Maeotians

Map of the Roman empire under Hadrian (ruled 117-138 AD), showing the location of the Maeotae on the eastern shore of the eponymous Lacus Maeotis (Sea of Azov)

A Maeotan skeleton from the burial ground near Lenin Farm, Krasnodar region, Russia; 4th to 2nd century BC

Maeotan symbol

The Maeotians (Adyghe: МыутIэхэр, romanized: Mıwt'əxər; Ancient Greek: Μαιῶται, romanized: Maiōtai; Latin: Maeōtae) were an ancient people dwelling along the Sea of Azov, which was known in antiquity as the "Maeotian marshes" or "Lake Maeotis".

Identity

The etymology of the name and the identity of the people remain unclear. Edward James and William Smith were of the opinion that the term "Maeotian" was applied broadly to various peoples around the Sea of Azov, rather than the name of the sea deriving from a certain people. Their subdivisions included the Sindi, the Dandarii, the Toreatae, the Agri, the Arrechi, the Tarpetes, the Obidiaceni, the Sittaceni, the Dosci, and "many" others. Of these, the Sindi are the best attested, and were probably the dominant people among the Maeotians. The language of the Maeotians - and even its language family - is uncertain. One princess of the Ixomates was called Tirgatao, comparable to Tirgutawiya, a name on a tablet discovered in Hurrian Alalakh.

Ukrainian archaeologists and modern Hellenists claim that Maeotians were ancient Greeks who established colonies in Maeotia. A Greek historian Apostolos Vakalopoulos claimed that Greeks settled in the south of present-day Donbas and later established colonies on the coast of Kuban. He did not contest the possibility of Greeks intermixing with the local Sarmatians. The Maeotians named themselves after the name of the region, Maeotia, as the Greeks named it.

Karl Eichwald claimed that the Maeotians originated as a "Hindu" (Indian) colony, but this view is rejected by the majority of scholars. Soviet archaeologists, historians, and ethnographers concluded that the Maeotians were one of the Circassian tribes. The Cambridge Ancient History classifies the Maeotians as either a people of Cimmerian ancestry or as Caucasian aboriginals.

Early history

The earliest known reference to Moesia is from the logographer Hellanicus of Lesbos. According to Strabo, the Maeotians lived partly on fish and partly from agriculture but were as warlike as their nomadic neighbors. These wild hordes were sometimes tributary to the factor at the River Tanais (the present-day Don) and at other times to the Bosporani. In later times, especially under Pharnaces II, Asander, and Polemon I, the Bosporan Kingdom extended as far as the Tanais.

Historiography

The logographers come before Herodotus, focusing on memorization and straight repetition of lists and formulas. They have not begun to practice critical judgment in their reading of records or in the way they pass down recollected accounts of events. The account of Hellanicus about Moesia, as such, has a character somewhere between the mytho-poetic sensibility of the rhapsode and the dry accounting style of an ancient census—evidently or likely true data and legend appear alongside one another and are not distinguished from one another.

Work by a Logographer named of the 5th century BCE in a 2nd century papyrus manuscript

The marshland of the Maeotian swamps also features prominently as the initial meeting place of the Ostrogoths and the Huns in a history of the Goths written by Jordanes just after the fall of the Western Empire c. 550CE. The year in which the final Roman emperor who could claim ancestry in that city was dethroned and displaced by a Gothic invader (476CE) is just dying out from living memory as he embarks on the composition of this history. The Getica of Jordanes largely turns on the origins and outcomes of the conflict between Goths and Huns in their relation to the great migrations in Europe—a period of crisis referred to by later historians as ‘the fall of the Roman Empire.’

The deeds of Dacians and Getae (here from Trajan's Column) were wrongly attributed to Goths by Jordanes

Jordanes is a sort of a missing link figure in historiography, writing in a rustic and rather whimsical late attempt to maintain the imperial style of classical history, but relating the events in his narrative from a Gothic perspective. He lacks the rudiment of the classical historical tradition in the form of reliable records and substantiating documents or contemporary correspondence dating to the period described. The court records have been junked or incinerated, and many of the libraries have been burned or otherwise buried in hiding places where they are largely forgotten and have already begun crumbling to dust or falling prey to other forms of decay. The Goths have been illiterate for most of their history and recollections of earlier centuries survive in marching songs, folk tales, or in the alienated accounts of Roman observers hostile to the Goths when he begins to piece things together. He might also be considered the first historian of the Middle Ages whose histories are more imaginative, bizarre, markedly less frequent in their appearance or survival then classical histories and incomparably less reliable as to the verifiable content of the events they relate than their classical predecessors—sometimes having a character halfway between fairy tales and imaginative apocryphal variants of Bible stories. Jordanes hews to the tradition of the former classical style in his rhetorical posture but—lacking resources—veers toward and anticipates the latter medieval style of writing. He himself admits that he is without almost all of the sort of reference material that would have been considered essential by classical historians in his dedication of the book to his Gothic patron (an otherwise unknown warlord in Spain), complaining that he only had access to the primary work on his subject by Cassiodorus (now lost altogether except for this reference in Jordanes) when it was lent to him for three days at some point well before his patron requested that he embark on the composition of the history of the Goths.

Huns in battle with the Alans. An 1870s engraving after a drawing by Johann Nepomuk Geiger (1805–1880).

For example, the account appearing in Jordanes relating the origins of the Huns tells us of a race of Moesian swamp dwellers (who may have had earlier ancestry from the east on the basis of their physical description but have either forgotten that their ancestors came there from somewhere else or otherwise it is Jordanes who has forgotten these earlier origins, or it may be the Gothic people who never knew about these earlier origins to begin with). The swamp dwellers or the Moesians are described as belonging to a non-human race with elongated heads and tiny eyes, short in stature. A hunting party of these swamp dwellers track a magical fawn out of the fen—which had formerly comprised the boundary of the known world to them—and into lands inhabited by the goths. Here the encounter the Halliarunnae—usually translated as witches though its literal translation might be closer to ‘female secret-bearers’ or feminine rune wielders who have either marginal or exile status with the goths but descend from gothic ancestry. These sorceresses and the swamp-dwellers intermingle with one another and their children are the Huns.

Nibelungen illustration by Arthur Rackham(1910)

The sensibility of the Nibelunglied, and later ring-cycles by Wagner and J.R.R. Tolkien arguably find a substantive portion their largely forgotten and obscured or mythologized historical basis (insofar as there is any historical basis to these legends) in the Getica. The ring cycles also draw from Norse sagas and various other sources—but these sagas are later legends branching from northern barbarians amongst whom the goths arise and back into whom they fade out. They are related. The tradition or culture extends as far west as the Beowulf epic (Geats<->Goths) over time. A rough equivalent to this line of Germanic survivals finding their focus in Central Europe and Eurasia in the case of the remembrances of the great migration, can be found in the Arthurian legends of Britain whose earliest discernible roots date to the same period.

The semi-mythological and semi-historical accounts of these sort of events in the Maeotian swamps in both Jordanes and in Hellanicus the logographer thus bookend the history of antiquity as prelude and postlude: the logographers working just before the discipline (as constituted in Herodotus) begins and Jordanes working just after the cultural conditions and material practicability required for that discipline comes to its end (or otherwise enters into a long recession lasting for more than a millennia) as the European dark ages are inaugurated.

It may therefore be said that in antiquity, these swamps represent a wilderness lying just outside the frontier of historical memory, whose roughly preserved geographical location (between the Dnieper and the Don, north of the coast) is nevertheless known to us—a place where real events appear in the form of fables, and vice versa.

The Don river comes to an end at Moscow, while the Dnieper flows through Kiev.

Conflicting accounts about events in this region during the Russo-Ukrainian War—where the Putinist narrative vs. the Ukrainian narrative, and the right-wing narrative vs. the left-wing narrative in Western European and American news sources bring this traditional problem of arriving at consensus or coherence as to what happened in the swamp between the Don and the Dnieper to mind as an issue or historiographic highlight of somewhat ominous contemporary relevance.

Sources

• Boardman, John; Edwards, I. E. S. (1991). The Cambridge Ancient History. Volume 3. Part 2. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521227178. Retrieved March 2, 2015.