GHOSTS OF AMAZONS PAST...

Sarmatian Kurgan, Filipovka, South Urals, 4th c. BC

OK.  So, let’s get the terminology out of the way first.
Kurgan.  A burial mound.  Usually visible against the skyline from miles away.  And there are a lot of them.  All over Russia and even down into China and Mongolia.
Steppes.  Grasslands.  Derived from a Russian word meaning “plains”.  A grassy area that, according to Dr. Davis-Kimball, stretches from Manchuria to Hungary, and from Tibet in the south to Siberia in the north.  In other words, it’s big.  Real big.
As previously mentioned, Dr. Jeannine Davis-Kimball, Ph.D., of the University of California at Berkeley and author of Warrior Women: An Archaeologist’s Search for History’s Hidden Heroines, is one of the leading experts on the Scythian kurgans of Russia’s steppe-lands.  It was in July of 1994 that, while excavating a kurgan mound, she noticed a teenaged girl buried with a collection of arrowheads, a quiver, and an iron dagger.
This discovery was the beginning of the end for the archaeological assumption that only men were buried with – or had in life used – weapons.  It was the advent of the academic community’s reluctant admission that maybe – just maybe – there had been warrior women riding amongst the men on the steppes.  Just like Herodotus and all those other Greeks had been saying for centuries.
Gosh!  All those people…weren’t liars!  Hmmm…  Maybe Heinrich Schliemann had the right idea after all, when he decided to follow the Yellow Brick Road laid out by Homer in his Iliad?
So, here they were, lying right out in the open (well, buried deep in the earth, but you get the idea) for all to see (or excavate, analyze, and then see).  And no one had ever known they were there.  (Except for whoever buried them some time in the first millennium BC).
Not all of them were women.  Not all of the women had weapons – or horses – buried with them.  (Some had great, bronze cauldrons and fancy, gold icons, but we’ll get to that later).
But, there they were, a whole vanished – or, more accurately, previously assumed illusory – culture, come back to life like ghosts in the mist.
And, speaking of mist…it’s on to Scotland wi’ ye’…tomorrow.

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