DARK MIST RISING: AVALON UNVEILED

  By ArchaiOptix - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=88625666 Rage. The great bard, Homer, employed wrath as the driving force behind the events of his  Iliad , including the deaths of his leading man, Achilles – the warrior-hero of the Greeks – and the Amazon Wonder Woman, Penthesilea. For, had the warrior woman not first killed one of her own, she would not have been compelled to find redemption in battle against the Greeks. Perhaps, she would instead have died somewhere on her native steppes, unremembered. Such a death – our loss, as well as that of Penthesilea and her people – would have been sad, indeed. Her name would have then been forever lost to time and anonymity. That ancient name conveyed some connotation of sadness:  penthos  meant “sorrow” in Ancient Greek. The second syllable of the warrior queen’s name is not so easy to decipher. Maybe, it came from the Latin verb for “silence”:  sileo . Or perhaps it was som...

  Painter of Munich: By ArchaiOptix - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=93548087 So, have any horse remains actually been found in the Scythian  kurgans ? The short answer is “Yes”. The longer answer is “Wow!” Not only have large burials yielded piles of horse bones; but a circle of twenty-two horse skulls wreathed the perimeter of one kurgan. Of course, that find was small pickings compared to what awaited archaeologists at the famous Pazyryk I site. At Pazyryk I, archaeologists discovered a burial of ten golden horses. (Not horses made of gold; palominos). This shade was highly prized in antiquity; maybe it was rarer then. Their modern descendants are famous in equine circles as the “Turkmen horse”. (I’ve never heard of it before, but then I don’t run with the “horsey set”). Other types found in the grave sprang from the crossbreeding of a small, hardy, local variety with a Central Asian breed. Although all the manes and eyebrows we...

"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...