Sarmatians

At their greatest reported extent, around 100 BC, these tribes ranged from the Vistula River to the mouth of the Danube and eastward to the Volga, bordering the shores of the Black and Caspian seas as well as the Caucasus to the south.

With the Hunnic invasions of the fourth century, many Sarmatians joined the Goths and other Germanic tribes (Vandals) in settling in the Western Roman Empire.

[10][11] The Alans survived in the North Caucasus into the Early Middle Ages, ultimately giving rise to the modern Ossetic ethnic group.

[15] This name meant "armed with throwing darts and arrows," and is cognate with the Indic Sanskrit term śárumant (शरुमन्त्),[16] which makes it semantically similar to the endonym of the Scythians, *Skuẟatā, meaning "archers.

The ethnogenesis of the Sarmatians occurred during the 6th to 4rd centuries BC, when nomads from Central Asia migrated into the territory of the Sauromatians in the southern Ural Mountains.

[21][22][23] These nomads conquered the Sauromatians, resulting in an increased incidence of eastern Asiatic features in the Early Sarmatians, similar to those of the Sakas.

[24] The name "Sarmatians" eventually came to be applied to the whole of the new people formed out of these migrations, whose constituent tribes were the Aorsi, Roxolani, Alans, and the Iazyges.

[25][26] A typical transitional site between these two periods is found in the Filippovka kurgans, which are Late Sauromatian-Early Sarmatian, and dated to the 5th-4th century BC.

They experienced another military setback after participating in the Bosporan Civil War in 309 BC and came under pressure from the Thracian Getae and the Celtic Bastarnae.

Pressured by the Sakā and Dahā in the east and taking advantage of the decline of Scythian power, the Sarmatians began crossing the Don river and invaded Scythia and also migrated south into the North Caucasus.

From there, the pressure from their growing power forcing the more western Sarmatian tribes to migrate further west, and the Aorsi and Siraces destroyed the power of the Royal Sarmatians and the Iazyges, with the Aorsi being able to extend their rule over a large region stretching from the Caucasus across the Terek–Kuma Lowland and Kalmykia in the west up to the Aral Sea region in the east.

Related to the Asii who invaded Bactria in the 2nd century BC, the Alans were pushed west by the Kangju people (known to Graeco-Roman authors as the Ιαξαρται Iaxartai in Greek, and the Iaxartae in Latin) who were living in the Syr Darya basin, from where they expanded their rule from Fergana to the Aral Sea region.

[30] During the 1st and 2nd centuries AD, the Iazyges often bothered the Roman authorities in Pannonia; they participated in the destruction of the Quadian kingdom of Vannius, and often migrated to the east across the Transylvanian Plateau and the Carpathian Mountains during seasonal movements or for trade.

Under the hegemony of the Alans a trade route connected the Pontic Steppe, the southern Urals, and the region presently known as Western Turkestan.

The supremacy of the Sarmatians was finally destroyed when the Germanic Goths migrating from the Baltic Sea region conquered the Pontic Steppe around 200 AD.

[34] During the Early Middle Ages, the Proto-Slavic population of Eastern Europe assimilated and absorbed Sarmatians during the political upheavals of that era.

[35][36] However, a people related to the Sarmatians, known as the Alans, survived in the North Caucasus into the Early Middle Ages, ultimately giving rise to the modern Ossetic ethnic group.

Typical grey, granular Üllő5 ceramics form a distinct group of Sarmatian pottery is found ubiquitously in the north-central part of the Great Hungarian Plain region, indicating a lively trading activity.

[45] A 2023 paper on a grave discovered in Cambridgeshire, England found via archaeogenetics that the person had Sarmatian-related ancestry, and was not related to the local population.

[57] The first Sarmatians are mostly identified with the Prokhorovka culture, which moved from the southern Urals to the Lower Volga and then to the northern Pontic steppe, in the fourth–third centuries BC.

It was spread by nomads in the Eurasian steppes during the 7th-5th century BC, from the Altai Mountains (Arzhan-2 kurgan) westward to central Kazakhstan and the southern Urals.

[69] Sarmatians emerged primarily from the Bronze and Iron Age Western Steppe Herders (Steppe_MLBA), associated with the Sintashta, Srubnaya and Andronovo cultures, but also carried a small amount of admixed from an East Asian-derived population represented by Khövsgöl LBA groups, which may have been indirectly mediated via contact with the related Saka from the Altai region, which are regarded as the oldest Scythoid cultural group.

[83] A genetic study published in Current Biology in July 2019 examined the remains of nine Sarmatians from the southern Ural Mountains between 7th–2nd century BC.

[84] A archaeogenetic study published in Cell in 2022, analyzed 17 Late Sarmatian samples from 4-5th century AD from the Pannonian Basin in Hungary.

[85] The Early Sarmatians from the Filippovka kurgans (4th century BC) combined Western (Timber Grave and Andronovo) and Eastern characteristics.

Compared with classical Sauromatians, Early Sarmatians, such as those of Filippovka, generally display an increased incidence of eastern Asiatic features.

[90] They most closely resembled the Saka populations of Central Asia, particularly from the Altai region (Pazyryk), and were very different from the western Scythians, or the Sarmatians of the Volga River area.

[90] The Roman author Ovid recorded that one of the Sarmatian tribes, the Coralli, had blond hair, which is a characteristic that Ammianus Marcellinus also ascribed to the Alans.

[92] However, John Day has argued that Bachrach's analysis is flawed, because he mistranslated the original passage from Ammianus Marcellinus, and that the majority of the Alans were in fact blond.

At its core was the unifying belief that the people of the Polish Commonwealth descended from the ancient Iranic Sarmatians, the legendary invaders of Slavic lands in antiquity.