The Greek chronicler, Herodotus (5th century BC) makes references to a nomadic
people, the Scythians; he describes them as having dwelt in what is today southern
European Russia and Ukraine. He was the first to make a reference to them. Many
ancient Sanskrit texts from a later period make references to such tribes they were
witness of pointing them towards the southeasternmost edges of Central Asia, around
the Hindukush range in northern Pakistan.
It is believed that these Scythians were conquered by their eastern cousins,
the Sarmatians, who are mentioned by Strabo as the dominant tribe which controlled
the southern Russian steppe in the 1st millennium AD. These Sarmatians were also
known to the Romans, who conquered the western tribes in the Balkans and sent
Sarmatian conscripts, as part of Roman legions, as far west as Roman Britain. These
Iranian-speaking Scythians and Sarmatians dominated large parts of Eastern
Europe for a millennium, and were eventually absorbed and assimilated
(e.g. Slavicisation) by the Proto-Slavic population of the region.[8][9][11]
The Sarmatians differed from the Scythians in their veneration of the god of fire rather
than god of nature, and women's prominent role in warfare, which possibly served as
the inspiration for the Amazons.[73] At their greatest reported extent, around the 1st
century AD, these tribes ranged from the Vistula River to the mouth of the Danube and
eastward to the Volga, bordering the shores of the Black and Caspian Seas as well as
the Caucasus to the south.[74] Their territory, which was known as Sarmatia to Greco-
Roman ethnographers, corresponded to the western part of greater Scythia (mostly
modern Ukraine and Southern Russia, also to a smaller extent north eastern Balkans
around Moldova). According to authors Arrowsmith, Fellowes and Graves Hansard in
their book A Grammar of Ancient Geography published in 1832, Sarmatia had two
parts, Sarmatia Europea[75] and Sarmatia Asiatica[76] covering a combined area of
503,000 sq mi or 1,302,764 km^2.
Throughout the 1st millennium AD, the large presence of the Sarmatians who once
dominated Ukraine, Southern Russia, and swaths of the Carpathians, gradually started
to diminish mainly due to assimilation and absorption by the Germanic Goths, especially
from the areas near the Roman frontier, but only completely by the Proto-Slavic