From the archive: The remains of more than 300 ancient warrior women have been unearthed over the years — and more discoveries are likely, researchers say. Here's their story — and why scholars chose to ignore their history for decades.
Penthesilea was described as powerful Amazon queen — a group of fierce women warriors that matched men in strength and skills. They fought on horseback, were excellent with a bow and were great hunters. Whether Penthesilea was a real, historical figure or not, the ancient Greeks were fascinated with the idea of strong female warriors.
At least until archaeological techniques began to advance starting in the 1970s, when a number of female warrior graves were identified in Central Asia that might well correspond to the legendary Amazonians.The Greeks believed the fierce, horse-loving women came from exotic lands to the northeast of Greece, an area that many researchers now believe corresponded to Scythia — a vast territory stretching roughly from north of the Black Sea in the west to Mongolia in the east.
She says that many of the early images the Greeks made of Amazons often portrayed them more like Greek women. But as time went on, the images began to portray Amazons that looked more like Scythians on horseback with bows, probably as the Greeks began to come into contact with the nomadic cultures of Scythia.The Greeks weren’t the only ones who wrote about these women. Amazons were mentioned in texts from the Persians, Egyptians and Chinese, but their accounts differed a little.
Egyptian papyrus fragments tell a tale of an Egyptian king, Pedikhons, who fought an Amazon queen Serpot for three days before they become so exhausted they form an alliance.These myths would persist for centuries — the Amazon River’s name even came from reports heard by European colonial explorers about egalitarian tribes in South America.
Despite leading Greek historians and philosophers like Herodotus and Plato mentioning women in the Black Sea and Caucasus region living similarly to the mythical Amazons, Mayor wrote in a follow up email that some modern scholars “prefer to claim that Amazons were invented by Greeks to be defeated by male heroes, or that the Amazons were merely symbols of ‘others’ — ‘monstrous women who refuse to marry.
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