cal race in the
eyes of the civilised races of the Oriental world. They imagined them as
living in a perpetual mist on the confines of the universe: "Never
does bright Helios look upon them with his rays, neither when he rises
towards the starry heaven, nor when he turns back from heaven towards
the earth, but a baleful night spreads itself over these miserable
mortals."*

* Odyssey, xi. 14-19. It is this passage which Ephorus
applies to the Cimmerians of his own time who were
established in the Crimea, and which accounts for his saying
that they were a race of miners, living perpetually
underground.

Fabulous animals, such as griffins with lions' bodies, having the neck
and ears of a fox, and the wings and beak of an eagle, wandered over
their plains, and sometimes attacked them; the inhabitants were forced
to defend themselves with axes, and did not always emerge victorious
from these terrible conflicts.

[Illustration: 111.jpg SCYTHIANS ARMED FOR WAR]

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from the reliefs on the silver vase
of Kul-Oba.

The few merchants who had ventured to penetrate into their country had
returned from their travels with less fanciful notions concerning the
nature of the regions frequented by them, but little continued to be
known of them, until an unforeseen occurrence obliged them to quit their
remote steppes. The Scythians, driven from the plains of the Iaxartes by
an influx of the Massagetae, were urged forwards in a westerly direction
beyond the Volga and the Don, and so great was the terror inspired by
the mere report of their approach, that the Cimmerians decided to quit
their own territory. A tradition current in Asia three centuries later,
told how their kings had counselled them to make a stand against the
invaders; the people, however, having refused to listen to their advice,
their rulers and those who were loyal to them fell by each other's
hands, and their burial-place was still shown near the banks of the
Tyras. Some of their tribes took refuge in the Chersonesus Taurica, but
the greater number pushed forward beyond the Maeotio marshes; a body of
Scythians followed in their track, and the united horde pressed onwards
till they entered Asia Minor, keeping to the shores of the Black Sea.*
This heterogeneous mass of people came into conflict first with
Urartu; then turning obliquely in a south-easterly direction, their
advance-guard fell upon the Mannai. But