information:classification
Class structure

Scythian society was stratified along class lines. Herodotus of Halicarnassus named the three classes of Scythians only once in his writings, where he described them as descended from the three sons of the Scythian ancestor-god Targitaos:

The Scythian aristocracy were property owners who possessed landed estates large enough that it sometimes took a whole day to ride around them. These freeborn Scythian rulers used the whip as their symbol.

The commoners were free but still depended to some extent on the aristocracy. They were allowed to own some property, usually a pair of oxen needed to pull a cart, hence why they were called oktapodes (Ancient Greek: οκταποδες, lit. ' eight-feeters ') in Greek. By the 4th century BC, the exploitation of these free commoners became the main economic policy of Scythia.

Serfs belonged to the poorest sections of the native populations of Scythia, and, being tied to the land and not possessing cattle, they were not free and did not own cattle or wagons. Stablemen and farmers were recruited from the serf class.

A rudimentary form of slavery was also practised in Scythia, and the Scythian ruling class used a large number of slaves to till the land and tend to the cattle. Slaves were also assigned to the production of dairy products. The Greek author Herodotus of Halicarnassus claimed that the Scythians used to blind their slaves to prevent them from eating the most valuable of these dairy products. He also claimed that the Scythian kings considered the inhabitants of Crimea to be their slaves.

This class structure thus existed in a hierarchy where the farmer-peasant class occupied the lowest social position, the clergy occupied the middle position, and warrior-aristocracy occupied the highest social position and dominated the other two classes, with the Scythian kings belonging to this dominant class. The class stratification of Scythian society corresponded to a hierarchy of social standing and property ownership which is visibly in how export of the grain cultivated by the common freemen profited only the aristocracy but not these commoners, whose graves lacked the lavish furnishing of the aristocratic burials.

This drastic difference between the aristocracy and the commoners is also visible in how Scythian art only represented the interested of the Scythian ruling classes.