Post by Graveyardbride on Oct 19, 2014 9:05:33 GMT -5
The Real Amazons
According to Herodotus, many thousands of years ago, a group of Greek raiders ventured into what is now northern Turkey and crossing the steppe, they encountered a throng of female warriors. The Greeks overpowered and kidnapped them, locked them in the holds of their ships, and set sail for Greece. Somehow, the Amazons escaped, got to their weapons and slaughtered their captors. While the women were accomplished equestrians, they had no idea how to sail a ship and drifted aimlessly until they landed in the Crimea, where they went ashore, stole horses and commenced marauding and pillaging while increasing their strength.
Nearby there was a settlement of Royal Scythians – rich traders who had settled in towns – and to avoid capture, they sent out scouts who learned the mysterious raiders were Amazons. The Scythians had planned to send soldiers to kill the marauders, but decided instead to assemble a group of desirable young men. Life in town was good, but the leaders thought a few fearless, randy Amazons would liven up things. The band of bachelors left the village and went out to meet the women on horseback. They set up camp and hung around until one of them finally saw a single Amazon walking alone. “Wordlessly he made advances and she responded,” Adrienne Mayor writes, in The Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Women Across the Ancient World. “They made love in the grass. Afterward, the Amazon gestured to indicate that he should return the next day to the same spot – and to bring a friend. She made it clear that she would bring a friend, too.”
The natural question, when you’re faced with a story like this, is: How true is it? In Amazons, Mayor – a classicist based at Stanford and by all accounts the world’s leading expert on ancient female fighters – argues that even if it isn’t literally true in all particulars, it is still broadly true. The evidence, she writes, points to the fact there really were Amazons: in some archaeological digs in Eurasia, as many as 37 percent of the graves contain the bones and weapons of horsewomen who fought alongside men. (“Arrows, used for hunting and battle, are the most common weapons buried with women, but swords, daggers, spears, armor, shields and sling stones are also found,” Mayor writes.) These were the women the Greeks encountered on their expeditions around the Black Sea; they inspired similar stories among travelers from ancient Persia, Egypt, China and other locations. In Greece, they were objects of romantic fascination and their societies, in which both men and women were able to embody the martial virtues, provided a counterpoint to Greek society, in which only men could be valorous. Greek stories pertaining to Amazons, Mayor argues, expressed the ancient Greek’s yearning for gender equality.
Mayor doesn’t teach, she is a full-time scholar and researcher in the Classics department at Stanford, where she studies the folklore, myth and science of the ancient world. (Her 2010 biography of Mithradates, the Poison King, who attempted to take over Rome and inspired fear as a deadly toxicologist, was a finalist for the National Book Award.) “The Amazons,” Mayor told Joshua Rothman of The New Yorker, has been in the works for decades. “As a kid, I was a tomboy,” she admitted. “I played with toy cowboys and Indians and soldiers and noticed there weren’t any girls. Then, as a college student at the University of Minnesota during the Vietnam War, I got interested in military history. I just thought that stories from wartime have the very best of human behavior and the very worst. I got permission to take ROTC classes (back then girls weren’t allowed). Then I took classes in ancient Greek and Roman history. I was fascinated by the war stories about Amazons. In 1990, I proposed an article about Amazons to Military History Quarterly and it was turned down. So I searched around, found a male co-author, had the guy propose the same article and it was accepted.” It’s a pleasant coincidence that a critical mass of evidence about the historical Amazons has coalesced at the same time that our culture, in characters such as Katniss Everdeen, is settling into an Amazon moment.
For a long time, Mayor continued, “Most people argued that the Amazons on Greek vases were purely symbolic – that they represented, for example, young women who weren’t yet married.” The interpretation has been challenged by “a wealth of archaeological discoveries that show that there were women who behaved like Amazons – who wore the same clothes, who used weapons, who rode horses and who lived at the same time as the ancient Greeks.” It’s now possible to know, in a concrete way, what Amazon life was like. The Amazons were likely Scythian nomads who traveled the territory north of the Black Sea – roughly between the Balkans, to the west, and the Caucasus, to the east. They were not, as Mayor puts it, “man-hating virgins,” but simply members of “a people notorious for strong, free women.” (No one knows the origins of the word “Amazon” – it isn’t Greek – but there are a few possibilities, including an ancient Iranian word meaning “warrior.”) The Greek manner of war centered on infantry – that is, on armored, brawny men. But, on the steppe, “the horse was the great equalizer, along with the bow and arrow, which meant woman could be just as fast, just as deadly, as a man,” Mayor writes.
Amazons spent days at a time on horseback and often their legs were bowed from so much riding. Their lives followed a yearly cycle with occasional large gatherings for feasting, funerals, athletic contests and “purifying saunas.” The Greeks credited the Amazons with inventing trousers and the Amazons wore them with long-sleeved tunics and pointed hats with ear-flaps. (It was cold out on the steppe.) They drank fermented mare’s milk – frozen milk from which the ice is skimmed to increase the alcohol concentration. They smoked cannabis, which is indigenous to Central Asia, and they were elaborately tattooed. They fought on foot, when necessary. (One study of Amazon skeletons with head wounds from battle-axes, Mayor reports, showed “most of the blows were dealt by a right-handed opponent in face-to-face combat.”) There was fierce competition for territory and resources. Amazons domesticated dogs and hunted with eagles. Little is known of their spiritual lives, but according to Mayor, archaeological evidence and folktales give us “an impressionistic sense of the beliefs of the women archers of Scythian lands known as Amazons, an intangible mosaic of animism, totemism, magic, of sacred fire and gold, of reverence for Sun, Moon, sky, earth, nature, wild animals, fantastic creatures. And horses.”
The Greeks, of course, were fascinated by the sex lives of these warrior women and came up with all sorts of lurid ideas – that they were single-breasted lesbians who killed their male children, or they mated once a year with strange men to perpetuate an all-female society, or that an Amazon had to kill a man before she could lose her virginity. The idea was that the Amazons had, in some sense, renounced their femininity. The reality of Amazon family life was different. There seems to have been great diversity in approaches to child rearing: archaeologists have found children’s skeletons interred with lone men, lone women and couples. Some groups may have practiced “fosterage”: the exchange of children to cement alliances. The best accounts of “Amazon sex,” meanwhile, suggest it “was robust, promiscuous. It took place outdoors, outside of marriage, in the summer season, with any man an Amazon cared to mate with.” (Among some groups, “the sign for sex in progress was a quiver hung outside a woman’s wagon.”) You can get a sense of the completeness of the Amazon life by looking at Amazon names. Mayor worked with a linguist and vase expert to examine some of the words on vases depicting Amazons. Previously, they had been considered “nonsense words,” but turned out to be “suitable names for male and female Scythian warriors in their own languages, translated for the first time after more than 2,500 years.” These ancient Circassian names include Pkpupes, “worthy of armor”; Kepes, “hot flanks/eager sex”; Barkida, “princess”; and Khasa, “one who heads a council.”
Much of The Amazons is devoted to exploring how the real lives of Amazons were transformed into myth. In Greece, Mayor writes, much of the myth-making was structured around a thought experiment: “What would happen if our Greek heroes encountered a band of Amazons? Sparks would fly!” “The original title of the book,” Mayor said, “was going to be Amazons in Love and War, because there were just as many love stories as there were war stories.” Interestingly, the love stories differ from each other in important ways. “In the stories that the Persians and Egyptians told, they were often attracted to the women they were fighting: their impulse was, we want them on our side, we want them as companions and lovers.” In one of Mayor’s favorite stories, repeated in Egypt, Iran and elsewhere, “a prince fights a warrior princess; they’re so equally matched that the fight goes on and on, and when they sit down to rest, they fall in love.”
The Greeks, by contrast, had a “uniquely dark mythic script: all Amazons must die, no matter how attractive, no matter how heroic.” The Greeks admired the Amazons and according to Mayor, unlike other enemies of Greece, the Amazons are never represented in Greek art as fleeing danger or begging for mercy. Lasting romance between a Greek man and an Amazon woman, though, is always portrayed as impossible. “Every Amazon that we hear about in Greek mythology is heroic – heroes who are the equals of the greatest male Greek heroes,” Mayor explained. In Greek representations of Amazons, she believes, “you can discern some yearning and desire for some kind of resolution to the tension between ‘Yes, we want them as our companions,’ and ‘We couldn’t possibly, because we have to control our own women.’” At the same time, Amazons had a special place in the lives of Greek women. “Amazons were featured everywhere, on women’s pottery, on perfume jars, on jewelry boxes, on sewing equipment. Little girls played with Amazon dolls.” It’s a glimpse, Mayor says, into “a mystery of Greek private life.”
Thinking about Amazons continues, of course, to be a way of thinking about men, women and how they might live together. Katherine Hepburn’s first big break, Mayor points out, was in a play called The Warrior’s Husband, in which she played the role of an Amazon named Antiope. The play was a satire of male-female role reversal; Hepburn, 24, wearing a short tunic and boots, made her entrance by “leaping down a flight of stairs with a dead stag over her shoulders.” (Later, Mayor writes, she “cut a dashing figure in her signature trousers, at once shocking and fabulous, which also fueled her Amazonian image.”) Today, Mayor is part of the “Amazons Ancient and Modern” Facebook group: “Slightly more men than women make up the membership,” she reports. She regularly hears from Amazon enthusiasts – not just scholars, but also “women who ride horses and shoot bows and arrows, or who recreate Scythian bows. All these women practice mounted archery every weekend; they’re experts, they travel around the world competing with men and shooting arrows on horseback.” These mounted archers have helped Mayor interpret details in paintings of Amazons: “They notice the use of nomad-style thumb releases . . . heel guards and ankle spurs, they know what it takes to shoot a Parthian shot when you don’t have any reins or a saddle. You have to do this every day to know that.” People ask her all the time whether she herself is a “real Amazon.” She laughs, “I certainly believe in gender equality and female ferocity. But I’m not actually a horsewoman.”
Sources: Joshua Rothman, The New Yorker, October 17, 2014; Amanda Foreman, Smithsonian Magazine, April 2014; and Lyn Webster Wilde, The Independent, February 25, 1999.