Greek writings about Amazons indicated several different Amazon “habitats” and zones of activity in Scythia. Some sources located Amazons in Thrace and western Anatolia; some placed them in Pontus on the southern shore of the Black Sea; still others put them in the northern Black Sea-Sea of Azov-Caucasus regions; and many writers mentioned more than one locale. Modern scholars have taken this apparent inconsistency as proof that the Greeks were simply making up ecological niches for imaginary beings. In fact, however, this mobile “sphere of influence” for Amazons makes sense. Whether or not the ancient my-thographers and historians realized it, the depiction of shifting environments around the Black Sea for the Amazons’ home bases, strongholds, migrations, and battle campaigns accurately captured the realities of nomadic life. There is no doubt that at various times in historical antiquity groups of Scythians were present in the various regions designated in classical texts as occupied by Amazons (Map 2.3).12
In Homer’s Iliad, for example, King Priam of Troy recalls seeing Amazons in northern Anatolia as a youth. At the beginning of the war with the Greeks, Priam musters his army at a man-made mound near Troy
MAP 2.3. Amazons and warrior women in ancient Greek literature within the context of nomadic steppe peoples of “Scythia” and migration and trade routes. Map © Michele Angel.
Said to be the grave of the Amazon queen Myrina. Mound tumuli are scattered across Phrygia, Mysia, and Thrace, and Scythian tomb mounds (kurgans) of the seventh-sixth centuries BC exist near Sinope, Pontus. Priam’s ally Queen Penthesilea was a Thracian, but she led a band of Amazons from Pontus. The mythic quest of Jason and Argonauts for
The Golden Fleece is at least as ancient in its origins as the Trojan War cycle. According to the Argonautica (the version of the myth composed by Apollonius of Rhodes, ca. 280 BC), Pontus and Colchis were occupied by three different tribes famed for women warriors (chapter 10).13
In the mid-seventh century BC, the adventurer Aristeas (from an island in the Sea of Marmara) wrote about his journey east across Scythia to Issedonia and the Altai Mountains. His epic, Arimaspea (a Scythian word meaning something like “people rich in horses”), preserved only in fragments, was very influential in forming the early Greek picture of Scythia and Amazons. Aristeas said that Amazons wandered the iron-rich territory around the Maeotis (Sea of Azov) and the River Tanais (Don). Another lost work, by Skylax of Caryanda (sixth century BC), described the Maeotians, the Sinti (Sinds), and the Sarmatians as “people ruled by women.” Several authors referred to Amazons as Maeotides, “people of the Maeotis.” (Scythian tribes around the Sea of Azov included the Sinds, Dandarii, Doschi, Ixomatae, and many others.) Other ancient historians placed Amazons and their allied forces among the nomads beyond the Borysthenes (Dnieper) River on the steppes north of the Black Sea.14
Pontus was the Amazon headquarters in another lost epic, the The-seis, about the Athenian hero Theseus, probably composed in the sixth century BC. In the fifth century BC the playwright Euripides located the Amazons in Pontus; so did the poet Pindar, who described Amazons “armed with spears with broad iron points.” The play Prometheus Bound (Aeschylus, ca. 480 BC) speaks of the “fearless maidens” of Colchis and the Caucasus and the “Scythian multitudes” to the north; it foretells that this Amazon host will “one day settle at Themiscyra by the Thermodon” in Pontus. The fourth-century BC Greek historian Epho-rus (from Cyme, named for an Amazon) reported that a faction of Scythians had once left the northern Black Sea and settled in Pontus, becoming the Amazons. The geographer Strabo (first century BC) located various Amazon tribes in the valleys and mountains of Pontus, Colchis, the Don region, and the Caucasus.15 Instead of evidence for Greek confusion about where to locate imaginary Amazons, these examples represented Amazons as people who roved around the Black Sea. Scythian culture was consistently recognized as the wellspring of the women warriors known as Amazons.
World History
