Amazons and a Novel Idea

During my lunch breaks I often browsed the Barnes & Nobel Bookstore in downtown Minneapolis (now, sadly, closed). One day in 2016 while perusing the history section, I spotted a book titled Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Women in the Ancient World.* I didn't buy it immediately -- woman warriors are hot and all but I figured the book would be overly speculative and sensational. Yet whenever I returned to the store, it seemed to beckon. Eventually I broke down.

The purchase marked a turning point for me, not only sparking a fascination with ancient history, but stimulating an idea and an obsession that ultimately turned into my first (and only) finished novel.

As for the author, Adrienne Mayor, she is a respected scholar and writer of a highly regarded history, The Poison King.*

Amazons, of course, are the menacing warrior women that appear frequently in Greek literature and art. Sometimes they're depicted as strange, savage aliens; sometimes as tragic heroines. Many of the major heroes -- Heracles, Theseus, Achilles -- encounter Amazons during their adventures. Often the hero meets an Amazon queen in battle, kills her, then regrets it afterward in a tearful death scene, thinking he could have loved her instead.

Achilles kills Penthesilea

The consensus was that Amazon myths had little or no basis in actual history. The ancient historians didn't give them credence except Herodotus but he was considered unreliable in that regard. There was no archaeological evidence of an Amazon kingdom and no evidence that women fought as warriors in any substantial way. The myths were a product of the Greek imagination, a counterpoint perhaps to the way the fiercely patriarchal Greeks tended to keep women separated, suppressed and out of sight. All those women on vase paintings decked out in armor and wielding spears were just figments of men's dark, erotic fantasies.

But wait.

Scattered throughout the Eurasian plains are burial mounds known as kurgans and hundreds have been excavated over the last couple of centuries. In them were the remains of a nomadic people the Greeks knew as Scythians. Nearly all appeared to be warriors who were interred with weapons, armor and other objects of their lives. Naturally, these warriors must have been men.

Then DNA analysis came along and researchers applied it to the skeletons. Oddly, some were female. Probably just a fluke, a couple of exceptional individuals maybe, or possibly they were buried with armor and weapons for ceremonial reasons. As more of the remains were analyzed, more were discovered to have been women. And not only were they buried with armor and weapons, they had battle wounds to show their bona fides -- holes in their skulls, great cuts in their limbs, and so on. These women were indeed combatants and turned out to represent about 30 percent of the warriors found in the kurgans.

Thirty percent. Even if you allow that female remains may be over represented in the kurgans for some reason, it still means the Scythians were employing significant numbers of women as warriors. And, since the Greeks were in contact with the Scythians since at least 800 BCE, they almost had to be the source material for the Amazon myths. (Which isn't to say the myths don't remain erotic fantasies.)

Who were these Scythians? What was their culture like? Mayor suggests it was highly egalitarian, at least in regards to gender relations. She points to things found in the graves that aren't weapons or armor, things like spindle whorls. 

In Greek society, only women spun thread. But in the Scythian burial mounds, spindle whorls were found with the male warriors as well as the female. All Scythians, it seemed, spun thread.

~

My imagination swirled. I began to wonder what a truly gender-egalitarian society would look like. I wasn't sure, but it would be fun to explore the possibility. 

This line of thought converged with another that I'd indulged for some time: What if you could go back in time and see what actually happened? How much of "history" would turn out to be wrong? A lot, I think.

Then it hit me: Castaways from the 21st century are hurled back 2,500 years and end up in the foothills of the Caucasus Mountains not far from the Black Sea. After a wilderness adventure, they end up in a Greek colony on the coast. The main character is a woman and finds life with the paternalistic Greeks hard to bear. Later she hooks up with a band of Scythians who are more to her liking.

This was the beginnings of a plot. It would be an action-adventure story that would give readers a look at two contrasting societies -- the Greeks, whose culture is much like our own (despite recent progress); and the Scythians whose ways might seem weird even to modern liberal sensibilities.

I was energized and I had much work to do.

[Edit: The book is published and available *here.]