The first mention of the Amazons is by Homer in “The Iliad”. He refers to them as the Androktones (“killers of men”). Homer says they were fighting on the side of the Trojans in the Trojan War. The warriors were led by Queen Penthesilea. She was killed by Achilles in a night raid on their camp. Later Greeks began to call them Amazons from the Greek word a-mazos meaning “without a breast”. Supposedly they removed their right breasts to make their archery more efficient. (Some historians insist that this was a misinterpretation of the legend.) The Greeks believed they were the offspring of Ares and lived in Pontus (today northeastern Turkey). They appear in myths. Hercules completes his 9th Labor by taking the Amazon queen Hippolyta’s girdle (belt). He kills her in the process, although he falls in love with her at the last second. She was giving her girdle willingly, but the other Amazons thought he was kidnapping her and attacked. One of the stories of Theseus had him kidnapping Hippolyta (she got around, apparently) and bringing her to Athens. She fell in love with him, naturally. Her followers made war with the Athenians (the Attic War) and she was killed in the battle for Athens.
Herodotus mentions them in his “History”. He wrote that they were defeated in battle by the Greeks. The captives were put on a prison ship, but they killed the men and sailed to Scythia where they mated with the men, but maintained their warrior lifestyle. Eventually, they and their menfolk migrated eastward into Russia and founded the Sarmatian culture. They became raiders roaming the steppes. Another version of this myth said that once a year, they would hook up with men from a neighboring kingdom so they could have offspring. If a baby turned out to be a boy, he was either killed or shipped off to his father. (In some versions, they crippled the boys and kept them as slaves.) They became known as Amazons from the Iranian word ha-mazan meaning “warrior”. Before you brush this all off as a myth, excavations in the area that was Sarmatia has uncovered the burial places of women who were buried with armor and weapons. The skeletons indicated an average height of 5’6” which would fit our current use of the word Amazon to refer to tall and fit woman.
I read that one historian thinks the legend of the Amazons was the Greeks’ way to express the desire for gender equality. Seriously? My theory is that in a society dominated by men, the men came up with campfire stories that would frighten themselves. What could be scarier than women warriors who could compete with men? Note that most of the tales ended with the violent death of the Amazon leader. The listeners could sleep well. Amazons became a popular subject for vase painters. The women combined sex with danger. Sound familiar?
– Amazing 381-383
– https://www.newyorker.com/books/joshua-rothman/real-amazons
– https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/amazon-women-there-any-truth-behind-myth-180950188/
1 Comment
MICHAEL R HERNDON · November 19, 2022 at 6:09 pm
One theory on the origins of the Amazons is that they were possibly Hittites, a people whose males were clean shaven & wore their hair long (as did the Philistines) & whose power center was in Asia Minor adjacent to the early Greek world. Upon first encounter, the Greeks thought them to be females.