by the Sauromatai, Maiotai, and other Sarmatian tribes. When Georgio Interiano visited them in the middle of the 15th century the Cherkes extended from the Don along the Sea of Azov as far south as Abkhasia, which thus gave them, according to his estimation, a coast line of five hundred miles. Before his time, till driven out by the Tartars, they had settlements in the Crimea. Until recently they peopled the country between Taman and the confines of the Abkhas country, as well as the great and little Kabardá. There is, therefore, considerable ground for assuming that the Sarmatai, including the Sauromatai, Maiotai, and the many other tribes into which they were sub-divided, whom ancient writers aver to have been Caucasians, to have had racial affinity with the Iberians, to have been different from Scythians, in Herodotus' narrow sense of the word, and to have had Amazons among them, are now represented by the Cherkes and Abkhas, or Absne, who occupy, or have occupied, much of the same geographical area, who are Caucasians, who are certainly more nearly related to the Georgians than to any non-Caucasian people, who are anaryan and allophyl as regards Tatars, Mongols, and Finno-ugrians, and who retain the custom of flattening the breasts during maidenhood.[1]
It now remains to compare what is reported of the Amazons with existing customs of the Cherkes and
- ↑ This proposed identification of the Sarmatai with Caucasian races runs counter to the general opinion that they were an Aryan-speaking people now represented by some of the Slav nationalities. For undoubtedly in later times Roman writers apply the term Sarmatian to tribes dwelling as far west as the Dniester and the Vistula; but this may be explained. They were dubbed Sarmatians from possessing certain test customs and from living in Sarmatia, a geographical expression of elastic nature which gradually expanded from a small area north of the Caucasus till it covered the whole of Eastern Europe; just as Siberia, which once meant a small territory east of the Ural Mountains, now serves to designate the whole of Northern Asia, and includes several distinct races, each of which may loosely be spoken of as Siberian.
