Cyrus II of Persia conquered the Median Empire in 550 BC. Like the Medes, Cyrus also made war on the Saka tribes between the Caspian Sea and Baktria. Before hostilities broke out between Cyrus and To-myris, Cyrus battled a different army of Saka horse warriors, led by the chieftain Amorges (“Having Excellent Meadows”), in about 545 BC, in the region of Sogdiana and Baktria. These were the Amyrgioi, known to the Persians as “haoma-drinking Saka” (chapter 9). According to Cte-sias, after Cyrus captured Amorges, Amorges’s wife, Sparethra (“Heroic Army”), became the leader of the tribe. Sparethra called up an immense force of male and female warriors to attack Cyrus and free her husband. Ctesias wrote that “Sparethra headed an army of 300,000 horsemen and 200,000 horsewomen.” The numbers may be exaggerated, but the detail provides evidence that women and men rode to war side by side in Saka-Scythian tribes. It evokes a dramatic picture to accompany Diodorus’s comments (ca. 50 BC) about the Saka tribes: “Now, this people, in general, have courageous women who share with their men the dangers of war.”11
Sparethra led her large force of allied tribes against Cyrus. She defeated his Persian army and captured many of Cyrus’s highest-ranking men, including three of his sons. After the battle, Sparethra negotiated a treaty with Cyrus, who released her husband, Amorges, in exchange for the Persians taken prisoner by Sparethra. Sparethra’s tribe became an ally of Cyrus.12
Cyrus expanded the Persian Empire south to Babylon. In 525 BC, his son Cambyses conquered Egypt, marking the end of the Egyptian Saite period (Twenty-Sixth Dynasty, which began in the early seventh century BC). This was the beginning of long Persian rule in Egypt (Ach-aemaenid period). Egyptians were among the myriad ethnic groups serving in Persian armies that maintained and expanded the vast Persian Empire, which stretched from Thrace and Anatolia to Baktria. To continue this simplified Persian-Egyptian chronology, after the reign of Darius I (521-486 BC), his son Xerxes (520-465 BC) suppressed a revolt in Egypt and invaded Greece but was defeated in 479 BC. We recall that Xerxes’s gift to his female admiral Artemisia was a costly alabaster jar made in Egypt (Fig. 19.2).
During the reign of Xerxes’s son Artaxerxes, more anti-Persian revolts arose in Egypt, but in 341 BC Egypt was reconquered and held by Persia until Alexander the Great defeated Darius III and claimed the Persian Empire, including Egypt, in 332 BC. This began the Hellenistic period of Macedonian Ptolemaic rule, lasting until the Romans annexed Egypt after Cleopatra’s suicide in 30 BC. As this history shows, Late Period Egypt had its own traditions and was also subject to Persian and Greek cultural influences. Most of the evidence for Persian and Egyptian history in this time frame depends on Greek sources along with Egyptian inscriptions and papyrus texts in both Greek and demotic Egyptian scripts.13
The next sections present narratives about Amazons in Egypt. The most ancient is an Egyptian romance, discovered on papyrus fragments, whose origins and influences are controversial. Next is a lost fantasy about Amazons written in Hellenistic Alexandria; a summary of it was preserved by Diodorus. We conclude with descriptions of Amazon-like women in North Africa by two Roman poets of the first century AD.
World History
