HARD-DRINKING AmAZON? OuTSIDE OF COMEDY,
Women who overindulge in alcohol were rare in an. cient Greek literature. But this was the reputation of the Amazon who gave her name to Sinope, one of several towns in Anatolia that claimed Amazons in their mythic past. The Greek tradition about the drinking Amazon appears in an ancient commentary on the epic voyage of the Argonauts to Pontus. The commentator cites lost histories of the Black Sea by Hecataeus (fifth century BC) and Andron of Teos (ca. 350 BC). According to the story, an Amazon named Sanape, a “Daughter of Ares,” had “fled to Pontus and married a local king,” presumably during some conflict in her homeland. “Because she drank too much wine she was called Sanape.” The commentator explains, “Those with a liking for drink were called sanapai by the Thracians, whose dialect the Amazons also use.” So, he concludes, the town where she and the king lived “was called Sanape, later corrupted to Sinope.” In keeping with the restless Amazonian nature, “This hard-drinking Amazon later left this place for Lytidas.” (No one knows whether Lytidas was a place or a person.)1
Ancient Greek etymological claims are notoriously spurious. Some modern scholars have interpreted Sinope to mean “to seize or carry off.” But in this case, the ancient etymology of Sanape appears to have an accurate core. In the heroic Nart sagas of Caucasia, the Circassian word sana means “wine” and sanapai means “the one from/of the place of sana” The Amazon who came to Pontus may not have been a hard drinker but simply a woman from a wine-growing region. Colchis was
Known in antiquity for its fine vineyards; Sinope was also known for its wine. The Amazon’s name, derived from a Circassian word for wine, was explained with a colorful story. The Sinopeans celebrated their Amazonian history by issuing coins with Sanape’s image and an annual procession on the city walls of women dressed as armed warriors.2
The tale of the tipsy Amazon brings up a question. Did intoxicants have a place in Amazonian-Scythian culture.? In antiquity, wine and opium were the chief drugs known to the Greeks. The Greeks often portrayed “inferior” barbarians as especially susceptible to liquor. In Greek thinking, extreme passion for warfare went hand in hand with compulsive drinking. So, since at least the sixth century BC, the bellicose Scythians were stereotyped as unrestrained wine drinkers seeking “maenadic” alcoholic frenzy. This belief would have made Sanape’s name seem appropriate for a war-l oving Amazon. According to the Greeks, Scythians preferred to drink wine straight, unlike the Greeks who liked to water their wine. Hence the proverbial saying in Athens, “to drink in Scythian style.”3
The stereotype of Scythians’ wild drinking bouts was applied to the seminomadic Scythians whom Greeks met in Black Sea trading colonies. These Scythians imported wine from Greece or from vineyards in Black Sea agricultural regions. The Nart sagas of the northwest Caucasus describe the introduction of sana (wine) from the south. According to an Abaza tradition of Abkhazia, sana was a gift of the gods, a sweet, strong drink that made one feel powerful and “pleased with the world.” Many Greek wine amphoras—some with stamps from Aegean islands and some even containing red wine deposits—have been found in several archaeological sites in the northern Black Sea-Don River region. Some real-l ife warrior women of that region were buried with their painted Greek wine amphoras (Chapter 4), bringing to mind the story of the Amazon Sanape’s liking for wine.4
World History
