The Scythians
Nomad Warriors of the Steppe
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The Scythians
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Narrated by:
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Matthew Waterson
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By:
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Barry Cunliffe
About this listen
The Scythians were nomadic horsemen who ranged wide across the grasslands of the Asian steppe from the Altai mountains in the east to the Great Hungarian Plain in the first millennium BC. Their steppe homeland bordered on a number of sedentary states to the south and there were, inevitably, numerous interactions between the nomads and their neighbours. The Scythians fought the Persians on a number of occasions, in one battle killing their king and on another occasion driving the invading army of Darius the Great from the steppe.
Relations with the Greeks around the shores of the Black Sea were rather different - both communities benefiting from trading with each other. It is from the writings of Greeks like the historian Herodotus that we learn of Scythian life: their beliefs, their burial practices, their love of fighting, and their ambivalent attitudes to gender. It is a world that is also brilliantly illuminated by the rich material culture recovered from Scythian burials, where all the organic material is amazingly well preserved.
Barry Cunliffe here marshals this vast array of evidence - both archaeological and textual - in a masterful reconstruction of the lost world of the Scythians, allowing them to emerge in all their considerable vigor and splendor for the first time in over two millennia.
©2019 Barry Cunliffe (P)2020 TantorListeners also enjoyed...
What listeners say about The Scythians
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance2 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- M&m!
- 05-11-23
Annoying audio edits ruined it for me
It is great that one tries to be accurate in pronunciation but the obvious inserts of a later moment and recording setup ruin the flow of the story for me. It’s like mental speed bumps. My brain thinks ‘whoops’ every time I hear one. And there are many. So with 8 hours to go… I give up :(
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Overall3 out of 5 stars
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Performance1 out of 5 stars
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Story4 out of 5 stars
- Marina Strinkovsky
- 18-10-24
Bafflingly poor narration
It’s to be expected that in a book spanning place & proper names from China to Hungary, a performer would struggle with some pronunciation, but here the bloopers are elevated to comic heights. The reader ought to have been able to land on some correct pronunciation by sheer chance, but he defies probability by getting every single one wrong - including quite common words like lapis lazuli (pronounced laZOOlie) & redolent (reDOElent). Surely if the job is to say words, a responsible producer would check that they’re hiring someone who can, in fact, say them? Poor Barry Cunliffe.
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance1 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- E. Sumptus
- 19-06-21
Wonderful book - What a waste..
A book as valuable and significant as this one deserved a maximum effort for the audio-book.
Instead, it appears that a semi-literate actor was hired, who, though he has acquired an actorly diction and accent, has not managed to acquire either an education, or even the ability to look up the phonetics of words with which he is not familiar.
All of this begging the question as to why this was not read by Cunliffe himself?
The quality and worth of the work outweighs the poor delivery, but this book deserved a five-star performance.
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4 people found this helpful