The Scythians were riding horses a thousand years before the Greeks and there’s a good reason. Scythians lived on the steppes, a great flat ocean of grass easily crossed with horses and carts. The Greeks lived in mostly mountainous terrain where runners could travel faster than horses over steep rocky trails. Both cultures descended from the Yamnaya, but the ones who preferred sailing and a southern climate moved south, while the others settled in the shadow of Mt. Elbrus, where Heracles was born, or at least where he went looking for his stolen cattle.
The greatest piece of Scythian art is a three-ring, gold breastplate intended for a high-ranking royal Scythian, with fantastic mythological creatures attacking real animals on the bottom. All details were created separately and then soldered to the frame. The center contains spirals on spirals, flowers, leaves, and a few birds.
The top ring shows two men stretching a golden fleece, while another man milks a sheep, and a colt drinks from his mother. The distinctive Scythian quivers for holding arrows and bow are liberally distributed around.
If you melt this down you can get around $150k, while the breastplate is priceless and would sell for many hundreds of millions if ever auctioned, which will never happen as it is a Ukrainian national treasure.
Tragically, most of the Scythian art was melted down after the kurgans were raided, starting around 200 BC and continuing until 1715 when Peter the Great pleaded with the raiders to sell him the artifacts intact rather than melt them.
Nobody knew anything about the Scythians. History ignored them. Maybe because they had no alphabet, only runes. Or maybe it was the cannabis.