What can the Amazons teach us?

It is a fact – even though it may have escaped The New York Times – that the Amazons were real fighting and warring women of the Scythian steppes, which extended from the Danube basin all the way to Mongolia. In the last ten years, advances in DNA techniques have allowed archaeologists to determine the sex of bodies in kurgans – burial mounds scattered throughout the steppes. Conventionally identified as ‘warriors’ interred with their weapons and horses, the remains have often turned out to be those of women.

It makes eminent sense. Given their environment and the lack of restraining structures, nomadic people lived by consensus (DNA analysis of horses shows that many mares were domesticated, but just one stallion; my wild conjecture is that girls were the first who took to wild fillies, and grew up together in a camp). Fluidity of roles prevailed, all the way down to the family. How could one stop girls, living among the herds, from building attachments to horses? From riding with the boys to becoming skilled archers, and then on to wielding a battle axe, the progression was open-ended. When raiders attacked a camp, all had to fight, particularly if the men had themselves gone on long-distance raids.

Across the whole Eurasian continent, the steppes border agricultural lands to the south. The settled peoples – from Greece to China – developed many stories and myths about these free-ranging nomadic people and their warrior women. Where equivalent conditions in Africa prevailed, equivalent myths often materialised.

When comparing underlying themes in antiquity about Amazons, one is struck by a bifurcation. I am oversimplifying to the extreme. The Greeks killed Amazons in battle (though they may have had regrets, as Achilles did after slaying Penthesilea).

Other civilisations, mainly east and south of the Mediterranean, tell of pitched but inconclusive battles, followed by duels among opposing leaders, and ending in consensual sex all around. After that, the Amazons would return to their free life. They would keep the girls and send the boys to their fathers. This ‘division’ may reflect a link between agriculture and patriarchy. (Whether Amazons were actually virgins, or simply unmarried, is not clear to me from the sources. I suspect that the latter is the case. This ambiguity is a recurring topos in antiquity.).

Why the Greeks developed a topos involving the destruction of the ‘strange’ and the ‘other’ is anyone’s guess. It certainly antedates the Persian Wars. The topos of battle ending in friendship between the contenders rather than death, on the other hand, is present in the Epic of Gilgamesh, possibly 3,000 years old.

The underlying theme that the ‘foreign’ has to be destroyed, however, has become a Western archetype. The ‘clash of civilisations’ is but a current example.

The post was first published on DeepDip.

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1 The nomadic lifestyle even crosses gendered tasks like iron smelting. Usually a strictly male domain, according to the Narts, women invented ironworking (see L’Amazone et la cuisinière: Anthropologie de la division sexuelle du travail by Alain Testart (2014)). The Narts lived on the Caucasian steppes and in the mountains between the Black and Caspian Seas (see The Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Women Across the Ancient World by Adrienne Mayor (2014)). Again, it makes sense: where iron is found in bogs, ironworking is a comparatively sedentary activity.