Derbices Erotic

The Derbices were an ancient people of Central Asia who lived along the lower Oxus River toward the southeastern Caspian, in what is now Turkmenistan and neighboring Uzbekistan. Greek writers place them there as early as the reign of Cyrus the Great in the 6th century BC, and Roman-era geographers were still naming them. After that they vanish from the record, and any descendants were presumably absorbed into later populations of the region. Everything known about them comes from outsiders. Nothing they wrote survives. Their language is unknown, though their neighbors make an Eastern Iranian language the usual guess. Ptolemy lists them in Margiana, the oasis country around Merv. Pliny the Elder sets them on the Oxus, and Strabo discusses them alongside the Caspii. Their one big moment in history is a king's death. Herodotus has Cyrus killed fighting the Massagetae, but Ctesias, a Greek physician at the Persian court around 400 BC, tells it differently. In his account Cyrus marched against the Derbices and their king Amoraeus, who met him with war elephants supplied by Indian allies. Cyrus was thrown from his horse and struck by a javelin. A Saka ally, Amorges, arrived with reinforcements, and the Derbices were beaten and Amoraeus killed, but Cyrus died of the wound soon after. Ctesias is not a reliable witness. Still, his version shows the Derbices were remembered as dangerous enough to bring down the founder of the Persian Empire.

Strabo preserves the custom that made them notorious. The Derbices, he writes, worshiped the earth and would neither sacrifice nor eat any female animal. When men passed seventy, their nearest kin killed them and ate them. Old women were strangled and buried, and anyone who died younger was buried rather than eaten. That account deserves some caution. Greek writers told similar stories about other steppe peoples, and Herodotus says much the same of the Massagetae, so part of it may be a stock image of the far northeast rather than firsthand observation. The ban on killing female animals is a stranger, more specific detail, and no surviving source explains it. What remains of the Derbices is a name in the ancient geographers, a disputed role in the death of Cyrus, and a handful of customs written down by people who, as far as we know, never met them.