Scythians dominated the Pontic steppe c. 700-300 BCE: Herodotus (Histories Book 4) describes their wars with Darius, their cannabis purification tents, their archery. The kurgan burials, Arzhan, Pazyryk's frozen tombs with tattooed bodies, confirm the goldwork and horsemanship. They forced the world's first superpower to retreat across the Danube.
The Greek-framed legacy: Scythians as the savage Other, scalping, skinning, drinking from skulls. Much of it is Herodotus enjoying himself; the same sources record diplomatic sophistication and a military record no city-state matched on open ground.
The romantic reading, from Herder to Jorjani: the Indo-European homeland lies on that steppe, so the Scythians are less aliens than ancestors, the mounted, gold-burning, wordless id beneath literate civilization. Every empire's mythology keeps a steppe in it.
Does an empire without writing leave history, or only glitter?