Modern classicists and historians tend to assume that all “Scythians” (and therefore the women known as Amazons) spoke a single North Iranian language. This is true of some but not all peoples of the immense territory known to the Greeks as “Scythia.” In his ethnographic
Descriptions Herodotus commented knowledgeably about the many different languages spoken from the Black Sea to the Altai Mountains, a region of incredible linguistic diversity. He famously remarked that some information about the far eastern reaches of Scythia had been transmitted by a chain of translators. Herodotus also stated that some Scythians from the northern Black Sea area taught their language to Iranian-speaking Persians and Medes. Eurasia, especially the Caucasus region, was (and still is) a cauldron of a great many linguistic families. Some of the tribes within the Scythian cultural zone of the Black Sea-Caucasus area spoke Iranian-i nfluenced languages, but others would have spoken non-Indo-European Caucasian languages, such as Circassian, Georgian, Abkhazian, and Ubykh. Some nomadic groups in Central and Inner Asia also spoke non-Iranian tongues.3
A fascinating linguistic discovery of 2011 in Pontus, one of the traditional Amazon homelands, suggests that people in that region may not have spoken a “pure” form of any single language. Real women warriors in this rugged landscape in antiquity might have spoken ancient Pontic or South Caucasian Laz, but another possibility is a recently rediscovered dialect known as Romeyka. This unique, nearly extinct dialect is being studied by Ioanna Sitaridou, a philologist at Cambridge University. Today only a few thousand people, living in a cluster of isolated villages clinging to the mountains above the Black Sea, speak Romeyka (it has no written form). Preserved chiefly by elderly but robust blueeyed, fair-haired women who still remain in the remote villages, Romeyka has some remarkable grammatical and vocabulary similarities to ancient Greek as it was spoken in classical times. The villagers, who play lyres like those depicted in ancient Greek vase paintings, are believed to be the direct descendants of ancient Greek speakers in Pontus. The Greeks from Miletus who first colonized Trabzon in 756 BC intermarried with indigenous people of Pontus, who learned the language of the colonizers. Sitaridou and her colleagues are recording the speech of the women to learn how language structures change and persist over generations. Spoken over millennia, the mixed Greek/non-Greek hybrid dialect used by the old women of Pontus might shed light on linguistic questions about ancient Amazons of Greek mytho-history.4
Herodotus mentions hybrid languages spoken by peoples of the steppes and Caucasus. The Budini, a large nomadic group in what is now
Ukraine, for example, spoke an Iranian dialect, but within their territory was a city with wooden walls and temples to Greek gods. It had been established “long ago” by Greeks who left the coastal colonies on the Black Sea and settled among the Budini. Called the Geloni, this mixed group spoke a language that Herodotus called “half Greek, half Scythian.”5
Amazons had a facility with languages, according to Herodotus in his account of the women of Pontus who intermarried with the Scythians of the Don River to become the Sarmatians (Chapter 3). The women took the lead in conversing with gestures and body language with the strangers, and Herodotus makes the point that the men were “incapable” of learning the Amazons’ tongue, while the women “easily picked up” the men’s. The women’s hybrid form of the men’s language predominated in the new tribe. The result, noted Herodotus, was a Sar-matian “dialect distinct from pure Scythian,” analogous to the process that created Romeyka and the hybrid language of the Geloni.
The two Oxford classical scholars who wrote the authoritative commentary on Herodotus in 1912 scoffed at Herodotus’s “delightful” details. The Amazons’ grasp of the unfamiliar language, the classicists asserted, was “inaccurate—as lady linguists often are.” The scholars’ gratuitous remark was intended to denigrate the Amazons for their “impure” version of Scythian while at the same time insulting linguists of their day who happened to be female. Herodotus, who had a strong interest in languages, was showing off his knowledge of Scythian tribes and their various dialects. But Herodotus’s linguistic insights were quite perceptive. His details anticipate, by more than twenty-five hundred years, modern knowledge about how language structures evolve. Moreover, the women’s initiative and success in communicating with the men is supported by scientific studies demonstrating that, compared to men, women do initiate communication and enjoy relative advantages in language acquisition and verbal abilities.
World History
