Amazonian Tales

For centuries, the Amazons were dismissed as products of ancient Greek male erotic imagination. Today, archaeological and scientific evidence suggests otherwise. Nomadic horse-riding tribes of women who lived on the Eurasian steppes – and were capable of shooting 15–20 arrows per minute while riding – did in fact exist. Classicist and archaeologist Adrienne Mayor has assembled extensive evidence of these revolutionary women. For millennia, the only accounts of them survived in Greek myths and historical texts. Within dominant ideas about women’s roles – then and even now – their existence seemed too absurd to be real. With the rise of bioarchaeology in the 1990s, however, this perspective began to shift. Graves, once assumed to belong to men because they contained weapons, were re-examined. And surprise, surprise – in approximately 37% of such cases, the remains proved to be female! What was long considered fantasy now reshapes our understanding of women’s roles in the ancient world. In this work, racing legs become closed lips – holding back a story that insists on being told.