An 1882 print shows an Amazon, perhaps Penthesilea, Queen of the Amazons, about to spear a panther.
Photograph by Ivy Close Images, Alamy
Drawing on a wealth of textual, artistic, and archaeological evidence, Adrienne Mayor, author of The Amazons, dispels these myths and takes us inside the truly wild and wonderful world of these ancient warrior women
What archaeological proofs have been discovered to show that these mythical beings actually existed?
They've been excavating Scythian kurgans, which
are the burial mounds of these nomadic peoples. They all had
horse-centred lifestyles, ranging across vast distances from the Black
Sea all the way to Mongolia. They lived in small tribes, so it makes
sense that everyone in the tribe is a stakeholder. They all have to
contribute to defense and to war efforts and hunting. They all have to
be able to defend themselves.
The great equalizer for those peoples was the domestication
of horses and the invention of horse riding, followed by the perfection
of the Scythian bow, which is smaller and very powerful. If you think
about it, a woman on a horse with a bow, trained since childhood, can be
just as fast and as deadly as a boy or man.
Archaeologists have found skeletons buried with bows and
arrows and quivers and spears and horses. At first they assumed that
anyone buried with weapons in that region must have been a male warrior.
But with the advent of DNA testing and other bioarchaeological
scientific analysis, they've found that about one-third of all Scythian
women are buried with weapons and have war injuries just like the men.
The women were also buried with knives and daggers and tools. So burial
with masculine-seeming grave goods is no longer taken as an indicator of
a male warrior. It's overwhelming proof that there were women answering
to the description of the ancient Amazons.
Why were they called Amazons?
[Laughs.] That's such a complex story that I actually
devoted an entire chapter to it. It's the one thing everyone seems to
think they know about Amazons: that the name has something to do with
only having one breast so they could easily fire an arrow or hurl a
spear. But anyone who's watched The Hunger Games, or female
archers, knows that that is an absolutely physiologically ridiculous
idea. Indeed, no ancient Greek artworks—and there are thousands—show a
woman with one breast.
All modern scholars point out that the plural noun
"Amazones" was not originally a Greek word—and has nothing to do with
breasts. The notion that "Amazon" meant "without breast" was invented by
the Greek historian Hellanikos in the fifth century B.C.
He tried to force a Greek meaning on the foreign loan word: a
for "lack" and "mazon," which sounded a bit like the Greek word for
breast. His idea was rejected by other historians of his own day, and no
ancient artist bought the story. But it stuck like superglue. Two early
reviews of my book even claimed I accept that false etymology.
Linguists today suggest that the name derives from ancient Iranian or
Caucasian roots.
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