Sarmatian Religion
SARMATIAN RELIGION. The Sarmatians were Iranian-speaking nomadic tribes that formed in the middle of the first millennium BCE in the southern Urals. In the last centuries before the common era they spread from there in a westward direction—to the lower Volga region, the Ciscaucasus, and the northern Black Sea shore—where they were still dominant in the first centuries CE. In language and culture, the Sarmatians were close to the Scythians. Their ethnonym is similar to that of the Sauromatians, who inhabited the left bank of the Lower Don in the middle of the first millennium BCE. Classical tradition often treated both these names as identical, but in contemporary scholarship the question of the degree of relationship between the Sauromatians and the Sarmatians remains debatable.
The Sarmatians' lack of a written language has severely limited the scope of available data about their religion. The only evidence about their pantheon is the indication by a writer of the fifth century CE that in the language of the Alani (a tribe of the Sarmatian group) the name of the town Feodosia in the Crimea was Ardabda ("seven gods"). This is a reflection of the tradition, common among the ancient Indo-Iranians, of worshiping seven gods, a practice also characteristic of Scythian religion.
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