The Scythian Empire: Central Eurasia and the Birth of the Classical Age From Persia to China. By Christopher I. Beckwith

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Christopher Beckwith is a distinguished philologist at Indiana University Bloomington, where he researches the cultures of ancient and medieval Central Asia and specializes in Asian language studies, linguistics, and the history of Central Eurasia. This new work is defined by its challenging and iconoclastic approach to multiple issues that he claims are key to the emergence of a Scythian empire—such as language, philosophies, and monotheistic religions in Western Asia, Central Eurasia, and China. His main argument is that the contributions of a group of mobile pastoralists, the “Scythians,” whom he locates in the ninth-century BCE Tuvan People’s Republic, are “axial” in the creation of the Classical Age, as defined in the Golden Age of Greek philosophy, Zoroastrianism, Indian Buddhism, and Chinese Daoist philosophy. Such sweeping assertions, based primarily on analyses of historical texts and word lineages, will challenge many archaeologists, historians of art and religion, and anthropologists and delight others, especially historical linguists.