Scythian

The Scythian collection is designed not just to echo a past civilization, recorded in the classical works of Herodotos and Pliny; it is also intended as a clarion call to the Russians to look to their jewelry heritage and their wealth of precious stones.

1685, John Norris, (translator), The Institution and Life of Cyrus the Great [Cyropaedia] by Xenophon Book I How far he surpassed them all may be felt if we remember that no Scythian, although the Scythians are reckoned by their myriads, has ever succeeded in dominating a foreign nation […]

Scythian was therefore not the same as modern Dutch, but the ancestral language of the Dutch as well as other neighbouring languages.

Though Boxhorn was working over a century before Sir William Jones, his ‘Scythian’ is not conceptually far off the later notion of Indo-European, and his choice of term ‘Scythian’ shows that Boxhorn was envisaging a cultural connection between the (northern) languages of the Near East and their Western European brethren, a perspicacious hypothesis that assumend some kind of ethnic drift between the two continents.

From 1647 onwards, in several of his writings, Boxhorn elaborated the idea that Scythian was the original mother language of Persian, Greek, Latin, the Germanic languages, Turkish, Welsh, Lithuanian, Russian and Latvian (cf. Boxhorn 1647).