Amazons

• 1. Introduction

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  The Amazons were female warriors and hunters in Greek mythology, and the ancient Greeks never doubted they were real. They appear in the Labours of Heracles, in the Argonautica, and in Homer's Iliad. Commanded by a queen, they ran a society closed to men. They raised only their daughters and returned their sons to the fathers, whom they met only briefly to reproduce. In 2019, near Voronezh in southwestern Russia, archaeologists opened a grave holding multiple generations of female Scythian warriors, armed and wearing golden headdresses. So who were these women the Greeks placed at the edge of the known world? Where did the Greeks believe they lived, and which queens led them? Why did skeptics insist they never existed, and what have spades in the steppe turned up to answer back?

• 2. A Name Argued Over

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  The origin of the word Amazon is uncertain, and scholars have offered competing roots for centuries. One proposal traces it to an Iranian ethnonym meaning warriors, attested indirectly through a gloss in Hesychius of Alexandria. Another derives it from a Greek phrase meaning manless, or without husbands, an explanation that the scholar Hjalmar Frisk deemed unlikely. A third suggests an Iranian source meaning virility-killing. The most colorful theory came from the Greeks themselves. They folk-etymologized the name from a word meaning breastless, and Marcus Justinus claimed the Amazons cut off or burned out their right breast. Yet ancient art shows otherwise. The Amazons always appear with both breasts, though one is often covered. Author Adrienne Mayor argues the false etymology produced the myth rather than recording a real custom. Other writers reached for harsher labels. Herodotus called them killers of men. Aeschylus used a term meaning those who loathe all men, and Herodotus reported that in the Scythian language they were called Oiorpata, from oior, man, and pata, to slay.

• 3. The War At Troy

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  Penthesilea, an Amazon queen of Thracian birth, came to fight for Troy after the death of Hector. She arrived in the lost epic Aethiopis, probably composed by Arctinus of Miletus in the 6th century BCE, part of the Trojan War Epic Cycle. Her warriors initially put the Greeks under serious pressure. Only the reinvigorated hero Achilles turned the tide, and Penthesilea died facing him in single combat. Quintus Smyrnaeus, in his Posthomerica, named the attendants who came with her, among them Clonie, Polemusa, Derinoe, Evandre, Bremusa, and Thermodosa glorying with the spear. Earlier still, Amazons crossed paths with Greek heroes before the war. The hero Bellerophon faced them in Lycia, sent by King Iobates who hoped they would kill him; instead Bellerophon slew them all. The young King Priam of Troy fought beside the Phrygians when Amazons attacked them at the Sangarios River. Homer treated the Amazon myths as common knowledge across Greece, a sign they had circulated long before his time.

• 4. Heracles And Theseus

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  Hippolyte, an Amazon queen, owned a magic belt that Heracles was sent to obtain as one of his Labours. Neither side intended lethal combat, but a misunderstanding sparked a fight in which Heracles killed the queen and several others. In awe of the hero, the Amazons handed over the belt. In another version he spares the queen and instead exchanges her kidnapped sister Melanippe for it. Diodorus Siculus listed twelve Amazons who challenged and died fighting Heracles during that quest, beginning with Aella and Philippis and ending with Tecmessa and Alcippe. The Theseus story carried a different consequence. Theseus abducted Queen Hippolyte, took her to Athens, married her, and had a son named Hippolytus; in other versions the abducted woman is her sister Antiope. In revenge the Amazons invaded Greece, plundered cities along the coast of Attica, and besieged and occupied Athens. By one account Hippolyte fought on the side of Athens and was killed in the final battle along with all the Amazons.

• 5. The Lands At The Edge

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  Pontus, on the southern shores of the Black Sea in northern Anatolia, was the place authors most often named as the Amazon kingdom. There the queen resided at her capital Themiscyra, on the banks of the Thermodon river, known today as the Terme. The poet Bacchylides and the historian Herodotus both fixed the homeland here. Other writers placed it elsewhere, ranging from provinces in Asia Minor such as Lycia and Caria to the steppes around the Black Sea. Herodotus explained how some Amazons came to live in Scythia. A Greek fleet sailing home after a victory at the Thermodon carried Amazon prisoners on three ships. Out at sea the prisoners overwhelmed and killed the small crews, and though they lacked basic navigation skills they reached the Scythian shore. Once they had caught enough horses, they asserted themselves in the steppe between the Caspian Sea and the Black Sea. Strabo later visited the plains by the Thermodon and confirmed the old homeland, though by his lifetime the Amazons had reportedly retreated into the mountains. He added that other authors said they resettled beyond the Gargareans, an all-male tribe of the northern Caucasian foothills, meeting them in secret once a year during two spring months to produce children.

• 6. From Dionysus To Alexander

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  Dionysus fought the Amazons at Ephesus, according to Plutarch, then pursued the survivors who fled to Samos and killed many at a site afterward called Panaema, the blood-soaked field. In other tales the god allied with them. Polyaenus writes that after subduing the Indians, Dionysus took the Amazons into his service for his campaign against the Bactrians. Alexander the Great drew his own Amazon stories. Some historians report Queen Thalestris seeking him out to bear his child, while others, including Plutarch, dispute it. Plutarch recorded a telling moment. Alexander's naval commander Onesicritus read an Amazon passage of his Alexander History aloud to King Lysimachus of Thrace, who had taken part in the original expedition. The king smiled and asked, And where was I, then? The Talmud offers a sharper exchange. Alexander wished to conquer a kingdom of women but reconsidered when they warned him: if you kill us, people will say Alexander kills women, and if we kill you, people will say Alexander is the king whom women killed in battle.

• 7. The Roll Of Queens

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  Otrera was the first Amazon queen, born of the war god Ares and the nymph Harmonia of the Akmonian Wood, which made her a demigoddess. She was the mother of Hippolyta, Antiope, Melanippe, and Penthesilea, and the mythical founder of the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus. Myrina led a military expedition into Libya, defeated the Atlantians, and razed the city of Cerne, according to Diodorus. She named the city Mytilene after her sister, and three further cities, Cyme, Pitane, and Priene, after the Amazons who held her most important commands. Lampedo and Marpesia, named by Justin, shared power during an incursion into Europe and Asia and were slain there. Marpesia's daughter Orithyia succeeded them, admired for her skill in war, and shared power with her sister Antiope. Thalestris stands as the last known Amazon queen, said to have met Alexander in 330 BCE, her home given as the Thermodon region or the Gates of Alexander south of the Caspian Sea. Penthesilea carried a private grief among them, having killed her sister Hippolyte in a hunting accident before she ever reached Troy.

• 8. Skeptics And Spades

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  Palaephatus, who may himself have been a fictional figure, tried to explain the Amazons away in his work On Unbelievable Tales. He guessed they were really men, mistaken for women because they wore long clothing, tied their hair in headbands, and shaved their beards. He reasoned that since they did not exist in his own time, they probably never had, though he contradicted himself by casting the Sphinx as an Amazon woman. Centuries of digging have complicated his confidence. Modern historiography now draws on over a thousand nomad graves stretching from the Black Sea to Mongolia. Battle-scarred female skeletons buried with bows, arrows, quivers, and spears show that women warriors were not figments of imagination. On the lower Don and lower Volga, about 20 percent of warrior graves held women dressed for battle as men were, and armed women made up as much as 25 percent of Sarmatian military burials. The Russian archaeologist Vera Kovalevskaya argued that when Scythian men were away fighting or hunting, women had to defend themselves, their animals, and their pastures. A 2017 discovery in Armenia produced the grave of a woman buried with Iron Age jewelry whose injuries and musculature matched a horse-back warrior who frequented battle. Whether these steppe peoples truly inspired the Greek Amazons remains unproven. The city of Samsun in Turkey now keeps an Amazon Village museum, and an annual Amazon Celebration Festival takes place in the Terme district, where the Thermodon still runs.