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[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

Bev,

I don't have much to contribute but a few oddments:

In trying to figure out who the Scythians were, the only linguistic clues 
come from a few inscriptions and place names that occur in Scythian and 
Greek.  
They are so sparce that there is no general agreement but most linguists say 
that the Scytians spoke a variety of languages in the Iranian group such as 
modren Farsi.  The now extinct group is called the Scytho-Sarmatian group.  
The 
Ossetic Language spoken in Georgia and Russia (by about half a million 
people) 
is considered to be the lone survior from that group of languages.  Some say 
the Scythian languages were more related to Turkish languages, and small odds 
since all those languages are straight forward Indo-European languages.

The only thing this offers your topic is that if it is so, they had little to 
do with the Finns since Finnish is not an Indo-European language.

The Scythians are also credited with inventing the compound bow which 
operates very much as those modern monstrosities with pulleys.  They nearly 
lived on 
horseback or in their charriots and it is exceedingly difficult to use a 
staight bow (called a 'simple' bow) from horseback.  So they invented a way 
of 
laminating horn onto thin strips of wood making a bow that when released, 
would 
propel the arrow slowly at first and then 'flip' it very hard just at the 
last, 
exactly like a modern compound bow does.  The huge recurves on the Scythian 
bow operated just exactly like the pulleys on the modern bow.

For centuries no army could touch them, a lesson for our modern times, 
because they acted much like moder terrorists:  No central command, no fixed 
location, and no supply lines.  They traded or raided settlements for grain 
and wine, 
ate a lot of meat, and most of the time didn't live in any type of housing.  
They were reluctant to take prisoners and when they did, they blinded the 
prisoners before making slaves of them and didn't keep them for long.  Most 
of 
this comes from Herodotus and is not to be conidered unbiased.

They were defeated by Alexander the Great who understood that their mobility 
and lack of a base gave them a devastating advantage.  He sent in light 
calvary and the Scythian horsemen surrounded them, pelting them with arrows.  
He 
sent in light infantry javelin troops whom the Scythias knew were no threat 
since 
they could get away on their horses much faster than the infantry could 
respond.  But behind the infantry and hidden by them was the heavy calvary 
who were 
able to completely surround the Scythians and cut them down.