In the 4th century BC, the Athenian politician Aeschines referred to the Scythian ancestry of his
opponent Demosthenes to attempt discrediting him.[165]
The Ancient Greeks included the Scythians in their mythology, with Herodorus of Heraclea making a
mythical Scythian named Teutarus into a herdsman who served Amphitryon and taught archery
to Heracles. Herodorus also portrayed the Titan Prometheus as a Scythian king, and, by extension,
described Prometheus's son Deucalion as a Scythian as well.[168]
The ancient Israelites called the Scythians ʾAškūz (אשכוז), and this name, corrupted to ʾAškənāz (אשכנז),
appears in the Hebrew Bible, where ʾAškənāz is closely linked to Gōmer (גֹּמֶר), that is to the
Cimmerians.[46]
The richness of Scythian burials was already well known in Antiquity, and, by the time the power of the
Scythians came to an end in the 3rd century BC, the robbing of Scythian graves started[169] and was
initially carried out by Scythians themselves.[170]
The Romans confused the peoples whom they perceived as archetypical "Barbarians," namely the
Scythians and the Celts, into a single grouping whom they called the "Celto-Scythians"
(Latin: Celtoscythae ) and supposedly living from Gaul in the west to the Pontic steppe in the east.[171]
During Late Antiquity itself, another wave of grave robbery of Scythian burials occurred at the time of
the Sarmatian and Hunnish domination of the Pontic Steppe, when these peoples reused older Scythian
kurgans to bury their own dead.[170]
In Late Antiquity itself, as well as in and the Middle Ages, the name "Scythians" was used in Greco-
Roman and Byzantine literature for various groups of nomadic "barbarians" living on the Pontic-Caspian
Steppe who were not related to the actual Scythians, such as
the Huns, Goths, Ostrogoths, Gokturks, Pannonian Avars, Slavs, and Khazars.[15][19] For example,
Byzantine sources referred to the Rus' raiders who attacked Constantinople in 860 AD in contemporary
accounts as "Tauroscythians" because of their geographical origin, and despite their lack of any ethnic
relation to Scythians.[172]
Mediaeval period
Following the Christianisation of Europe, the view that the peoples of this continent originated in West
Asia as the descendants of Japheth became the normative historiography.[173]
The flight of the Scota, Goídel Glas, and the Scythians from
Egypt, in a 15th-century manuscript of the Scotichronicon of Walter Bower