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The Sarmatians (; ; Latin: Sarmatae ) were a large confederation of ancient Iranian Eurasian nomads peoples who dominated the Pontic steppe from about the 5th century BCE to the 4th century CE.Radley, Dario, (14 February 2025). "Ancient Sarmatian jewelry and artifacts unearthed in Kazakhstan", in: Archaeology News, "The Sarmatians, an ancient Iranian equestrian nomadic group that dominated the Eurasian steppes from the 5th century BCE to the 4th century CE, were known for their warrior culture and elaborate metalwork."
The earliest known reference to the Sarmatians occurs in the Avesta, where they appear as Sairima-, which in later Iranian sources becomes *Sarm and Salm. Originating in the central parts of the Eurasian Steppe, the Sarmatians formed part of the wider Scythian cultures.. "During the first millennium BC, nomadic people spread over the Eurasian Steppe from the Altai Mountains over the northern Black Sea area as far as the Carpathian Basin... Greek and Persian historians of the 1st millennium BC chronicle the existence of the Massagetae and Sauromatians, and later, the Sarmatians and Sacae: cultures possessing artefacts similar to those found in classical Scythian monuments, such as weapons, horse harnesses and a distinctive 'Animal Style' artistic tradition. Accordingly, these groups are often assigned to the Scythian culture... They started migrating westward around the fourth and third centuries BCE, coming to dominate the closely related Scythians by 200 BCE. At their greatest reported extent, around 100 BCE, these tribes ranged from the Vistula River to the mouth of the Danube and eastward to the Volga, bordering the shores of the Black Sea and Caspian Sea seas and the Caucasus to the south.
In the first century CE, the Sarmatians began encroaching upon the Roman Empire in alliance with Germanic peoples. In the third century CE, the Germanic Goths broke the Sarmatian dominance of the Pontic Steppe. With the Huns invasions of the fourth century, many Sarmatians joined the Goths and other Germanic tribes (Vandals) in settling in the Western Roman Empire. Since large parts of today's Russia, specifically the land between the Ural Mountains and the Don River, were controlled in the fifth century BCE by the Sarmatians, the Lower Volga–Don steppes are sometimes called the "Sarmatian Motherland".
The Sarmatians in the Bosporan Kingdom assimilated into Greek civilization, while others were absorbed by the proto-Circassians Maeotians people, "While the Sarmatians dominated the Meot lands, they were themselves assimilated and the language of the Meots, the predecessor of the modern Circassian dialects, survived." by the Alans, and by the Goths. Other Sarmatians were assimilated and absorbed by the Early Slavs. The Alans survived in the North Caucasus into the Early Middle Ages, ultimately giving rise to the modern Ossetians ethnic group.
The early-modern Polish nobility () claimed to stem from the Sarmatians.
Genomic studies suggest that the Sarmatians may have been genetically similar to the eastern Yamnaya culture Bronze Age group.
This name meant "armed with throwing darts and arrows" and is cognate with the Indic Sanskrit term , which makes it semantically similar to the endonym of the Scythians, , meaning "archers."
The later, Middle Iranic, form of was or , of which the later form, or , was recorded in ancient Greek as (; ).
The name "Sarmatians" eventually came to be applied to the whole of the new people formed out of these migrations, whose constituent tribes were the Aorsi, Roxolani, Alans, and the Iazyges. Despite the similarity between the names Sarmatian and Sauromatian, modern authors distinguish between the two, since Sarmatian culture did not directly develop from the Sauromatian culture and the core of the Sarmatian culture was composed of these newly arrived migrants. A typical transitional site between these two periods is found in the Filippovka kurgans, which are Late Sauromatian-Early Sarmatian, and dated to the 5th-4th century BCE.
During the end of the 4th century BCE, the Scythians, the then dominant power in the Black Sea Steppe, were militarily defeated by the Macedonian kings Philip II of Macedon and Lysimachus in 339 and 313 BCE respectively. They experienced another military setback after participating in the Bosporan Civil War in 309 BCE and came under pressure from the Thracians Getae and the Celtic peoples Bastarnae. At the same time, in Central Asia, following the Macedonian conquest of the Achaemenid Empire, the new Seleucid Empire started attacking the Saka and Dahae nomads who lived to the north of its borders, who in turn put westward pressure on the Sarmatians. Pressured by the Sakā and Dahā in the east and taking advantage of the decline of Scythian power, the Sarmatians began crossing the Don river and invaded Scythia and also migrated south into the North Caucasus.
The first wave of westward Sarmatian migration happened during the 2nd century BCE, and involved the Royal Sarmatians, or Saioi (from Scytho-Sarmatian , meaning "kings"), who moved into the Pontic Steppe, and the Iazyges, also called the Iaxamatai or Iazamatai, who initially settled between the Don and Dnieper rivers. The Roxolani, who might have been a mixed Scytho-Sarmatian tribe, followed the Iazyges and occupied the Black Sea steppes up to the Dnieper and raided the region during that century, at the end of which they were involved in a conflict with the generals of the Pontic king Mithridates VI Eupator in the Crimea, while the Iazyges became his allies.
That the tribes formerly referred to by Herodotus as Scythians were now called Sarmatians by Hellenistic and Roman authors implies that the Sarmatian conquest did not involve a displacement of the Scythians from the Pontic Steppe, but rather that the Scythian tribes were absorbed by the Sarmatians. After their conquest of Scythia, the Sarmatians became the dominant political power in the northern Pontic Steppe, where Sarmatian graves first started appearing in the 2nd century BCE. Meanwhile, the populations which still identified as Scythians proper became reduced to Crimea and the Dobruja region, and at one point the Crimean Scythians were the vassals of the Sarmatian queen Amage. Sarmatian power in the Pontic Steppes was also directed against the Ancient Greece cities on its shores, with the city of Pontic Olbia being forced to pay repeated tribute to the Royal Sarmatians and their king Saitapharnes, who is mentioned in the Protogenes inscription along with the tribes of the Thisamatae, Scythians, and Saudaratae. Another Sarmatian king, Gatalos, was named in a peace treaty concluded by the king Pharnaces I of Pontus with his enemies.
Two other Sarmatian tribes, the Siraces, who had previously originated in the Transcaspian Plains immediately to the northeast of Hyrcania before migrating to the west, and the Aorsi, moved to the west across the Volga and into the Caucasus mountains' foothills between the 2nd to 1st centuries BCE. From there, the pressure from their growing power forcing the more western Sarmatian tribes to migrate further west, and the Aorsi and Siraces destroyed the power of the Royal Sarmatians and the Iazyges, with the Aorsi being able to extend their rule over a large region stretching from the Caucasus across the Terek–Kuma Lowland and Kalmykia in the west up to the Aral Sea region in the east. Yet another new Sarmatian group, the Alans, originated in Central Asia out of the merger of some old tribal groups with the Massagetae. Related to the Asii who invaded Bactria in the 2nd century BCE, the Alans were pushed west by the Kangju people (known to Graeco-Roman authors as the in Greek, and the Iaxartae in Latin) who were living in the Syr Darya basin, from where they expanded their rule from Fergana to the Aral Sea region.
The hegemony of the Sarmatians in the Pontic Steppe continued during the 1st century BCE, when they were allied with the Scythians against Diophantus, a general of Mithradates VI Eupator, before allying with Mithradates against the Ancient Rome and fighting for him in both Europe and Asia, demonstrating the Sarmatians' complete involvement in the affairs of the Pontic and Danubian regions. During the early part of the century, the Alans had migrated to the area to the northeast of the Lake Maeotis. Meanwhile, the Iazyges moved westwards until they reached the Danube, and the Roxolani moved into the area between the Dnipro and the Danube and from there further west. These two peoples attacked the regions around Tomis and Moesia, respectively. During this period, the Iazyges and Roxolani also attacked the Roman province of Thracia, whose governor Tiberius Plautius Silvanus Aelianus had to defend the Roman border of the Danube. During the 1st century BCE, various Sarmatians reached the Pannonian Basin, with the Iazyges passing through the territories corresponding to modern-day Moldavia and Wallachia before settling in the Tisza valley, by the middle of the century.
Although the Sarmatian were defeated and their movements stopped temporarily during the 1st century BCE due to the rise of the Dacians kingdom of Burebista, they resumed after the collapse of his kingdom following his assassination and in 16 BCE. Lucius Tarius Rufus had to repel a Sarmatian attack on Thracia and Macedonia, while further attacks around 10 BCE and 2 BCE were defeated by Gnaeus Cornelius Lentulus.
Meanwhile, other Sarmatian tribes, possibly the Aorsi, sent ambassadors to the Roman emperor Augustus, who tried to establish a diplomatic accommodation with them. During the 1st century CE, the Siraces and Aorsi, who were mutually hostile, participated in the Roman–Bosporan War on opposite sides: the Siraces and their king Zorsines allied with Mithridates III against his half-brother Cotys I, who was allied with Rome and the Aorsi. With the defeat of Mithridates, the Siraces were also routed and lost rulership over most of their lands. Between 50 and 60 CE, the Alans had appeared in the foothills of the Caucasus, from where they attacked the Caucasus and Transcaucasus areas and the Parthian Empire. During the 1st century CE, the Alans expanded across the Volga to the west, absorbing part of the Aorsi and displacing the rest, and pressure from the Alans forced the Iazyges and Roxolani to continue attacking the Roman Empire from across the Danube. During the 1st century CE, two Sarmatian rulers from the steppe named Pharzoios and Inismeōs were minting coins in Pontic Olbia.
The Roxolani continued their westward migration following the conflict on the Bosporan Chersonesus, and by 69 CE they were close enough to the lower Danube that they were able to attack across the river when it was frozen in winter, and soon later they and the Alans were living on the coast of the Black Sea, and they later moved further west and were living in the areas corresponding to modern-day Moldavia and western Ukraine.
The Sarmatian tribe of the Arraei, who had had close contacts with the Romans, eventually settled to the south of the Danube river, in Thrace, and another Sarmatian tribe, the Koralloi, were also living in the same area alongside a section of the Scythian Sindi people.
During the 1st and 2nd centuries CE, the Iazyges often bothered the Roman authorities in Pannonia; they participated in the destruction of the kingdom of Vannius, and often migrated to the east across the Transylvanian Plateau and the Carpathian Mountains during seasonal movements or for trade.
By the 2nd century CE, the Alans had conquered the steppes of the north Caucasus and of the north Black Sea area and created a powerful confederation of tribes under their rule. Under the hegemony of the Alans a trade route connected the Pontic Steppe, the southern Urals, and the region presently known as Western Turkestan. One group of the Alans, the Antes people, migrated north into the territory of what is presently Poland.
The Sarmatians in the Bosporan Kingdom assimilated into the Greek civilization. Others assimilated with the proto-Circassians Meot people, and may have influenced the Circassian language. ""While the Sarmatians dominated the Meot lands, they were themselves assimilated and the language of the Meots, the predecessor of the modern Circassian dialects, survived." Some Sarmatians were absorbed by the Alans and Goths. During the Early Middle Ages, the Proto-Slavs population of Eastern Europe assimilated and absorbed Sarmatians during the political upheavals of that era. However, a people related to the Sarmatians, known as the Alans, survived in the North Caucasus into the Early Middle Ages, ultimately giving rise to the modern Ossetians ethnic group.
While "Sarmatian" and "Sauromatian" are synonymous as ethnonyms, by convention they are given different meanings as archaeological technical terms. The term "Prokhorovka culture" derives from a complex of mounds in the Prokhorovski District, Orenburg Oblast, excavated by Sergei Rudenko in 1916.
Reportedly, during 2001 and 2006 a great Late Sarmatian pottery centre was unearthed near Budapest, Hungary in the Üllő5 archaeological site. Typical grey, granular Üllő5 ceramics form a distinct group of Sarmatian pottery is found ubiquitously in the north-central part of the Great Hungarian Plain region, indicating a lively trading activity.
A 1998 paper on the study of glass beads found in Sarmatian graves suggests wide cultural and trade links. "Chemical Analyses of Sarmatian Glass Beads from Pokrovka, Russia" , by Mark E. Hall and Leonid Yablonsky.
A 2023 paper on a grave discovered in Cambridgeshire, England found via archaeogenetics that the person had Sarmatian-related ancestry, and was not related to the local population. Stable isotope analysis of his teeth determined that he had probably migrated long distances twice in his life. One tooth was radiocarbon dated to cal 126-228 CE.
Archaeological evidence suggests that Scythian-Sarmatian cultures may have given rise to the Greek legends of Amazons. Graves of armed women have been found in southern Ukraine and Russia. David Anthony noted that approximately 20% of Scythian-Sarmatian "warrior graves" on the lower Don and lower Volga contained women dressed for battle as warriors and he asserts that encountering that cultural phenomenon "probably inspired the Greek tales about the Amazons."
The first Sarmatians are mostly identified with the Prokhorovka culture, which moved from the southern Urals to the Lower Volga and then to the northern Pontic steppe, in the fourth–third centuries BCE. During the migration, the Sarmatian population seems to have grown and they divided themselves into several groups, such as the Alans, Aorsi, Roxolani, and Iazyges. By 200 BCE, the Sarmatians replaced the Scythians as the dominant people of the steppes. The Sarmatians and Scythians had fought on the Pontic steppe to the north of the Black Sea. The Sarmatians, described as a large confederation, were to dominate these territories over the next five centuries. According to Brzezinski and Mielczarek, the Sarmatians were ethnogenesis between the Don River and the Ural Mountains. Pliny the Elder wrote that they ranged from the Vistula River (in present-day Poland) to the Danube.
The early Sarmatians already possessed the technique of decorating with gold inclusions, observed in Achaemenid metalwork. It was spread by nomads in the Eurasian steppes during the 7th-5th centuries BCE, from the Altai Mountains (Arzhan-2 kurgan) westward to central Kazakhstan and the southern Urals. Tsar Peter the Great particularly cherished his Demidov Gift, a Sarmatian gold collection, now exhibited in the Gold Chamber at the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg. The Novocherkassk Treasure with the famous Sarmatian Diadem adorned with a Tree of Life can also be seen in the Hermitage Gold Room. It is a Sarmatian hoard of gold, silver and bronze articles and jewellery discovered in the Khokhlach barrow in Novocherkassk in 1864. Chronologically it belongs to the first and second centuries CE.
Numerous weapons, armour, helmets had already been found in the excavations of the Early Sarmatian Filippovka kurgan (dated to 450-300 BCE):
Many Chinese mirrors occur in graves of the Middle-Sarmatian to Late-Sarmatian periods.
A genetic study published in Current Biology in 2022 regarding the genetic origin of Huns, Avars, and conquering Hungarians. 265 ancient genomes were analyzed, it revealed that the Hungarians conquerors admixed with Sarmatians and Huns. Sarmatian ancestry was also detected among several Hun samples which implies a significant Sarmatian influence on European Huns.
There is also evidence for a later eastwards expansion of Sarmatian-like ancestry, evident in a Saka-associated sample from southeastern Kazakhstan (Konyr Tobe 300CE), displaying around 85% Sarmatian and 15% additional BMAC-like ancestry. Sarmatian-like contributions have also been detected among some Xiongnu remains.
In 2015, again Afanasiev et al. analyzed skeletons of various Sarmato-Alan and Saltovo-Mayaki culture Kurgan burials. The two Alan samples from the fourth to sixth century CE belonged to Y-DNA haplogroups G2a-P15 and R1a-Z94, while two of the three Sarmatian samples from the second to third century CE found to belong to Y-DNA haplogroup J1-M267, and one belonged to R1a. Three Saltovo-Mayaki samples from the eighth to ninth century CE turned out to have Y-DNA corresponding to haplogroups G, J2a-M410 and R1a-z94. (2025). 9785944572431, Языки славянской культуры Languages for Institute of Archaeology, Russian Academy of Sciences. . ISBN 9785944572431
A genetic study published in Nature Communications in March 2017 examined several Sarmatian individuals buried in Pokrovka, Russia (southwest of the Ural Mountains) between the fifth century BCE and the second century BCE. The sample of Y-DNA extracted belonged to haplogroup R1b1a2a2. This was the dominant lineage among males of the earlier Yamnaya culture.. "Individual I0575 (Sarmatian) belonged to haplogroup R1b1a2a2, and was thus related to the dominant Ychromosome lineage of the Yamnaya (Pit Grave) males from Samara..." The eleven samples of mtDNA extracted belonged to the haplogroups U3, M, U1a'c, T, F1b, N1a1a1a1a, T2, U2e2, H2a1f, T1a, and U5a1d2b. The Sarmatians examined were found to be closely related to peoples of the earlier Yamnaya culture and to the Poltavka culture.. "The two Early Sarmatian samples from the West... fall close to an Iron Age sample from the Samara district... and are generally close to the Early Bronze Age Yamnaya samples from Samara... and Kalmykia... and the Middle Bronze Age Poltavka samples from Samara..."
A genetic study published in Nature in May 2018 examined the remains of twelve Sarmatians buried between 400 BCE and 400 CE. The five samples of Y-DNA extracted belonged to haplogroup R1a1, I2b, R (two samples), and R1. The eleven samples of mtDNA extracted belonged to C4a1a, U4a2 (two samples), C4b1, I1, A, U2e1h (two samples), U4b1a4, H28, and U5a1.
A genetic study published in Science Advances in October 2018 examined the remains of five Sarmatians buried between 55 CE and 320 CE. The three samples of Y-DNA extracted belonged to haplogroup R1a1a and R1b1a2a2 (two samples), while the five samples of mtDNA extracted belonged to haplogroup H2a1, T1a1, U5b2b (two samples), and D4q.
A genetic study published in Current Biology in July 2019 examined the remains of nine Sarmatians from the southern Ural Mountains between 7th–2nd century BCE. The five samples of Y-DNA extracted belonged to haplogroup Q1c-L332, R1a1e-CTS1123, R1a-Z645 (two samples), and E1b1b-PF6746, while the nine samples of mtDNA extracted belonged to haplogroup W, W3a, T1a1, U5a2, U5b2a1a2, T1a1d, C1e, U5b2a1a1, U5b2c, and U5b2c.
A archaeogenetic study published in Cell in 2022, analyzed 17 Late Sarmatian samples from 4-5th century CE from the Pannonian Basin in Hungary. The nine extraced Y-DNA belonged to a diverse set of haplogroups, 2x I2a1b1a2b1-CTS4348, 2x I1a2a1a1a-Z141, I1a-DF29, G2a1-FGC725, E1b1b-L142.1, R1a1a1b2a2a1-Z2123 and R1b1a1b1a1a2b-PF6570, while the mtDNA haplogroups C5, H, 2x H1, H5, H7, H40, H59, HV0 I1, J1, 2x K1a, T1a, 2x T2b, U2.
The Roman author Ovid recorded that one of the Sarmatian tribes, the Coralli, had blond hair, which is a characteristic that Ammianus Marcellinus also ascribed to the Alans. He wrote that nearly all of the Alani were "of great stature and beauty, their hair is somewhat yellow, their eyes are frighteningly fierce."
Modern historians have offered conflicting opinions about the description of the Alans as being tall and having blond hair. For instance, Roger Batty has posited that "presumably, only some of the Alans would have been blond". (Footnote 224) "In reality, presumably only some Alans were blond." Bernard Bachrach has likewise suggested that because the Alans assimilated so many foreigners, the majority of them are unlikely to have been blond-haired, and that there was no distinguishing physical characteristic of the Alans. However, John Day has argued that Bachrach's analysis is flawed, because he mistranslated the original passage from Ammianus Marcellinus, and that the majority of the Alans were in fact blond. Iver Neumann has suggested that the description of Alans as blond may mean that their Indo-Iranians ancestry was greater than it was in the Huns. "They saw Alans as tall and blond, whereas the Huns were seen as squat and ugly (Bachrach 1973:19), we may take this to mean that the Alans looked more like Romans, i.e. that the Iranic element was stronger in them than it was in the Huns." Charles Previté-Orton wrote that the Alans were only partly of Iranian heritage, and that the other part of their ancestry came from captive women and slaves. "...the blond Alans between the Don, the Volga, and Mount Caucasus were Iranian in speech and partly in blood, and remnants of other Iranian nomads, not to mention descendants of captive women and slaves..."
In the 17th century the Cossack Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky, building on Polish Sarmatianism, claimed the title of "Prince of the Sarmatians".
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