The historical Scythians whose women were the models for the Amazons of legend did not worship the gods and goddesses of the Greek pantheon. But some similar attributes of deities and rituals reported and/or observed by early Greek travelers in the Black Sea-Caucasus region led the Greeks to compare or assimilate them to Hellenic beliefs and gods. For example, Greeks referred to Amazons as “Daughters of Ares” who worshipped the god of war and Artemis the Huntress with armed dances at Ephesus. This was a Greek way of explaining the women’s warlike nature, their ardent resistance to male control, their preference for outdoor pursuits, and their expertise as archers.
A picture of Amazon religion emerges from the myths of Jason and the Argonauts, a collection of early Bronze Age oral traditions. The first full written account that survives is the Argonautia by Apollonius of Rhodes. On the way to Colchis to obtain the Golden Fleece, the Argo sailed east along the southern Black Sea coast. The Argonauts moored in a harbor at Lyra and met the lonely ghost of Sthenelus, a Greek warrior who had died of an arrow wound inflicted by an Amazon archer during Heracles’s great expedition against Queen Hippolyte at Themis-cyra (chapter 15). The Argonauts stopped again at Sinope and at the mouth of the Thermodon, with the “Amazonian Mountains” in the distance. Here they spotted a band of Themiscyrian Amazons, descendants of survivors of the war with Heracles. Jason and his men prepared to fight the Amazon women assembling on the beach, but strong winds drove their ship on, past the land of the Mossynoeci, the tattooed “free love” neighbors of the Amazons described by Xenophon (Chapter 6).
Apollonius remarked that the “Daughters of Ares are scattered over the land in three tribes.” Besides the Themiscyrian Amazons, there were also women warriors among the Chadesians of Chadesia and the Lykas-tians of Lykastia (“Wolf-Land”). According to Hecataeus, “Chadesiai” was another name for Amazons. Lykastia, near Amisus according to ancient geographers, has been identified as the ancient archaeological site of Dundartepe, ca. 2000 BC; among the finds there are spearheads; animal figures similar to those of the same date found around the Sea of Azov; and clay female figurines with incised tattoos similar to those found in the Neolithic Cucuteni culture of Ukraine’s forest steppes (Chapter 6).19
The Argonauts dropped anchor at Aretias, a small desert island less than a mile from the coast, also known as Ares or Amazon Island. Here Jason and his men found “an old stone temple to Ares built by the Amazon queens Otrera and Antiope.” They also discovered the altar “where the Amazons sacrificed before going to war.” But the description of the Amazons’ altar and sacred rites makes it clear that this was not a typical Greek temple to Ares. The archaic “temple,” already very old when the Argonauts arrived, had no roof. Inside the open-air enclosure “was fixed a black stone, to which of yore the Amazons used to pray.”
Veneration for a sacred black stone was a prominent feature of ancient Anatolian worship of the great “mountain mother” Cybele of Asia
Minor, a goddess associated with rock, wild animals (especially lions), and birds of prey such as eagles. Her attributes recall the divine warrior horsewoman Lady Amezan of the Caucasus Nart sagas, whose name means “Forest Mother.” At Cybele’s sanctuary at Pessinus in central Anatolia, the goddess was worshipped in the form of “a black stone that fell from the sky.” (That sacred meteorite was transported to Rome in 215 BC.) Moreover, Cybele’s rites included ecstatic music and frenzied dancing featuring clashing shields and spears, calling to mind the Amazonian war dances at Ephesus described in Greek literature. Golden earrings with images of Cybele were found in the graves of women warriors of the northern Black Sea area (Chapter 4). According to Diodorus, the Amazon queen Myrine set up altars and sacrificed to Cy-bele on another desert island, Samothrace.20
Many of the Argonauts’ adventures are fantasies, but “Amazon Island” and the sacred black stone happen to be real. The tiny (four-acre) rocky islet was clearly described by later ancient writers who also referred to the old temple of Ares and gave the island’s exact location. Now called Giresun Island, it is the only island off the southern Black Sea coast (opposite the sixth-century BC Greek colony of Pharnacia/ Kerasus, now Giresun, Turkey).21
The large, round black rock, about twelve feet in diameter, believed to have been worshipped by the Amazons thousands of years ago, can be seen today on the island. During traditional spring rituals on Amazon Island each May, the mystical “Hamza Stone” is venerated as a magical “wishing stone” by women seeking fertility. In the local Turkish folklore, the ancient Amazons used to meet here with men from other tribes to make sacrifices and procreate.22
According to Apollonius of Rhodes, Jason and his Argonauts observed the “altar made of pebbles where the Amazons once sacrificed burnt offerings.” The Greeks assumed that the warlike women they called “Daughters of Ares” must have made sacrifices to Ares here. But we now know that the black rock and archaeological features of the open-air “temple” point to Cybele worship. Turkish archaeologists began to investigate the antiquities on Amazon Island in 2010. The oldest structures include steps cut into the bedrock to a level platform “altar” in the middle of the island. Attic black-glaze pottery sherds were found in the lowest excavation levels, and there are ancient rock
FiG. I0.I. Sacred black rock venerated by the Amazons, on Amazon (Giresun) Island, Black Sea, Turkey. Photo courtesy of Ertekin M. Doksanalti.
Cuttings for mooring ships in the harbor at the southern end of the island. Two deep holes cut into the great boulder indicate that ropes were used to place the sacred stone on the rocky promontory. Square and round “offering holes” for Cybele worship were cut into the bedrock near the rock. Not far away, the archaeologists discovered another, smaller, spherical black rock next to more rock-cut niches (the round stones are not meteorites, but they may have been brought to the island in antiquity). Stepped altars and rock-cut niches in open-air sacred precincts are typical of other ancient Cybele cult sites in Anatolia.23
Apollonius described the burned offerings of the Amazons. Unlike the Greeks who “sacrifice sheep and oxen to the gods, the Amazons sacrificed horses from their great herds on the mainland.” Here again, we are on familiar ground, given what we know about horse cultures of Scythia. Apollonius described the three tribes of Amazons in Pontus as nomadic people, like the Saka-Scythians, who did not own oxen for plowing or flocks of sheep and instead sacrificed their most prized
FiG. 10.2. Plan of the archaeological ruins on Amazon Island showing the large black rock described in the Argonautica epic as sacred to the Amazons. The ancient mooring cuttings are at the bottom right. Drawings courtesy of Mete Mimiroglu.
Possessions, horses.24 A few Greek vase paintings show Amazons sacrificing at altars before departing for battle: one shows an Amazon in tunic, trousers, and pointed cap standing before an altar, her battle-axe and shield on the ground behind her. Another shows an Amazon with her weapons running with her dog, looking back at an altar with a flame. A third vase depicts an Amazon wearing an animal-skin sash on her knees before an altar; her quiver and bow are hung up behind her.25
Horses, a god of war, and a mother goddess probably held deep meanings for the real warrior women who were mythologized as Amazons by the Greeks. Since the peoples of ancient Scythia did not leave writings, however, we can only speculate about the religious ideas of
The myriad, culturally related groups of the steppes and mountains, drawing on what Greeks and others reported and guessed, and on clues in modern archaeology and ethnographic comparisons. The richest ancient source for nomad belief systems is Herodotus, who gathered detailed descriptions of the religious rites, sorcery, fortune-telling, hemp smoking, methods of sacrifice, and embalming and funeral practices of Scythians, Issedonians, Massagetae, Saka, and others from the Black Sea to Central Asia. Many of his minute details are now confirmed by archaeological excavations of kurgans from Ukraine to the Altai. Herodotus said that the Scythians sacrificed horses to “Ares,” represented by an iron sword, and that Persian magi and the Massagetae-Saka-Scythians sacrificed horses to the Sun. A Chinese eunuch who joined the steppe tribes of the Xiongnu (second century BC) related that the nomads “set out from camp at dawn to worship the rising sun and at nightfall to worship the moon.” Another ancient Chinese source tells how the nomads sealed a treaty by dipping a sword in wine and sacrificing a white horse. Chapter 4 Surveyed numerous ancient burials of armed women and men from the Black Sea to the Altai, all distinguished by the physical remains of huge numbers of horses that were sacrificed at the funerals of males and females. The mourners ate great quantities of horse meat and prepared a portion for the journey of their dead. A belief in a kind of afterlife seems evident in the typical grave goods of food, weapons, clothing, supplies, tools, personal amulets, items of daily use, and golden treasures.26
In the end, all we can have is an impressionistic sense of the beliefs of the women archers of Scythian lands known as Amazons, an intangible mosaic of animism, totemism, magic, of sacred fire and gold, of reverence for Sun, Moon, sky, earth, nature, wild animals, fantastic creatures. And horses.27
World History
