This is, of course, why all nomadic horse riding tribes developed women warriors.
The Scythian bow was indeed small and very powerful. But it required immense upper body strength, probably more than a bow used from the ground. And of course most women simply don't have this stremgth.
This sounds like a case where a feminist takes some small, unexplined fact, and creates an entire mythos from it, to completely rewrite history.
Much like the book “when God was a Woman”.
Hey, no fair! You are taking some feminist’s nonsensical conclusion and applying logic to it.
To me, the author sounded reasonable and moderate in the interview. She didn’t say that “most” women could have done this; but that a portion of women could have done it.
Those times and cultures were rough, both men and women had to be a lot tougher than we are today; and they stressed, in many areas, very different values than ours. If there existed a powerful cultural incentive, and the freedom for women to at least try, I think many women could have given rise to the “myth” through their accomplishments. I think they would have held a unique position; been a certain “class” of people/women; a cult or “priesthood”.
We may think that we “know” a lot about ancient people and their cultures; but I think there’s a lot of what we know that we don’t really *understand*.
This is what makes the study - even of something as “well-known” to most of us in America as the Bible - so endlessly fascinating (i.e., ‘what did they really mean by that word, after it’s translated down through several languages and thousands of years to us; what did that image or object really symbolize to them, in their own time and milieu; what might this story have meant to tell those people, in their own day, deep under the surface’, etc.)
-JT