Aspects of Cross-cultural Understanding in Ancient Greek 2: Herodotus and Scythia

In this paper, I investigated the characteristics of cross-cultural knowledge of ancient Greeks, who understood non-Greek cultures through the concept of "otherness." Herodotus was a thinker who represented other cultures to Greek audiences through many techniques dubbed "the rhetoric of otherness." The most typical and important example is his description of the Scythians. For this study, the following five typical topics concerning Scythia, which were presented by Herodotus in the fourth book of his Histories, were analyzed with regard to his rhetorical techniques for representing the otherness of non-Greek cultures. (1)Descriptions of the king of the Scythians as the center of nomads. (2) The otherness of Scythian religion. (3) Explanations by Greeks concerning Salmoxis (the god of Getae). (4) Stories of Scythian intellectuals who crossed the border between Greece and other countries. (5) Descriptions of the Scythian expedition by King Darius