Exceptions prove the rule. When necessity demands, people of both sees are capable of exceptional acts. Viking women, American frontierwomen, some native American women, Saxon women, etc, at one time all fought and were skilled in the use of weapons. BUT a warrior is not a soldier and - sorry - women have no place in combat in a military establishment which seeks to win wars rather than make social statements.
The Scythians weren’t necessarily going to fight anyway.
Herodotus recounts the Persians’ attempt to conquer them. The Persian military engineers bridged the strait (they did it at least one other time, during an invasion of Greece), and marched north, bridged the Danube, and crossed over into the steppe. The Scythian camp was large, and apparently they were not unlike the various plains Indians of the Old West; when the Persians’ dust cloud was spotted, the Scythians packed up everyone and everything and rode off in one direction or other. The Persians would reach the former location, and follow the trail. Each time they’d approach, the Scythians would pack up and ride off. This went on for some time, then the winter started to roll in, the Persians skedaddled, and managed to get across the Danube and the Bosphorus before anyone burned their bridges.
One would think that Napoleon would have learned something from that story.
And one would think that the Germans would have learned something from Herodotus, and the experience of Napoleon. And later, from their earlier experience. But nooooo.
The Scythians were the indigenous population along the northern shore of the Black Sea by Roman times; when Ovid pissed off Augustus, the Big A exiled the Big O to that very area. Ovid’s later writings were still in Latin, but he joked that he dreamed in the Scythian language, and barely recognized his own spoken Latin.
The Scythians’ distant relatives, the Sarmatians, rode on up centuries later and bitch-slapped the Scythians, who’d taken on settled ways. The Sarmatians threatened the Romans, never a bright idea back then, and eventually were cornered and defeated. Their mounted warriors became auxiliary cavalry for the Roman army, but were deployed in places where no one would understand their language or like them, such as Britain. The women and children were sold off into slavery throughout the empire, and the Sarmatian culture basically ceased to exist within a couple of generations.
I thought we began discussing one scholar’s theory about historical references to an ancient culture, and archaeological finds that might give credence to those references.
I don’t know what the author’s motive was. I have to take the book at face value, and weigh all the parts of it - without extrapolating from an ancient time, to contemporary socio-political statements that may happen to “put a bee in my bonnet”.
(And: there will NEVER be a time when individual women don’t find themselves ‘in extremis’ and required to act and prove themselves as ‘warriors’.)
-JT