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

legendary Amazons? Probably not. In one sense, Herodotus was rightthere are certainly Sauromatian women warriors. However, there is no evidence that they descended from the Amazon-Scythian intermarriage mentioned in Herodotus' Histories. Another factor is that Sauromatian women warriors only made up a relatively small proportion of the tribe. While 90 percent of male burials were warriors, only around 20 percent of the women were buried with weapons.

There is another reason why it is unlikely that the Sauromatians were the source of the Amazon myths. Amazons were being depicted in Greek art and literature as far back as the eighth century B.C., at least 200 years before there is any evidence of women warriors on the Eurasian steppe. The earliest Greek colonies in the Black Sea date from the seventh century B.C., though there were probably earlier trading voyages. So although it is just barely possible that female warriors existed on the steppe earlier than current archaeological evidence suggests-and that Greeks made contact with them-there is no evidence for this contact. As it stands, the women warriors of the Sauromatian culture may have influenced the Amazon myth, but they could not have been its source. Around the fourth century B.C. the Sauromatian culture evolved into the Sarmatian culture, another nomadic tribe, and women warriors are also found in early Sarmatian burials. The Sarmatians ranged much

further west than their predecessors, and came into direct contact with the Romans. In fact, Sarmatian cavalry, in the service of Rome, were active in Britain from the second to the fifth centuries A.D. Whether these Romanized cavalry included women warriors is not known, however.

There are other examples of steppe tribes that included women warriors, one of which are the Pazyryk people, another culture related to the Scythians. Though the Pazyryks were located a long way to the east of the Sarmatians, in the Altai Mountains of Siberian Russia, they had almost identical burial customs, using kurgans similar to those found in the Ukraine and southern Russia. A fifth century B.C. Pazyryk kurgan-burial found in 1993 by Russian archaeologist Natalia Polosmak has become known as the Siberian Ice Maiden, although she was not a warrior but a high-ranking priestess. Polosmak did, however, find a grave containing the skeletons of a man and a woman, each buried with arrowheads and an axe.

Perhaps it was traveler's stories of the higher social standing enjoyed by steppe women that added another, more realistic, dimension to the already existing Greek Amazon myths. In another way, the Amazons can be seen as a mythical illustration of the dangersand perhaps the barbarism-of the unknown, which the Greeks faced when venturing into new lands, such as the Black Sea coast. It is interesting to note that for the Greeks, the Amazons always existed at the very edge of the known world, on the fringes of civilization. As the Greek world expanded, the homeland of the Amazons was pushed further away, which is probably why the actual geography associated with them shifts around so much. The earliest references begin with the Amazons to the east of Greece in Asia Minor (Turkey), supposedly founding the cities of Ephesus and Smyrna, on its eastern coast. By the time of Herodotus (fifth century B.C.) they had moved into southern Russia, and when Diodorus of Sicily was writing his Library of World History in the first century B.C., the Amazons were associated with western Libya.

If the Amazons myths are a memory of a factual matriarchal culture of fighting women, an important point to consider is that Homer wrote in the eighth century about them as if the audience was already familiar with the topic. Thus they must have existed earlier, probably somewhere in the Late Bronze Age/Early Iron Age period (between the dates c. 1600 B.C. and c. 900 B.C.). A location for the Amazons either in Anatolia, the Russian Steppes, or the Caucasus mountains,

seems the most likely. But for the moment at least, there is no evidence for any warrior women at this early date in these areas.

In one sense, the Amazon myth can be viewed partly as how the Greeks viewed the concept of the other. The characteristics given to these women in the literature and art of the time are intended to demonstrate the opposite of everything possessed by a normal society. In Greek society, women's duties were on the whole confined to the home, and they did not have any involvement in war or politics. In contrast, the Amazons made their own decisions and fought their own battles. Such reverse role myths helped to support the status quo of the Greek state by showing the unnaturalness of a society that was radically different from their own. And, of course, when barbarism comes up against culture-as in the case of the many battles between Amazons and Greeks-it loses.

the Mystery of the Ice Man

@ Innsbruck Medical University, W. Platzer.

Skeleton of the Ice Man at Innsbruck Medical University.

On a clear day in September 1991, high in the desolate Otztal Alps, close to the border between Italy and Austria, two German hikers (Helmut and Erika Simon) made what has proven to be one of the most incredible discoveries of the 20th century. Lying face down in the ice was a frozen body. Thinking they had found the remains of a mountaineer who had died in a fall, the couple informed the authorities, who arranged to visit the site the following day. Due to the melting of the glacier, it was not unusual to find the bodies of climbers who had died in accidents in the area. Three weeks earlier, the mummified remains of a man and woman who had set off hiking in 1934, never to be seen again, had been discovered. The day after Helmut and Erika Simon's discovery, the Austrian police arrived at the site and be

gan, somewhat clumsily, to remove the body from its frozen grave. During its extraction from the ice, some of the body's clothing was shredded, a hole was