Like the rumor that Amazons cut or burned off one breast of girls, claims of their maiming, abandoning, or even killing baby boys became a mainstay of Amazon lore. Where did these grim ideas come from.?
A possible source might be a seventh-century BC poem by Mimner-mus of Smyrna (a city named for an Amazon), famous for pithy erotic poetry recited for entertainment at drinking parties. In a verse riffing
On the proverb “A lame man makes the best lover” the poet joked that the Amazon queen Antianeira crippled her male attendants. Another possible origin of the maiming theme could be the Hippocratic surgical treatise On Joints (dated to the late fifth-early fourth centuries BC). It stated, “Amazon women dislocate the hip or knee joint of male infants, to ensure that they will not conspire to overthrow the females.” Yet no harm to boys was ever mentioned by Herodotus, the earliest “anthropologist” of Saka-Scythian-Sarmatian ways of life, writing in the mid-fifth century BC. Herodotus never passed up juicy details about barbarians. Yet he simply said that nomad girls and boys were brought up alike. Could the Greek idea about injured boys and men have stemmed from some Scythians’ ill-treatment of captives.? Herodotus claimed that the Royal Scythians blinded their slaves. Perhaps a now-lost ancient account described a cruel practice, among the Kyrgyz of Central Asia, of crippling captives by inserting a stiff horsehair into a cut on the sole of the foot.2
That infant boys were injured or killed persists as a cliche about Amazons. It was at odds with other historical accounts of Scythian men as tough warriors. And the notion that only weak, lame, or unwarlike men lived side by side with women warriors is not supported by archaeological evidence of hundreds of skeletons of men, women, and children in ancient Scythian kurgans from the Black Sea to the Altai. Equivalent honors, horse sacrifices, grave goods, and last meals are evident in the burials of males and females. Most but not all men were accompanied by weapons and a smaller percentage of women had weapons (chapter 4). Careful scientific analysis of the skeletons for bone trauma reveals an extremely harsh and violent lifestyle, with numerous healed broken limbs and dislocations that likely resulted in lifelong pain and lameness, along with fatal war injuries suffered by both men and women. Men received the most injuries from weapons, but many of the armed women sustained such injuries too.
But no forensic bioarchaeological evidence points to systematic, deliberate maiming of young males in the cultures of the Eurasian steppes. Could cliche have a medical source.? It is striking that Scythian boys’ lameness first appeared in the Hippocratic treatise about joints. In other works in the Hippocratic corpus certain medical conditions are attributed to Scythian males and females, with variable plausibility and
In accounts rife with contradictions. One Hippocratic text explains that a lifetime of horse riding causes Scythians to develop lameness and hip-joint problems. One wonders whether a high incidence of healed broken bones, traumatic joint dislocations, or even congenital hip dysplasia (dislocation) of infants in Scythia might have been observed by the Hippocratic medical writers, leading to misunderstandings. Scythian nomads practiced swaddling of infants and spent much of their lives on horses. Dislocated arm and leg joints and broken bones were common injuries suffered in falls from horses. Hip dysplasia can be hereditary or it can develop in infancy owing to swaddling. In the modern world this childhood condition is prevalent in two ethnic groups: the nomadic Sami people (the Scythian-like Scrithiphini tribe of antiquity described in chapter 5) and the nomads of Mongolia. In fact, bioarchaeologists studying ancient Scythian skeletons describe a number of congenital hip and spinal abnormalities, including hip dysplasias.3 A higher-than-expected incidence of limping or lame Scythian boys and men could have been misinterpreted in antiquity to fit the Greek image of Amazon women bent on subjugating males.
World History
