aras and no other river. Rather their confusion must be ascribed to ancient Greeks’ poor knowledge of the Caspian region, still evident even in the most detailed geography assembled in the antique period, by the 2nd century CE geographer Claudius Ptolemy. This confusion also explains why Herodotos thought the Massagetai killed Kyros the Great, as he was killed while campaigning against people known as Derbikes or Dahai in what is now Turkmenistan, according to Ktesias and the Hellenistic Mesopotamian historian Berossos, who apparently read cuneiform archives.

Biographers of Alexander the Great later identified small groups of nomadic peoples his armies encountered in what is now Turkmenistan as Massagetai. Later geographers located the Massagetai in various other places in central Asia near to the edges of their known worlds.