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One writer averred that they were not pure Scythians, but, being descended from young Scythian men and Amazons, spoke an impure dialect and allowed their women to take part in war and to enjoy much freedom. Later writers call some of them the "woman-ruled Sarmatae". Hippocrates (De Aere, etc., 24) classes them as Scythian. From this we may infer that they spoke an Iranian language cognate with Scythian.

Later, Pausanias, viewing votive offerings near the Athenian Acropolis in the 2nd century AD (Description of Greece 1.21.5-6), found among them

"a Sauromatic breastplate. On seeing this a man will say that no less than Greeks are foreigners skilled in the arts: for the Sauromatae have no iron, neither mined by themselves nor yet imported. They have, in fact, no dealings at all with the foreigners around them. To meet this deficiency they have contrived inventions. In place of iron they use bone for their spear-blades, and cornel-woodThe genus Cornus is also known as the dogwoods, with about 30-50 species depending on taxonomic interpretation. Most species have opposite leaves, but alternate in a few. The fruit of all species is a drupe with one or two seeds. Flowers have four parts. for their bows and arrows, with bone points for the arrows. They throw a lasso round any enemy they meet, and then turning round their horses upset the enemy caught in the lasso.

"Their breastplates they make in the following fashion. Each man keeps many mares, since the land is not divided into private allotments, nor does it bear any thing except wild trees, as the people are nomads. These mares they not only use for war, but also sacrifice them to the local gods and eat them for food. Their hoofs they collect, clean, split, and make from them as it were python scales. Whoever has never seen a python must at least have seen a pine-cone still green. He will not be mistaken if he liken the product from the hoof to the segments that are seen on the pine-cone. These pieces they bore and stitch together with the sinews of horses and oxen, and then use them as breastplates that are as handsome and strong as those of the Greeks. For they can withstand blows of missiles and those struck in close combat."

The greater part of the barbarian names occurring in the inscriptions of OlbiaOlbia (locally "Terranoa" in the Sardinian language or "Tarranoa" in Gallurese), is a town of approximately 40,000 inhabitants in northeastern Sardinia ( Italy), in the Gallura sub-region. Called "Olbia" in the Roman age, "Civita" in the Middle Ages (Giud, TanaisTanais the Greek name for the River Don in antiquity, was also the name of the city on the river situated in the Don river delta that reaches into the northeasternmost part of the Sea of Azov, which the Greeks called Lake Maeotis. The site of ancient Tana and PanticapaeumPanticapaeum was an ancient Greek colony founded about 2600 years ago on the Cimmerian Bosporus, at the site of present-day Kerch city in the Crimea ( Ukraine). Panticapaeum became the capital of the Bosporan Kingdom, which arose in the 5th century. It wa are supposed to be Sarmatian, and as they have been well explained from the Iranian language now spoken by the Ossetians of the CaucasusThe Caucasus is a region in eastern Europe and western Asia between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea which includes the Caucasus mountains and surrounding lowlands. It is occasionally considered part of Central Asia. The highest peak is Elbrus (5642m), w (the Ossetic languageOssetic or Ossetian is a language spoken on the slopes of the Caucasus Mountains on the borders of Russia and Georgia. The area in Russia is known as North Ossetia-Alania (capital: Vladikavkaz), while the area in Georgia is called South Ossetia (capital:), these are supposed to be the modern representatives of the Sarmatae and can be shown to have a direct connection with the Alans, one of their tribes.

By the 3rd century BC the Sarmatae appear to have supplanted the Scyths proper in the plains of south Russia, where they remained dominant until the Gothic and Hunnish invasions. Their chief divisions were the Rhoxolani, the Iazyges, with whom the Romans had to deal on the Danube and Theiss; and the Alani.

Sarmatians were still a force the Romans had to reckon with in the late 4th century AD. Ammianus Marcellinus (29.6.13-14) describes a severe defeat which Sarmatian raiders inflicted upon Roman forces in the province of Valeria in Pannonia in late 374, when they almost annihilated both a legion recruited from Moesia and one from Pannonia, which had been sent to intercept a party of Sarmatians who had been pursuing a senior Roman officer named Aequitius deep into Roman territory; the two legions failed to coordinate, and their quarrelling allowed the Sarmatians to catch them unprepared and deal a stunning blow.

The term Sarmatia is applied by later writers to as much as was known of what is Central and Eastern Europe, including all that which the older authorities call Scythia, the latter name being transferred to regions farther east. Ptolemy's Geography gave maps of European and Asiatic Sarmatia.