Lecture 4: Greek colonies and the steppe peoples

Professor Paul Robert Magocsi — Ukraine: A History Course.

The Ukrainian Jewish Encounter is pleased to present a lecture series by Paul Robert Magocsi titled Ukraine: A History Course. Magocsi recorded 45 lectures in 2023 at the University of Toronto, where he holds the professorial Chair of Ukrainian Studies and is a history and political science professor. He is also a Board Member of the Ukrainian Jewish Encounter.

Magocsi, one of the world’s leading experts on Ukraine, explores this fascinating country in all its complexity, from its history, culture, geography, politics, and multi-ethnic composition. The lectures are an important counterweight to Russian propaganda and explain Ukraine’s importance to global security today.

Time stamps are available for each lecture. Auto-translate is available in Ukrainian, major European, Asian, African, and Middle Eastern languages, including Hebrew and Yiddish.

Recordings of the lecture series were made possible with the support of the Temerty Foundation.

All the lectures are available on YouTube here.

0:30 Nomadic civilizations on Ukrainian territory
2:00 Greeks and Scythians in Ukraine map
6:35 Nomadic civilizations on Ukrainian territory
14:15 Military equipment of Scythian soldiers excavated from kurhans in Ukraine, 5th century
14:38 Amphora (70 cm: silver), 4th-century BC found in Chertomlyk, Dnipropetrovsk region, Ukraine. Vases from the Kul-Oba kurgan in the Crimea, 4th-century BC. Golden Pectoral from Tovsta Mohyla, Pokrov, Ukraine, 4th century BC, Scythian belt buckle made of gold, gold comb
15:32 The Greeks and the Scythians in Ukraine, map
16:20 Scythian society: royalty, notable, agriculturalist, ploughmen
21:59 Greeks and Scythians in the Pontic-Aegean region. Miletus, Greece (current day Turkey)
31:12 Herodotus, descriptions of Scythian lifestyle, burial mounds - kurhany (kurgan)
31:50 Kurhan (kurgan) in Zaporizhzhia region, Ukraine. Ohuz kurhan, Nyzhniy Sirohozy, Kherson region, Ukraine. Nosivka kurhan, Chernihiv region, Ukraine
41:15 Goths move into Ukraine and broke up the dominance of the Sarmatians. Ostrogoths settled in Crimea
43:20 During World War 2 (WW2) Hitler spent a large amount of money on archaeological expeditions to Crimea to find remnants of Germanic civilization
45:45 Chersonesus. Remnants of a 6th-century Christian basilica uncovered by archaeologists in 1935. Ancient Greek theatre, mid-3rd century BCE. Kerch, Church of John the Baptist, Byzantine architecture from the late 9th-early 10th century.

For further information, you may wish to consult: A History of Ukraine: The Land and Its Peoples (University of Toronto Press, 2010)

Robert Paul Magocsi
Chair of Ukrainian Studies University of Toronto
Toronto, Canada, September 2023.