To tales of heroes and heroines because the conditions of life are so harsh and extreme. The landscape itself demands human spirit on an epic scale. Scythia, for the ancient Greeks, was an immense ocean of land whose vastness paradoxically expanded as their knowledge about the world to the East increased. The exhilarating, terrifying lives of warlike archers on horseback fascinated not only the Greeks and Romans but also the Persians and Egyptians. And as we’ve seen, these westerners thrilled to tales of Amazons and foreign warrior queens from beyond the Black and Caspian seas, tales drawn from historical events, factual details, unwritten barbarian chronicles, hearsay, speculation, and the experiences of travelers and soldiers—and burnished by countless retellings.
Evidence for both historical and legendary Amazon-like figures in the Caucasus and the Middle East was embedded in the Nart sagas and local oral tales about strong nomad women such as Tirgatao, Tomyris, Spare-thra, Zarina, Banu Chichak, and Gordafarid transmitted by Greek and Persian writers. Meanwhile, of course, the men and women of the various nomad warrior societies of Central Asia were telling their own war stories, adventures, and romances about themselves and their neighbors—stories about, by, and for real Scythians and Amazons. It turns out that women warriors were familiar characters in Middle Eastern and Central and South Asian folklore, as popular as heroes, fleet horses, and evil rulers.
Unfortunately, unlike ancient Greek, Egyptian, and Indian literature, the oral myths, ancestral lore, and folk memories of the myriad and far-ranging ethnic groups of Central Asia were not recorded in writing until the mid-twentieth century. What survives of this living folklore has passed through thousands of years of turbulence, continuous migrations over vast and varied topographies, intermarriage, extinctions of entire tribes, forced relocations, violent colonizations, political oppression, and wars. In the written versions of the ancient ballads, epic verses, and tales of lands now divided into the nations of Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan, some events are set in medieval or later times. Yet, as scholars note, many of the ethnographic and traditional details retain archaic roots.1 The tales reverberate with the small, random portions of genuine nomad lore in many tongues that reached Greece through the writings and oral reports by the early Greek adventurer Aristeas, who traveled across what is now Kazakhstan, southern Siberia, and northwest China in the seventh century BC, and from Herodotus, and others. The Greek texts contain surprisingly accurate details of steppe lifestyles and histories, unavoidably peppered with outsiders’ misunderstandings and fantasy. What shines through is the barbarians’ celebration of men and women as peers in love and war. Assimilated into Greek art and literature, this consistent facet of nomadic life helped to shape Western ideas about Amazons.
The horse-tiding heroines in this chapter seem familiar because they strongly resemble their sisters who were kidnapped, like Antiope, into Greek literature and art. But the Greek mythic mold produced a crucial difference. In the stories that Scythians and Amazons told themselves, warrior women could survive battles, and their conflicts with male warriors could end on a positive note instead of inevitable death for the “unnatural” manly woman at the hands of a Greek mythic hero. Significantly, the Greek historians who described real Amazons did not hew to the mythic script, and so their accounts of barbarian women at war, such as Tirgatao and Zarina, are more realistic. The following pages give a sense of the kinds of Amazon tales that would have enthralled Saka-Scythian and related peoples and those who lived in close proximity to nomad territories thousands of years ago, from the eastern shores of the Caspian Sea to the Altai and Hindu Kush and the western frontier of China.
World History
