Sarmatiana: A List of References, Old & New

[Michael Kerr]

   Thanks for the recommendation of the Great Courses lectures on the Steppe empires, I haven’t seen this thread for a while so I thought I might add a few publications that have cropped up in my collection since posting on this thread a while ago. Roger Batty’s book “Rome and the Nomads – The Pontic-Danubian Realm in Antiquity” is a good source for Steppe peoples who lived around the Crimea and Danube. Batty is an economist and if you are after a book on military campaigns of the Sarmatians, Alans and Scythians then this book is not for you. But he covers climate, soils, the condition of the Danube and Black Sea in ancient times compared to now and nomad and pastoral economies trade and the necessity of raids  and how the nomads interacted with their neighbours like the Greeks, Dacians, Thracians, the Bastarnae and the Romans and before them the Greek city states.

  Another book I recommend although it covers Central Asia (It does cover the Sarmatians and Alans though) is “Mounted Archers” by Laszlo Torday. It starts with the rise of the Hsiung-nu and how their expansion affected the rest of the tribes of Central Asia like the Saka, Scythians, the Yueh-chih, the Wusun and the oasis trading centres of the Tarim Basin, the routes used as well as how these movements and migrations affected Europe, Persia, China and India.

  “The Urals and Western Siberia in the Bronze and Iron Ages” by Ludmila Koryakova and Andrej Epimakhov is also a good book which covers in English a lot of Russian research into the archaeology of the Urals and Western Siberia which is usually not available to non-Russian speakers. It has interesting material on a few ancient cultures like Sargats and how they interacted with their neighbours like the Scythians, Sarmatians etc. and covers ancient mining and metallurgy as well.

 Lastly another book covering the Alans from 1st to 15th centuries although it is in French is “Les Alains” by Vladimir Kouznetsov and Iaroslav Lebedynsky. It covers the history and migrations of the Alans with lots of maps and illustrations of weapons, costumes, utensils, jewellry and horse gear.  I found that Google Translate does a fair job of translating various sections of the book. If you subscribe to Scribd it is available free for download as a PDF which makes it handy to copy and paste sections for translating.

Regards

Michael Kerr