by offering them gifts; some Scythian stragglers looted the temple of ʿAštart in the city and their descendants were allegedly afflicted by the goddess with a "female disease," due to which they became a class of transvestite diviners called the (meaning "unmanly" in Scythian). The Scythians were finally expelled from West Asia by the Medes in the 600s BC, after which they retreated to the Pontic Steppe. Some splinter Scythian groups nevertheless remained in West Asia and settled in Transcaucasia, who by the middle of the 6th century BC had completely assimilated culturally and politically into Median society and no longer existed as a distinct group. Pontic Scythian kingdom Early phase After their expulsion from West Asia, and beginning in the later 7th and lasting throughout much of the 6th century BC, the majority of the Scythians migrated from Ciscaucasia into the Pontic Steppe, which became the centre of Scythian power. Although Herodotus of Halicarnassus claimed that the Scythians retreated into the northern Pontic region through Crimea, archaeological evidence instead suggests that the Royal Scythians migrated northwards into western Ciscaucasia, and from there into the country of those Scythians who had previously established themselves in the Pontic steppe. Some of the Scythian groups who had settled in the eastern Pontic steppe to the east of the Dnipro river were displaced by the arrival of the Royal Scythians from West Asia, and they moved north into the region of the forest-steppe zone, where they constituted the tribe of the Androphagi. During this early phase of the Pontic Scythian kingdom, the hold of the Royal Scythians on the western part of the steppe located to the west of the Dnieper was light, and they were largely satisfied with the tribute they levied on the sedentary agriculturist population of the region, while the tribe of the Aroteres, which consisted of a settled Thracian population over which ruled an Iranic Scythian ruling class, imported Greek pottery, jewellery and weapons in exchange of agricultural products, and in turn offered them in tribute to their Scythian overlords, although the country of the Alazones tribe appears to have become poorer during this time, in the early 6th century BC, when many of the rebuilt pre-Scythian settlements in their territory were destroyed by the Royal Scythians arriving from West Asia. In Crimea, the Royal Scythians took over most of the territory up to the Cimmerian Bosporus in the