Sagaris

This article is about an ancient weapon. For the TVR sports car, see TVR Sagaris. For the river of Asia Minor, see Sakarya River.

Scythian archer holding a sagaris, as depicted by the vase-painter Euphronios on an Attic red-figure neck amphora (510–500 BC, Louvre)

The sagaris (Ancient Greek: Σάγαρις and Σάγαρι) is an ancient shafted weapon used by the horse-riding ancient Saka and Scythian peoples of the great Eurasian steppe. It was used also by Western and Central Asian peoples: the Medes, Persians, Parthians, Indo-Saka, Kushans, Mossynoeci, and others living within the milieu of Iranian peoples. According to Aristarchus of Samothrace, the legendary Amazons used the sagaris, as well. In The Histories, Herodotus attributes the sagaris to the Sacae Scythians in the army-list of Xerxes the Great.

The sagaris was a kind of battle-axe, or sometimes war hammer. Examples have been collected from Eurasian steppe archeological excavations, and are depicted on the Achaemenid cylinders and ancient Greek pottery and other surviving iconographic material. It is a long-shafted weapon with a metal head, with an either sharp (axe-like) or blunt (hammer-like) edge on one side and a sharp (straight or curving) 'ice-pick'-like point on the other. It may have been the sagaris that led medieval and Renaissance authors (such as Johannes Aventinus) to attribute the invention of the battle-axe weapon to the Amazons – as some Scythian women seen hunting and along warrior riders gave rise to the legend to the Amazons themselves – and to the modern association of the Amazons with the labrys.

A shorter form, as depicted in the hand of Spalirises on his coins, was labelled klevets by Russian archaeologist and ancient military historian V.P. Nikonorov.

The skulls of buried Scythian horses of older age are often found with damage that suggests they were killed by a blow to the mid forehead with the pointed part of the sagaris, possibly as a form of euthanasia. It is possible that this method of execution may have held some sort of cultural importance considering the great significance of horses in Scythian life.