THE ASS-KICKING AMAZONS

Amazons Killing Greeks, Woodcut, 16th or 17th c.

Did you ever just feel like killing someone?  Maybe your kids are driving you nuts.  Or maybe it’s your husband.  Maybe the traffic is bad, or you had a bad day at the office.  Maybe your monthly friend arrived early, and the chocolate ran out already.  Or maybe it’s Friday the Thirteenth or a full moon or Mercury in Retrograde, and everyone seems like they’ve lost their collective celestial mind.  (I feel like most of these things on a daily basis – and the chocolate doesn’t even need to run out for that to happen – but I always assume that it’s the combination of my Wild Irish with my White Russian and let it go).

If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, then you understand how it is to want to off someone.  Well, the Amazons actually did it.  Regularly.

Some people, like the male-oriented and xenophobic Greeks, thought that’s what their name meant: Oiro-pata, Man-Killers.  (I don’t.  I think that such independent women as they were would have had their own name for themselves.  If that was the case, then the name probably meant something in Scythian like A-Ma-Sa-n, Chieftain of the Great Mother).

The woodcut above is from the sixteenth or seventeenth century, so it is a late-late-late representation of how people viewed these mysterious women, but there are many earlier ones (lots of which will be showing up in this blog).  The Greeks were the biggest purveyors of Amazon-related art.  Some even went so far as to receive posthumous names like “The Penthesilea Painter” and “The Amazon Painter”, (though they painted other themes, too).  I’ll be discussing their costumes and weaponry in detail in later blogs devoted to the specifics.

Suffice it to say here that the Amazons are usually depicted as either hunting or fighting.  And, if fighting male warriors, they are almost always shown getting the worst of it.  Unlike the woodcut.  (This says more about the artist than the subject, however.  One should always consider the source).  Unfortunately, these International Women of Mystery have left posterity without a self-portrait.  Betcha, if they had, it would have been the other way ‘round.

Oh well.  You say “tomato”.  However other cultures may have viewed them, there is one thing they all agreed upon: these broads were fighters.  The Amazons are continually associated with war.  Herodotus said that they worshipped the war god, whom he identified as the Greek Ares.  Many Amazons, like Penthesilea and her sisters, were said to be descended from Ares.

Legend has it that they burnt off the left breast of every female child at birth so that all of her strength would revert to her bow arm.  (This is not borne out, however, by artistic representations of Amazons.  The Greeks always painted them with two breasts, though one breast might or might not have been covered).  They were ferocious, formidable, implacable, and, as the above story indicates, unflinching.

Though they are depicted as fighting both on foot and on horseback, the Amazons are inextricably bound up with the horse, much like the hard-riding steppe tribes, the Scythians.  Few peoples in the world are so associated with horses as these two.  True, certain Native American Nations of the Great Plains, such as the Comanche and Cheyenne, were wondrous horsemen.  And some claim that the Irish are the best horsemen – and women – in the world.  Yet, none of these come even remotely close, geographically speaking, to the steppe location shared by the Amazons and Scyths.

Were these Daughters of Ares the progenitors of the later, Scythian Daughters of Heracles?