DARK MIST RISING: AVALON UNVEILED

Amazons once again comprise my control group. And no group in the world has been so linked with horses as the mythological Amazons of the steppes. But why? What caused these legendary women to be so intrinsically bound up with their mounts, remembered for posterity as near-centaurs? Before we can compare the mythic Amazon horse culture to those of the more historically-accepted Scythians and Picts, we need to examine the actual evidence – if any survives – that Amazons employed horses in combat: that is, as cavalry. Herodotus identified the Amazons and Scyths as “the progenitors of the Sauromatians”. Apparently from horseback, in addition to bows and spears, they wielded lariats as weapons, much as the fifth century Huns -  also steppe-dwellers - used nets. Ancient sources described how the horsewomen wheeled their mounts, adroitly whirling their lariats to ensnare their foes. Pomponius Mela, a Roman geographer, proclaimed them "expert" in the "cowboy way" (hi

So, did the ancient Greek reporters send us on a “wild horse-chase”? Maybe. But I tend to think that where there’s smoke, there’s fire. From Melanippe to Marc, we have discovered quite a few horse names. The problem being that all but one of them belong to quasi-mythological Amazon warriors. There is a Grand Canyon-sized gap in the Scythian culture, where we have names, but none pertaining to horses. The Picts have also provided us with a name, but only one. Both the Scythian and Pictish languages also leave something to be desired, in that very little of them remains to us. Tough to compare names when you have a plethora in one language, none in the next, and only one in the third and final language. Hmmm…. Maybe all that leaves us with is the old, archaeological adage: “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” Or maybe the question becomes: Do we have  other  evidence demonstrating the importance of horses to these cultures and thus their cultural connectivity to on

This is the "Maglocunos Stone", boasting fifth century names in both Latin and Ogham, the preferred written script of the Picts. Yes, it bears directly on this post. And, no: I'm not going to tell you how. For that, you need to pick up a copy of "The Annals of Anavere". We have even less of the Pictish language than we do of Scythian. And, of that, very little has been translated. Nevertheless, I went “hunting” for Pictish horse names. I didn’t find much. I did find a Pictish kings list. I located a couple of glossaries of Pictish male and female names. And, of course, there are the scattered Pictish words I’ve “collected” over my last zillion years of research. It’s not a lot. But here’s what I’ve got. Pictish has never been officially “diagnosed” as either a Celtic tongue – one of the languages dangling from a branch of the Proto-Indo-European language tree – or something else. (Scholars are divided on this issue, so I’m not going to weigh in very

Carved stone Scythian horse-headed pestle. We don’t have much Scythian “to our name”. Meaning: there isn’t much of the language left to us moderns. There is enough, however, to discern something that masquerades as their possible word for “horse”. My Scythian glossary says that  ippa  means “mare” or “horse” in that ancient language. Hippocrates – whose name would also seem to indicate “horse” – says in his  Diseases  that  hippaka , or  ippaka , is the name of a mare’s milk cheese manufactured by the Scyths. Unfortunately, none of the names for the powerful goddesses or warrior-chieftains recorded in that glossary include the word  ippa . Even so, I’m not sure these words – and the other Amazon horse names, like  Hippolyte ,  Melanippe , and  Ainippe , don’t derive from the language of the Greeks who reported them. Greek boasts several words for horse, including: §    Foráda , “mare” §    Á λoyo, “horse” §    Ίππος , “horse” This last,  Ίππος , translates into E

"Amazon Breaking a Savage Horse", 1843, bronze, by Jean-Jacques Feuchére. On display at the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts on the Stanford University campus in Stanford, California.  By I, BrokenSphere, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4270411 No culture in history has been more bound up with one animal than that of the Amazons. Fabled warrior women of the steppes, they are known to have fought from horseback and to have employed weapons, such as the long spear and bow-and-arrow, that enabled them to capitalize on their skill as cavalrywomen and minimize any physical shortcomings. As women then and now generally possess less upper body strength and a shorter reach than men, it would have availed them nothing to have fought on foot or hand-to-hand. So, it seems that the Amazons played to their strengths. Horses were and are an intrinsic part of steppe culture. Steppe nomads still ride horseback as part of daily life, and