The Scythian Diet

The Scythians were a nomadic people and as such did not rely on an agrarian style of life like the Greeks or Persians did. A recent isotopic analysis of Scythian remains has given us new insight into what exactly they did eat however. While the Scythians were not agrarian, they were highly pastoral and relied on their herds of animals for food. This meant that their diet was primarily meat based, with milk and milk products such as cheese and yogurt supplementing it. Various vegetables, such as tubers, would also be gathered during the spring and summer.

The isotopic analysis that was recently completed also seemed to indicate that the Scythians had a complex trading system with neighboring peoples, allowing for agricultural crops such as millet to form part of their diet despite not growing any themselves.

The Scythians would also commonly drink fermented mares milk, a sour alcoholic drink still drank today, instead of beer or wine. This further illustrates the Scythian reliance on pastoralism over agrarianism.

Ventresca Miller, Alicia R., James Johnson, Sergey Makhortykh, Claudia Gerling, Ludmilla Litvinova, Svetlana Andrukh, Gennady Toschev, et al. “Re-Evaluating Scythian Lifeways: Isotopic Analysis of Diet and Mobility in Iron Age Ukraine.” PLOS ONE 16, no. 3 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0245996.