Amazon weapons maximize the wielder’s strengths and compensate for weakness or smaller size. Like bows, lightweight spears have the advantage of long-range lethality. Many Amazons on foot and on horses in vase paintings are equipped with two light spears (for thrusting) or javelins (for hurling, see figs. 13.3 and 16.3). Amazons are often depicted in the act of spearing Greek warriors (Figs. 11.3, 13.6, 18.1). An unusual spear with a sickle attached appears in a vase painting of the early fifth century BC; such sickles were used by Phrygians, Carians, and Lydians. Many Amazons in Greek art wear swords in scabbards, and others are shown wielding swords, often with both hands. Powerful leg muscles and agile hands maximize the use of small and medium-size swords, while large swords require more arm strength. Spears and swords of iron and bronze are represented in real warrior women’s grave goods; some weapons at Pokrova had smaller handles suited to women’s hands (Chapter 4).27
Hoards of large bronze swords (more than two feet long) engraved with geometric designs (Kakheti type, Bronze Age, ca. 1250 BC, same time period as the so-called Amazon axes, above) have come to light in eastern Georgia (Fig. 13.4). In antiquity this region of ancient Colchis was strongly associated with women warriors. Strabo located several tribes of Amazons here, and this is where Pompey’s Roman army fought (and captured) women identified as Amazons in the first century BC (chapter 21). Local Georgian folklore claimed that these hoards of ancient swords must have belonged to Amazons. Indeed, it was a bronze sword of this type that lay in the lap of the warrior woman of ancient Colchis whose skull had a pointed axe wound (above, Fig. 4.1).28
In addition to swords, archaeological excavations have unearthed many different types of bronze and iron spear and javelin points, swords, and considerable numbers of knives and daggers, with handles decorated with animals and geometric designs. Two very large iron lance points (about twenty inches long) accompanied the warrior woman buried with her knives and forty-seven bronze arrowheads on the bank of the Tyasmin River; two lances and two spears were interred with the woman in the kurgan at Tyras. Chapter 4 Gives examples of the array of blades and spear/lance/javelin points in women’s burials across Scythia and discusses skeletons, some of them female, that display evidence of battle injuries inflicted by swords and daggers. One striking example discovered in 2006-7 in the Altai is a young woman whose ribs were slashed by a double-edged weapon more than two thousand years ago (Fig. 4.3; see also fig. 25.2).29
The congruence between artistic images of Amazons’ weapons and those actual weapons excavated from armed women’s graves, along with the skeletal evidence of combat wounds, demonstrates that by the late sixth century BC Greek artists and their customers were very familiar with the typical weapons used by genuine women warriors: archery sets, pointed battle-axes, swords, and spears. How true to life were the ancient artistic depictions of Amazons actually wielding their weapons in battle.? Two fascinating examples of artistic acuity survive in a pair of quirky fifth-century BC vase paintings. Each artist chose to portray an Amazon using an unusual weapon, not yet discussed here. The two images are surprising and unparalleled in Greek art. Yet each weapon is well documented in the ancient literary sources and artistic/archaeological evidence.
World History
