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.
It would have been the perfect place to do it. Why don’t you go on and say what you were thinking. ;0)
I’m sorry but I do not see a woman on a horse but a man on a horse. I do not a warrior being lassoed but more likely the rider-less horse next to him.
Leave it to a bunch of very sick politically motivated idiot to find a picture and make up a whole story out of it without the slightest bit evidence. I just wonder what they would do with an ink blot test properly administered.
Perhaps it is Caitlyn. Yes, looks like a man to me as well.
I was going to say that the “woman” was born Bruce and took the gold in the 450 BC Olympics. Maybe with the East German team.
Reality check — the longhaired barbarian cavalry cultures probably led to the legends. Will ping this when I get back to the HQ.
Check out the Photo Gallery slideshow at the site link. It is of various archaeological finds recently in the news, and is very interesting....................
Thanks Red Badger.
The vase is a better match to the Amazon legend than Lynda Carter could be. The Amazons were supposed to have bound/burned/cut off their right breasts to avoid interfering with archery. Lynda Carter fails spectacularly and symmetrically in that respect.
Xena warrior princess attempting to simulate wonder woman.
I was just trying to remember the name of that movie as I was thinking the same thing.
LOL, that’s even better. But it sure does not look like a woman to me.
Herodotus, with his usual flare....
***
Flare? Oh, dear! For illumination?
I have looked at the image about 3 times in an attempt to find anything about the figure that suggests it’s a female. Methinks the researcher is batty.
I think it was drawn by the same guy who draws the Duluth underwear commercials on TV. You know, the no stink underwear by Duluth?
I am still trying to figure that one out too.
You can’t really see what is going on in the rest of the picture, but there is someone holding a spear and shield in front of the figure, so it seems to be a battle scene.
Sorry, I watch almost no TV and, thanks to the DVR, I see no commercials, so I have no idea what you are talking about.
Just ads for men’s work clothes from a company called Duluth they use a cartoon- like mans drawing that looks like that antique.
Bookmarking...
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
