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