CHAPTER I. PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY AND NATURAL PRODUCTIONS.

The scope of the present work includes the History of the Creek Settlements on the north coast of the Euxine from the mouth of the Danube to that of the Kuban, and the Ethnology of the country at the back of that coastline from the slopes of the Carpathians to the lower course of the Volga and the foothills of the Caucasus.

This tract extending through twenty degrees of longitude is quite different from any other tract in Europe, wherein the only region at all similar is that of the Hungarian Puszta, which is in a sense its westerly continuation and has always been deeply influenced by the neighbourhood of the greater plain. But this greater plain is itself but a continuation, almost a dependency, of the still wider plains of Northern Asia, and this continuity is the governing condition of its historical development. It is only within the last hundred years or so that Southern Russia has been definitely added to Europe. Before that time Asiatic tribes have been more at home in it than European. In Europe and Asia it is one continuous belt of steppe or prairie. The most striking feature of this broad stretch of country is the absence of mountains; they only come in as forming its border on the west and on the southeast, where the coast range of the Crimea is a continuation of the Caucasus, just as the plain of its northern region is really one with the mainland plain beyond the Isthmus^[I].

But though the whole region may be broadly regarded as a plain, this must not be taken to mean that it is one dead level. Right across from the Carpathians to the coast of the Sea of Azov near the Berda there runs a belt of granite, which crops out wherever it is crossed by one of the great rivers. To the north of the granite belt is a limestone formation. Where these rocks occur the plain attains a considerable elevation, to the west in Podolia it becomes diversified with hills, and again further east about the Donets, where are the chief coal-mines of Russia, there is hilly country that ends in steep cliffs about Taganrog.

Even where the rise of the plain is gradual, it attains a height of

woodlands. Cf. also Elisde Reclus, Nouvelle Ge- gruphie Universelle, Yoh v„ and L. Burchner, Die llesiedelung der Küsten des Pantos Euxeinos, Pt I. Introduction, pp. 5-22.

300 feet above the sea, as in Ekaterinoslav. In general it slopes gently towards the south-west: so that the cliffs which are a few feet high near the Danube are not less than a hundred and fifty at the mouth of the Dnepr. To the east of the Dnepr the coast plain is very low. Between the Crimea and the mainland the boundaries of land and water are so ill defined that a change of wind will make the sea encroach, but the steppe reaches the level of the western plain about the fortyseventh parallel, and further north it attains four hundred feet south of the Great Meadow^[2].

In spite therefore of the general flatness the actual heights reached by some parts of the plain are far too great to allow any talk of serious changes in the course of the rivers during the last two thousand years. These have not been able to do more than deepen their beds and very slowly edge westwards. The outlines of their course have been fixed by the geological formation which has made the remarkable correspondence of the sudden bends from ese. to wsw. round which Dnepr, Donets and Don have to find their way to the sea. The plain and the rivers are the features of the country that specially struck the Greeks, they had nothing of the sort in their own land^[3].

It is the great rivers that shew up the heights to which the plain rises. Each has a steep or “hilly” bank to the west and a flat or “meadow” bank to the east, and flows winding along a broad valley,

which at the lower end has been cut down to below the level of the

sea forming the liman* so characteristic of Russian rivers. If the river has to cross the granite belt it has there failed to make its course easy

for itself and is broken by rapids, most important in the case of the

Dnepr.

The lesser streams have made proportionate valleys and into these leads a whole system of ravines, which carry off the melting snow but are dry during most of the year. All these depressions make no difference to the view of the steppe, as they are not noticeable until the traveller comes to the edge of one of them, but they present considerable obstacles to anyone not acquainted with the precise places where they can be crossed conveniently. They provided much too complete a system of drainage and the now diminished rainfall is carried off at once from the surface of the steppe, compare the expression of Hippocrates, e^o^erevovcri. For the inhabitants of the steppe they are of the utmost importance. In them the flocks can find shelter in the winter, and in them the first beginnings of agriculture can be made. There is little doubt that the agricultural tribes of which we read in Herodotus confined their attempts to these valleys, and it was not till the other day that the open steppe was cut up by the plough. Till then it had been merely pasture, but some of it pasture unsurpassed in the world, at any rate during its season.

Hippocrates, De aere, etc. 25, Ή δε' Σκυθέων Ζρημίη καλιυμίνη πεδιάί ε’στι και λ^ιμακώδης κα'ι yp-i\rj, και Ζνυδρος μ^τρίως- ποταμοί γάρ ela'l μιγάλοι, οί ιξοχιτιύ- ουσι το ύδωρ ε’κ των πεδίων.

³ An estuary or lagoon cut off from the sea by a strip of sand with or without openings.

From the time of the snow’s melting to the middle of summer the growth of the grass in the richer regions seems by all accounts to have been marvellous: but even so the sun would scorch it up and animals had to come near the streams until the autumn rains: and again they had to find shelter in the valleys for the depth of the winter, so that the nomad life was not quite as free as is represented, for these wintering places are quite definitely the property of particular tribes.

Throughout great areas of the steppe, especially towards the south and east, the rich pasture gives way to barren lands offering but wormwood and silk grass, or tussock grass that does not even cover the surface of the sand. Worse still in the government of Astrakhan, at the eastern boundary of our area, there is but unrelieved salt sand : here the only land of any value is that along the lower Volga. This is why the trade route of which Herodotus gives particulars goes so far to the north. Yet commentators gaily assign such a district as the only local habitation of more or less important tribes. A great characteristic of the whole region is lack of trees, but in the river valleys, besides the meadows which kept the cattle alive in the winter, there were some woods at any rate. Especially was this the case on the lower Dnepr where much land, since invaded by sand-dunes, was formerly wooded. In the north also the forest belt seems to have come further south down to the edge of the glacial deposit, along the line shaded on the general map, and to have sent outliers into the open plain. The retreat of the woods is due partly to man and partly to the drying up of Eurasia^[4] to which it has itself contributed. This drying up of the interior has also had a strange effect even upon the coastline.

The shores of such a country as we have described do not naturally offer facilities for commerce. To begin with the gentle slope of the plains continues in some parts under the sea: hence the shore between the mouths of the Dnepr and the Don, if we leave out of account the southern part of the Crimea, as ever a strong contrast to the rest of the region, is not to be approached by ships. This initial difficulty is increased by the deposits of the great rivers, deposits which are heaped up with the more ease in that there is no tide to carry them away. As soon as the stream meets the dead mass of motionless sea, still more some current of the sea or of another river, it drops its load of silt along gentle curves mathematically determined by the meeting places of the opposing currents.

So the Sea of Azov acts as a kind of settling tank for collecting the silt of the Don. The coarsest falls to the bottom at once to add to the growth of the delta, the finer has to pass successively the dead points produced by the opposing currents of the various streams that fall in from each side : hence the spits running out between the river mouths and especially the strange Arabat spit that encloses the Putrid Sea^[5] and makes an alternative entrance to the Crimea.

Hence too the fact that during certain winds vessels have to lie ten miles from the shore off Taganrog^[6], and the complaints of the silting up of the Maeotis expressed by Polybius^[7] who regarded the completion of the process as not very distant, and the recent Imperial commission on the subject^[8].

After all this the current that flows out of the Maeotis has left only 4'25 metres on the bar at Kerch.

The same process goes on at the mouth of the Dnepr. There is the bar and delta below Kherson, another bar (6 metres) at Ochakov running across from Kinburn spit (*AXwhere it meets a coast current from east to west.

The Dnestr only just keeps open. Here the bar has long been dry land, save for two small openings of which that used by ships has a depth of only five feet.

The small rivers such as the Kujalnik and Tiligul are entirely closed. Yet this process is quite modern. In 1823 the Tiligul was open, now the highroad runs along its bar. Within the bar in every case is an estuary (liman) which used once to be open. This inconvenient phenomenon of shut river mouths is due partly to the unequal flow of rivers which have to carry snow water ; more however to their inability to keep a sufficient current in a channel that they had excavated in ages of more abundant rainfall. It is one more evidence of the drying up of the country.

The Greek colonies of Tyras and Olbia were founded on the steep side of a liman where the current came near the coast, the position of Tanais was somewhat similar.

All the other ports depended on the entirely exceptional formation of the Crimea: Chersonese had the use of the many harbours about Sevastopol, some of which are steep to. Theodosia had a small harbour and fine roads, and the towns on the Bosporus though troubled with shoals were not yet strangled by accumulating silt. Beyond the Bosporus Bata (Novorossijsk) and Pagrae (Gelendzhik) had clean harbours, but the former suffers from a unique disadvantage, the Bora, a wind which blowing from the mountains covers ships with such a coating of ice that they have been known to sink under the weight^[9].

Of modern towns Odessa is comparatively free from silt, but its harbour is entirely artificial. In fact the headland that sheltered the roads is being washed away. But both Nicolaev and Kherson suffer from the shoals and bars encouraged by the drying up of their respective rivers.

This drying process has tended to make the climate of Scythia more extreme in character. Of course most of the ancients regarded only its cold, and regarded it as cold all the year round^[10]: just as it requires an effort

E. Reclus, op. cit. p. 789.

⁴ N. A. Korostelev, The Bora at Novorossijsk. Mem. de PAcad. Imp. des Sciences de St Pe'tersbonrg, Classe Physico-Mathematique, vm^e sdr., T. xv. No. 2, St P. 1904.

⁵ Her. iv. 28. Hippocrates, De aere, c. 26.

for most of us to think of Russia and Siberia as very hot in the summer. Strabo^[11] even refuses to believe in the heat, arguing that those who found it hot did not know real heat^[12]. A curious fact is that the Greeks undoubtedly looked on Scythia as damp and foggy, whereas it suffers from oft-recurring drought. Probably there was more wood and so there was more moisture, and probably also the Greeks connected the north with cold and wet and thought that further to the north there must be more cold and wet. Also there certainly were marshy foggy tracts at the mouths of the big rivers, the points where they had most commerce with Scythia, and the readiness with which people believe the worst of foreign climates accounts for the permanence of this idea.

One or two little points served to confirm this impression. A Greek felt a kind of horror of a country in which the myrtle and bay did not grow^[13], and the attempts to make them grow at Panticapaeum were probably not very skilled, for the vine did not do well, and that succeeds there quite easily nowadays^[14].

So too the fact of the sea freezing struck them as evidence of an intolerable climate. Actually this tends to come about chiefly in places where the fresh water contributed by the rivers has made the sea hardly more than brackish. But this again was just in regions where the Greeks were most likely to see it. Also the uncertainty it introduced into commerce at certain times of the year would bring it home to the Greeks of Hellas, and every Greek had heard of the brazen pot split by the. frost and dedicated by Stratius in the temple of Aesculapius at Panticapaeum and the epigram thereon^[15] ^{^[16].}

The Fauna of the steppe region is not specially striking. It is on the whole poor. The ancients were interested in the accounts of the Tarandus, a beast with a square face and a power of changing colour, apparently the reindeer with its summer and winter coat”: that no longer comes so far south. So too the otter and beaver have retreated with the forests though place-names shew the former extent of the latter^[17].

The wild white horses about the source of the Hypanis may either have been the western extension of the grey pony of Upper Asia or they may have merely run wild^[18].

Strabo (vu. iv. 8) mentions that in the marshes there were hunted deer and wild boar, and on the plains wild asses and goats. He also mentions the Colus, a kind of buffalo or bison.

On domesticated animals the climate was supposed to have such an effect that asses (in spite of Strabo’s wild asses) and mules succumbed⁸, and horned cattle lost their horns¹⁰.

⁵ Strabo, 11. i. 16.

⁰ Arist. de Mirabilibus, c. 30. Theophr. Frag. 172 ; Her. IV. 109.

⁷ Her. l.c.; Strabo, ill. iv. 15; Th. P. Koppen, On the Distribution of the Beaver in Russia, Journ. Min. Publ. Inst. St P., June, 1902.

⁸ Her. iv. 52.

⁹ Aristotle, r/i’ Animalibus, VIII. 25.

¹⁰ Arist. op. cit. VIII. 28. This circumstance was explained by the statement that the cold prevented

Very characteristic of the steppe are the various rodents, susliks and baibaks, relations of the jerboa, but regarded by the ancients as exaggerated mice : hence the story that skins of mice were used for clothing¹. Such creatures with their curious watchful attitude, along with Indian ants and Babylonish garments, may have their part in the origin of griffin legends.

We may also mention adders and snakes², bees³ and ephemera⁴.

More important than the land animals were the fish that abounded in the rivers and formed the main object of export®.

The most important species were the Pelamys, a kind of tunny, and the apra/catot or sturgeons. Of the former Strabo (vn. vi. 2) has an idea that they were born in the Maeotis and made their way round and began to be worth catching when they got as far as Trapezus, and were of full size at Sinope. The difficulty is that I am assured by Mr Zernov, Director of the Marine Biological Laboratory at Sevastopol, to whom I offer my best thanks, that no sort of tunny does this ; that a kind of herring does so ; but that the scumbria, which answers to the general description of the pelamys, and a mackarel now called palamida, do not go into the Sea of Azov at all. The palamida is quite rare in the Black Sea though common in the Mediterranean. Moreover the tendency is for the Mediterranean fauna gradually to conquer the Black Sea, so it is not likely that this particular species was commoner in ancient times. Yet Strabo from his birthplace ought to have known all about it.

The dpTa/faioi or sturgeons are first mentioned by Herodotus (iv. 53) at the mouth of the Dnepr. This fishery does not seem very abundant now. The other great locality was in the Maeotis, both along the eastern shore at the mouths of the rivers Rhombites⁶ (this is now represented by fisheries at the same points and at Achuev which is just at the mouth of the Anticites) and at the Cimmerian Bosporus, where the Greeks were much struck by the fishing carried on through the ice and believed that fish as big as dolphins were dug out of the solid⁷. As a matter of fact though ice is collected on the shore every year the strait does not freeze over very often : this happens more regularly in the upper part of the Maeotis at the mouth of the Don.

There are three kinds of sturgeon. Accipenser Stellatus (sevrjuga) with a sharp nose forms the bulk of the catch in the Sea of Azov. A. Httso (B^lUga) has whiter flesh and used to be common at Kerch and at the delta of the Dnepr. This seems to be the one that Strabo means when he talks of its being as big as a dolphin. Finally we have A. Sturio (osjotr), our sturgeon, which is more characteristic of the Volga. It has a blunt nose, and so differs from the fish represented on the Greek coins (Fl. v. 18, 20).

The ancients thought that the fish went into the Pontus to escape the larger fish that preyed upon them outside and to spawn, as the fresher water was more favourable to the young. That is true of the coastline, but the middle of the sea is full of bacteria which produce sulphuretted hydrogen, so that the fishes from the Mediterranean can only make their way round gradually and have not yet elbowed out of existence the archaic but excellent species proper to the Aralo-Caspian-Euxine basin.

their growth. Yet we have Greek representations of the saiga with its splendid horns, and the tarandus or reindeer was known with its horned hind.

¹ Justin 11. 2, pellibus murinis utuntur, cf. Hipp. de aere, c. 26.

² Arist. de Mirabilibus, c. 141 ; Her. IV. 105.

³ Her. v. 10. Arist. de Animalibus, v. xxii. 8.

⁴lb. v. xix. 14.

⁵ Cf. especially M. Koehler, TAPIX02 in Mem. de I'Acad. des Sciences de St Petersbourg, vi^me sdr. T. 1. p. 347, St P. 1832.

⁰ Strabo, XL ii. 4.

⁷ Strabo, vn. iii. 18.

As to the Flora of the northern coast of the Euxine, leaving aside the Crimean mountains, we have already spoken of the scarcity of wood, a scarcity which seems to have increased in modern times. What trees do grow are confined to the river valleys and include deciduous species only, as indeed is noticed by Theophrastus' who speaks of figs and pomegranates growing if earthed up, also excellent pears and apples, and among wild trees of oaks, limes and ashes; but no firs or pines. There is however a special Pinus Taurica. In the open country the ancients noticed the luxuriance of the grass or when they wished to find fault the stretches of wormwood^[19] ^{^[20], to which however they ascribed the good quality of the meat^[21]. They speak also of eatable roots and bulbs^[22] and of various drugs, also of hemp used both as a fibre and as a narcotic⁵.}

A special lack in Scythia was that of good stone. About Odessa and Kerch there is a soft local limestone easy to work but only durable if protected from the weather by a coat of plaster : in the Crimea, especially at Inkerman, there occurs a stone of higher quality: but in general stone is not to be found, and this has been one reason for the absence throughout the whole region of important architectural monuments.

Of other natural productions we need mention but amber", which is occasionally found near Kiev, but does not seem ever to have been systematically worked ; salt⁷, given as occurring at the mouth of the Dnepr, and indeed spread over a whole section of the steppe (the carting of salt into the interior was a great industry until the railways came, and followed immemorial tracks, the Greeks must have profited by it in their time), and gold which does not occur in Scythia itself, but has been abundant to the west in Transylvania whence the Romans obtained much gold, and to the north-east in the Urals where the mines of the ancient inhabitants {Chudskia kopi} have been worked by the Russians, and further towards the middle of Asia, in the Altai, where also the modern miner has come across traces of former exploitation. In ancient times there were no doubt placer workings that yielded gold more readily than it can be attained now. These regions also contained ancient copper mines : and the turquoise of the east country was not without influence on the development of decorative art in the whole region.

So we may conclude a very hasty survey of the natural conditions which the Greeks met on the north coast of the Euxine and which governed the evolution and history of the native tribes they found there.

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Source: Minns E.H.. Scythians and Greeks. A survey of ancient history and archaeology on the north coast of the Euxine from the Danube to the Caucasus. Cambridge: University Press,1913. — 720 p.. 1913

CHAPTER I. PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY AND NATURAL PRODUCTIONS.

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