Instructed by these colonists, Herodotus, who wrote about four hundred and forty years before Christ, gives some information respecting the then condition of interior Russia.

The first great irruption into the wastes of Russia, of which history gives us any record, was about one hundred years before our Saviour.

An immense multitude of conglomerated tribes, taking the general name of Scythians, with their wives and their children, their flocks and their herds, and their warriors, fiercer than wolves, crossed the Volga, and took possession of the whole country between the Don and the Danube.

These barbarians did not molest the Greek colonies, but, on the contrary, were glad to learn of them many of the rudiments of civilization.

Some of these tribes retained their ancestral habits of wandering herdsmen, and, with their flocks, traversed the vast and treeless plains, where they found ample pasture.