Scythians at the Tomb of Ovid (c. 1640), by Johann Heinrich
Schönfeld
During the early modern era itself, colonial ethnographers used the narrative of Herodotus of
Halicarnassus to create an image of the Scythians as a notorious and "savage" people chauvinistically
attached to their own customs and opposed to outside influences. Fascinated by this imagery, these
ethnographers drew on it to claim populations who were completely unrelated to the Scythians, such as
the Irish, Tatars, Mongols, Turks, and Indigenous peoples of the Americas, as being alleged descendants
of the Scythians.[183]
While claims of Scythian and Japhethic ancestry in much of Europe were abandoned during
the Reformation and Renaissance, British works on Ireland continued to emphasise the alleged Scythian
ancestry of the Irish to confirm their "barbaric" nature; these endeavours were further reinforced by
17th century proto-linguistic hypotheses about "Scytho-Celtic" languages and enjoyed enthusiastic
popularity during the 18th century, until these origin hypotheses were finally discredited by early 19th
century advances in philology[184] and by the discovery of features common to the cultures of the
ancient continental Celts and the Irish.[182]
During the early modern period itself, Hungarian scholars identified the Hungarians with the Huns, and
claimed that they descended from Scythians.[185] Therefore, the image of the Scythians among
Hungarians was shaped into one of "noble savages" who were valorous and honest, uncouth and hostile
to Western refinement, but at the same time defended "Christian civilisation" from aggression from the
East, such as from the Pechenegs, Cumans, and Tatars in the Middle Age, and from the Ottomans in the
early modern period.[186] This view was later superseded by the now established scientific consensus
that the Hungarians are a Finno-Ugric people.[187]
The 17th century Irish historian Roderick O'Flaherty continued the claim of the Lebor Gabála Érenn that
the Irish descended from the Scythians in his history of Ireland titled Ogygia: seu Rerum Hibernicarum
Chronologia & etc. , in which he identified Fénius Farsaid with the figure of Phoenix, who in Greek
mythology was believed to have created the Phoenician alphabet. O'Flaherty elaborated on this by
claiming that Fénius Farsaid also invented the Ogham script and the early Greek alphabet from which
the Latin alphabet evolved.[188]
Large scale robbery of Scythian tombs started when the Russian Empire started occupying the Pontic
steppe in the 18th century:[189] in 1718 the Russian Tsar Peter I issued decrees overseeing the collection