Gender Norms, Sex, Marriage, & Childhood

While the Greeks and Romans believed that women should be subservient to men, the Scythians had a much different view. In the steppes, everyone must do their part to help the tribe get by, and the Scythians did not believe men or women should have specific roles, an ideal their society was built upon. In fact, the Scythians were so egalitarian that many of their women would fight in battle alongside the men. So many women fought in battle in fact that Scythian women would inspire the stories of the Amazons in Greek folklore, as I discuss in the separate section on the Amazons. It is estimated that up to 1/3 of all women would fight in battle and would hunt alongside men as well.

In Scythian society, children were raised the same way regardless of gender. Both boys and girls were trained in the arts of war, from horsemanship to archery and sword-fighting.

The historian Aelian recorded what he said were the courtship rituals of the Massagetae. Suitors would fight in a mock battle against the one they wished to marry, which was a symbolic duel for dominance. Aelian stated, “If a man wants to marry a maiden, he must fight a duel with her… If the girl wins, she carries him off as a captive and has power and control over him, but if she is defeated then she is under his control.” It is highly likely that he was overstating the outcome of these duels as spouses were considered equals, but this ritual did seem to have been to determine who would have symbolic dominance in the relationship, just not as literally as Aelian believed.

According to Herodotus, Scythian maidens did not marry until they had fought and killed or defeated at least one enemy in battle.

Marriage and sexual norms differed significantly between the various Scythian tribes, however they all had the same thing in common. Women were largely free to choose their partners and did not belong to men. In fact, some tribes practiced both polyamory (men having multiple wives) and polyandry (women having multiple husbands). The Massagetae formed companionate couples that commonly had an option for having an open marriage, where both the men and women were free to choose their sexual partners.

(On an interesting note, the Scythians seemed to have been the first to ‘put a sock on the door handle’ so to speak. The sign that two people were ‘occupied’ was to hang a arrow quiver outside the woman’s wagon.)

Mayor, Adrienne. The Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Women across the Ancient World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016.