Posted on 11/01/2014 3:18:49 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Archaeology shows that these fierce women also smoked pot, got tattoos, killed—and loved—men.
The Amazons got a bum rap in antiquity. They wore trousers. They smoked pot, covered their skin with tattoos, rode horses, and fought as hard as the guys. Legends sprang up like weeds. They cut off their breasts to fire their bows better! They mutilated or killed their boy children! Modern (mostly male) scholars continued the confabulations. The Amazons were hard-core feminists. Man haters. Delinquent mothers. Lesbians.
Drawing on a wealth of textual, artistic, and archaeological evidence, Adrienne Mayor, author of The Amazons, dispels these myths and takes us inside the truly wild and wonderful world of these ancient warrior women.
Talking from her home in Palo Alto, California, she explains what Johnny Depp has in common with Amazons, why the Amazon spirit is breaking out all over pop culture, and who invented trousers.
We associate the word Amazon with digital book sales these days. Tell us about the real Amazons.
The real Amazons were long believed to be purely imaginary. They were the mythical warrior women who were the archenemies of the ancient Greeks. Every Greek hero or champion, from Hercules to Theseus and Achilles, had to prove his mettle by fighting a powerful warrior queen.
We know their names: Hippolyta, Antiope, Thessalia. But they were long thought to be just travelers' tales or products of the Greek storytelling imagination. A lot of scholars still argue that. But archaeology has now proven without a doubt that there really were women fitting the description that the Greeks gave us of Amazons and warrior women....
(Excerpt) Read more at news.nationalgeographic.com ...
PMS Feminist Brigade......??????
Hey, no fair! You are taking some feminist’s nonsensical conclusion and applying logic to it.
One of the scenarios involved a feminist version. No warfare, no murder, women were in charge. I asked the prof about the merits of the feminist scenario which sounded pretty ridiculous to me. The prof, who was no conservative, agreed.
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
And the leftists are so rarely called out on that sort of nonsense.
A very reasonable response.
My partial disagreement is strictly one of the physical limitations.
It is probable that a man can, on average, pull twice the draw weight bow of a woman. Some a good bit more.
There is no reason in this world that a woman can’t be as skilled with a bow as a man, but the draw weight difference means that he can shoot from a much greater distance and that his arrows will hit with much greater force.
Important factors in a combat situation. I just get tired of the female warrior meme. It’s so utterly stupid. And I sometimes wonder if it plays a role in young women getting themselves into dangerous situation because they don’t realize how utterly vulnerable they are without a man to defend them. Oe a gun.
...archaeology has now proven without a doubt that there really were women fitting the description that the Greeks gave us of Amazons and warrior women.That would mark the first time in history that archaeology has proven something without a doubt. This reeks to high heaven of cryptofeminist meme-building anachronism. The skirt- and kilt-wearing barbarian cavalry archers of various non-Greek peoples are the one, the only, source for ancient myths of breast-removing Amazon warriors.
She can tie me up with a golden lasso and make me tell the truth.
Didnt they cut off one of their breasts off in order to handle a bow better?
They didn’t exist per se. Those barbarian mounted archers were all men.
Those damned horrible "males" ... always with the confabulations.
by Adrienne Mayor
foreword by Peter Dodson
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 have no problem with what you say. I’m only suggesting that some women, back then, could have done it :-)
I’m just trying to get at what the legend really refers to and means.
=JT
As an aside, Greek men did not wear pants, and would have considered any man that (i.e., the Persians) did to be cross-dressing, and consequently make jokes about his masculinity.
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
And yet the early Greeks and Romans used cavalry before the stirrup came to Europe. Yes, riding a horse without stirrups and modern saddles makes it harder to stay on and ride well, but that doesn't mean that you can't ride.
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