Hidden History: Lost Civilizations, Secret Knowledge, and Ancient Mysteries by Brian Haughton (beginner reading books for adults txt) 📕

our imagination. From ancient Greek and Roman writers of myth and myth-history, right up to modern television shows such as Xena: Warrior Princess, this war-like, women-only society has been constantly reinvented to suit the time and the place. But is there something tangible, or even historical, behind these stories and legends?

We first hear of the Amazons as a tribe of warrior women in the Iliad, Homer's epic tale about the Trojan War, probably written in the eighth century B.C. Here they are briefly mentioned as having attacked Priam of Troy while he was campaigning in central Turkey. Homer describes these women as "those who fight like men." After Homer, many Greek writers added more elements to the Amazon character and supposed origin. The Greek historian Herodotus, writing around the middle of the fifth century B.C., called them Androktones (killers of men), and has an interesting (in the light of recent archaeological discoveries) story to tell about them. After being beaten by the Greeks at the battle of Thermodon, in northern Turkey, Amazon prisoners of war were taken back to Greece by ship. During the journey, they attacked and killed their captors, but were incapable of sailing the boat, and drifted northwards across the Black Sea. They eventually landed on the shores of Scythian territory, where they stole horses and began raiding the area. Herodotus describes the Amazons reaching an agreement with the Scythians, a loose network of horseriding nomadic steppe tribes, and subsequently intermarrying with the men. Afterwards they moved northwards and settled east of the Don, in what is now southern Russia, where they ultimately evolved into the Sauromatian culture. Another story, this time told by Roman writers, involve the Amazons fighting as allies of Priam against the Greeks in the Trojan War. Towards the end of the war, after killing many Greeks in battle, the Amazon queen Penthesilea took the field against Achilles, only to be slain in a bloody duel. A number of other Greek heroes also had life or death struggles with these formidable women.

One of the 12 labors imposed upon Hercules required him to obtain the magic girdle of the Amazon queen, Hippolyte. To fulfill this task, Hercules, in the company of another Greek hero, Theseus, journeyed to the capital city of the Amazons, Themiscyra, on the river Thermodon, on the south

ern shore of the Black Sea. Heracles killed Hippolyte and obtained the girdle, and Theseus carried off the princess Antiope, one of Hippolyte's sisters. In order to rescue Antiope, the Amazons invaded Greece and attacked Athens, but were defeated. In some versions of the story, Antiope is cut down fighting at the side of Theseus. The mythical battles between the Greeks and the Amazons were often commemorated in a genre of Greek art known as amazonomachy, one example of which, carved in marble, comes from the Parthenon, in Athens. Some biographers of Alexander the Great mention him meeting with an Amazon queen called Thalestris, and her having a child by him, though this is disputed by Greek historian and biographer Plutarch in his book, Life of Alexander, as well as other ancient writers.

Early Greek and Roman writers associated various strange customs with the Amazons. The very word Amazon, thought now to derive from the Iranian word ha-mazan (meaning warrior), in the Greek version means without breast. The Greeks probably attached this meaning to the word to explain a tradition that the Amazons had their right breast burned or cut off to facilitate the drawing of the bowstring. However, depictions of Amazons in Greek art always show them with two breasts. Another myth describes how the Amazons did not allow men to live in their territory. However, once a year, in order to sustain their race, they traveled to visit a neighboring all-male tribe called the Gargareans. Female children who resulted from this procreation were brought up by the Amazons, and trained in agriculture, hunting, and war, while males were either put to death or given back to their fathers.

Amazons were associated with a bewildering range of places, from the Black Sea coast of Turkey to southern Russia, Libya, and even Atlantis. In light of such far-fetched ideas, it is not surprising that the consensus of opinion about the Amazons is that they are a myth. But recently, thanks to archaeology, scholarly opinions have been changing. According to Herodotus, the Sauromatian people of southern Russia were descendants of the Amazons and the Scythians. Although Russian archaeologists had been finding skeletons of female warriors in the Pontic Steppe (the steppelands north of the Black Sea extending east as far as the Caspian Sea) since the mid-19th century, western scholars and archaeologists were either unaware of these finds or had not made the connection with the Amazons of Greek legend. Excavations conducted by Russian and American archaeologists and led by Jeannine Davis-Kimball (of the American-Eurasian Research Institute) have suggested that these Greek stories may have had some basis in fact. Ancient burial mounds (known as kurgans) found near the town of Pokrovka, near the Russian border with Kazakhstan, have produced skeletons of women buried with weapons. The burials included iron swords or daggers, bronze arrowheads, bows, quivers, and horse harnesses. The graves date from the sixth to the fourth century B.c., and indicate a culture that included warrior women of high status.

Photographer unknown.

(GNU Free Documentation License)

Amazon Preparing for Battle by PierreEugene-Emile Hebert. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Initially there were suggestions that the weapons served a ritual purpose, but examinations of the skeletons have revealed otherwise. Some of the skulls exhibit signs of wounds, and bowed leg bones belonging to one 13- or 14-year-old girl indicate a life on horseback. A bent arrowhead embedded in the knee of another woman suggests a battle wound. The weapons found with the women appeared to have seen frequent use in battle, and they also had smaller handles than those buried with the males, suggesting that they were made especially for women. Could these then be graves of the