WELCOME TO AMAZONIA! (PLEASE STOW ALL YOUR VALUABLES...)

Traditional, Rural, Pontic House

So, onward to Amazonia!  The mythological Amazons – “mythological” simply means that their existence has never been proven – are said to have lived in several, far-flung places.  Herodotus, the celebrity geographer of ancient times, said that they hailed from the steppes of what is now the Ukraine (which, oddly enough, is where my beautiful, feisty, Russian grandmother’s family comes from: a parallel that I am thoroughly enjoying).
Some chroniclers place them in Libya.  The Minoans did have contact with Egypt, and even a settlement in the Nile Delta, as evidenced by a Minoan bull-leaping fresco found there.  It is certainly possible that some of them resettled there after the eruption of Santorini, perhaps, as their contemporaries, the Semitic Hyksos, initially did, as traders or mercenaries.
Others locate these warrior-women in Asia Minor (modern Turkey), Africa proper (as with the Dahomey), or even South America.  But, it is the Amazons of the Pontic steppes with whom we are here concerned.
Their capital, Themiscyra, was said to be a city out of legend, like Camelot or Ubar or El Dorado.  Built by the Amazons with their own hands, there are a handful of suggested locations for it, the main one being near the mouth of the River Thermodon where the town of Terme sits.  But the most likely situation for this Amazon Atlantis, once perched precariously on the south shore of the Black Sea, seems to be that it now lies submerged beneath the sea’s murky waves.
In the last several decades, Dr. Jeannine Davis-Kimball has done extensive excavations on the kurgan, or burial mounds, of the Scythian steppes.  In some of them, she has found the remains of women, buried with weapons and horses.  Are these departed Scythian warrior-princesses the ghosts of Amazons past?

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