Editing Scythians (section)

===Modern period===
[[File:Eugène Delacroix - Ovide chez les Scythes (1862).jpg|thumb|left|upright=1.15|[[Eugène Delacroix]]'s painting of the Roman poet, Ovid, in exile among the Scythians{{sfn|Lomazoff|Ralby|2013|p=63}}]]
[[File:Scythians at the Tomb of Ovid c. 1640.jpg|thumb|''Scythians at the Tomb of [[Ovid]]'' (c. 1640), by [[Johann Heinrich Schönfeld]]]]
Drawing on the Biblical narrative and the Graeco-Roman conflation of the Scythians and Celts, [[Early modern period|early modern]] European scholars believed that the Celts were Scythians. It therefore became popular among [[Pseudohistory|pseudohistorians]] of the 15th and 16th centuries to claim that the Irish people were the "truest" inheritors of Scythian culture so as both to distinguish and denigrate Irish culture.{{sfn|Lennon|2008|p=9}} While these claims in much of Europe were abandoned during the [[Reformation]] and [[Renaissance]], British works on [[Ireland]] continued to emphasise the alleged Scythian ancestry of the Irish, until it was discredited by early 19th century advances in [[philology]].{{sfn|Lennon|2008|p=8}} During the early modern period itself, Hungarian scholars identified the [[Hungarians]] with the [[Huns]], and claimed that they descended from Scythians.{{sfn|Klaniczay|2011|p=183}} Therefore, the image of the Scythians among Hungarians was shaped into one of "[[noble savage]]s" who were valorous and honest, uncouth and hostile to "Western refinement," but at the same time defended "[[Christianity in Europe|Christian civilisation]]" from aggression from the East.{{sfn|Klaniczay|2011|p=192}}

Large scale robbery of Scythian tombs started when the [[Russian Empire]] started occupying the Pontic steppe in the 18th century:{{sfn|Parzinger|2004|p=111-112}} in 1718 the Russian [[Tsar#Russia|Tsar]] [[Peter the Great|Peter I]] issued decrees overseeing the collection of "right old and rare" objects to [[Saint Petersburg]] in exchange for compensation, and the material thus obtained became the basis of the Saint Petersburg [[Hermitage Museum|State Hermitage Museum]]'s collection of Scythian gold. This resulted in significant [[grave robbery]] of Scythian burials, due to which most of the Scythian tombs of the Russian Empire had been sacked by 1764.{{sfn|Sulimirski|Taylor|1991|p=550}} In the 19th century, Scythian kurgans in [[Ukraine]], [[Kuban]], and [[Crimea]] had been looted, so that by the 20th century, more than 85% of Scythian kurgans excavated by archaeologists had already been pillaged.{{sfn|Sulimirski|Taylor|1991|p=550}} The grave robbers of the 18th and 19th centuries were experienced enough that they almost always found the burial chambers of the tombs and stole the treasures contained within them.{{sfn|Parzinger|2004|p=111-112}}

[[File:Бой скифов со славянами.jpg|thumb|upright=1.15|''Battle between the Scythians and the Slavs'' (1881) by [[Viktor Vasnetsov]]]]
In the later 19th century, a cultural movement called {{ill|Skifstvo|lt={{translit|ru|Skifstvo}}|ru|Скифство}} ({{langx|ru|Скифство|lit=Scythianism}}) emerged in Russia whose members unreservedly referred to themselves and to Russians as a whole as {{translit|ru|Skify}} ({{langx|ru|Скифы|lit=Scythians}}).{{sfn|Bassin|2012|p=75}} Closely affiliated to the [[Left Socialist-Revolutionaries]], the {{translit|ru|Skify}} were a movement of [[Russian nationalism|Russian nationalist]] religious mysticists who saw [[Russia]] as a sort of Messiah-like figure who would usher in a new historical era of the world,{{sfn|Maslenikov|1952|p=88}} and their identification with the ancient Scythians was a positive acceptance of [[Fyodor Dostoevsky|Dostoevsky]]'s view that Europe had always seen [[Russians]] as being Asiatic.{{sfn|Bassin|2012|p=76}} The culmination of {{translit|ru|Skifstvo}} was the famous poem written in 1918 by [[Aleksandr Blok]], titled {{translit|ru|Skify}} ({{langx|ru|Скифы|lit=The Scythians}}), in which he depicted Russia as a barrier between the "warring races" of Europe and Asia, and he made use of the racist [[Yellow Peril]] ideology by threatening that Russia was capable of stopping its "protection" of Europe and allow East Asians to overrun it.{{sfn|Bassin|2012|p=77}}

The scholar [[Adrienne Mayor]] hypothesised that the legend of the [[griffin]] originated among the Scythians, who came across fossilised skeletons of the [[dinosaur]] [[Protoceratops|{{translit|la|Protoceratops}}]]. This hypothesis was contested by the palaeontologist [[Mark P. Witton]], who argued that the imagery of the griffin originated in early Bronze Age West Asia.{{sfn|Witton|Hing|2024}} The imagery of griffins in Scythian art itself was borrowed from the artistic traditions of West Asia and ancient Greece.{{sfn|Ivantchik|2018}} The scholar [[David W. Anthony|David Anthony]] has also hypothesised that the martial role of women among Scytho-Sarmatians had given rise to the Greek myths about [[Amazons]].{{sfn|Anthony|2007|p=329}} However, according to the Scythologist Askold Ivantchik, the imagery of the Amazons was already known to Homer and was originally unrelated to the Scythians, with the link between Scythians and Amazons in Greek literature beginning only later in the 5th century BC.{{sfn|Ivantchik|1999c|p=499-500}}