N THE REALM Of MYTH, Of COURSE, GrEEK HEROES,
Olympian gods and goddesses, Trojans, Persians, and. Amazons all communicated with magical ease. For example, in the myth of Heracles’s Ninth Labor, winning the belt of Hip-polyte, Heracles and the Amazon queen converse with no difficulty— until violence breaks out. But, since classical Greeks also wrote about Amazons as real people of Scythia, dwelling in the lands around the Black Sea, Caucasus, and beyond, what languages did they believe Amazons spoke?
Many other linguistic questions swirl around the mythic and historical Amazons. What languages were actually spoken by the peoples of the Black Sea and steppes? What might the personal names of Amazons and Amazon-like warrior women reveal? Did the Greeks suppose that Amazons could read and write? The extensive literary, artistic, and archaeological evidence from ancient Greece demonstrates what a rich imaginary realm was created for Amazons. Embedded in that evidence are strong hints that the ethnonym “Amazon” was originally a name the archaic Greeks used to designate little-known steppe peoples (chapter 1). Moreover, some individual names of Amazons inscribed on Greek vases and preserved in non-Greek sources reflect the languages of Amazons’ real-life counterparts, the women of nomadic cultures in western Asia.
Greeks applied the label “barbarian” to anyone who did not speak Greek. When Greeks began exploring and colonizing the Black Sea coast in the eighth and seventh centuries BC, their contact with exotic
“barbarians” resulted in exchanges of goods, folklore, and languages. Foreign words and names—such as Amazon—and stories about faraway lands entered Greek parlance through traders, colonists, sailors, mercenaries, allies, and travelers. Foreigners came to live and work in Athens as slaves, soldiers, merchants, and artisans. Scythian characters began to appear in Greek plays, and their languages were heard in households and marketplaces. Some names from the Black Sea region are preserved in Greek mythology, such as the sorceress Medea of Colchis (modern Georgia; her name is Iranian) and Medea’s brother Apsyrtos (whose name is Abkhazian).1
Herodotus visited the Black Sea-Azov region in the mid-fifth century BC and preserved several authentic words from Scythian groups. Some have ancient Iranian roots and others derive from Caucasian languages. For example, Herodotus reported the folk etymology “man-killer” for the Scythian word for “Amazons,” Oiorpata. Linguists suggest that it probably meant something like “ruler/preeminent warrior” (presumably the top “man-killer”) in an Iranian language. Other Scythian words of Iranian (Indo-European) origin recorded by Herodotus include sagaris (“pointed battle-axe”), akinakes (“dagger”), Massagetai (“great clan”), Arimaspi (“owners of horses”), Sarmatia (Ossetian, “free people”), and Issedones (“people of the icy river”). A number of words preserved by Herodotus and other classical writers derive from Caucasian languages, which, unlike Iranian and Greek (and English), are mostly non-Indo-European. Examples are Colchis (Circassian, “mountains”), Gargaria (Georgian, “apricot”), Maeotis (Circassian, “lake not dammed up,” for the Kerch Strait/Azov Sea), and aschu (“wild cherry juice”).2 These Iranian and Caucasian vocabulary words came from the languages spoken by the indigenous nomadic and seminomadic men and women of Scythia encountered by those Greeks who ventured north and east of the Aegean.
World History
