They were unstoppable. Having broken out of the South Russian steppes, the Aryan tribes flooded the steppes and forest-steppes of Eurasia up to the Urals and Western Siberia. It seemed that no one could ever stop them.
4000 years ago, in the Middle Bronze Age, the Iranian-Aryan (Indo-Iranian) Indo-European tribes spread rapidly across the Eurasian steppes and forest-steppes. Their movement began, apparently, from the Black Sea steppes and they moved to the east and north-east.
However, let us digress and deal with the term «Irano-Aryan». This word has a purely linguistic origin and means only tribes and peoples speaking dialects of the Irano-Aryan (aka Indo-Iranian) group of the Indo-European language family and further divided into Indo-Aryan and Iranian groups.
So, in the Middle Bronze Age archeologists distinguish in the Eurasian steppes a whole layer of cultures, the belonging of which to the Iranian-Aryan tribes has not been disputed for a long time — Abashevskaya, Catacomb, Sintashtinskaya, Andronovskaya, Petrovskaya.
No one could stop them. It’s natural. It’s hard to defend against someone who has a huge advantage in military technology. And the Aryans had it. They invented chariots and domesticated horses. And these were terrible weapons.
But there was a solution for them too. Having reached the Urals, the Aryans had to stop. And though separate burials of representatives of Indo-European Abashev culture are found far to the north, in the modern Komi Republic, but they could not break through further than Chelyabinsk. Moreover, they had to go on the defensive.
Sintashti culture
Reconstruction of the Arkaim settlement.
The Sintashta culture is somewhat unique among these similar steppe cultures. The informal name «country of cities» refers to it.
This informal name reflects a unique feature of the Sintashta culture — the presence of fortified settlements, we can say, cities, although with some tension. There is nothing like this in other related cultures.
And it is not one city, but about a hundred according to the data of archeological reconnaissance. They are located in the Southern Urals on a compact territory with a diameter of 350 km.
They were built approximately at the same time and, so to speak, from scratch. That is, they are not the result of the development of early settlements. They are located from each other at a distance of a day’s crossing (about 70 km). It should be said that it rather resembles a military fortified area and has no analogues in Eurasia in that epoch.
Full feeling that in this area the warlike steppes had to go on the defense. By the way, the famous settlement of Arkaim belongs to the Sintashti culture.
And it is possible to assume that inhabitants of this region were in a state of war and constantly waited for an attack. Apparently they waited and still failed. All these settlements perished in fires and approximately at the same time.
But who was this enemy? There are mostly close archaeological cultures around, and to all appearances, like Sintashti, they were left by tribes of Iranian-Aryan group. Except that in the north…
A bit of mythology
In the mythology of the Komi people there is a very interesting character — Pera the bogatyr. One of the key episodes of his stormy biography filled with numerous feats is the victory over the idol on wheels.
The plot is simple enough. On Komma (mythical city of Komi) attacked enemies from the south, the main weapon of which was a wheel controlled by a man. The prince could not cope with them and sent to the north for the famous bogatyr Pera.
The warrior came and, as is usual with bogatyrs, quickly killed all the enemies. Nothing special, quite meets the standard of folk tales. Except for one thing — an unusual weapon of the enemy. Wheeled technology in the military began to be used only in the XX century … or in very ancient times in the form of war chariots.
Of course, there were still all sorts of siege vehicles on wheels, but in this case nothing similar. There is only one conclusion — this plot is an echo of very long ago events, when the forest dwellers of the Kama region faced expansion from the south, with warriors on war chariots. And they won. But how? How could the few, scattered forest dwellers defeat the hitherto invincible Aryan warriors?
Warriors of the forest
The tip of a bronze dagger from the Rostovka burial ground.
Synchronously with the Sintashti culture, in the XX-XVII centuries B.C., another unique phenomenon appears — «Seiminsko-Turbinsky transcultural phenomenon». It should be said that a scientific name with the word «phenomenon» is a very rare phenomenon.
We will not go into hypotheses about its origin and what it is (more details can be seen here on the channel), we are only interested in the fact that the Turbin monuments are military and only military and they are located just to the north of the Iranian-Aryan archaeological cultures.
And to the north of the country of cities just to the north of the country there is a powerful Seiminsko-Turbinsky complex. There, near the city of Perm is the largest burial ground of this type — Turbinsky — with a plume of small burial grounds.
Everything fits together. Apparently, the threat from the south forced the forest peoples to consolidate and create some kind of socio-political unity to resist the advance of Iranian-Aryan tribes.
It should be noted that they also had technological capabilities. Complex thin-walled molding, a unique technology that allowed them to make excellent, high-quality weapons. Such technology at that time was known only in the ancient east and nowhere else. In addition, the Turbinians have developed and methods of fighting with chariots. On many spearheads you can see a hook bent in the opposite direction from the blade.
The purpose of such a hook is absolutely unclear, unless we assume that it was used to pull a person from a chariot or to cut the horses’ slings.
So most likely the ancestors of the Komi, Finno-Ugric people, fiercely fought with Iranian-Aryans of Sintashta and Arkaim. And they won. All settlements of the country of cities were burnt down, and the inhabitants themselves went further south — to Central Asia, India and Iran. And their place is occupied by archaeological cultures of forest origin.