question - do you mean by Scythians the inhabitants of the great Eurasian steppe from the east to the west i.e. from China to the Carpathian Mountains and today's Pakistan in the south - time frame 7cBC to 3c BC?
I am asking this because the Osprey book on the Scythians concetrates on the western part of the Scythian world - the Black Sea steppes. There is notable absence of the eastern Sctyhians aka Saka in that book (when book on Pazyryk is exculusively about them) - but there is more about the Saka in the book by Mair and Mallory - 'The Tarim Mummies: Ancient China and the Mystery of the Earliest Peoples from the West'(also on Yuezhi/Kushans, Tocharians, Parthians etc ), or 'The Mummies of Ãœrümchi' by Elizabeth Wayland Barber(very interesting chapters about textiles) or 'Warrior Women: An Archaeologist’s Search for History’s Hidden Heroines' by Jeannine Davis-Kimball (sort of feminist history of the steppe
) . Also a good book on the Saka is "The Golden Deer of Eurasia.' (got a copy via Amazon quite cheap)
Sarmatians - the most important in English is the Tadeusz Sulimirski's 'The Sarmatians' published in the 1970s, also 'Sarmatians' by prof Mariusz Mielczarek - with translating/editing help from Richard Brzezinski (very curcumscribed by the Osprey editors and their peculiar format).
also, famous Bernard S. Bachrach's 'A History of the Alans in the West, from their first appearance in the sources of classical antiquity through the early middle ages' - all good stroy telling
this book - DiCosmo's 'Ancient China and its Enemies' deals with the nomads from the eastern, Chinese, perspective, quite refreshing.
Huns - Otto J. Mänchen-Helfen's 'World of the Huns'. Also Nikonorov -Armies of Bactria (vo1 &2) has lots of info about the Yuezhi/Kushans...
Also the famous Russian ethnohistorian Lev Gumilov wrote two very interesting books on the Huns and early Turks or as he calls them Turkuts - I am not sure if they have been translated into any western European languages (I read them in Polish and Russian)
You could also take a copy of works by Herodotos, Tacitus and Pliny the Elder, and Ammianus Marcellinus .. by now your suitcase will be 50kg or more - you will need a sturdy team of horses to carry all that reading
bachmat66 (Dariusz T. Wielec)
<a class="postlink" href="http://dariocaballeros.blogspot.com/">http://dariocaballeros.blogspot.com/