ERsiA AND Egypt, known and respected by the ancient Greeks as venerable and powerful civilizations, had their own independent histories and traditions about warrior women. Ancient Iranians were more knowledgeable than the Greeks about the lives of women from Central Asian nomad tribes, since first the Medes and then the Persians fought Scythians from the north and Saka tribes on the eastern frontiers of their empires. Many Scythian groups spoke forms of ancient Iranian. Stories about Medes and Persians and their Saka-Scythian adversaries and allies fascinated the Greeks, who were curious—and apprehensive—about steppe peoples, as well as the great Persian superpower in the sixth and fifth centuries BC. The Greeks were also deeply interested in Egypt, which was taken over by Persia in the sixth century. Egyptian mytho-historical traditions were preserved by Greek writers, such as Herodotus, and recorded in Egyptian papyri.
We have already met several Amazon-l ike nomad queens in Persian contexts. Herodotus described the devastating battle (ca. 530 BC) between Tomyris of the Massagetae-Saka and Cyrus of Persia, and he told how Artemisia of Halicarnassus commanded a Persian warship for Xerxes in the fifth century BC (chapters 9 And 19). The captive women who became the Amazon-like companions of Xenophon’s Greek soldiers (ca. 400 BC; Chapter 8) were originally from Persian lands. Atossa, Rhodogyne, and Semiramis were warrior queens of Assyria and Persia (Chapters 12 And 22).
The Iranian stories about Saka warrior queens that came to us via ancient Greek authors originated in Persia. These were not just rehashed Greek yarns. The Saka women in these tales display many of the same characteristics as Amazons depicted in Greek myth, art, and literature, but they make war and love with Median and Persian warriors, not Greeks. These facts, along with the evidence from the previous chapter, disprove the notion that Greeks alone invented the idea of Amazons to challenge their national heroes. We can glean traces of Persian history and popular lore from close readings of the Greek sources without accepting the Greek-centered interpretations, notes a leading historian of the Persian Empire. “It is time to liberate ourselves from the Greek view on Persian history"’ including Hellenocentric perspectives on “notorious women.” Indeed, the existence of so many stories about warrior women’s relationships with Persian heroes strongly suggests that “fighting a Scythian queen may have formed part of a conventional Iranian repertory of heroic feats, just as fighting against Amazons seems to have been a required task for many Greek heroes.”1
The theme of valiant heroines battling male heroes as equals is widespread beyond the Hellenic world. Persia and Egypt are among many other ancient cultures besides Greece that not only could imagine warlike women but were familiar with their real counterparts within or outside their borders.
World History
