The Scythian Origins of Scepticism

Written by James Alexander on September 20, 2024. Posted in Current News

The book of the year is The Scythian Empire by the American historian and scholar Christopher Beckwith.

You should not expect narrative history. You should not even expect much continuity. You should not expect irony or grace. Beckwith is not Gibbon. He is not Macaulay.

He is not even Tom Holland. He is not trying to write literature: but he writes literature anyway, scholarly literature. Some of you will not be able to take it, this scholarship, but it is bold, singular, remarkable.

I have read all of Beckwith’s last four books: he is the only author one has to read. Other authors write too much: that’s the problem with literature. But Beckwith only writes when he has something to say, and the saying of it is difficult and one can see this in his writings, since he repeats himself, or starts an argument, and then continues it or corroborates it 50 pages later, or adds something decisive to a picture he set up 15 years before.

I confess that though I had read all of his handsome Princeton University Press books, and got quite a few things out of them, I did not see the entire drift of the argument until The Scythian Empire.

The argument is revolutionary. It is that Karl Jaspers was right. There was an Axial Age. Jaspers supposed that something in common had happened in the time of Zoroaster, Buddha, Confucius, Lao Tzu and Pythagoras, Heraclitus and the others.

All the historians dismissed Jaspers because it was a speculation. But Beckwith has found evidence for the fact that all of these figures were related to each other.

The evidence is in literature, and also in language. In one sentence: the Axial Age was the Scythian Age. Beckwith’s hypothesis is that one people, the Scythians, connected East to West for four or five important centuries BC, that they had one language, that they had one god, that they had one colossally significant ruling system, with a pride in its lineage so immense that everyone – including the people we now call Chinese.

But at the time had no name for themselves, copied it – and that they, always useful, had an entirely novel method of waging war.

Beckwith lacks the ability to summarise his own claims in the manner of a best-selling historian, or is too dignified to descend to selling his wares. So I shall do it for him:

The Scythians, the nomadic peoples of Central Asia, were the first to ride horses. Consequently, they invented close-fitting dress, with distinctive boots and hats; they invented a short composite bow; they were extremely skilled horsemen.
All of this has obvious influence on Persian and Chinese dress as they adopted Scythian ways.
The Scythians worshipped a great God, in relation to which other gods were false or inferior. This God, tanri or tengri, was the first great universal monotheist god. The God of the Israelites was only a tribal god until the Israelites learnt from the Persians and rebuilt their temple to this great God.
The Scythians invented feudalism: a form of politics based on equality amongst the warrior class, but then, outside of war, involving hierarchies of lordship and vassalship running from king reciprocally downwards to serf. There were no slaves. And the king was ‘king of kings’.
We have made mistakes about ancient history because of the names of tribes, ‘Medes’, ‘Persians’ etc., and because we suppose that the original Indo-Europeans were ‘Iranian’. So we tell the history in pieces, pixellated, rather than as a whole.
Beckwith even made this mistake in his old book Empires of the Silk Road (2009), though it contained the germ of his latest argument. In fact, as he now shows, the Scythians, also called Skuda, or Sugda, or Saka, conquered (and were conquered by) the Medes and made them Scythian; they conquered (and were conquered by) the Chinese and made them Scythian. They conquered them in military manner, but also, even in defeat, conquered them in dress and in language. We should not think of the Scythians, as Wikipedia or the old books would have it, as an empire of the Caucasus, but as a cultural empire stretching across the entire pasture that runs from Hungary in the west to Ordos in the east, dominating all of Central Asia from Iran and Anatolia to Mongolia. Their enemies paid them the compliment of copying their ways.
The Scythian language left a trace in almost all ancient languages. Beckwith argues that the ‘Avestan’ language in which Zoroaster wrote was in fact Scythian. He argues that the Chinese city Handan and the Persian city Ecbatana were both derived from Scythian Agamatana. He shows that the word ‘Aryan’ comes from the Scythian word for ‘royal lineage’, Harya. It was a universal word. Herodotus said the Medes were originally called Aria. Beckwith shows that Darius, supposedly a Persian, claimed to be “an Ariya and seed of an Ariya”, that is, of the great Scythian ruling lineage. Even more remarkably, the word Harya was transcribed into Chinese in several forms, one Hsia or Xia (originally a word for summer) and the other Hua (originally a word for flower). There was no word for ‘Chinese’ in antiquity. But the Hsiung-nu, once thought to be ‘Huns’, were in fact Scythians: these were the nomadic neighbours of what we now think of as the Chinese. The ancestors of the Chinese recognised the Aria concept, and used it of the Hsiung-nu: but, also, as they began to adopt Scythian techniques and style and words, they began also to use Scythians words of themselves.
So the word for a ruling lineage, Harya, then Hsia or Hua, was first used of the nomads to the east and north, but, then, it was used for themselves: to claim that whoever was uniting the Chao, Chin, Han etc. was part of a universal ruling lineage. It is of great significance that the generic word for the Chinese world, ‘all under heaven’ or Tianxia, was derived from the Scythian word for great god, Tengri and of course Hsia (Xia). The word Hua is still part of the names of both modern Chinese states.
Beckwith’s scholarship is manifest most exactly and speculatively in his philological work: he evidently is the master of all the languages. He shows even that the word ‘noble’ in the famous Four Noble Truths of Buddha is – yes, arya, ‘noble’, where ‘noble’ in fact means ‘of the ruling lineage’. Buddhism is a religion for wise rulers.
In fact, he shows that Buddha was a Scythian, called Sakamuni or Sakyamuni, ‘sage of the Sakas’, that is, the Scythians. In this he resembled Anacharsis, a Scythian philosopher who went to Greece in the sixth century BC, and was a later hero of the Cynics. Beckwith also claims that Zoroaster, the first great theological monotheist, was a Scythian. What made Scythian thought distinctive was that it recognised what Beckwith calls antilogies: opposites and binaries. Truth and falsehood, good and evil. Zoroaster was a traditionalist in that regard. But Anacharsis and Buddha tried to break with old Scythian philosophy, by showing how to overcome the antilogies, through what became Greek scepticism or Indian meditative practices and arguments. Beckwith also shows that this was taken to China. Lao Tzu, he speculates, is a rendering of the Buddha’s personal name, Gautama (via Lao Tan and Kao Tan): Lao Tzu was also what we would now call a non-dualist.

This is astonishing. Maximal suggestiveness and maximal ability to justify it at the highest scholarly level. It is almost nowhere in anyone else’s books.

I checked the literature on Tianxia, which is a newly prosperous subject, as Chinese scholars try to show that it is a superior concept to the western ‘state’: and nowhere in this literature is the etymological root of Tianxia explored.

Our scholarship is still insulated. Chinese scholars offer Chinese etymology. Indian scholars say Buddha was Indian. Persian scholars begin every argument with the Persian language. Scholars, politically, everywhere in the world are as cosmopolitan as you please.

Since political cosmopolitanism is cheap – but hardly any of them are cosmopolitan in the scholarly sense: it takes too much work, requires too much erudition, needs a remarkable combination of learning and perspicacity. Only Beckwith can manage it.

He calls himself Christopher I. Beckwith on his books. Perhaps this is just the polite American attempt to distinguish himself from all the other Christopher Beckwiths. (As if that were necessary.) To an Englishman it might come across as a bit vainglorious, as if, like Claudius, he is “I, Beckwith”.

But he deserves it. He is the only Beckwith. His book is a marvel. It is heavy going. Jared Diamond, it ain’t. But, unlike Diamond, who had two good ideas (that Greece has a convoluted shoreline.

And that the Americas have a north-south axis while Asia has an east-west axis – and, alright, all that stuff about “guns, germs and steel”), Beckwith has done more than look at a map: he has studied the old books.

His own books, published since 2009, are remarkable. Empires of the Silk Road emphasised the concept of the comitatus, the band of brothers who would swear loyalty to a leader, to die before him in battle, and to share the spoils of victory.

This is one of the most important political inventions ever made, for worse or better. Warriors of the Cloisters told the world that – forget the university which we always think is European – the ‘college’ has its ancestry, as George Makdisi used to argue, in the Islamic madrasa,but that the madrasa, unexpectedly, was in turn derived from a Central Asian institution, the vihara.

The Greek Buddha showed that Pyrrho’s sceptical precepts and Buddha’s early precepts (before Buddhism became the business of the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path) were identical.

And The Scythian Empire finally drives a Scythian short sword through the entire continent to show that there was a single world in the sixth century BC.

Since this is the Daily Sceptic, I should say that this is all relevant to our business here, too. Pyrrho – you might not have heard of him – was reputedly the first sceptic. (Even now we speak of Pyrrhonian Scepticism).

Pyrrho travelled to India with Alexander the Great in the 320s. Beckwith (in his book The Greek Buddha) says that the texts suggest that Pyrrho agreed with the Buddha. How does this work?

Beckwith relies on a remarkable passage about Pyrrho quoted [deep breath] in a lost work by Timon quoted [deep breath] in a lost work history by Aristocles quoted [deep breath]by Eusebius in his Preparation for the Gospel.

In it Pyrrho says all questions are adiaphora, undifferentiated by logical differentia, astathmeta, unstable, unbalanced, unmeasurable, and anepikrita, unjudged, unfixed, undecideable.

Therefore we should be adoxastous, without views and saying about everything that “no more is than it is not or it both is and is not or it neither is nor is not”.

Beckwith relies on an early text for the Buddha, the Anguttura-nikaya from the Pali canon, the oldest surviving tradition. In this the Buddha announces the Trilaksana, the three characteristics of all dharmas. “The Buddha says, ‘All dharmas are anitya, impermanent… all dharmas are duhkha, unsatisfactory, imperfect, unstable… all dharmas are anatman, without an innate self-identity.”

Beckwith says that the Buddha’s saying is so close to Pyrrho’s they are a translation of each other. (By the way, the last argument of Pyrrho that I quoted above – “it no more is” etc – is identical to the famous catuskoti of Nagarjuna, the most famous para-sceptical Buddhist philosopher.)

Let me summarise the entire argument of The Scythian Empire, if I can. It is that the Scythians invented a very dynamic political system.

It was godly, kingly and feudal: hierarchical but reciprocal, and with a streak of egalitarianism running through it, and no slavery. It was an empire on horseback.

This system influenced the sedentary orders it encountered from Egypt to China: so that all the great civilisations of the past were no longer simple or single, but were duplex systems, compositely formed out of 1) king and slaves (or in the case of the Greeks citizens and slaves) but also 2) this other kingly-feudal idea, with no slavery but graded hierarchy. Remarkably, China was built on a Scythian concept. In addition, it is very likely that Scythians saw things very clearly: insisting on duality (black/white, good/evil etc).

And then it may have been particular Scythian philosophers who complicated things one step further: so that Anacharsis, Buddha and Lao Tzu tried to break through the dualities and suggest something else – and along the way invented scepticism.

Yes, indeed: those late Scythians invented the form of thought which was opposed to the imposition of a singular order from above. A form of thought that proposed that truth, though formerly opposed to falsehood, might be extremely difficult, and perhaps impossible, to establish.

(RIP my oldest friend Matthew Neale, of Cambridge, Cairo and Kathmandu, who studied Arabic, Greek, Pali, Sanskrit and was fascinated by the Sextus Empiricus/Nagarjuna sceptical harmonies: the last thing he did, before he died, was write a review of Beckwith’s Greek Buddha.)

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