Amazon Warriors Did Indeed Fight and Die Like Men

National Geographic's Book Talk ^ | October 29, 2014 | Simon Worrall

[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....

[BroJoeK]

Sherman Logan: "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."

The article tries hard to separate fact from fantasy, the facts being that a large percentage (30%?) of Sythian women were buried with warrior tools, and that Greeks considered many "barbarian" women to be warriors.
This was a scandal to civilized Greeks, but then one needs to wonder about their own warrior goddesses, Athena and Artemis (Diana) and also Jason's companion, Atalanta.
So the basic idea of women warriors was not entirely myth.
There were some.

[Sherman Logan]

The Romans had a goddess of war, Bellona. So did the ancient Semitic civilizations of Assyria, Babylon, etc.

[Jamestown1630]

The moment of an original invention may not have gone down in the history books, but stirrups and some way to attach them are a very common-sense invention; any number of people in ancient times who had ever ridden bareback, might have imagined it, and invented it - and their community have kept it as a useful tool.

Little pockets of people often know things that the BIG CITY people don’t know. Eventually, discoveries get around, and finally go down in the history books as the invention of some “civilization” - when actually, to steal awkwardly from Yeats, it actually began “in the mind of some shepherd boy, lighting up his eyes for a moment...”.

I’m certain that stirrups at least were imagined and invented by one of the first dozen or so people who ever sat on the back of a horse! along with saddles, and probably all kinds of tack; and re-imagined and invented many times over, for centuries, in different places.

Widespread implementation would depend upon local need and usefulness; but the knowledge in an area would not have been completely lost.

-JT

[Jamestown1630]

Well, she appears to somewhat possess the lower body attributes to ride bareback effectively......

-JT

[SunkenCiv]

Amazon Warrior Women
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Posted on 8/4/2004, 11:51:53 PM by blam
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