17. The Fearsome Ancient Scythians
Genghis Khan and Attila the Hun are the most famous Steppe leaders, but there were others who in their day gave their civilized contemporaries no end of trouble. One such was Idanthyrsus, a sixth-century BC king of the Scycthians, a nomadic Iranian-speaking tribal confederacy that inhabited the Steppe between the Carpathians and central China. The Scythians controlled an overland trade network that connected the Greeks, Chinese, Persians, and Indians, and they formed the first of the Steppe empires that terrified the adjacent settled lands for millennia.
In the seventh century BC, the Scythians began to raid into the Middle East. Their first major disruptive role was the key part they played in 612 BC in the destruction of the Assyrian Empire, an event that forever extinguished a nation that had existed for over a millennium, and that had dominated the ancient Middle East for centuries. In 513 BC, King Darius I of Persia sought to end Scythian raids on his empire once and for by conquering the troublesome nomads. As seen below, it did not go well.