Ciscaucasia . The photograph by
Prokudin-Gorskii (c. 1912). The Sindi were a tribe of the
Scythians who established themselves on the
Taman peninsula, where they formed a ruling class over the indigenous
North Caucasian Maeotians. Archaeologically, the Sindi belonged to the
Scythian culture, and they progressively became Hellenised due to contact with the
Bosporan Kingdom. As the Scythians lost more territory in Ciscaucasia to the
Sauromatians over the course of the late 6th century BC, the Sindi remained the only Scythian group still present in the region, in the area called
Sindica (; ) by the Greeks and which corresponded to the area west of present-day
Krasnodar, in the
Taman peninsula. The kingdom of Sindica existed for only a brief time, and it was soon annexed by the
Bosporan Kingdom.
Central Europe Unlike the majority of the Sindi, who remained in the northern Caucasus, a smaller section of the Sindi migrated westwards and settled into the
Hungarian Plain as part of the expansion of the
Scythian into
Central Europe during the 7th to 6th centuries BC, and they soon lost contact with the Scythians who remained in the Pontic Steppe. The 3rd century BC Greek author
Apollonius of Rhodes located a population of the Sindi living alongside the
Sigynnae and the otherwise unknown Grauci in the "plain of Laurion", which is likely the eastern part of the
Pannonian Basin. ==Archaeology==