Among the first great lords of the Eurasian steppe — a loose family of Iranian-speaking horse nomads who, from roughly the eighth to the third century BCE, dominated the Pontic steppe, while related Saka peoples ranged far into Central Asia. Living in wagons and fighting as mounted archers, they buried their kings under great mounds heaped with golden treasure, frustrated invasions by settled empires, and helped pioneer the mounted-archer steppe style that later peoples, from the Huns to the Mongols, would inherit and transform.
When the Persian king Darius led a vast army onto the steppe to crush the Scythians, they simply rode away. They burned the grass behind them, filled the wells, and refused to give him a battle he could win. The Scythians had no cities to besiege and no fields to burn, only horses, wagons, and an endless sea of grass — and a great empire learned that it could not conquer an enemy it could not catch. These were the first lords of the steppe: Iranian-speaking nomads who buried their kings under mounds of gold, fought from horseback with the bow, and pioneered a way of war that the Huns and the Mongols would carry across the world.