NO. II THE RACES OF RUSSIA — HRDLICKA 3 



great Ural-Altaic stock of Asia. All these peoples, including the 

 Scythians proper, had in common a greater or lesser admixture of 

 Mongolian blood, many were nomadic or semi-nomadic, none being 

 strictly agricultural, and except where in prolonged contact with 

 other peoples, such as in the case of the Scythians with the Greeks, 

 the Bulgars with the Khazars, or the Finns with the Scandinavians, 

 their culture was of a low order. 



The more northern and less hospitable regions were only sparsely 

 settled, developed no native political units of importance, and played 

 but a secondary part in the history of European Russia. The more 

 southern of these populations, on the other hand, were much more 

 numerous, showed greater virility, and, possibly under Iranian 

 influence, greater powers of organization. They gave rise to the 

 old Scythia ; they constituted for two thousand years the dread 

 southeastern background to the European peoples of Russia ; and 

 they were the sources, under one name or another (such as Huns, 

 Avars, Turks, Tartars, etc.), of many disastrous invasions of southern 

 Russia and even central Europe from the third to the thirteenth 

 centuries of our era. 



The term " Scythians " deserves a few remarks. Due to their 

 warlike qualities and the direct intercourse with them by the earlier 

 Greeks, few "barbaric" nations of the pre-Christian era have been 

 more mentioned, and few peoples since have given rise to more 

 speculation as to their racial identity. On the basis of our present 

 historical and archeological knowledge it may, however, be safely 

 said that the early Greeks applied the term Scythians not to a race, 

 but to a mass or conglomerate of peoples, partly nomadic and partly 

 agricultural, who occupied the southern part of Russia when the 

 Greeks began to explore and colonize the coasts of the Black Sea. 1 

 The main strain of the more eastern Scythians was undoubtedly 

 Tartar or Turkish, but probably tinged with Iranian. To the west 

 of the Borysthenes (Dnieper), however, and particularly in present 

 Volhynia, Bukovina, and Galicia, the principal strain and possibly 

 exclusive element of the population from the earliest times was evi- 

 dently of European extraction, and this stock could have been in the 

 main no other than Slav. To it belonged tribes such as the " Neuri " 

 (Nestor, the earliest Russian historian, mentions " Norici, who are 

 the same with the Slavs ") ; the Alazones or Halizones (which in 

 Russian would be Galitshani, after which Galicia) ; and possibly the 

 Borysthenitae husbandmen. 



1 Compare Ellis H. Minns — Scythians and Greeks, 4 , Cambridge (Engl.), 

 I9I3- 



