The long-running Civilization video game series just announced you can play as Tomyris, a former RP (read her entry here) who beheaded Cyrus the Great! She represents “Scythia,” that loose grouping of nomads into which Greeks lumped virtually everyone east of them.
Cool stuff! Love her outfit. Not a million miles off from the direction I went.
@rejectedprincesses says #don’t read the comments on that video , but I did and some were pretty illuminating.
Responding to the charges that the Scythians were too obscure, Van der Heist writes:
The simple fact that most people didn’t here about them should make them the first priority civ to be featured in a game.
I mean, popcultural vision of history is extremely deformed and unfair as it is, I love breaking stereotypes and introducing fresh air instead of forever EGYPT GREECE ROME WESTERN EUROPE JAPAN CHINA, as if entire humanity consisted only of those nations.
Each human culture and civilization stands on its own and is valuable on its own right, and none of them deserves to be called “unwashed savages”.
Also, anyone who knows their ancient history knows how awesome the scythians were. They had a massive impact on history. They acted as traders between China, Persia, Greece, and many others. They also defeated the guy who took over almost all of the Middle East in an incredibly short amount of time…
Pilchowski01 adds:
The Scythians were one of the first people’s to master mounted combat, and are believed to be the first of the great Steppe empires, with their legacy and descendants influencing the Huns, Slavs and Mongols. That’s pretty influential. The issue here is this isn’t about if people have heard of them. It’s about whether you’ve heard of them
Btw, the borders of Scythia are unclear, but in different parts of history, they seem to have covered bits of Ukraine, Russia, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Iran and Pakistan.
I won’t go into the story of Tomyris (since Rejected Princesses did it so well already), but it’s worth noting that she is pretty damn famous in Western art history. Interestingly, she wasn’t always really “othered” in terms of race:
The defeat of Cyrus II by Tomyris, Queen of the Massagetae Germany (1474) [Source]
Peter Paul Rubens The head of Cyrus brought to Queen Tomyris Belgium (1622-1623) [Source]
Mattia Pretti Queen Tomyris Receiving the Head of Cyrus, King of Persia Italy (1670-1672) [Source]
