Unlike the Central Asian sagas, which were recorded in writing for the first time less than a century ago, India’s ancient legends about warrior women were recorded in Sanskrit epics as early as 850 BC. Before the time of Alexander, “India” in Greek literature was a vague term for the exotic Far East. On his Indian campaign, as we saw, Alexander heard rumors of Amazons and fought an army of men and women led by Queen Cleophis on the border of Baktria and “India” (Chapter 20). In Greek myth, the god Dionysus meets Amazons in the same region of “India.” With his train of maenads and Bacchic revelers, Dionysus takes over a mountain stronghold. According to Polyaenus’s account of the myth, some Indian men and Amazons join Dionysus’s bacchantes as they are about to cross a river to subdue the Baktrians hiding in the mountains. Dionysus camps on the riverbank and directs the maenads and Amazons to cross first. His strategy is to lure the Baktrians down from the mountains—he predicts they will assume that women are poor fighters. Sure enough, the Baktrians descend and enter the river on the other side. The Amazons pretend to retreat in good nomad fashion, slyly drawing the Baktrians to the other bank. Then Dionysus and the Indian men join the Amazons and kill the Baktrians.15
Amazon stories were among the many legends that coalesced around Alexander and his expedition to India. Popular Greek lore portrayed Alexander fighting, negotiating, and having sex with Amazons. Digenes Akritas, a Greek folk epic of the Byzantine era (twelfth century AD), based on older oral traditions, indicates that there was also a story about Alexander bringing Amazons from India back to Asia Minor. The star of the epic is the Greek-Syrian hero Digenes Akritas, whose palace is decorated with paintings of Alexander visiting the Brahmins and Amazons of India. This imagery alludes to earlier reports (fourth century AD) claiming that Brahmin men and women lived on opposite banks of the Ganges and met for procreation in the summertime. The arrangement is reminiscent of even more ancient Greek descriptions of Amazons and their male lovers (chapter 8).16
One episode describes single combat between Digenes and an Amazon named Maximou (“Daughter of the Greatest”). She was “a descendant of the Amazon women brought back from among the Brahmins of India by the emperor Alexander.” Leading a band of male rebel fighters, Maximou rides a milk-white horse with red mane, tail, and hooves (dyed with henna, a Persian custom brought to India). But for the duel she arrives on a black warhorse (see chapter 11 For color choice of war horses). Wearing a green turban embroidered in gold and a breastplate over a tunic of purple silk, the Amazon carries a shield with an eagle device and an Arab spear and sword. They clash and fight strenuously. After Digenes kills Maximou’s horse, they retreat to the woods where the Amazon removes her armor. Her “gossamer-thin silk shift reveals her lovely limbs and breasts,” and the hero is smitten with lust. They have sex. In some versions Digenes later stalks and murders “the promiscuous creature” for seducing him. In this, Digenes seems to revert to the old Greek mythic script of killing the foreign Amazon. Some modern scholars believe that Maximou was originally the heroine of an earlier oral legend (perhaps about Amazons who returned with Alexander.?), and that she was rather clumsily incorporated into this Christian moralizing epic.17
More ancient evidence for women warriors in India and neighboring lands in the time of Alexander comes from Greeks in India and from Indian authors. After Alexander’s death, Megasthenes was the Greek ambassador to the court of Chandragupta, king of the Ganges region. Like so many missing ancient works that could have shed welcome light on our topic, Megasthenes’s Indica (ca. 300 BC) exists only in fragments. Megasthenes described the company of trained female bodyguards who surrounded Chandragupta at all times. A large party of armed women also accompanied the king on his hunts, some shooting arrows with him from the royal platform, while others drove chariots or rode horses and elephants after game. This custom was confirmed by Chandragupta’s military adviser, Kautilya, in his war manual, the Arthashastra. “Upon arising each morning” wrote Kautilya, “the king should be received by troops of women armed with bows and arrows {striganairdhenvibhih)r Chandragupta’s coruler of the Mauryan Kingdom was Queen Kumaradevi (of northeast India-Nepal); both were of the warrior caste (Kshatriya), in which men and women were trained to fight. Other ancient Indian sources refer to female spear throwers (saktiki) guarding the king’s palace and regiments of women soldiers. Historians suggest that some of these women were nomads from the Central Asian deserts beyond the mountains, the region poets called “the land of women” (more on this below).18
From the Agni Purana (a ninth-century AD Hindu encyclopedia based on older oral traditions) we learn that both men and women in India practiced fencing and archery to develop body and mind. Female warriors and bow hunters (svaghni) are depicted in Indian sculptures. For example, the Bharut reliefs of the third century BC in northeastern India show male and female mounted soldiers. Full-breasted bow-women appear in ancient and medieval carvings on temples at Palitana (northwestern India) and Bhatkal and Karnataka in southwestern India. Some early European travelers in India were excited to observe a number of “one-breasted women” in ancient Indian rock art, which they interpreted as “Amazons.” But these images are now recognized as religious carvings representing half-male, half-female deities or dualistic principles.19
Much earlier literary evidence for military training for girls in northwestern India is found in the Rig Veda and other Hindu oral traditions originally composed in about 1700-900 BC. The Rig Veda legends allude to women warriors. For example, Mudgalani drove her husband’s chariot to victory on the battlefield. Vishpala (“Strong Defender of the Village”) lost her leg fighting the enemy—the gods replaced it with an iron one. According to a late legend about Vadhrimati, when her hand was cut off in battle the gods gave her a golden one. In the Ramayana epic (fifth-fourth centuries BC) Queen Kaikeyi (from a northern land) served as a charioteer for her husband, King Dasaratha, in a battle and saved his life.20
Amazon-l ike women and “lands of women” apparently existed in India’s mythic imagination well before Indians had access to Greek literature. A society of warrior women is featured in an episode in the great epic poem Mahabharata. The oldest Sanskrit texts were first written down in about 400 BC based on much older oral tales that originated around 850 BC (a century or so before Homer’s Trojan War myths were written down). There were many regional versions of the Mahabharata legends. A popular Bengali version (northeastern India) describes Queen Pramila’s “ realm of women.” Her female cavalry armed with bows captures the sacred stallion being tracked across India by the hero Arjuna. For the fearless Pramila “love or war were the same.” So, clad in armor, Pramila takes her bow and sword and drives her chariot to meet Arjuna. She proposes that he become her lover. Arjuna resists and they fight a duel. But her prowess is equal to his—neither can win. Finally, heavenly voices advise Arjuna that since he cannot vanquish Pramila, he should agree to marry her.21
Another adventure is set in Stri-Rajya (“Women’s Land”), a distant place located somewhere in the nomadic Saka-Scythian-Xiongnu territories of Inner Asia along the Silk Route (including parts of Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, the Taklamakan Desert, Tibet, and the Kunlun Mountains). Two queens ruled the land devoid of men; any man who stayed with them more than a month was killed. Several legends tell how a famous yogi traveled to a country of women and fell under its queen’s spell, forgetting his spiritual vows. The yogi was allowed to stay several years and was finally rescued by his younger disciple. These women were se-ductresses, not warriors, however, and this legend was about sexual restraint, not armed heroines.22
The isolated tribes of Nagaland, northeastern India, whose languages belong to the Tibeto-Burman family, developed independent oral traditions about a land of Amazon-like women who shunned men and killed male infants. Naga folklore of the Angami and Sema collected by anthropologists in 1921 included tales about “a village of women” in the mountains farther east. The women drove men away with their war-bows, and they ate great amounts of rice and oil “to make them strong for battle.” They kept their girl babies and saved one boy to raise to manhood each generation, killing all other male babies by plunging them into boiling water. Some claimed that if a man did manage to enter their village, the women were so eager for sex that “in striving to possess him they tear him to pieces utterly.” The head-hunting Naga peoples had little or no contact with India or the outside world until the late nineteenth century. Was this Naga tale entirely imaginary, or did it contain specks of reality.? It appears to have originated outside ancient Greek influence, but it’s important to note that it was transmitted by British anthropologists familiar with classical myths.23
The widespread idea of women-only societies, like those associated with Amazons in some Greek accounts, can have multiple and independent origins. They could arise from the imagination, from outsiders’ misunderstandings of nomads’ seasonal customs, or from observations of ad hoc mixed or all-female hunting or war parties led by women. A group of girls might form to prove their hunting prowess or bravery. A group of widows might have survived the loss of a tribe’s menfolk in battle. “Lands of women” could also simply mean “lands ruled by women” or even “lands known for autonomous women.” Legends of “villages of maidens” circulated in Khorezm and among Turkmen, Karakalpaks, and other Turkic-speaking peoples; many medieval Muslim sources as well as Marco Polo recorded similar rumors. A number of ancient Chinese sources also refer to “lands of women” in the west. At least one “kingdom of women” really existed northeast of India and Nagaland and maintains Amazon-like traditions today (chapter 25).24
We have now reached the easternmost extent of the steppe nomads known collectively as “Scythians” to the ancient Greeks, and whose women were the real-life models for mythic and historical Amazons in Greek, Roman, Persian, and Egyptian accounts. This chapter shows that within the homelands of the Scythians and Amazons themselves, the customs and stories match many of the salient Greco-Roman details, confirmed by archaeology. Thus far in our journey we have been looking and moving east. Now at the frontier of China, the time has come to turn our gaze west. The next chapter assumes the vantage point of the Chinese. Far out of the range of classical Greek influence, Chinese writers described women fighters among the powerful nomad armies of the west, a relentless threat at their gates. In the fifth and fourth centuries BC—when Amazons were immensely popular subjects for Greek vase painters—Chinese emperors were recruiting warrior women for their own armies.
World History
