SCYTHIANS DID TERRIBLE THINGS. Two-thousand five-hundred years ago, these warrior nomads, who lived in the grasslands of what is now southern Ukraine, enjoyed a truly ferocious reputation. According to the Greek historian Herodotus, the Scythians drank the blood of their fallen enemies, took their heads back to their king and made trinkets out of their scalps. Sometimes, they draped whole human skins over their horses and used smaller pieces of human leather to make the quivers that held the deadly arrows for which they were famous.
Readers have long doubted the truth of this story, as they did many of Herodotus’s more outlandish tales, gathered from all corners of the ancient world. (Not for nothing was the “father of history” also known as the “father of lies” in antiquity.) Recently, though, evidence has come to light that vindicates his account. In 2023, scientists at the University of Copenhagen, led by Luise Ørsted Brandt, tested the composition of leather goods, including several quivers, recovered from Scythian tombs in Ukraine. By using a form of mass spectrometry, which let them read the “molecular barcode” of biological samples, the team found that while most of the Scythian leather came from sheep, goats, cows and horses, two of the quivers contained pieces of human skin. “Herodotus’s texts are sometimes questioned for their historical content, and some of the things he writes seem to be a little mythological, but in this case we could prove that he was right,” Brandt told me recently.
So, score one for Herodotus. But the hi-tech detective work by the Copenhagen researchers also points to something else about the future of history as a discipline. In its core techniques, history writing hasn’t changed that much since classical times. As a historian, you can do what Herodotus did – travel around talking to interesting people and gathering their recollections of events (though we now sometimes call this journalism). Or you can do what most of the historians that followed him did, which is to compile documents written in the past and about the past, and then try to make their different accounts and interpretations square up. That’s certainly the way I was trained in graduate school in the 2000s. We read primary texts written in the periods we studied, and works by later historians, and then tried to fit an argument based on those documents into a conversation conducted by those historians.
But what if there was another way? What if instead of digging in the archives and criticising arguments, you could write history directly from the physical remains of the past, reconstructing events with the forensic detail of a crime scene investigator? This would be a history written not from words, but from things. Archaeology, art
