Searching for the Amazons Read online

  Searching for the

  AMAZONS

  The Real Warrior Women of the Ancient World

  JOHN MAN

  For T

  CONTENTS

  Map: The Realms of the Amazons

  Introduction: Changing Myths, Emerging Truths

  1 A Legend and Its Meaning

  2 Close Encounters of the Scythian Kind

  3 A Short Chapter on Breasts

  4 Treasures in Bone and Gold

  5 The Ice Maiden

  6 Sarmatians: The Roots of the Legend

  7 The Return of the Mounted Archer

  8 Amazonia: From Dreams to a New Reality

  9 A Painting, Two Plays and a Suicide

  10 The Amazons of ‘Black Sparta’

  11 Amazons with Wings: Russia’s Night Witches

  12 Wonder Woman: The Secret Origins of an Amazon Princess

  Epilogue: Halfway to Amazonia

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  Picture Acknowledgements

  Illustrations

  Index

  Introduction

  CHANGING MYTHS, EMERGING TRUTHS

  WHEN I WAS SIX, MY PARENTS TOOK ME TO SEE A STAGE version of Peter Pan in London. I was amazed by Peter’s ability to fly, a skill he passes on to the Darling children. I asked my mother if she could teach me. She told me to ask Peter. So I wrote to him, c/o whatever theatre it was. To my intense joy, he replied. Revealing a remarkable ability to use a typewriter, he told me that the key was practice. My mother warned that it might take a while. I was up for it, and set about learning to fly by jumping off my parents’ bed, many times, with my mother assuring me that I had remained aloft just a split second longer each time I jumped. It was hard work, and progress immeasurable. Soon it was time for tea. I don’t recall a second flying lesson.

  Growing up in an English village, I lacked a ready source of books but read comics, which were already evolving into what would become graphic novels. One of the protagonists was Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future, who was totally convincing to me. Another was Superman, who wasn’t. At eight, I had grown older and wiser. I knew from personal experience that flying was impossible. For me, Superman lacked credibility. I simply did not buy into any of his abilities, super-strength, super-vision, all the rest.

  I was out of step with popular culture. Superheroes, a term that includes superheroines and supervillains, have remained the mainstays of countless comics, graphic novels and films for fifty years, and show no sign of falling from grace. One website lists 699 of them in alphabetical order from A-Bomb to Zoom. Only one appeals to me: not because she’s been around for over seventy years, not because she has recently starred in her own blockbuster, but because of the depth of her back-story. This is Wonder Woman, daughter of Zeus, princess of the Amazons.

  In fact, Wonder Woman is even more Amazonian than the Amazons of Greek legend. About 2,750 years ago, the Greeks spun tales about their Amazons as superb women warriors in order to show how terrific men were to defeat them in battle or tumble them into bed. Wonder Woman is not about to be defeated or bedded, even by superheroes. She is equal to, even superior to, any man, super or not. The ancient fable has evolved to suit today’s market for superheroes.

  But there is now much more to the Amazons than myth.

  Aristotle defined man as a political animal, meaning he was most at home in a polis, a city-state like his own Athens. Well, he was wrong in two senses – wrong morally, at least from today’s perspective, because he ignored Athens’s women; and also wrong in the sense of being incorrect. Long before his time, people who were no less human than Greeks had developed an entirely un-polis-like existence on the grasslands of inner Asia, one in which men and women shared a different way of life, without cities or states. The men were both herders and warriors. So were their women.

  Thanks to archaeologists, we now know more about them than Aristotle possibly could. Wonder Woman, it turns out, had real ancestral sisters. Right across inner Asia are grave mounds, tens of thousands of them. These tombs were made by ‘Scythians’ – a generalized term for several related cultures – who were expert in using the grasslands that run in irregular swathes from Hungary to Mongolia. Most tombs were robbed; but some contained treasures, preserved by cold. Archaeologists have found – are finding, will go on finding – what the grave-robbers missed: deep-frozen gold, decorations, clothing, bones and bodies. Among them are women whose possessions included weapons and whose remains show signs of violent death: real Amazons, products of a different way of life and a far more sophisticated one than the Greeks dreamed of.

  The myth endured, growing new branches down the centuries, influencing art and literature and popular culture, giving the name of Amazon not only to individual warrior women (and countless women fighting for countless causes) but also, more accurately, to very rare groups of women fighters. The myth interacted with the real world: the Amazon rainforest and amazon.com are branches of the same tree. Another branch is Wonder Woman, with her surprisingly radical agenda. In the vision of Wonder Woman’s creator – not Zeus, but William Moulton Marston, in All Star Comics No. 8 in 1941 – Amazons were as strong and sexy as in Greek legend, but destined for domination of men not defeat by them. That (he believed) was the way to enduring peace between women and men. ‘Give them an alluring woman stronger than themselves to submit to,’ he said, ‘and they’ll be proud to become her willing slaves!’ Aristotle would have been appalled.

  1

  A LEGEND AND ITS MEANING

  IMAGINE YOURSELF TO BE A SUITABLY EDUCATED SCHOLAR transported back in time to Athens 2,500 years ago. It’s a fine spring day. Wishing to feel in tune with Athenian history, you find yourself climbing the Areopagus, the summit of creamy marble near the Acropolis. You know it as the Hill of Ares, named after the god of war – Mars as he would become in Roman times. You are not alone. You come upon an old man in a tunic, resting on a boulder, his head on a stick. You could do with a break. You start a conversation. He’s glad of the company, and something of a historian himself. You ask: was this really the famous rock on which the early city council met? Of course it was, he says. He explains that it has nothing to do with Ares. No one ever worshipped Ares here. It’s actually named after arae, curses, because at the bottom of the hill is the cave of the Dread Ones, the Awful Goddesses, the Eumenides, the Furies, who hunted and cursed criminals. The council sat here because it was the key to the city from ancient times, long before the Acropolis. Why, this was the place that stopped the Amazons when they attacked Athens. Oh, you say, you mean the Amazons were real? You thought it was just one tale among many. Of course they were real, these warrior women who lived somewhere to the east, just beyond the edge of the civilized world. Tales passed down the generations – from before writing, before the Siege of Troy, before Homer – recorded how the heroes of old had actually visited them. The Amazons were as much part of Greek history as the gods.

  Ah, you say, so you believe in the gods?

  ‘Well, of course, no one has actually seen a god,’ he explains. ‘At least, not in my time.’ But the evidence is there in the stories told by our forefathers and in all the shrines and the rituals and sacrifices and oracles and dreams and the way people behave. ‘Do you know what men are like in battle? Have you seen the wildness of a bereaved woman? They’re possessed! We are all driven by the gods. That’s why we pray to them, and please them with sacrifices.’ To doubt the gods would be to doubt Greek identity. ‘So of course we believe the gods to be real, and the Amazons too.’

  We, here and now, in the twenty-first century, have our doubts. Why should anyone take these beliefs seriously? Because they are evidence of a sort – doorways to the minds of thos
e who lived in a long-vanished society that is still with us, rooted in our thought, government, art, drama. Perhaps in our minds as well as theirs the gods represent psychological truths about rage, love, jealousy, loyalty and betrayal. Perhaps also the legends hint at historical truths, as Homer’s great epic of a legendary war points towards the real city of Troy that you can still visit today. It’s worth taking a look at the legends. We may learn something about our history and about ourselves.

  Stories of the Amazons arose in the dream-time before written records, centuries before the fifth century BC the Golden Age of the Greeks. Back then, the ancestors of the Greeks dominated the eastern Mediterranean from great cities, like Tiryns, Argos and Mycenae, after which their Bronze Age culture is now named. Some time around 1250 BC the Mycenaean Greeks fought a people across the Aegean in what is now western Turkey. They were probably Luwians, a culture related to the Hittites of central Turkey.1 In any event, they were not Greeks. Their main city was the port of Troy, today’s Hisarlik, where Troy’s ruin is a tourist site. The legends blamed the start of the war on a Trojan who stole the divinely beautiful Helen from the Greeks. The storytellers gave the Trojans Greek names: Paris, Priam, Hector, Hecuba. Homer, rewriting the legends in the Iliad, mentions ‘Tiryns with her tremendous walls’. Tiryns, like its sister-city Mycenae, was and is real. Both had tremendous walls, which are still tremendous today – vast blocks of stone, each carved to fit its neighbour, irregular and snug as newly moulded clay.

  Our first story concerns Eurystheus, king of Argos, Mycenae or Tiryns, perhaps all three, for versions vary. It sounds a little bit credible, because they were and are all real places. But no one knows if Eurystheus was real, let alone when he ruled, because at that time the Greeks had no script and no records. His legendary rival was the semi-divine, ingenious and muscular hero Heracles (Hercules as he became in Roman times). Heracles needs to expiate the crime of killing his own children in a fit of madness. So he accepts the challenges laid down by Eurystheus: he must take on twelve tasks, all of which are supposedly missions impossible, but the most heroic of all Greeks accomplishes them all, as he must, for he is one of those who, after the collapse of Mycenae in 1100 BC and after 300 more dark-age years, became one of the founding fathers of what we call Ancient Greece.

  Task No. 9 is given by the king’s daughter, Admete, a priestess of Hera (Juno to the Romans), the goddess who is always seeking Heracles’s destruction. Admete covets the power of the queen of the Amazons, Hippolyte as she is in Greek (Hippolyta in later times). Her name reveals something, because it means ‘Releases the Horses’ – in Greek, not some Amazonian tongue, so clearly we are in the realm of fable, not historical truth. On the other hand, she shares the horsey element of her name (hippo, as in hippopotamus, ‘water horse’) with many other Amazons – the Greeks knew these awesome creatures were horse-riders.

  Like many a legendary and semi-divine figure, Hippolyte is defined by her attribute, a golden ‘girdle’, a belt of some kind, perhaps to hold a dagger or sword. The girdle is the MacGuffin in this story, a MacGuffin being defined by the film director Alfred Hitchcock as something that everyone wants and which therefore drives the plot of a film, or in this case a legend. Sometimes, the MacGuffin is merely desired for reasons no one can quite understand. Sometimes, it really is powerful, like the Ark itself in Raiders of the Lost Ark. In this case the girdle is more like the ring in Lord of the Rings. It has no power of its own, but it drives people mad with desire. Hippolyte was given it by her father, the war god Ares, and he was the son of Zeus (the Roman Jupiter), so she, as granddaughter of the top god, owns something which pretty much means she should rule the world. That’s why Admete wants it for her Mycenaean people, and why it would be good for the future of Greece if Heracles can get it.

  So he ventures eastwards, out of Greek territory, along the southern shores of the Black Sea. If there is a smidgen of truth in this fable, the journey would have taken Heracles and his companions close to territory claimed by the Hittites of central Turkey. On the Black Sea coast, Hittite rule was tenuous. This was no-man’s-land, occupied by who knew what barbarians. The Greeks filled this blank with their worst fears, a tribe of women, for what could be more threatening to a male-dominated society than untamed women? What more of a challenge to male warriors than to tame them?

  As rumours become credible when sourced to a friend of a friend, so legends gain conviction if firmly located in time and place. The Greeks attached this one to the river Thermodon, now known as the Terme, which wanders across a grassy plain. The Amazon warrior women had a capital, Themiscyra,2 now overlain by the little town of Termes, near the river’s mouth. The people of Termes are grateful for the link, according to their website, because they hold an annual festival celebrating the Amazons – ‘ladies-only archery, horseback-riding, cooking contests and row-boat rides’. Archery and horses sound appropriate, cookery and rowing less so.

  The Amazons have long had their reputation, recorded in the words of many later writers: a people great in war, and if ever they gave birth to children, they reared the females and killed the boys. Diodorus, writing in Sicily in the first century BC, says the Amazon queen ‘made war upon people after people of neighbouring lands, and as the tide of her fortune continued favourable, she was so filled with pride that she gave herself the appellation of Daughter of Ares, but to the men she assigned the spinning of wool.’ He goes on about how she trained the Amazon girls in hunting and warfare, and conquered her neighbours, and built palaces and shrines galore, and handed power to queen after queen ‘who ruled with distinction and advanced the nation of the Amazons in both power and fame’, until many generations later Heracles arrived.

  He camps. Queen Hippolyte comes to see him. He explains about her girdle (not, it seems, troubled by linguistic differences). They get on well. Perhaps, as some versions say, they are attracted to each other. She agrees to give him her girdle, just like that, no questions asked. But inspired by Heracles’s opponent, the goddess Hera, some Amazons whip up their troops with the fear that the Greeks are about to kidnap the queen. They charge, Heracles kills Hippolyte, seizes her girdle and beats a hasty retreat with it, back to Tiryns, where he places it in the temple of Hera.

  That’s the default version of the legend. The many other versions before and since pile detail on detail. In one, Heracles resorts to a surprise attack on the unsuspecting Amazons. In another, Heracles and Hippolyte fight it out in a long duel. Or there is a great battle between the two armies, with many combatants being named on both sides. Heracles kills Aella, named for her speed, but now too slow, then Philippis, and Prothoe, a sevenfold victor, and Eriboea, who boasts she needs no help but finds she’s wrong, and another eight of them, all named, the last being Alcippe, who had vowed to die a maiden, and does, falling to Heracles’s sword. So, in Diodorus’s words, ‘the race of them was utterly exterminated.’

  Well, not exactly, because there was a problem with the Amazons. Their Black Sea homeland, though part of legend, was also part of the real world and, as the Greeks began to explore further, they would have discovered that there was, in point of fact, no nation of Amazons. To retain credibility, they needed another homeland. Legend provided one. Herodotus, writing in the mid-fifth century BC repeats it.

  When the Greeks sail away from the River Thermodon, they take with them a bunch of Amazons. Once at sea, these battle-hardened warriors mutiny, slay their captors and seize the ship. Unable to handle it, they are blown 400 kilometres north across the Black Sea to the Sea of Azov – the shallow, marshy lake that the Greeks called Maeotis – landing them somewhere near the marshes at the mouth of the River Don. This is the land of the horse-riding Scythians. The Amazons steal some horses and set off in search of booty. The Scythians determine to resist, but, having discovered that the new arrivals are women, they set about trying to win them over by persuasion. Young Scythian men camp peacefully nearby and edge closer day by day. They see some Amazons leaving camp to relieve themse
lves on the steppe, the way girls do in Mongolia today. One of the lads approaches. They have sex, the difference in language being no hindrance. She makes signs: Let’s meet again – bring a friend – so will I. The word spreads, the camps combine. The girls start to learn Scythian. ‘Come back with us,’ say the men. ‘We’ll marry you.’ In Herodotus’s words, the independent-minded girls demur:

  Our ways are too much at variance. We are riders, our business is with the bow and the spear, and we know nothing of women’s work. But in your country no woman has anything to do with such things – your women stay at home in their wagons occupied with feminine tasks, and never go out to hunt or for any other purpose. We could not possibly agree.

  Instead they tell the men to go off home, bring back their share of their family property and settle the other side of the Don. Agreed. All migrate three days east and three days north, forming a new tribe, the Sauromatians (more on them later). The women keep to their old ways, hunting on horseback, sometimes with their men, sometimes without, raiding and fighting. ‘They have a marriage law which forbids a girl to marry until she has killed an enemy in battle.’ Thus the Amazons can remain in Greek legends as a distant nation, though when all this is supposed to have happened is lost in the mists of time.

  The next chapter in the saga of the Amazons concerns Theseus, legendary founder of Athens. Plutarch, writing in the first century AD takes the story as seriously as possible, trying to tease history from hearsay. It’s a hopeless task, because the facts, if there are any, are lost in a mass of contradictory folklore. ‘Nor is it to be wondered at,’ says Plutarch, commenting on his inability to write a definitive account, ‘that in events of such antiquity, history should be in disorder.’ He has many sources, but they all disagree. Names and events shift like phantoms, and no one has a clue when these supposedly great events happened.