In olden times, the earth thundered with the pounding of horses’ hooves. In that long ago age, women would saddle their horses, grab their lances, and ride forth with their men folk to meet the enemy in battle on the steppes. The women of that time could cut out an enemy’s heart with their swift, sharp swords. Yet they also comforted their men and harbored great love in their
Hearts____After the frenzied battle, Queen Amezan leaned down from her
Saddle and realized in despair that the warrior she had killed was her beloved.
A choking cry filled her throat: My sun has set forever!
—Caucasus tradition, Nart Saga 26
Achilles removed the brilliant helmet from the lifeless Amazon queen. Penthesilea had fought like a raging leopard in their duel at Troy. Her valor and beauty were undimmed by dust and blood. Achilles’ heart lurched with
Remorse and desire____All the Greeks on the battlefield crowded around and
Marveled, wishing with all their hearts that their wives at home could be just like her.
—Quintus of Smyrna, The Fall of Troy
F Queen Amezan and Queen Penthesilea could somehow meet in real life, they would recognize each other as sister Amazons. Two tales, two storytellers, two sites far apart in time and place, and yet one common tradition of women who made love and war. The first tale arose outside the classical Greek world, in the northern Black Sea-Caucasus region among the descendants of the steppe nomads of Scythia. The other tale originated within the ancient Greek world, in epic poems about the legendary Trojan War. In the two traditions the male and female roles are reversed, yet the stories resonate in striking ways—sharing similar characters, dramatic battle situations, emotions, tragic themes—and even the word “Amazon.”
Recently translated from the Circassian language, the first story tells of the mythic leader of a band of women warriors, Amezan. It is one of many “Nart” sagas, oral traditions about heroes and heroines of the heart of ancient Scythian—and Amazon—t erritory (now southern Russia). The Caucasus tales preserve ancient Indo-European myths combined with the folk legends of Eurasian nomads, first encountered by Greeks who sailed the Black Sea in the seventh century BC. The sagas not only describe strong horsewomen who match the descriptions of Amazons in Greek myth, but they also suggest a possible Caucasian etymology for the ancient Greek loanword “amazon.”1
The second vignette, about Achilles and Penthesilea, is an episode from the archaic Trojan War epic cycles, one of which was the Iliad. Many oral traditions about Amazons were already circulating before Homer’s day, the eighth/seventh century BC, around the time when the first recognizable images of Amazons appeared in Greek art. The Iliad covered only two months of the great ten-year war with Troy. At least six other epic poems preceded or continued the events in the Iliad, but they survive only as fragments. Many other lost oral traditions about the Trojan War are alluded to the Iliad and other works, and they are illustrated in ancient art depicting Greeks fighting Amazons. The lost poem Arimaspea by the Greek traveler Aristeas (ca. 670 BC) contained Amazon stories. Another wandering poet, Magnes from Smyrna (said to be Homer’s birthplace), recited tales in Lydian about an Amazon invasion of Lydia in western Anatolia in the early seventh century BC. Some scholars suggest that there was once a freestanding epic poem about Amazons, along the lines of the Iliad, a tantalizing possibility.2
One of the lost Trojan War epics, the Aethiopis (attributed to Arcti-nos of Miletos, eighth/seventh century BC), was a sequel to the Iliad, taking up the action where Homer left off. The Aethiopis described the arrival of Queen Penthesilea and her band of Amazon mercenaries who came to help the Trojans fight the Greeks. Scenes from this poem were very popular in Greek vase paintings. In the third century AD, the Greek poet Quintus of Smyrna drew on the Aethiopis to retell the story of Penthesilea’s duel with the Greek champion Achilles, in his Fall of Troy, quoted in this chapter’s second epigraph.
Both of the tales quoted above—one from Scythia and the other from the Greek homeland—feature women whose fighting skills matched those of men. Their heroic exploits were imaginary, but their characters and actions arose from a common historical source: warrior cultures of the steppes where nomad horsemen and - women could experience parity at a level almost unimaginable for ancient Hellenes.
Myth and reality commingled in the Greek imagination, and as more and more details came to light about Scythian culture, the women of Scythia were explicitly identified as “Amazons.” Today’s archaeological and linguistic discoveries point to the core of reality that lay behind Greek Amazon myths. But in fact, the newfound archaeological evidence allows us to finally catch up with the ancient Greeks themselves. The Amazons of myth and the independent women of Scythia were already deeply intertwined in Greek thinking more than twenty-five hundred years before modern archaeologists and classicists began to realize that women warriors really did exist and influenced Greek traditions.
Amazons of classical literature and art arose from hazy facts elaborated by Greek mythographers and then came into sharper focus as knowledge increased. Rumors of warlike nomad societies—where a woman might win fame and glory through “manly” prowess with weap-ons—fascinated the Greeks. The idea of bold, resourceful women warriors, the equals of men, dwelling at the edges of the known world, inspired an outpouring of mythic stories, pitting the greatest Greek heroes against Amazon heroines from the East. Every Greek man, woman, boy, and girl knew these adventure stories by heart, stories illustrated in public and private artworks. The details of the “Amazon” lifestyle aroused speculation and debate. Many classical Greco-Roman historians, philosophers, geographers, and other writers described Amazonian-Scythian history and customs.
The early Greeks received their information about northeastern peoples from many different sources, including travelers, traders, and explorers, and from the indigenous, migrating tribes around the Black Sea, Caucasus Mountains, Caspian Sea, and Central Asia. The tribes’ accounts of themselves and culturally similar groups were transmitted (and garbled) by layers of translations over thousands of miles. Another probable source was the high population of household slaves in Greece who hailed from Thrace and the Black Sea region.3 Selection bias was a factor. Accounts of “barbarian” customs that piqued Greek curiosity or matched Greek expectations might have been chosen over others. Yet a surprising number of accurate details, confirmed by archaeology, managed to sneak through all these obstacles.
The Scythians themselves left no written records. Much of our knowledge about them comes from the art and literature of Greece and Rome. But the Scythians did leave spectacular physical evidence of their way of life for archaeologists to uncover. Dramatic excavations of tombs, bodies, and artifacts illuminate the links between the women called Amazons and the warlike horsewomen archers of the Scythian steppes. According to one leading archaeologist, “All of the legends about Amazons find their visible archaeological reflection within the grave goods” of the ancient Scythians.4 That is an overstatement, yet recent and ongoing discoveries do offer astonishing evidence of the existence of authentic women warriors whose lives matched the descriptions of Amazons in Greek myths, art, and classical histories, geographies, ethnographies, and other writings. Scythian graves do contain battle-scarred skeletons of women buried with their weapons, horses, and other possessions. Scientific bone analysis proves that women rode, hunted, and engaged in combat in the very regions where Greco-Roman mythographers and historians once located “Amazons.”
Archaeology shows that Amazons were not simply symbolic figments of the Greek imagination, as many scholars claim. Nor are Amazons unique to Greek culture, another common claim. In fact, Greeks were not the only people to spin tales about Amazon-like figures and warrior women ranging over the vast regions east of the Mediterranean. Other literate cultures, such as Persia, Egypt, India, and China, encountered warlike nomads in antiquity, and their narratives drew on their own knowledge of steppe nomads through alliances, exploration, trade, and warfare. Their heroes also fought and fell in love with Amazon-like heroines. Moreover, vestiges of the tales told in antiquity by Scythian peoples about themselves are preserved in traditional oral legends, epic poems, and stories of Central Asia, some only recently committed to writing.
Who were the Amazons? Their complex identity is enmeshed in history and imagination. To see them clearly, we first need to cast away murky symbolic interpretations and spurious popular beliefs.
World History
