Early history The Massagetae rose to power in the 8th to 7th centuries BCE, when they migrated from the east into Central Asia, from where they expelled the
Scythians, another nomadic Iranian tribe to whom they were closely related. After this, they came to occupy large areas of the region, including the Caspian Steppe where they supplanted the Scythians. The Massagetae displacing the early Scythians and forcing them to the west across the
Araxes river and into the Caucasian and Pontic steppes started a significant movement of the nomadic peoples of the
Eurasian Steppe, following which the Scythians displaced the
Cimmerians and the
Agathyrsi, who were also nomadic Iranian peoples closely related to the Massagetae and the Scythians, conquered their territories, and invaded
Western Asia. There, their presence had an important role in the history of the ancient civilisations of
Mesopotamia,
Anatolia,
Egypt, and
Iran. The had close contact with the
Median Empire, whose influence had stretched to the lands east of the
Caspian Sea, before it was replaced by the Persian Achaemenid dynasty in 550 BC.
Death of Cyrus During the 6th century BCE, the Massagetae had to face the successor of the Median Empire, the newly formed
Persian Achaemenid Empire, whose founder,
Cyrus II, carried out a campaign against them in 530 BCE. According to Herodotus, Cyrus captured a Massagetaean camp by ruse, after which the Massagetae queen
Tomyris led the tribe's main force against the Persians, defeated them, killed Cyrus, and placed his severed head in a sack full of blood. According to another version of the death of Cyrus recorded by
Ctesias, it was the Derbices, who were the tribe against whom Cyrus died in battle: according to this version, he was mortally wounded by the Derbices and their
Indian allies, after which Cyrus's ally, the king Amorges of the Amyrgians|, intervened with his own army and helped the Persian soldiers defeat the Derbices, following which Cyrus endured for three days, during which he organised his empire and appointed
Spitaces son of
Sisamas as satrap over the Derbices, before finally dying. The reason why the Derbices, and not the Massagetae, are named as the people against whom Cyrus died fighting is because the Derbices were either part of or the same as Massagetae. According to
Strabo, Cyrus died fighting against the
Saka (of which the Massagetae were a group), and according to
Quintus Curtius Rufus he died fighting against the
Abiae. The
Babylonian scribe
Berossus, who lived in 3rd century BCE, instead recorded that Cyrus died in a battle against the
Dahae; according to the Iranologist
Muhammad Dandamayev, Berossus identified the Dahae rather than the Massagetae as Cyrus's killers because they had replaced the Massagetae as the most famous nomadic tribe of Central Asia long before Berossus's time; although some scholars identified the Dahae as being identical with the Massagetae or as one of their sub-groups. After Darius's administrative reforms of the Achaemenid Empire, the were included within the same tax district as the
Medes. During the Macedonian invasion of the Achaemenid Empire, the Massagetae provided the Achaemenid army with 40,000 troops, which was a larger number than the troops furnished by all the other inhabitants of the coast of the Caspian Sea put together.
Later history The Massagetae, along with the Sogdians and Bactrians, participated in the rebellion of
Spitamenes against
Alexander III of Macedon, but they later submitted to him again after Spitamenes was murdered. Among the scholars who do not identify the Massagetae with the Dahae,
Rüdiger Schmitt suggests that the Massagetae were instead absorbed by the
Dahae by the later
Hellenistic period.
Muhammad Dandamayev has suggested that the Dahae had replaced the Massagetae as the most known people of the Central Asian steppes. Marek Jan Olbrycht suggests that the Dahae migrated to the west from the areas east of the Aral Sea and around the Iaxartes valley and expelled the Derbices from their homeland, after which the latter split, with a part of them migrating into Hyrcania and others to the lower
Uzboy river. During the Hellenistic period, a section of the Massagetaean sub-tribe of the Derbices had migrated to the southwest along the coast of the Caspian Sea and reached central
Tabaristan, while another sub-group moved to the south-east into
Margiana. Around 230 BCE, the
Parnian king and founder of the
Parthian Empire,
Arsaces I, sought refuge from the
Seleucid king
Seleucus II Callinicus by fleeing among the Massagataean sub-tribe of the Apasiacae. Seleucus's attempted campaign to recover the eastern satrapies of his empire was initially successful. However, the outbreak of revolts in the western part of his empire prevented him from continuing his war against the Parthians, who, with the backing of the Apasiacae, were ultimately successful.
Disappearance The dominance of the Massagetae in Central Asia ended in the 3rd century BCE, following the Macedonian
conquest of Persia, which cut off the relations between the steppe nomads and the sedentary populations of the previous
Persian Achaemenid Empire. The succeeding
Seleucid Empire started attacking the Massagetae,
Saka and
Dahae nomads who had lived to the north of its borders, which in turn led to these peoples putting westward pressure from the east on a related nomadic Iranian people, the Sarmatians. The Sarmatians, taking advantage of the decline of Scythian power in the west, crossed the Don river and invaded
Scythia starting in the late 4th century and the early 3rd century BCE. The Massagetae themselves merged with tribal groups in Central Asia to form the
Alans, a people who themselves belonged to the larger
Sarmatian group. Related to the
Asii who had invaded
Bactria in the 2nd century BCE, the Alans were pushed by the
Kang-chü people to the west into the Caucasian and Pontic steppes, where they came in contact and conflict with the
Parthian and
Roman empires. By the 2nd century CE, they had conquered the steppes of the north Caucasus and the north Black Sea area and created a powerful confederation of tribes under their rule. In 375 CE, the
Huns conquered most of the Alans living to the east of the
Don river, massacred a significant number of them and absorbed them into their tribal polity, while the Alans to the west of the Don remained free from Hunnish domination and participated in the movements of the
Migration Period. Some free Alans fled into the mountains of the Caucasus, where they participated in the ethnogenesis of populations including the
Ossetians and the
Kabardians, and other Alan groupings survived in
Crimea. Other free Alans migrated into Central and then Western Europe, from where some of them went to
Britannia and
Hispania, and some Alans joined the
Germanic Vandals into crossing the
Strait of Gibraltar and creating the
Vandal Kingdom in
North Africa.
Legacy Byzantine authors later used the name "Massagetae" as an archaising term for the
Huns,
Turks,
Tatars and other related peoples who were completely unrelated to the populations the name initially designated in Antiquity. A 9th century work by
Rabanus Maurus,
De Universo, states: "The Massagetae are in origin from the tribe of the Scythians, and are called Massagetae, as if heavy, that is, strong Getae." In Central Asian languages such as
Middle Persian and
Avestan, the prefix
massa means "great," "heavy," or "strong." Some authors, such as
Alexander Cunningham,
James P. Mallory,
Victor H. Mair, and
Edgar Knobloch have proposed relating the Massagetae to the
Gutians of 2000 BC Mesopotamia, and/or a people known in ancient China as the "Da
Yuezhi" or "Great Yuezhi" (who founded the
Kushan Empire in South Asia). Mallory and Mair suggest that
Da Yuezhi may at one time have been pronounced ''d'ad-ngiwat-tieg'', connecting them to the Massagetae. These theories are not widely accepted, however. Many scholars have suggested that the Massagetae were related to the
Getae of ancient Eastern Europe.
Tadeusz Sulimirski notes that the
Sacae also invaded parts of Northern India.
Weer Rajendra Rishi, an Indian linguist has identified linguistic affinities between Indian and Central Asian languages, which further lends credence to the possibility of historical
Sacae influence in Northern India. ==Culture==