In Europe, the discoveries made in the Russian colonies were partly fol-
lowed by publications in French and German. The geographer and historian,
Karl Neumann (1823–80), publishedDie Hellenen im Skythenlandein Berlin
in 1855. In French we have theRecherches sur les antiquite ́s de la Russie
me ́ridionale et des cotes de la Mer Noire, which was published in 1855 by
Alexis Uvarov. In 1873 W. Stassov published E ́tudes sur les monuments
ge ́orgiens photographie ́s par M. Jermakof et sur leurs inscriptions par M. Brosset,
in Me ́langes Asiatiques VI in St Petersburg. These publications, however,
generally were little known, and this lack of knowledge became more acute
from 1889 when the policy of publishing in Russian became dominant,
leaving Western scholars in the dark about developments there. Two books
would assist in bridging this gap of knowledge. In 1889–90 the Russian
archaeologists Nikodim Pavlovich Kondakov (1844–1925) and Count Ivan
Ivanovich Tolstoy published a book on Scythian antiquities (as seen below,
this book aimed to be an introduction for the art of later periods). The book
was reissued in French by the archaeologist Salomon Reinach (1858–1932) in
theAntiquite ́s de la Russie Me ́ridionaleof 1891. The bulkyScythians and
Greekswritten by the Cambridge scholar Ellis Hovell Minns (1874–1953)
and published in 1913 would have a similar impact. The closure of Russia
to foreigners after the revolution would enhance the value of the book,
which came to be partly complemented in 1922 by the Russian e ́migre ́
in the US, Michael Rostovtsev’s (1870–1952)Iranians and Greeks in South
Russia.
The study of the Scythians was not only the province of archaeologists.
Throughout the nineteenth century, scholarly work on the Scythians dove-
tailed with philological and, increasingly, in racial debates in which archae-
ologists also participated (Mallory 1989). Sir William Jones (1746–94) had
identiWed their homeland in today’s Iran (Persia) but there were others who
proposed India, Turkey and Lithuania. The German professor Karl Zeiss
identiWed Scythians with Iranian-lingual tribes in 1837 and the German
linguist August Schleicher (1821–68) proposed the area of the Caspian Sea
as their homeland. From the 1850s the possible number of homelands became
even greater in geographical scope, ranging from Anatolia to the Balkans,
from the southern Russian steppes to northern Europe, central Europe, and,
eventually, Germany. The Czech-Austrian researcher of Central Asian histor-
ical geography, Wilhelm Tomaschek (1841–1901), contributed to the philo-
logical discussion with hisCentralasiatishe Studienof 1877–80. As Koerner
has suggested, however, it often appears that scholars choseWrst a location
and then looked for evidence to support it based on geography, history, myth,
religion, language, and archaeology (Koerner n.y.).
258 Colonial Archaeology