the Maeotio marshes; a body of Scythians followed in their track, and the united horde pressed onwards till they entered Asia Minor, keeping to the shores of the Black Sea.* This heterogeneous mass of people came into conflict first with Urartu; then turning obliquely in a south-easterly direction, their advance-guard fell upon the Mannai.  But they were repulsed by Sargon’s generals; the check thus administered forced them to fall back speedily upon other countries less vigorously defended.  The Scythians, therefore, settled themselves in the eastern basin of the Araxes, on the frontiers of Urartu and the Mannai, where they formed themselves into a kind of marauding community, perpetually quarrelling with their neighbours.** The Cimmerians took their way westwards, and established themselves upon the upper waters of the Araxes, the Euphrates, the Halys, and the Thermodon,*** greatly to the vexation of the rulers of Urartu.

* The version of Aristaeas of Proconnesus, as given by Herodotus and by Damastes of Sigsea, attributes a more complex origin to this migration, i.e. that the Arimaspes had driven the Issedonians before them, and that the latter had in turn driven the Scythians back on the Cimmerians.

** The Scythians of the tradition preserved by Herodotus must have been the Ashguzai or Ishkuzai of the cuneiform documents.  The original name must have been Skuza, Shkuza, with a sound in the second syllable that the Greeks have rendered by th, and the Assyrians by z:  the initial vowel has been added, according to a well-known rule, to facilitate the pronunciation of the combination sk, sine.  An oracle of the time of Esarhaddon shows that they occupied one of the districts really belonging to the Mannai:  and it is probably they who are mentioned in a passage of Jer. li. 27, where the traditional reading Aschenaz should be replaced by that of Ashkuz.

*** It is doubtless to these events that the tradition preserved by Pompeius Trogus, which is known to us through his abbreviator Justin, or through the compilers of a later period, refers, concerning the two Scythian princes Ylinus and Scolopitus:  they seem to have settled along the coast, on the banks of the Thermodon and in the district of Themiscyra.

They subsequently felt their way along the valleys of the Anti-Taurus, but finding them held by Assyrian troops, they turned their steps towards the country of the White Syrians, seized Sinope, where the Greeks had recently founded a colony, and bore down upon Phrygia.  It would appear that they were joined in these regions by other hordes from Thrace which had crossed the Bosphorus a few years earlier, and among whom the ancient historians particularly make mention of the Treres;* the results of the Scythian invasion had probably been felt by all the tribes on the banks of the Dnieper, and had been the means of forcing them in the direction of the Danube and the Balkans, whence they drove before them, as they went, the inhabitants of the Thracian peninsula across into Asia Minor.  It was about the year 750 B.C. that the Cimmerians had been forced to quit their first home, and towards 720 that they came into contact with the empires of the East; the Treres had crossed the Bosphorus about 710, and the meeting of the two streams of immigration may be placed in the opening years of the seventh century.**