The Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Women across the Ancient World - Adrienne Mayor
The Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Women across the Ancient World - Adrienne Mayor
Non-Fiction
Pages: 536
Adrienne Mayor is becoming something of a specialist in teasing out the potential historical truth that may lie behind the layers of myth built up over centuries. In her earlier books she has explored how the discovery of fossils and giant dinosaur bones may have inspired the Greek and Roman myths of Cyclops, griffins, heroic giants, and the lore and traditions of Native American peoples. I've read both, and they were utterly fascinating and intensely plausible.
In this book she turns her attention to the Greek myth of the Amazons, a tribe of women-only warriors, who occur again and again in Greek art and literature, from vase paintings and sculptures to the story of the Trojan War, usually always in conflict with Greek (male) heroes. The Amazons have always been dismissed as nothing more than a Greek invention, a story, a myth - despite the consistent and accurate details of weaponry, attire, culture and language that have been supported by modern archaeology, not to mention the recurrent parallels across cultures far removed from Greece.
Until the advent of more accurate scientific forensic archaeology, skeletons discovered buried with weaponry and armour have always been identified as (or more accurately, assumed to be) male. However, modern sexing technology has demonstrated that an increasingly large number of warrior burial sites across the Eurasian steppes actually contain the remains of female warriors, with similar battle wounds to those of males buried nearby. The Amazons, it turns out, may well have existed - as women warriors from the nomadic horse-cultures of the Eurasian steppes, most particularly the Saka-Samartian-Scythian peoples. The horse may have been the great leveller between the sexes, allowing a woman on horseback, armed with far-reaching bow and arrow, to be as lethal a warrior and hunter as any man.
Reinforcing this archaeological evidence, Mayor draws upon lore, both written and oral, from cultures across the sweep of the world that all came into contact with the nomadic horse-peoples of the steppes - from the Greeks and Macedonians to the Persians and Chinese - all of whom tell tales of warrior women with strikingly similar details.
Gathered together in this one book, Mayor forms a persuasive argument. Whilst there may never have been a specific tribe of women-warriors called Amazons, it is clear that the myth had its roots in a nomadic, horse-centred culture that did contain women-warriors - and that these women had frequent points of contact with cultures that found this feature so unusual and distinctive that they preserved the memory of these women long after the cultures themselves had succumbed to the sweep of history and Hellenocentric gender roles.