This part here is potentially misleading: > Without a written language or direct sources, the language or languages they spoke ... remain unclear. This is not

This part here is potentially misleading: > Without a written language or direct sources, the language or languages they spoke ... remain unclear. This is not quite the case. It is the mainstream consensus – and has been for many, many decades – that the Scythians spoke Iranian languages ancestral to Sarmatian and Alanic. See the article on the Scythian language [0] in the Encyclopedia Iranica, the standard reference work for this field. This finding is based on onomastics (Scythian names in Greek sources), as well as loanwords into the Uralic languages spoken just north of the steppes. What is unclear are dialectal divisions within Scythian, not the general affiliation of the language. Random Turkish nationalists on the internet sometimes say that the Scythians spoke a Turkic language, as there have been some crackpot publications claiming this. However, with regard to the millennia BCE this is not taken seriously among historical linguists. [0] https://iranicaonline.org/articles/scythian-language https://iranicaonline.org/articles/scythian-language