A few days ago a history professor at the uni I go to brought up the subject of the Scythians/Scythia which was a bit of a funny coincidence because I was talking about this with a friend of mine just before this - and well the professor insists that it was not an empire which I'm at odds with. Considering the vast area they had command over from roughly 1000 BC to about 380 AD, surely this was an empire, right?