Amazons

by John Man

  To someone without a horse, it was a nightmare, especially in winter, when the temperature plunges to –40° (Centigrade or Fahrenheit, it’s the same at –40) and ice-storms cover the grass in a frozen armour; or springtime rains, which turn earth to mud; or high summer, when grasses fade and rain fails. Even on a fine summer’s day, with larks twittering in a vast dome of blue, visitors seem to communicate by semaphore, because they’re swatting flies. To horse-people, whose tents have dung fires to cope with winter cold and summer flies, the steppe is at least security, and at best unbounded, glorious freedom.

  Here the Scythians lived, with ways that for a Greek were barbaric, literally: they couldn’t speak Greek, only their own incomprehensible bar-bar-bar. The Greeks stereotyped them as fat, flabby and not much interested in sex, a view that does not fit with their reputation as warriors. Though some groups had taken to farming and had permanent houses, most were nomads who lived in ox-drawn wagons, carrying felt tents, divided into two or three rooms. The women lived in the wagons, while the males rode on horseback followed by their herds. They would stay in one area and moved on only when there was no more pasture.

  Herodotus listed their peculiar habits. They blinded their slaves and forced them to labour at stirring milk, separating it to make the dozens of products that Mongolians use today: yoghurts, whey, curds, fermented drinks of many kinds, from the mild-but-bitter mare’s-milk beer known as kumiss to spirits like camel’s-milk brandy.fn2 They sacrificed animals by strangling them and boiling them over a fire made from their bones. They sacrificed men to their war god – to whom Herodotus refers by the Greek name, Ares – by slitting the victim’s throat, while prisoners had their arms and legs cut off nearby. In war, they drank the blood of the first man they killed. Enemies slain in battle were brought to the king, who turned the flesh of their skulls into soft handkerchiefs. ‘Sometimes they flay a whole body, and stretch the skin on a wooden frame which they carry around with them when they ride.’ The skulls of their worst enemies they sliced off across the forehead to make drinking cups. ‘When important visitors arrive, these skulls are passed around and the host tells the story of them … Which passes for a proof of courage.’ To make an oath or ‘solemn compact’, Scythians drank a mixture of wine and blood, into which a weapon was dipped. One Scythian group, the Argippaei, ‘are said to be bald from birth, women and men alike.’

  Herodotus mentions eight different sub-groups (including the Sauromatians). One of these groups, the Tauri, lived on the Black Sea coast, and were particularly feared by the Greeks because ‘it is the custom of the Tauri to sacrifice to the Maiden Goddess’ – apparently Iphigenia, daughter of Agamemnon, though this seems odd for a non-Greek tribe – ‘all shipwrecked sailors and such Greeks as they happen to capture upon their coasts; their method of sacrifice is, after the preliminary ceremonies, to hit the victim on the head with a club,’ then fix the head on a stake.

  When a Scythian king died, the body was embalmed, a process that Herodotus describes as if giving a recipe: ‘The belly is slit open, cleaned out, and filled with various aromatic substances, crushed galingale,fn3 parsley-seed and anise.’ It was then sewed up, covered in wax and taken round to different tribes, who in ritual mourning cut bits off their ears, made ‘circular motions with their arms’ – a gesture still used in Mongolia today – gashed their foreheads and noses, and pushed arrows through their left hands. Finally, the corpse was placed in a pit, along with the bodies of strangled servants and horses, and covered with a great mound. A year later, fifty more servants and fifty more horses were throttled, gutted, stuffed with chaff and fixed upright with stakes around the grave.

  When non-royal people became old, at least among one group, the Massagetae (about whom more in a moment),

  they have one way only of determining the time to die, namely this: when a man is very old, all his relatives give a party and include him in a general sacrifice of cattle, then they boil the flesh and eat it; this they consider the best form of death. Those who die of disease are not eaten but buried, and it is held a misfortune not to have lived long enough to be sacrificed.

  Among other groups, the dead were taken round to relatives in a wagon for forty days, made into the centrepieces of feasts, and finally burned. Afterwards, the relatives cleansed themselves in saunas made of three tent-poles, a cloth and a dish of hemp brought to the boil with red-hot stones. ‘The Scythians enjoy it so much they howl with pleasure,’ says Herodotus. ‘This is their substitute for an ordinary bath with water, which they never use.’ The women plaster themselves in a paste made of frankincense, cypress and cedar, which leaves their skin ‘clean, glossy and fragrant’.

  A lot more is known about the Scythians now, not only from their remains (more on those in Chapter 4), but also from sources written in Akkadian, the cuneiform script of the people who dominated Mesopotamia during the Neo-Assyrian empire (911–612 BC).

  The Scythians emerged from Central Asia in the early seventh century, chasing out their predecessors, the Cimmerians. Assyria, Lydia (in Turkey) and Egypt all recorded campaigns involving the Cimmerians, who were eventually defeated and vanished from history, leaving the steppes to the Scythians. They formed three dynasties, covering 1,000 years:

  1 In the region of the Kuban River, north-east of the Black Sea (700–550 BC).

  2 Between the Don and Dnieper (550–third century BC), these being the people known to Herodotus. He mentions a dozen names of rulers, and records many interactions with Greek cities and settlements.

  3 In Crimea (170 BC–third century AD).

  Greek contact with these people was intense, but mainly commercial. Conquest was almost impossible, as the Persian king Cyrus the Great found to his cost in 530 BC, a century before Herodotus’s day. His nemesis was an Amazon in all but name.

  After establishing his empire, Cyrus turned north and east, to Scythian lands. One of the tribes – probably a confederacy – was the Massagetae, whose way of life fed into the Greek belief in a nation of Amazons. Kumiss-drinkers known for their sexual equality – shocking to the male-dominated Greeks and Persians – the Massagetae fought on horseback with battleaxes and bows, men and women alike. At the time, they were ruled by a queen named Tomyris.

  Herodotus relates how Cyrus, having discovered the hard way how difficult it was to defeat nomadic horse-archers, resorts to trickery. He sets out a banquet with much wine, which is unfamiliar to the milk-drinking nomads. The Persians withdraw, the nomads advance, find the banquet, eat, drink and fall into a stupor. The Persians return, kill most of them and take Tomyris’s unconscious son prisoner. When he awakens, he commits suicide. Tomyris swears revenge. ‘Leave my land now,’ she says, ‘or I will give you more blood than you can drink.’ In the next battle, the nomads destroy the Persians and kill Cyrus. Tomyris finds the king’s corpse, fills a skin container with blood, and cuts off his head. ‘Although I am alive and gained victory over you in battle,’ she says, ‘you have destroyed me because you took my son by trickery. Now I shall do just as I threatened, and give you your fill of blood.’ With these words, she thrusts Cyrus’s head into the blood-filled container.

  The Amazons as a nation made another of their rare appearances in 330 BC, two centuries after Cyrus’s death. This story is about Alexander the Great. He has just conquered Persia and is on his way eastwards, mopping up minor kingdoms in present-day Iran, in a region called Hyrcania, on the southern shore of the Caspian Sea. The earliest version of this story, now lost, was written by one of Alexander’s aides. Many other versions followed (Plutarch says he knew of fourteen). The earliest surviving version of the story dates from the first century BC, 200 years after the supposed event, having acquired ever more colourful details along the way. Here is a version by the first-century AD writer Curtius, interspersed with my comments:

  There was neighbouring on Hyrcania, a race of Amazons, inhabiting the plains of Themiscyra, about the river Thermodon. They had a queen, Thalestris, who ruled all who dwelt between t
he Caucasus mountains and the river Phasis. She, fired with a desire to visit the king, came forth from the boundaries of her kingdom.

  The Thermodon and the Phasis (today’s Rioni in Georgia) marked the hypothetical original frontiers of the Amazons, so this account ignores their supposed shift to inner Asia and the formation of the Sauromatians. The region is 1,500 kilometres from Hyrcania, not exactly round the corner. It would have taken these Amazons a few weeks’ hard gallop to reach Alexander, which meant they would have needed to set off before he arrived. Something’s not right.

  When she was not far away she sent messengers to give notice that a queen had come who was eager to meet him and to become acquainted with him. She was at once given permission to come. Having ordered the rest of her escort to halt, she came forward attended by three hundred women, and as soon as the king was in sight, she herself leaped down from her horse, carrying two lances in her right hand.

  Curtius then adds a few semi-pornographic details on a subject to which we will return in the next chapter:

  The clothing of the Amazons does not wholly cover the body; for the left side is nude as far as the breast, then the other parts of the body are veiled. However, the fold of the robe, which they gather in a knot, does not reach below the knee. One nipple is left untouched, and with it they nourish their female children; the right is seared, in order that they may more easily stretch their bows and hurl their spears. With fearless expression Thalestris gazed at the king, carefully surveying his person, which did not by any means correspond to the fame of his exploits …

  Alexander was apparently quite small, and ‘prone to drink and choleric’, according to Plutarch. ‘The pleasures of the body had little hold upon him, and he indulged in them with great moderation, while his ambition kept his spirit serious and lofty.’ Nor was he muscular, being ‘averse to the whole race of athletes’, which apparently included the tough, hard-riding, single-breasted Amazon queen. Thalestris was not put off …

  … for all the barbarians feel veneration for a majestic presence, and believe that only those are capable of great deeds whom nature has deigned to adorn with extraordinary physical attractiveness.

  However, on being asked whether she wished to make any request, she did not hesitate to confess that she had come to share children with the king, being worthy that he should beget from her heirs to his kingdom; that she would retain any female offspring but would return a male to his father.

  Alexander asked her whether she wished to serve in war with him; but she, giving as an excuse that she had left her realm without a guard, persisted in asking that he should not suffer her to go away disappointed in her hope.

  The passion of the woman, being, as she was, more keen for love than the king, compelled him to remain there for a few days. Thirteen days were spent in satisfying her desire. Then she went to her kingdom.

  And no one ever heard of her again, or of any child.

  What is all this about? The writer who first described the incident was Onesicritus, one of Alexander’s entourage on the Asian campaign, about which he wrote a long history. So it’s a contemporary – perhaps even an eyewitness – account. But how could it be, since there was no kingdom of Amazons?

  Onesicritus’s words suggest a resolution. He was certainly in a position to report accurately. He was go-between for Alexander when he wished to contact an Indian philosopher and also had such a reputation as a sea captain that Alexander put him in charge of the fleet that took him down the Indus back towards Persia, or so Onesicritus himself said. But he was also a self-promoter who knew how to curry favour with the powerful. He remained at court with Alexander’s successor Lysimachus, but his account of the Asian campaign was derided as exaggerated by later writers. Some said he was never an admiral of the fleet, as he claimed, but only a river pilot.

  Two centuries later, Plutarch told this story against him: ‘Onesicritus was reading aloud to Lysimachus, who was now king, the fourth book of his history, in which was the tale of the Amazon, at which Lysimachus smiled gently and said: “And where was I at the time?”’ Well, he was on the spot, with Alexander, and knew Onesicritus was over-dramatizing. But why spoil a nice story? It served everyone’s purpose to interpret the Scythian princess as an Amazon queen eager to have a child with the great Alexander.

  Here is a possible explanation. Alexander is met by a contingent of Scythians, among whom there are some women. They come from nearby steppes. One of the women is clearly the boss. Alexander is already a heroic conqueror, in a long tradition of Greek heroes. These heroes, men like Heracles and Theseus, had met the Amazons – that was how everyone ‘knew’ the Amazons were real; here’s proof that they still are. Therefore it is only right and proper that Alexander, a modern Heracles, should encounter Amazons. There is a language problem. No one understands what the Amazons want. They are not hostile. They hang around for a few days. Alexander, recalling Cyrus’s fate at the hands of Tomyris, is hospitable. Sometimes the Scythian ‘queen’ is alone with Alexander in his tent. Then they all vanish, back into the grasslands. It is a small step for Onesicritus to turn the Scythian visit into an incident that enhances Alexander’s status; and his own.

  3

  A SHORT CHAPTER ON BREASTS

  THE ONE THING everyone ‘knows’ about the Amazons is that they cut off their right breasts in order not to obstruct their bow strings. When I told people I was writing a book about the Amazons, this was what they asked about. Did they really do that? No, they didn’t. It’s rubbish, nonsense, balderdash, tosh, twaddle, and in all ways totally daft. But the idea is so widely believed, even now, that it demands explanation and refutation.

  It seems to have arisen in the fifth century BC, when the myth of the Amazons was already well known, and growing in popularity as one of the legends that told Greeks about their identity. That posed a question: why ‘Amazon’? Where did the name come from? There are many theories – a queen named Amezan, numerous supposed origins in various languages – but the truth is that no one knows. Homer called them Amazones, with an –es ending which is not specifically female. But he adds the term antianeirai, ‘a match for men’. Possibly, the Amazons were originally a tribe in which men and women were equal, perhaps in ability, perhaps in status – some long-forgotten sub-group.

  For people trying to understand something that everyone ‘knew’ to be true, that left a hole to be filled. In other similar circumstances, a hole like that is often filled with an entirely spurious explanation – folk etymology, in which analogy and charm trump truth. The artichoke known as a Jerusalem is so-called because the English had no idea what its Italian name, girasole (turn-(with-the)-sun), meant and opted for the nearest English-sounding name. Some people prefer to think that ‘marmalade’ derives from a chef’s recipe for an ailing Queen Mary that he termed ‘Marie est malade’ – ‘Marie is sick’ – which is rather more appealing than the obvious and boring root in the Portuguese marmelada (quince jam). A peccadillo is ‘little sin’ in Spanish, but how much more interesting it would be if it derived from a rare Amazonian animal that was a cross between a peccary and an armadillo, hunted to extinction by Spanish colonists, thus causing the creature’s name to stand for a small crime. Somehow Greeks fixed on the idea that ‘Amazon’ meant ‘without a breast’, from a- ‘without’, as in ‘amoral’ or ‘asexual’, and mastos, breast, as in ‘mastectomy’. Of course, it doesn’t work: a-mastos is not a-mazon. Nor is it ‘without’ anything else, although there have been many suggestions: without breast milk, without corn. Perhaps it derived from the fact that steppe horsewomen wore leather armour, which hid the female shape – but armour constrained both breasts, so that doesn’t work either. In any event, there is no good explanation now, nor was there in the fifth century BC.

  Still, it was ‘without a breast’ that caught on and evolved, apparently in order to make some practical sense out of an idea that had none. It’s a horrible thought, that a girl would have a breast cut off. And if a breast was to be dest
royed, surely it would be better to cauterize it when the girl was young? That was what Greeks told each other, and many writers repeated this ‘fact’ as if it were a truth universally acknowledged.

  For example: in about 400 BC, in his On Airs, Waters, Places, Hippocrates, usually called the ‘Father of Medicine’, linked diseases to various external causes. As part of his survey, he has this to say about the Sauromatians, founded (you will remember) when the Amazons mated with the Scythians. These people are different from all other races.

  Their women ride horses and shoot arrows and hurl javelins from horseback and they fight in campaigns as long as they remain virgins … They have no right breast since their mothers heat a specially made iron [or ‘copper instrument’, for translations vary] and apply it to the breast while they are still children. This prevents the breast from growing, and all the strength and size of it go into the right arm and shoulder instead.

  Of course Greek women were supposedly home bodies, not noted as archers or javelin-throwers, so perhaps he had no evidence from his household. But he really should have known better. A little research would have proved him wrong. Herodotus, writing at the same time from personal experience, makes no mention of the practice, although he records some fairly horrific Scythian rituals.

  So the idea remained, fixed. Here, for instance, is Justinus, writing in the second century AD, repeating the accepted ‘truths’: