** The Scythians of the tradition preserved by Herodotus must have been the Ashguzai or Ishkuzai of the cuneiform documents. The original name must have been Skuza, Shkuza, with a sound in the second syllable that the Greeks have rendered by _th_, and the Assyrians by _z_: the initial vowel has been added, according to a well-known rule, to facilitate the pronunciation of the combination sk, sine. An oracle of the time of Esarhaddon shows that they occupied one of the districts really belonging to the Mannai: and it is probably they who are mentioned in a passage of Jer. li. 27, where the traditional reading _Aschenaz_ should be replaced by that of Ashkuz. *** It is doubtless to these events that the tradition preserved by Pompeius Trogus, which is known to us through his abbreviator Justin, or through the compilers of a later period, refers, concerning the two Scythian princes Ylinus and Scolopitus: they seem to have settled along the coast, on the banks of the Thermodon and in the district of Themiscyra. They subsequently felt their way along the valleys of the Anti-Taurus, but finding them held by Assyrian troops, they turned their steps towards the country of the White Syrians, seized Sinope, where the Greeks had recently founded a colony, and bore down upon Phrygia. It would appear that they were joined in these regions by other hordes from Thrace which had crossed the Bosphorus a few years earlier, and among whom the ancient historians particularly make mention of the Treres;* the results of the Scythian invasion had probably been felt by all the tribes on the banks of the Dnieper, and had been the means of forcing them in the direction of the Danube and the Balkans, whence they drove before them, as they went, the inhabitants of the Thracian peninsula across into Asia Minor. It was about the year 750 B.C. that the Cimmerians had been forced to quit their first home, and towards 720 that they came into contact with the empires of the East; the Treres had crossed the Bosphorus about 710, and the meeting of the two streams of immigration may be placed in the opening years of the seventh century.** * Strabo says decisively that the Treres were both Cimmerians and Thracians; elsewhere he makes the Treres synonymous with the Cimmerians. The Treres were probably the predominating tribe among the people which had come into Asia on that side. ** Gelzer thinks that the invasion by the Bosphorus took place about 705, and Radet about 708; and their reckoning seems to me to be so likely to be correct, that I do not hesitate to place the arrival of the Treres in Asia about the time they have both indicated--roughly speaking, about 710 B.C.