Issedones

Issedones, an ancient people of Central Asia at the end of the trade route leading north-east from Scythia, described by Herodotus in Book Four of his History. Like the Massagetae to the west, the Issedones are described by Herodotus as similar to, yet distinct from, the Scythians. The exact location of their country is unknown; Herodotus (who allegedly got his information through both Greek and Scythian sources) describes them as living east of Scythia while the geographer Ptolemy appears to place them in the Tarym basin. They may have been identical with the ethnoi described in Chinese sources as Wu-su, situated around Lake Balkash.

The location of the land of the Issedones was between the Arimaspians (Arimaspi) (Huns at the foot of the Carpathian Mountains) and the Scythians (Ukraine, probably) according to ancient writers. The Arimaspians were north of the Issedones, and the Scythians were south of them:

"At Prasiai [in Attika] is a temple of Apollon. Hither they say are sent the first-fruits of the Hyperboreans, and the Hyperboreans are said to hand them over to the Arimaspoi, the Arimaspoi to the Issedones, from these the Skythians bring them to Sinope, thence they are carried by Greeks to Prasiai, and the Athenians take them to Delos." - Pausanias 1.31.2

Description

Herodotus reported that a Greek, Aristeas son of Kaustrobios of Prokonnessos (or Cyzicus), had managed to penetrate the country of the Issedones and observe their customs first-hand. The Ptolemy relates a similar story about a Syrian merchant.

According to Herodotus, the Issedones practiced euthanasia of their elderly males, followed by a ritual feast at which the deceased patriarch's family ate his flesh, gilded his skull, and placed it in a position of honor much like a cult image. In addition, the Issedones were supposed to have kept their wives in common; whether this marks high status (as institutionalized polyandry) or low social status (as chattel slavery) for the women is unclear. Similar customs could be found until recently among many Tibetan tribes, leading some to speculate that the Issedones were of Tibetan extraction; they may, however, have been Iranian or Tocharian in origin (and the similarities with the Tibetans the result of proximity alone). Similar customs were also reported by ancient authors among the Massagetae, with whom the Issedones often warred.

Controversy

The archeologists E. M. Murphy and J. P. Mallory of Queen's University, Belfast, have argued (in the June, 2001 issue of Antiquities) that Herodotus was mistaken in his interpretation of what he imagined to be cannibalism. Recently-excavated sites in southern Siberia, such as the large cemetery at Aymyrlyg containing more than 1,000 burials of the Scythian period, have revealed accumulations of bones often arranged in anatomical order, which indicate burials of semi-decomposed corpses or defleshed bodies sometimes associated with leather bags or cloth sacks. Marks on some bones show cut-marks of a nature indicative of defleshing, but most appear to suggest disarticulation of adult skeletons. This has led some scholars to suggest that dismembered burial took place in winter or spring, before the ground was unfrozen sufficiently to permit immediate burial. Defleshing and dismemberment would have been more hygienic than extended storage. Such procedures may have been mistaken for evidence of cannibalism by foreign onlookers. Murphy and Mallory also pointed out that elsewhere, Herodotus names another tribe(Androphagi) as the only group to eat human flesh.

Dismemberment for burial of the type described by Murphy and Mallory does appear in medieval sources, as when saints were dismembered for relics. The following flaws in Murphy and Mallory's have been pointed out by Dr. Timothy Taylor in British Archeology Magazine [1]

1. Herodotus does report that the so-called "Androphagoi" are the "only" people in the region to practice cannibalism. However, a distinction should be drawn between "aggressive gustatory cannibalism" (i.e., hunting humans for food) and the ritualized, reverential practices reported among the Issedones and Massagetae. 2. Scythian-type peoples were renowned embalmers and presumably would have no need for funerary defleshing to delay decomposition of the corpse. 3. Herodotus specifically describes the removal of the meat and mixing it with other foodstuffs to make a funerary stew.

The issue remains hotly debated.

Herodotus. The Histories. Book 4.

External Sources

Scythians at Livius.org