HE RUGGED MOUNTAINS, EORESTS, GORGES, RIVER
Valleys, pastures, and lonely steppes between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea have been a cultural crossroads and a turbulent cauldron of diverse languages, ethnicities, and geopolitical conflicts for thousands of years. In antiquity, adventurous Greeks traveled to the outer fringes of this vast territory, part of ancient Scythia-Sarmatia, where they established trading colonies, met exotic peoples, and listened to their exciting tales. What the Greeks saw and heard around the Black Sea colored their ideas of barbarian life and encouraged them to imagine what might lie beyond the world they knew: war-loving tribes of Amazons, griffins, fabulous golden treasures.
Straddling the great Caucasus mountain range between Europe and Asia, these lands have long been isolated by topography and language, subject to violent conflicts, and politically atomized. Despite this history, the numerous ethnic groups of this complex terrain shared ancient traditions of nomadic and seminomadic culture centered on horses, hunting, herding, raiding, and warfare. Many of the numerous languages seem to have changed little in the past two thousand years. Outside influences arrived late, with Mongols from the east, Muslims from the south, and Christians from the west in the Byzantine-medieval periods, and Russians in the modern era. The northern Caucasus region— stretching more than one thousand miles from the Sea of Azov to the Caspian Sea—today includes parts of Russia and Ukraine, Crimea, and numerous republics declared and disputed after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Southern Caucasia or Transcaucasia (in antiquity Abkhazia, eastern Pontus, Colchis, Iberia, Albania, Armenia, and Media) today includes Abkhazia, northeastern Turkey, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and northern Iran. Within each of these modern borders are scores of ethnic minorities, with their own dialects and histories.1
The staggering multiplicity of names gives a tiny glimpse into the even more impressive diversity of peoples that inhabited this region in antiquity. The peoples of these lands told their own stories about celebrated heroes and heroines, some imaginary and others based on the exploits of historical people who became legendary. Caucasus narratives are little known in the West partly because the cultures of this region were oral. In contrast to Greek myths and histories, recorded in writing more than twenty-five hundred years ago, the myths and chronicles of Caucasia were maintained in collective memories, perpetuated by spoken word. With the exception of Georgian, most Caucasian languages had no alphabets until the twentieth century. Armenian, an Indo-European language, acquired an alphabet in AD 405; the earliest Ossetian (ancient Iranian) writings are ca. AD 950-1150. Ancient Caucasian tales and epics were recounted by generations of bards in many different tongues for millennia before they were first captured in writing in the nineteenth century by European and Russian travelers and folklorists who transcribed versions they heard recited by local storytellers. Only about two hundred of nearly one thousand recorded oral traditions of Caucasia have been translated into English. The origins of the oral stories, sagas, songs, ballads, and poems of Caucasia cannot be dated with precision. But scholars agree that they contain traces of ancient Indo-European myths interwoven with local folktales. The Greek myths of Cyclops and Prometheus, for example, may have been borrowed from Caucasian traditions about a one-eyed ogre and a fire-bringing giant.
Many Caucasian sagas feature heroines who ride and do battle with men. Some ancient Caucasian traditions about independent women appear to have filtered into Greek art and literature. For example, linguistic and artistic evidence raises the possibility that an Abkhaz saga might have contributed to Greek tales and images of Atalanta (prologue). Many place-names and ethnonyms in Greek histories about this region are Hellenized versions of Caucasian names, and some names and words inscribed next to Amazons and Scythian figures on Greek vases are from Caucasian languages (chapter 14). As noted in chapter 5, the ancient Greek word for Amazon appears to have linguistic roots in Caucasia, perhaps linked to the name of the Circassian warrior queen Amezan, whose story is related below.2
Archaeological discoveries of armed women buried where the ancient Greeks located Amazons provide solid evidence that horsewomen warriors of steppe cultures really existed as contemporaries of the Greeks (Chapter 4). These flesh-and-blood women were the Amazons described by Greek and Roman historians from Herodotus to Orosius. Many examples of autonomous fighting women who behaved as the equals of men can be found in ancient oral and literary traditions beyond the Greek world—in cultures outside Greek influence in the Caucasus, the Near East, Central Asia, and China. These facts lay to rest the Hellenocentric argument that Amazons were the exclusive creations of fantasizing Greeks.
The following narratives about women warriors are gathered from oral tales of the Caucasus translated from Circassian, Ingush, and Lak languages; legends and epic poems of Armenia and Azerbaijan; a Greco-Roman military treatise; and early European travelers’ reports of oral tales they heard in the region. Some accounts are mythic. Some, like the stories of Tirgatao and Amage preserved by Polyaenus, concern historical events and peoples of special interest to the Greeks and Romans. Others describe the lives of riders, hunters, herders, raiders, fighters, lovers, and leaders who happen to be women—the steppe sisters of the women buried with their weapons and horses in archaeological sites across Scythia.
Epic stories about strong women who battle men are widely distributed among northern Caucasus groups. The tales of original “Amazons” from non-Greek cultures vary in significant ways from Amazon myths told in Greece. Unlike Hippolyte and Penthesilea and their all-women bands, the heroines of the Caucasus usually act alone or in mixed armies of women and men. This realistic feature of nomad life was captured in the earliest Greek use of the name “Amazon” to designate an ethnic group of men and women. It also corresponds with many Greek historians’ accounts of Amazons as barbarian women who live or consort with men (Chapters 1, 8, 10). But a crucial difference stands out in comparison
With the Greek myths, in which the great heroes killed Amazons even though they found them attractive. Other cultures that had close encounters with powerful nomad women recorded more practical scenarios, and they could imagine the women as victors. The warrior women in non-Greek sagas and histories may suffer tragic setbacks in their personal lives, but, unlike the mythic queens Hippolyte, Antiope, and Pen-thesilea, the Amazon-like characters of Caucasus tales and histories frequently win their battles with men.
World History
