Hello and welcome to the History Extra podcast from BBC History magazine,

Britain's best-selling history magazine. I'm I'm I'm Ile Korthon. On today's episode we have another in our

recorded lecture series from our autumn 2019 history events. This time it's Professor Barry Kunnuff talking about the Scythians, following the publication of his book, The Scythians, No Mad Warriors of the Step. While we're not currently holding live events,

we are running a series of fortnightly virtual lectures on various different historical subjects.

You can find out more about them on our website at history extra

dot com forward slash events. Now here's Professor Kunleff taking us on a fascinating

tour of this remarkable nomadic society.

Now the Scythians, you'll see the subheading on that book,

Nomad Warriors of the Step, because people in the West, west of Europe I mean, on the whole

don't know very much about the Scythians. It's not within our general knowledge.

If you want to find Scythian material in museums,

you'd be pretty hard put to it.

There's a small collection tucked away in the Ashmoline Museum in

Oxford but not much more anywhere else. We don't have Scythian collections and

some of you I suspect will have seen that fabulous exhibition that the British Museum put

on about what two three years ago on the Scythians. But before that the only other time there

was any exhibition on the Scythians in Britain was 1978.

So we are really starved, I think, of good information, up-to-date information about who these very remarkable people were.

The Greek historian Epharous, writing the fourth century,

said that the Scythians were one of the four great

barbarian peoples of the world the world known to the Greeks. So one of the

four great barbarian peoples. We know about the Celts, a lot about the

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