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<div class="text-justify">The title of this article might make you think of the beginning of a joke, but it's very serious: in the ancient world, how did different people and nations communicated? They didn’t have dictionaries, and very few interpreters were available, probably taken from the ranks of the merchant classes who travelled enough to have encountered, studied the new cultures. An interesting story from The Histories give us a clue about the common thirst for symbols and knowledge between those human beings.</div><br>

As you may know, a good portion of **The Histories** is devoted to the attempt by the Persians and Darius to invade and conquer the whole known world. Not only Greece, but also the **Scythians**, the nomad people living in what is know Ukraine and Russia. Such a mammoth task quickly turned to disaster, and Darius eventually received a “gift” from the adversary:

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<center><h4>*After this had happened a number of times, things were starting to go very badly for Darius. The Scythian kings realized this and sent a herald with gifts for him—a bird, a mouse, a frog, and five arrows. The Persians asked the man who had brought the gifts what the kings meant by them, but he said that all he was supposed to do was hand over the gifts and leave straight away—he had received no further instructions. However, he told the Persians that if they were clever they would work out what the gifts meant. So the Persians talked the matter over among themselves.*</h4></center><br>


The thing is that in the ancient world, the people used to communicate between themselves by the use of symbols. The main symbol of submission was when a people, a city, a nation offered the salt and the water to its conqueror. But in that case… what was the meaning of that strange gift? <br>

<center><h4>*Darius’ opinion was that the Scythians were giving him earth and water and tokens of their surrender. His reasoning was as follows: a mouse is born in the ground and eats the same food as human beings, a frog lives in water, a bird closely resembles a horse, and they gave arrows as symbols of their own military might.*</h4></center>

<div class="pull-left"><img src="https://s14.postimg.org/mz9p8wdfl/24a9a611eba9937cba1582ba4e389674--ancient-jewelry-ancient-artifa.jpg" height="45%" width="45%" alt="DESCRIBE IMAGE.">(SCYTHIAN WARRIOR )</div>

But one advisor of Darius challenged the opinion of his master and offered this explanation:

<center><h4>*This is how he explained the message of the gifts: ‘Listen, men of Persia: if you don’t become birds and fly up into the sky, or mice and burrow into the ground, or frogs and jump into the lakes, you’ll never return home, because you’ll be shot down by these arrows.*</h4></center>

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<br>Herodotus does not give the Scythian version of the symbolic gift, but we may assume that the advisor had guessed right: Darius situation was at this point pretty dire and he had to retreat back to the safety of Asia Minor, beaten by the immensity and the elements of the northern shores of the Black Sea.<br>

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**Herodotus** was a Greek citizen who lived and died in the Vth century BC, hailing from the town of Halicarnassus in modern-day Turkey. He is widely considered as "the Father of History", even if he had a fascination for alternative stories which earned him the nickname of **"Father of Lies"**. It means that he was the first (known) writer to talk about the deeds of men in an analytical way, looking for the causes and consequences of events, and recording customs, events, deeds, battles, wars and speeches with always in mind to find the germ of truth among all the tall tales of poetry and propaganda.  <br>

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 Source: The Histories of Herodotus, Oxford University Press.