Amazonian Cavalry: The Dying Ember...

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" (his word, my phrase).

In her book, Warrior Women: An Archaeologist’s Search for History’s Hidden Heroines, Jeanine Davis-Kimball tells us that:

Greek literature, as well as art, abounds with details of these fierce women warriors, beginning in the eighth century BC when Homer and Arctinus of Miletus composed their epic poems about the Trojan War…

She relates that "Lysias says the Amazons were the first to mount and ride horses” and adds:

Apollonius Rhodius refers to the herds of horses they kept, partly for sacrifice. If they were part of the first or early waves of horse-pastoralist people, coming from the steppes, via the southern shore of the Black Sea, they may have been nomadic or semi-nomadic women (such as those whose graves were found in the Ukrainian steppe…) …who were good horsewomen and practiced rites in which horses were sacrificed.

She mentions also that Plato praised their “readiness to fight in defense of their nation” alongside that of the Sauromatian women, and that Aeschylus called them “virgins fearless in battle”. In his later addendum to the Iliad, Quintus of Smyrna (now Izmir in Turkey) tells us that Achilles fatally speared Penthesilea while she was still a-horse.

This evidence – although certainly qualifying as literature – is somewhat less than literal. So, let us take a look at something that is literal: the grave-goods. What can they tell us about the importance of horses in Amazonian culture?

Again, Dr. Davis-Kimball comes to the rescue. A renowned archaeologist specializing in the excavation of Scythian kurgan mounds (burials), she references “a Saka woman’s burial abundantly provided with bronze harness rings that have been used to harness the seven horses in her grave…” The Saka were nomads from the eastern boundaries of steppe-country, ranging as far east as the borders of what is now China. Experts debate how much crossover existed between the Saka and Scythian cultures.

Also mentioned is the Greek colony of Samsun, which is the more modern name for ancient Amisos. This settlement was founded in the sixth century BC by settlers from Miletus on the Aegean coast. Miletus, in turn, was situated fairly close to the temple of Ephesus, which was rumored to have been built by Amazons. Certainly, the Artemis-worshipping priestesses of Ephesus had a great deal in common with Amazons.

Artemis was a virginal goddess of the hunt, who sometimes demanded sacrifices – both human and animal. She could be fierce in her warding-off of male advances. Strange creatures, oddly evocative of Amazons, were found in a first century BC grave at Amisos: bronze “…seahorses ridden by fierce-looking nymphs in helmets who were brandishing swords…” Were these “nymphs” intended as an ancient representation of Amazons? Maybe even from the Amazonian point of view?

Greek ceramics provide us with the largest quantity of Amazon depictions. Surprisingly – and while keeping their own womenfolk sequestered at home – those macho, patriarchal Greeks couldn’t get enough of the liberated, warlike Asian women warriors, at least in the abstract. They seem to have commissioned and collected pottery that depicted Amazons springing to vibrant, black-white-and-red life and given these in large part…to their own ladies. For some reason, modest Greek women apparently relished the sight of other, foreign women decked out in battle gear and riding boldly forth into the fight, for these images appear on artifacts that must have belonged to women, such as perfume bottles.

It makes one wonder why the men, so bent on suppressing any sign of female independence – let alone fostering outright defiance – in their own womenfolk, allowed and even encouraged it in their Amazon cartoons: early Wonder Women. Were they reminding their women of what happens to all who defy the status quo: a bloody and ignominious death? If so, they seem to have defeated their own purpose, for it is clear that if the Amazons died in ignominy, killed by masculine foes, they lived on in infamy. Perhaps that is what so caught the imaginations of those nameless, faceless women, sequestered so long ago in the ancient Greek equivalent of a sultan’s harem or medieval convent: the possibilities of a female’s name and fame living on in memory.

Davis-Kimball says “Amazon women warriors began to appear on Greek ceramics in the seventh century BC. During the Classical Age, about 500 to 323 BC, the motif became so popular, it was given its own name, amazonomachy…” Incidentally, many of the vases pictured in Women Warriors illustrate Amazons in conjunction with horses. An Amazon war party, on foot and on horseback, emerges from the red background of a fifth century Attic Black Figure pot. A wine krater describes a stealthy Amazon leading her horse by the reins. On a lekythos bloom three Amazons in full battle panoply and – you guessed it – on horseback. And one of the Five Brothers kurgans from the north Black Sea region of Russia yields a pelike with mounted Amazons doing combat.

Looking backward in time through these vases, one has the sense of early Greek painters – the Charles Russells and Frederick Remingtons of their day – marveling in wonder and enthusiasm as they rendered these foreign oddities, much as Russell and Remington captured the dying of the Old West in their paintings: with admiration and a sense of nostalgia for a time and place that was almost, but not quite yet, gone. They remind me, too, of an old friend from childhood: the book, Woman Chief, by Rose Sobol. A Crow warrior of the Great Plains, Woman Chief fought as a woman in a predominantly male world, earning her literal name by rising to the highest stature her realm would allow: that of head of her family and a respected chieftain of her adopted nation.

Strange. They say that, where there’s smoke, there’s fire. But how much fire is there? (Or was there)?

Did these old stories – in history/fiction (literature) and art – derive from a conflagration: patriarchal Greek outrage at a different way of life, that of free women who dared to face off with them and their Mycenaean ancestors in battle? Was it a bonfire: warming stories told around the hearth about a strange group rumored to be living to the east (just far enough away to do no real harm) and comfortingly subordinate to the Hittite Empire, whose women were equal to their men and rode beside them in the hunt and in combat? Or was it a mere spark: just the occasional presumptuous, foreign woman riding amongst male compatriots or challenging a man, as Medea did the ancient Greek Jason? More importantly, is there now remaining to us an ember, smoldering under the ash, waiting to be uncovered by archaeologists like Jeanine Davis-Kimball and fanned into flame?

We’ll get into that more in the next section: Scythian horse burials…

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Davis-Kimball, Jeannine, and Mona Behan. Warrior Women: an Archaeologist's Search for History's Hidden Heroines. Warner, 2003.

Rothman, Joshua. “The Real Amazons.” The New Yorker, The New Yorker, 19 June 2017, www.newyorker.com/books/joshua-rothman/real-amazons.

Sobol, Rose. Woman Chief. Dell Publ., 1976.

Whitlock, Robin. “Amazon Warrior Woman on Horseback Discovered on 2,500-Year-Old Vase.” Ancient Origins, Ancient Origins, www.ancient-origins.net/news-history-archaeology/amazon-warrior-woman-horseback-discovered-2500-year-old-vase-003207.

Wilde, Lyn Webster. On the Trail of the Women Warriors: the Amazons in Myth and History. Thomas Dunne Books, 2000.