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The myth of the Amazons, a tribe of bloodthirsty blond women thundering across arid battlefields to the horror of their male foes, has lingered for centuries. Their exploits seized the imagination of the Greek scribes Homer, Hippocrates, and Herodotus. But proof of their existence had always been lacking. Now, a 2,500-year-old mystery may have been solved, cracked by an American scientist whose 10-year odyssey led her tens of thousands of miles in pursuit of the truth. After unearthing a culture of ancient warrior women in the Russian steppes, Dr. Jeannine Davis-Kimball followed a trail of artifacts to a remote village...

GORNO-ALTAISK, September 23. KAZINFORM. - Big ancient Scythian drawings were found for the first time in the mountains of the Russian Republic of Altai. Three drawings or petroglyphs of a size of 1.5 meters were reported by Yevgeny Matochkin from the National Museum of Altai to regional authorities. He said he found them on a cliff that is 30-meter high and 10-meter wide near the village of Inegen at the Katun and Chuya Rivers thanks to local residents, Kazinform quotes Itar-Tass. Matochkin said one drawing is that of a deer and others need to be cleaned to see what they...

December 22, 2004 Women warriors from Amazon fought for Britain's Roman army By Lewis Smith THE remains of two Amazon warriors serving with the Roman army in Britain have been discovered in a cemetery that has astonished archaeologists. Women soldiers were previously unknown in the Roman army in Britain and the find at Brougham in Cumbria will force a reappraisal of their role in 3rd-century society. The women are thought to have come from the Danube region of Eastern Europe, which was where the Ancient Greeks said the fearsome Amazon warriors could be found. The women, believed to have died...

ARCHEOLOGISTS MAKE UNIQUE FIND IN SOUTHERN RUSSIA MOSCOW, August 25 (RIA Novosti) - Archeologists working in the Russian republic of North Ossetia, in the Caucasus, have made a unique find. They have unearthed remains of a horse with outfit. The horse is reported to have belonged to a dignitary of Alan, the state that presumably existed here in the 7th-9th centuries. The horse's outfit is elaborately decorated with gold-plated silver pendants, openwork pendants, and jingle bells, says Ruslan Dzatiati, a senior official at the North Ossetian Humanities Institute. Scholars believe that the horse was buried together with its owner to...

Amazon Warrior WomenThis painting on a Greek vase depicts an Amazon woman warrior on horseback engaged in battle.Amazons in myth: History's first mention of a race of warrior women comes in Homer's ILIAD, an account of the Trojan War, probably written in the 8th to the 7th century B.C. Homer's Amazons, a race of fierce women who mated with vanquished male foes and kept only the female children they bore, were believed to occupy the area around the Black Sea. Amazon women also crop up in other Greek myths. One of the labors of Hercules, for example, required him to...

Siberian Graveyard's Secrets YEKATERINBURG, Russia In a medieval Siberian graveyard a few miles south of the Arctic Circle, Russian scientists have unearthed mummies roughly 1,000 years old, clad in copper masks, hoops and plates - burial rites that archaeologists say they have never seen before. . Among 34 shallow graves were five mummies shrouded in copper and blankets of reindeer, beaver, wolverine or bear fur. Unlike the remains of Egyptian pharaohs, the scientists say, the Siberian bodies were mummified by accident. The cold, dry permafrost preserved the remains, and the copper may have helped prevent oxidation. . The discovery adds...

  For the freedom you enjoyed yesterday... Thank the Veterans who served in The United States Armed Forces.     Looking forward to tomorrow's freedom? Support The United States Armed Forces Today!   ANCIENT WARFAREPart III: Ancient Greek Military:  Mercenaries Struggle for Hegemony MercenariesMercenaries were very important in the ancient history. The Greek armies did not need them at first, but later on they were even used in Hellas. Mercenaries were normally used because they were capable of doing something which the army could not do. That is why the Greeks hired Scythic archers, why the Persians used Greek...

If you are under Roman siege in the middle of a desert, a scorpion bomb seems like a very good idea. Collect a bunch of lethal scorpions and, very carefully, seal them in clay pots. Hurl the pots at the attackers as needed. That's exactly what the defenders of Hatra, just south of Mosul in today's Iraq, did in 198 AD. The siege was lifted in 20 days. As Adrienne Mayor writes in her intriguing book Greek Fire, Poison Arrows and Scorpion Bombs, scorpions weren't the only stinging animals pressed into service in the ancient world. A clay pot full...

The Mongol mysteries: Are 'deer stones' a clue? By Guy Gugliotta The Washington Post Sometime around 1000 B.C., a Mongolian tribesman climbed on the back of a horse and surveyed the windblown steppe that stretched as far as the eye could see. The weather was turning colder, and there wasn't enough grass for his goats. It was time to move. From the moment that decision was made, a tradition was born. Horses — yesterday's beasts of burden — became a means of escape. Soon they would become the tool of conquest, and the people of the steppe — whether Scythian,...

    Summer 2000 (8.2) Scandinavian Ancestry Tracing Roots to Azerbaijan by Thor Heyerdahl Above: Thor Heyerdahl with Peruvian children who still construct traditional boats made of reeds, the principle material that enabled early migrations on trans-oceanic voyages. Courtesy: Thor Heyerdahl. Archeologist and historian Thor Heyerdahl, 85, has visited Azerbaijan on several occasions during the past two decades. Each time, he garners more evidence to prove his tantalizing theory - that Scandinavian ancestry can be traced to the region now known as Azerbaijan. Heyerdahl first began forming this hypothesis after visiting Gobustan, an ancient cave dwelling found 30 miles ...

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...

The things found in at the burial site certify that the woman was from a distinguished tribe. According to the archaeologists, the golden head wear that looks like Kazakh Saukele (national headgear of women) is the most valuable item for the research. “The pointed golden head wear with zoomorphic ornaments has the top that looks like the arrows and is decorated with a spiral made of golden wire and jewels. A similar head wear used to be part of the official costume of the Saka tribe chieftains. It is quite possible that the woman was a daughter of a king...

Evidence of the potential genetic blending between Europeans and Asians has been discovered by a team of researchers led by the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) within the remains of Scythian warriors living over 2,000 years ago in the Altai region of Mongolia. The Scythians were already documented as the first large Eurasian culture, but were believed to be the product of migration from Europe. The researchers now suggest that the genetic blending is actually a result of the expansion of Scythian culture over the mountains. Studies on ancient mitochondrial DNA of this region suggest that the Altai Mountains played...

Tuekta is in the Altai Mountains where Russia, China, Kazakhstan and Mongolia come together. Researchers there have discovered burial mounds 2,300 to 2,800 years old and up to 250 feet (76 meters) wide. These burial mounds, called "kurgans," probably belonged to chiefs or princes among the Scythians, a nomadic people known for their horsemanship, who once had a rich, powerful empire. Excavations of some of these have revealed extraordinary treasures of gold and other artifacts well-preserved by permafrost. Nearly 200 burial mounds were discovered in Tuekta, situated along the River Ursul. The site's heart appears to once have been a...

Archeologists in Kazakhstan have discovered the grave of a gold-clad ancient Scythian warrior who has already earned himself a nickname: "The Sun Lord." Researchers uncovered the find in a Scythian grave consisting of seven burial mounds in Karaganda Region east of the capital, Astana. The opulence of the warrior's burial indicates that he was a leader as well as a fighter, expedition leader Arman Beysenov explained. "He was probably a ruler and a warrior simultaneously," Beysenov said in remarks quoted by the Kazinform news agency on July 16. "The person's torso was entirely covered with gold. The figure of a...

An international archeological expedition to Lake Issyk Kul, high in the Kyrgyz mountains, proves the existence of an advanced civilization 25 centuries ago... The expedition resulted in sensational finds, including the discovery of major settlements, presently buried underwater... Last year, we worked near the north coast at depths of 5-10 metres to discover formidable walls, some stretching for 500 meters-traces of a large city with an area of several square kilometers... We also found Scythian burial mounds, eroded by waves over the centuries, and numerous well preserved artifacts-bronze battleaxes, arrowheads, self-sharpening daggers, objects discarded by smiths, casting molds, and a...

Top 10 Discoveries of 2006 Volume 60 Number 1, January/February 2007 How do you know it's been an extraordinary year in archaeology? When the discovery of the earliest Maya writing and a 2,500-year-old sarcophagus decorated with scenes from the Iliad don't crack ARCHAEOLOGY's Top 10 list: 1. Valley of the Kings Tomb KV63 was the first tomb to be excavated in the Valley of the Kings since Tutankhamun's in 1922. The chamber held seven 18th Dynasty coffins. 2. 3-Million-Year-Old Child After years of chiseling tiny bones out of sandstone blocks from Ethiopia's Rift Valley, paleontologists announced the discovery of a...

In Mongolia archaeologists discover permafrost mummy with fur coat. Written by Ulaanbaatar correspondent Thursday, 17 August 2006 Research workers of the German archaeological institute have discovered a mummy in permafrost at excavation work in Mongolia of approximately 2,500 years old. At the "sensational find" of a sepulchre chamber of the Scythian rider people a crew of the German television sender ZDF were present. In front of the camera the archaeologists opened the sepulchre where the mummy of the Scythian soldier was stored. The mummy, conserved in permafrost, carried still a fur coat and had a decorated gilded head ornament. According...

Surprising Discoveries in Silla's Royal Tomb No. 98 (including Greco-Roman artifacts) King Nae-Mool(birth/death: unknown/402 AD) and his queen's royal tomb in Dae-Roong-Won, Kyong-ju, S. Korea was excavated in 1973-75 to yield some truly unexpected findings later. Many artifacts were quite different from those known to be produced in Korea or China. Exotic designs and materials abound. Further research established that these artifacts originated from Central Asia, Black Sea, Caucasus, Persia and Eastern Mediterranean. This is quite far away from the South Eastern tip of Korean Peninsula, where this ancient Kingdom, Silla, located. The last of 5 short videos below shows...

'Descendants of the Dragon' confirmed at the Liaohe River ValleyIn thousands of years, the Chinese people have been deeming themselves as "the descendant of the dragon" though there is no enough solid proof to support the statement. But in this year, with continually findings of dragons in archeological work at the Liaohe River Valley, the statement that the Chinese people are "the descendant of the dragon" is further confirmed. In thousands of years, the Chinese people have been deeming themselves as "the descendant of the dragon" though there is no enough solid proof to support the statement. But in this...