Page 430 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

grounds which traditionally were not theirs. There had been

clashes of mounted archers, cattle-raiding—in both directions—
and horse-thieving and woman-snatching. Occasionally a wagon
camp was burnt and its inhabitants massacred and scalped. And
in the midst of it all there had been parleys and trading, cere­

monial visits of chieftains accompanied by impressive presents
and protestations of good will, exchanges of captives and sur­

render of political refugees. All the usual bickering and chaffering
of a border between two loose confederacies.
They were even willing to count the eastern tribal confed­
eracy as their distant cousins. The eastern tribes were descend­

ants of the clans that at the time of the great expansion, perhaps
a thousand years ago, had ranged east and north, to the Urals

and beyond, and they still retained the fair skin and intelligible
speech of their ancestors, though up on the Yanisei they had ac­
quired a foreign strain, which showed itself in lank black hair
and yellow skin and high cheekbones.

The tribes of the eastern confederacy had many names, and
the confederacy was generally known by the name of whatever

tribe was paramount for the time being. But now, after the Per­
sians and the Medes and the other southern nations had hived off
a couple of generations or so ago and migrated south into the

Iranian plateau, the remainder of the confederacy had gradually
adopted the generic title of Scythians, in much the same way as
the people north of the Caucasus would call themselves Cim­

merians.
The Scythians were being troublesome. The adoption of a
common name was only one symptom of a greater coherence and

unity of purpose, and their paramount king was not merely re­
newing the traditional claims of his people; he was enforcing
them. He claimed, it was true, that he was being pushed by his

own eastern neighbors, a Sarmatian confederacy related to the
yellow men of Siberia, but whatever the pretext, he had occupied
the disputed grazing lands in force and could not be dislodged.

The council of the Cimmerian chiefs met on the Maikop
plain, at the time of the great horse fair. Among the corrals and
booths and wagon camps their great curved tents of embroidered

felt rose like the grave mounds of their ancestors hard by. Where