In the second century AD, Pausanias viewed several ancient inscribed monuments in Greece that were related to the great mythic war against the invading Amazons (Battle for Athens; chapter 17), but those inscriptions were engraved by the Greeks.14 No inscriptions attributed to Amazons or to historical women warriors of the steppes were reported by ancient writers or known to modern archaeologists.
The Scythians left no written literature. If real Amazons within tribes of the steppes or Caucasus ever left inscriptions on wood, clay, or stone, the markings would most likely have been tamgas, or runes, symbolic seals used to mark property. Each tribe or clan of Eurasian nomads was identified by a particular tamga emblem and their particular uran, battle cry. Tamgas are found on ancient petroglyphs, textiles,
Artifacts, and coins, and the old symbols are still used to brand livestock among pastoralists on the steppes. If warrior women known as Amazons branded their horses, it would have been with tamgas (chapter 11).
Tamgas are inscribed on nearly 1,000 ancient stone monoliths, called “deer stones,” scattered over the eastern Scythian steppes. The flat stones, 3 to 15 feet high, are 2,500-3,000 years old and associated with the kurgans of Siberia, Altai, Mongolia, and Inner Asia. The granite megaliths are commonly inscribed with Scythian-s tyle “flying” deer with fantastic antlers similar to the tattoos of the frozen Pazyryk mummies. The chevrons, dots, circles, and cross-hatching patterns call to mind the patterned attire of Amazons and the tattoos of Thracian women on Greek vase paintings. Other motifs carved on the stones include daggers, axes, bows, arrows, horses, tigers, birds, and human faces. The stones’ purpose is a mystery. They do not appear to mark human burials and usually occur in groups. Were they territorial markers.? Were they religious-s hamanistic sites.? Did they commemorate significant events or people.? The images on the stones do not represent spoken language, but they were certainly signs intended to convey meaningful information to observers within the same culture zone. In this way, tamgas and deer stones resemble Scythian tattoos.15
Extraordinary archaeological evidence of Scythian men and women frozen in permafrost has emerged in the Altai region. Many of the naturally mummified human remains, preserved for more than two thousand years, still bear detailed tattoos of animals. As archaeologist Svetlana Pankova observed in 2012, the Scythian peoples did not leave written texts, but one might consider their heavily tattooed bodies as a kind of “writing” that conveyed significant information with individual, tribal, and cultural relevance. Like the similar motifs carved on the deer-stone megaliths, the vivid tattoos of tigers, deer, birds, and fantastic creatures, twisting, pouncing, fighting, and dying, created an “animated” panorama on human skin, with the figures appearing to breathe and jump into motion as one flexed muscles and moved. Beyond their obvious decorative power, Pankova suggests that the lively images on the skin were ways of narrating stories. Like the carved deer-stone monoliths, the tattoos functioned as “texts” passing along individual tales and cultural knowledge within each tribe and among related nomadic groups.16
FiG. 14.1. Deer stones, inscriptions, and tamgas on the northern steppes. Collage by Michele Angel.
Another extraordinary discovery in ancient Scythia holds a hint of writing by nomads. The Saka-Scythian kurgan at Issyk (southeastern Kazakhstan) where several tombs of women buried with weapons have been found, yielded a skeleton clad in magnificent golden armor, possibly a young warrior woman of the fifth to third centuries BC (chapter
4). Among the grave goods of the Golden Warrior is a silver cup bearing an inscription, still undeciphered, in what may be a variant of Kharos-thi script, an ancient “alphasyllabary” used in Central Asia. This very rare epigraphic trace of a Scythian dialect, perhaps Khotanese Saka, offers unique evidence of writing by the nomad tribes of the steppes (other examples have been found at Tillya Tepe and the Tarim Basin on leather, wood, and birch bark). In Inner Asia, among the steppe tribes known to the Chinese as the Xiongnu, ancient Chinese chronicles reported that the nomads sent messages by “making marks in a strange script on pieces of wood.” Later, in the second century BC, a renegade eunuch from China who joined the Xiongnu taught the nomads “how to write official letters to the Chinese court” on wooden tablets.17
In the imagination of Greek and Roman mythographers and historians, could the Amazons read and write? Amazons receive and send messages to enemies and allies in the mythic narratives. For example, in the legendary Trojan War, King Priam dispatched a message to the Amazon queen Penthesilea, requesting her help in defending Troy. Such communications could be delivered verbally. But the military historian Polyaenus specifically stated that the Scythian warrior queen Tirgatao of the Maeotians (Sea of Asov) exchanged written diplomatic letters with the king of the Bosporus in the fifth century BC (Chapter 24). We do not know the language of their missives or whether translators read them, but the clear implication is that Tirgatao was literate.18
According to Ctesias, the Greek who served as the royal physician in Persia (fifth century BC), the Saka-Scythian warrior queen Zarina (Chapter 23) was very well educated. In his fragmentary history of Persia, Ctesias told of Zarina’s reaction to a letter from a Medean warrior, evidence of her literacy.19 In a later collection of legends known as the Alexander Romance by Pseudo-Callisthenes, Alexander the Great exchanges a series of diplomatic communiques with some Amazon leaders during his eastern conquests. Both the Greek version (fourth century AD) and the Armenian version (fifth century AD) “quote” the correspondence in detail. These legends even portray the Amazons holding an Athenian-style democratic assembly to decide how to respond to Alexander’s letters. It is striking that the Greek mythographers imagined that Amazon society would have mirrored the strong relationship between Greek democracy and literacy.20
Now that we have surveyed the historical realities of Scythia and Scythians that influenced Greek ideas about women as warriors in parts 1 and 2, we can better understand the ancient myths and legends that the ancient Greeks told themselves about Amazons. Each myth, legend, story, and historical account and their many alternative versions were woven from tangled threads of facts, half-truths, plausibilities, possibilities, speculations, and fantasies. Armed with the background material in this and the previous chapters, we can sift through the layers of classical stories to see how the curious details and specific elements might have arisen from authentic knowledge encrusted with centuries of lore, misunderstood customs, rumors, imagination, and romance.
World History
