Editing Scythians (section)

==== Broader designations ====
By the Hellenistic period, authors such as [[Hecataeus of Miletus]] however sometimes extended the designation "Scythians" indiscriminately to all steppe nomads and forest steppe populations living in Europe and Asia, and used it to also designate the Saka of Central Asia.<ref>{{Unbulleted list citebundle|{{harvnb|Melyukova|1990|p=98}}|{{harvnb|Sulimirski|Taylor|1991|p=555}}|{{harvnb|Dandamayev|1994|p=37}}|{{harvnb|Melyukova|1995|p=28}}|{{harvnb|West|2002|p=439}}|{{harvnb|Yablonsky|2006|p=26}}}}</ref>

Early modern scholars tended to follow the lead of the Hellenistic authors in extending the name "Scythians" into a general catch-all term for the various equestrian warrior-nomadic cultures of the Iron Age-period Eurasian Steppe following the discovery in the 1930s in the eastern parts of the Eurasian steppe of items forming the "Scythian triad," consisting of distinctive weapons, horse harnesses, and objects decorated in the "Animal Style" art, which had until then been considered to be markers of the Scythians proper.<ref>{{Unbulleted list citebundle|{{harvnb|Sulimirski|1954|p=282}}|{{harvnb|Parzinger|2004|p=123}}|{{harvnb|Yablonsky|2006|p=26}}|{{harvnb|Unterländer|2017|p=2}}}}</ref>

This broad use of the term "Scythian" has however been criticised for lumping together various heterogeneous populations belonging to different cultures,{{sfn|Yablonsky|2006|p=26}} and therefore leading to several errors in the coverage of the various warrior-nomadic cultures of the Iron Age-period Eurasian Steppe. Therefore, the narrow use of the term "Scythian" as denoting specifically the people who dominated the Pontic Steppe between the 7th and 3rd centuries BC is preferred by Scythologists such as [[Askold Ivantchik]].{{sfn|Ivantchik|2018}}

Within this broad use, the Scythians proper who lived in the Pontic Steppes are sometimes referred to as {{translit|en|Pontic Scythians}}.{{sfn|Jacobson|1995|p=32}}{{sfn|Cunliffe|2019|p=42}}

Modern-day anthropologists instead prefer using the term "Scytho-Siberians" to denote this larger cultural grouping of nomadic peoples living in the Eurasian steppe and forest steppe extending from Central Europe to the limits of the Chinese Zhou Empire, and of which the Pontic Scythians proper were only one section.<ref>{{Unbulleted list citebundle|{{harvnb|Jacobson|1995|p=2}}|{{harvnb|Jacobson|1995|p=29}}|{{harvnb|Ivantchik|2018}}|{{harvnb|Ivantchik|2018}}}}</ref> These various peoples shared the use of the "Scythian triad," that is of distinctive weapons, horse harnesses and the "Animal Style" art.{{sfn|Unterländer|2017|p=}}

The term "Scytho-Siberian" has itself in turn also been criticised since it is sometimes used broadly to include all Iron Age equestrian nomads, including those who were not part of any Scythian or Saka.{{sfn|Di Cosmo|1999|p=890-891}} The scholars [[Nicola Di Cosmo]] and Andrzej Rozwadowski instead prefer the use of the term "Early Nomadic" for the broad designation of the Iron Age horse-riding nomads.{{sfn|Di Cosmo|1999|p=886}}{{sfn|Rozwadowski|2018|p=156}}