As the preceding reports show, the earliest European travelers to the remote, wild Caucasus Mountains interpreted the local warlike women in terms of ancient Greek myths about Amazons. The German adventurer Jacob Reineggs (1744-93) undertook several exploratory missions to the little-known Caucasus for the Russian court. He recorded Tcher-kessian (Circassian) tales about their ancient migrations. One story concerned a tribe of women called the Emmetsch. Presumably Reineggs transcribed the sounds of this name into German as he heard it pronounced by the storyteller and the translator. In Circassian traditions, the Emmetsch were the original inhabitants of Circassia. In Circassian the name means “those who did not leave.” Reineggs’s account was translated to English in 1807.24
“When our ancestors dwelt on the shores of the Black Sea” recited the Circassian bards, there were “frequent wars with the Emmetsch. These were women who possessed the Circassian and Soanian mountain regions, as well as the whole plain as far as Aghla-Kabak. They received no men among them, but, full of warlike valor,” they welcomed any woman of any nation who wished to join “their heroine society and participate in their incursions.” (Strabo had described the Soanes as a tribe that held the heights of the Caucasus; they gathered gold from mountain streams and used poisoned arrows.) After a long series of battles with no decisive outcome, the armies of the Circassians and the Emmetsch faced each other on the steppes.
“Suddenly, the leader of the Emmetsch, known to be a great prophetess, requested a private meeting with Thulme, the commander of the Circassians, also a great seer himself. A tent was immediately pitched between the two armies,” and the two commanders entered alone. After many hours they emerged from the tent. The leader of the women announced that she was convinced by Thulme’s prophecies about the future. She had “chosen to marry Thulme on condition that all hostilities should cease” and that the soldiers, women and men, of both armies “should follow their example. This took place. The women warriors immediately ended the war” and took the Circassians as husbands. The Circassians, “delighted with their wives,” dispersed over the land.25
Alternative versions of this Circassian legend were recorded by other early travelers. In the version documented by the Polish adventurer Count John Potocki (b. 1761), the women were called Emmetsch, but instead of fighting Circassians on the shores of the Black Sea, they battled a band of Nogays on the steppes north of the Caspian Sea (the Turkic-Mongol peoples in the Ingush story, above). The Nogay chieftain in this version was named Tul. In 1807/8, the German agent Julius von Klaproth, sent by the Russian government on a reconnaissance mission in the Caucasus, sought to verify the tales recorded by Reineggs and Potocki. Klaproth discovered an even earlier report by the German physician Gottlob Schober. Schober had been dispatched by Peter the Great across Great Tartary (the Eurasian steppes) in 1717 to locate mineral springs. Dagestani people told Schober that a tribe of women warriors, along with other vanished tribes, had once dwelled thereabout. Schober reported that Armenian and Tartar traders sometimes met “relics of these people” in remote mountains of Great Tartary, and that they were called Emazuhn (his German transliteration of the name he heard). Among the Emazuhn, the men served as the women’s “domestic servants and bed-fellows.” According to the traders, the women of the Emazuhn no longer made war but were “passionately fond of hunting.” Schober identified these women as “Amazons.”26
In about 1722, north of the Caspian Sea, the eminent French scholar of mythology Nicholas Freret (b. 1688) recorded a Kalmyk word for a “strong, vigorous, heroic woman” pronounced “aemetzaine” in French. The nomadic Kalmyks (Oirats) were a Mongol people who had migrated west from the Altai and northern Kazakhstan to the old Nogay territory north of the Caspian Sea and remained there after the Mongol hordes returned to Inner Asia (see also chapter 24). Aemetzaine sounds something like Amazon, Amezan, Emmetsch, and Emazuhn (see chapTer 5). The word is not Mongolian. It was likely a loanword from the Caucasus, but the concept of warrior women was already familiar to the Kalmyks. Interestingly, the name Kalmyk, bestowed on this tribe by their neighbors ca. AD 1200, is Turkic for “remnant or to remain” recalling the etymology of Emmetsch, above.27
In 1838, during his explorations in the Caucasus, Edmund Spencer also listened to Karbardian (Circassian) bards reciting their history: “When our ancestors inhabited the shores of the Sea of Azov, the isles of Taman, and the Tanais” they warred with “the Emazuhn-ites, who lived contiguous to the mountains we now occupy.” The two armies were facing each other when the Emazuhn leader “Valdusa, a famous heroine and prophetess, suddenly rushed forward on her prancing charger and requested an interview with Thulme, leader of the Circassians.” Spencer’s version contains other details paralleling Reineggs’s older account: the leaders meet in a tent pitched between the two bands, they announce sealing the peace with their marriage, and the pairs of male and female warriors follow suit, concluding with the Circassian men admiring the women’s land so much that they decide to dwell there ever after.28
The Circassian legend bears some striking similarities to the foundation story of the Sarmatians heard by Herodotus in the northern Black Sea area in the fifth century BC. (Another parallel appears in an Egyptian legend; chapter 23.) The tribes and locales differ in the versions preserved by the European travelers: a tribe of women battle Circassians near the Black Sea or the Nogays on the northern steppes. Spencer’s version adds the woman leader’s name, “Valdusa,” and his use of Emazuhn (used in 1717 by Schober) instead of Emmetsch (as in Potocki and Reineggs) is noteworthy. Emazuhn/amezan/amazon/aemetzaine all sound vaguely similar, as noted above. The male chieftain’s name Tul is a variant of Thulme; a modern history of Circassia gives his name as Toulmey. Consistent names of people and places are considered signs of a legend’s antiquity.29 There is also the possibility that Spencer embroidered the legend for his European audience. Nevertheless, taken together, the reports of Reineggs, Potocki, Schober, Klaproth, Freret, and Spencer indicate that warrior women with a name similar to the Greek word “Amazon” were featured in the historical and legendary traditions of the Caucasus in stories that resemble one that the Greek traveler Herodotus heard in the same region more than two thousand years earlier.
World History
