Posted on 06/08/2015 2:22:47 PM PDT by Red Badger
A 2,500-year-old predecessor of DC Comics’ Wonder Woman super heroine has emerged on a vase painting kept at a small American museum.
Drawn on a white-ground pyxis (a lidded cylindrical box that was used for cosmetics, jewelry, or ointments) the image shows an Amazon on horseback in a battle against a Greek warrior.
Much like the fictional warrior princess of the Amazons, the horsewoman is twirling a lasso.
“It is the only ancient artistic image of an Amazon using a lariat in battle,” Adrienne Mayor, a research scholar at Stanford University’s departments of classics and history of science, told Discovery News.
Mayor noticed the vase at the University of Mississippi Museum during research for her 2014 book “The Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Women across the Ancient World.”
Created between 480 and 450 B.C. in Athens, the image is attributed to the Sotheby painter.
“The vase would have held a Greek woman’s intimate make-up or jewelry. The images on the box suggest that women enjoyed scenes of Amazons getting the best of male Greek warriors,” Mayor said.
According to the researcher, the suspenseful scene of a Greek male about to be lassoed by a powerful foreign warrior woman was exotic and also subversive, a surprising twist on traditional Greek women’s roles.
The Amazon is portrayed in a dynamic action just before roping her victim. She looks back over her shoulder at the lasso she is swinging while the Greek man crouches under his shield with a spear.
“The rest of her rope, painted purple like her shoes, is coiled around her waist, and she correctly holds the lariat’s loop near the knot,” Mayor said. “Her technique is accurate for roping something straight ahead,” she added.
She noted the Amazon has her battle-axe ready to dispatch her victim.
According to Mayor, the vase decoration is evidence that the painter and his audience were familiar with descriptions of horse-riding Scythian warrior women using lariats.
Ancient Greek and Roman historians describe Scythian mounted archers skillfully using lassos in warfare.
For example, Herodotus reported that 8,000 nomadic steppe riders armed with daggers and braided leather lariats joined the army of Persian king Darius in 480 B.C.
Several other sources told how Scythian skirmishers threw rope nooses and wheeled their horses around to entangle their enemies.
Roman geographer Pomponius Mela, who wrote around 43 A.D., also reported that warrior women of the northern Black Sea region were experts with the lasso.
David Saunders, associate curator at J. Paul Getty Museum’s department of antiquities, found the pyxis fascinating for its shape and techniques of decoration, for the unusual image of the lassoing Amazon and for what it might have meant for the woman who owned it – and perhaps also whoever bought it for her.
“There’s plenty to explore in terms of how the scene might relate to the arts of seduction, and more broadly regarding male and female attitudes to one another in ancient Athens,” Saunders, who specializes in Greek vase-painting and iconography, told Discovery News.
“A vessel like this would probably have been used as a container for some sort of adornment – be it make-up, perfume, perhaps jewellery. Maybe we could think of its owner preparing herself as the Amazons did for battle,” he added.
PinGGG!.................
Thanks for not posting the Kathy Lee version. Unbelievably terrible movie.
Careful - that looks more like Wonder Caitlyn.
Shouldn’t her horse be invisible?
Wonder Woman does not ride a horse. So there.
I was taught in anthropology that Amazons went into battle for the privilege of getting married and having children. They couldn't marry without proving they could kill an enemy man.
She rides Pegasus any time she wants......................
Not Wonder Woman. More like that gal who was in the news lately. Bruce Jenner or something.
Then what’s that book she’s holding in her left hand? And the golden lariat? Where is that? She had that invisible plane. Plus the fictitious Wonder Woman rode a two-headed unicorn, Pegasus. Just being picky :)
You have never read comics written before the seventies then.
When cowboy movies were popular, Wonder Woman wrestled rustle as required.
The image is not of a woman nor does it resemble in any way Wonder Woman
“Herodotus, with his usual flare, tells a remarkable story of how the Amazons came to be with the Scythians which makes a great deal more sense when one understands that the nomadic Scythians were later arrivals and the Amazons were part of an earlier civilization still existing to the south of the Black Sea but in constant threat from the Greeks as the accounts of many battles suggest. He recounts that after the Battle of Thermodon, several galleys carrying Amazon prisoners were retaken by the captives and the women came ashore in the land of Scythia on the north shore of the Black Sea They engaged some of the Scythians in combat who upon discovering that the dead were actually women decided not to try to kill the newcomers but woo them instead. They eventually approached them unarmed and the two groups decided to merge but not without negotiations. The Amazons refused to live as Scythian women, they would not give up their place in society so their new Scythian husbands agreed and asked for their inheritance to be given them and they left for lands to the northeast. This story seems to tell of a merging of the nomadic Scythians with the earlier matriarchal society and their migration away from the patriarchal societies rising to power to the south and eventually the entire world.
Of course most mainstream historians call the Amazons creatures of myth not because there are not ample records of their battles and individuals but for the reason Strabo the Greek historian put it 2000 years ago, “For who can believe that an army of women, or a city, or a nation, could ever subsist without men? and not only subsist, but make inroads upon the territories of other people, and obtain possession not only of the places near them, and advance as far as the present Ionia, but even dispatch an expedition across the sea to Attica?” Who indeed could believe such a thing? Certainly not the men who have written history but now we have their bodies, women buried with the respect once thought only reserved for men and these tattooed women warriors are much harder to call a myth.”
Scythians were known for their use of lassos in combat.
Sorry but that is not a woman.
I thought about making “Jenner” joke but I won’t.
Find the movie “Bobbie Jo and the Outlaw” and see what the real Wonder Woman looks like.
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