Amazons

by John Man

  Having thus secured peace by means of their arms, they [the Amazons] proceeded, in order that their race might not fail, to form connexions with the men of the adjacent nations. If any male children were born, they put them to death. The girls they bred up to the same mode of life with themselves, not consigning them to idleness, or working in wool, but training them to arms, the management of horses, and hunting; burning their right breasts in infancy, that their use of the bow might not be obstructed by them.

  But Greek artists and sculptors never took the idea seriously, always portraying the Amazons with breasts intact. That was the point: the Amazons were heroic warriors, but also fully women, and beauties. Usually they were shown with only one breast exposed, but the other one was obviously there. Otherwise, their beauty would be marred.

  Perhaps for this reason the idea dropped out of fashion. Artists avoided the matter. Authors seldom mentioned it. But there remained those who insisted on taking it seriously. One was a late-seventeenth-century French writer, Pierre Petit, in his De Amazonibus dissertatio (A Dissertation on Amazons). He was convinced that legends about the Amazons had to be accepted as true, simply because it defied belief that so many people had got it wrong. That being so, what, he wondered, made them special? His answers were a cold climate, diet, education and physical training. Since they existed, obviously it must also be true that they did away with their right breasts. Why would they do that? Not because it strengthened their right arms – that was ridiculous – but because it strengthened their whole bodies. How did they do it? Obviously not by cutting off the breast – that was ridiculous too, because it was far too dangerous. So they must have done it by using some sort of drug, which only they knew about, because otherwise everyone else would do it too. To prove his point, he collected as many apparently one-breasted images from the classical world as he could. It was beyond his comprehension that his ‘evidence’ was legend piled on legend, untruth upon untruth. He was a single-issue fanatic, interpreting everything by the light of his own obsession, and no one took any notice of him, except one or two who used him as additional ‘evidence’ to ‘prove’ that 2,000 years of repeating falsehoods somehow made them true.

  Yet the idea is with us still, as a few mouse-clicks show. Greeka.com, which should know better, says: ‘Peculiar, but perhaps justified from the Amazons’ perspective, was the removal of a girl’s right breast. While still a girl, the right breast would be cauterized using a searing hot bronze tool. It was thought to be a necessary evil, to mutilate and remove all possible hindrances to using a spear or drawing an arrow.’ The idea is fodder for psychologists, because it is so obviously contradictory. The Amazonian body ‘visibly gives and withholds itself, promises and frustrates both oral and aesthetic satisfaction, defines nurture and aggression as equal aspects of its nature; it is vulnerable in the possession of one breast while toughened by the absence of the other.’fn1 A paper ‘from the perspective of a plastic surgeon who has been living in this region that the Amazons inhabited’, states that ‘the primary purpose was to facilitate the efficient use of a bow. Another explanation would be that breast mutilation was performed for medical reasons, including the prevention of breast pain, the development of a tender lump, or cancer. There is another school of thought on this involving religious and sociological reasons that breast mutilation was a badge of honor for warrior women.’ Even the old, disproven etymology gets repeated: ‘While the Greek for breast is mazos (whence the name Amazon, or “without breast”) …’fn2

  Such nonsense. OK, girls have been and are subjected to appalling practices every bit as painful as the excision of a breast, two obvious examples being female genital mutilation in many parts of Africa, the Middle East and Indonesia, and foot-binding done in China up until 1949. But in such societies girls were and are treated as objects and possessions. The Amazons, whether in legend or reality, protected their daughters. Forget the lack of visual evidence, forget dictionary definitions – just consider the practicalities. At what age was the mutilation supposed to happen? Would Amazonian mothers really perform such major surgery? How many girls would have died? Why risk killing your own future soldiers?

  Anyway, the operation has no practical justification. When using a bow and arrow or throwing a javelin, women have no problems. Anyone watching the 2016 Olympics could see that women archers and javelin-throwers are not impeded by breasts, any more than female mounted archers are. If it helped to cut a breast off to improve performance, some hyper-ambitious athlete would surely have done it. It’s just blindingly obvious that to cut or cauterize a breast could not conceivably strengthen an arm or shoulder, let alone the whole body.

  The opposite would be the case, which is why no one ever did it, and why the idea has no grain of truth.

  4

  TREASURES IN BONE AND GOLD

  HERODOTUS WAS ON the right lines when he talked of the Sauromatians. He said these people, who lived beyond the Scythians, had been formed by a union of Amazons and Scythians. They then retained their ‘old ways’, by which he meant Scythian ways. To get to the Amazons demands a closer look at the Scythians, the real Scythians. In the fifth century BC, no one could say much more about them than Herodotus, because there were no good sources: no script, no histories. Herodotus records a few tribal names and a few gods – Tabiti, Papaeus, Api – but that’s not much help. We now know rather more about the Scythians than Herodotus did, because they left behind funeral mounds covering the graves, bodies and possessions of their leaders.

  How many? No one has counted. Certainly tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands. They run from north of the Black Sea, across present-day southern Russia and Kazakhstan into Mongolia and southern Siberia. Many were treasure chests of possessions, presumably to sustain the rich and powerful in the afterlife, so for centuries they were literally gold mines for grave-robbers.

  In the early eighteenth century, under Peter the Great, Russia began her great expansion eastwards into Siberia and southwards into what is now Ukraine and the various –stans of Central Asia. Russian colonists and explorers could not miss the grave mounds, which became known by the Russian term kurgans. It turned out that grave-robbers had not taken everything. In 1716, sixty items were given to Peter the Great, starting the ever-growing collection of Scythian gold that now dazzles tourists in the Gold Room in St Petersburg’s Hermitage Museum. During the second half of the nineteenth century, archaeologists started to do serious research on the Black Sea kurgans, revealing skeletons, golden plaques and immense cauldrons by the score. Historians meanwhile were looking at Herodotus with sceptical eyes, because he had not visited the far-off places he wrote about and was so vague about his sources that they suspected him of plagiarizing. Since then, he has gained respect for his honesty and industry. As one of his biographers, Sir John Myres, wrote in 1953, ‘his information is now seen to be such as an intelligent and observant man … might reasonably accept as true.’ Archaeologists agree. They have opened hundreds more kurgans, in ever remoter areas, recording, theorizing, arguing, revealing what scholars call the Scythian World.

  More emerges every year. Over 1,000 mounds have now been excavated. The truth about Scythia and related places and peoples is far richer, far more complex and altogether far less barbaric than Herodotus could possibly have dreamed. Their women, for instance, had a higher status than in male-dominated Athens. Among them were real Amazons, and others who were something much more than warrior women.

  ‘Scythia’ was not like a nation-state, with a capital and a centralized government, or a land-empire like Genghis Khan’s, controlled from the centre. No pony express linked east and west. Scythia was a collection of cultures, spanning all Central Asia from the Black Sea to Mongolia, unified by a few main traits: funeral mounds, horses, weaponry and a love of the so-called Animal style of art, made up of convoluted creatures, part real, part mythological. Every Scythian tribe and culture would have known, traded with, intermarried with and fought with its neighbours.
Ideas spread and customs changed, though slowly, over centuries. Tribes grew, fought, migrated and mixed. Herodotus lists several: Arimaspians, Issedonians, Massagetae, Sacae – a name that still endures in Kazakhstan, where ancient Scythians are known as Saka. Beyond these, in the mythical shadows, were the ‘gold-protecting griffins’ and the legendary Hyperboreans, the ‘Extreme Northerners’. Griffins, a mythical cross between a lion and an eagle, were common images in Scythian art.

  A few inscriptions and mentions of words in other cultures suggest that there were many Scythian languages. Herodotus was told that Black Sea Scythians who traded with a remote group called the Argippaei needed seven lots of interpreters along the way.fn1 Scholars generally agree that the languages were part of the vast Indo-European family, specifically Iranian – actually east Iranian – with one surviving member, Ossetian, still spoken on the borders of Russia and Georgia (more on them later). Much depended on local conditions, but the transcontinental links were strong: there is no gold to be found north of the Black Sea, except in kurgans – it was all imported along trade routes from the Altai Mountains of southern Siberia and western Mongolia. Altai is connected to the Mongolian for gold, altan, which perhaps explains why these mountains were the traditional home of griffins. If a few Scythians from western Mongolia had magically found themselves transported 4,000 kilometres to the Scythians north of the Black Sea, once they had found good interpreters, they would not have been entirely at a loss.

  In the late nineteenth century, the fourth-century BC burial of a Scythian woman was discovered in a kurgan in the middle of Ukraine, on the left bank of the Tyasmin River, a tributary of the Dnieper. The remains of a young man of about eighteen lay at her feet, a servant perhaps. She was clearly a warrior, because near her were two iron lance-points, a wooden quiver with forty-seven three-feathered arrowheads, and two bronze knives. Another female warrior from a kurgan near the Ukrainian port of Bilhorod-Dnistrovskyi – once the Greek colony of Tyras, then Akkerman under the Turks – was buried with a quiver of twenty arrows, four lances and a heavy fighting belt covered in strips of iron.

  At first, these women were assumed to be wives, daughters and mothers, mere adjuncts to the male warriors, who had been buried with weapons for unknown reasons. But these female skeletons had wounds. The second one had a crushed skull and a bronze arrowhead buried in her knee. Her death had been violent. The women had been warriors in their own right. They had actually used their weapons in battle and suffered the consequences.

  Since then it has become clear that the two women were not unusual. Women were routinely given burials matching those of men. Of the graves of women found between the Danube and the Don (112 by 1991, and more since), some 70 per cent belonged to women aged between sixteen and thirty.fn2 And in some areas 37 per cent of burials are those of armed women. From surveys in the 1980s and 1990s, about 20 per cent of those graves with weapons belonged to women, and these were not the graves of upper-class people, but ordinary women.

  The evidence for the violent lives lived by Scythian women – Amazons if you like, for that is how they seemed to the Greeks – was revealed in large burial grounds in southern Siberia. The Minusinsk Hollow is one of them, prime pastureland some 200 kilometres across. It and its surrounding territory have some 30,000 kurgans acquired in the course of 1,500 years (1000 BC–AD 500). The biggest, the Great Salbyk Kurgan (fourth century BC), is surrounded by twenty-three gigantic stones, weighing up to 40 tonnes, each cut and hauled from a quarry 60 kilometres away. Another prime site is in Tuva, 200 kilometres to the south-east.

  Until just over a century ago, Tuva was Chinese, when China ruled all Mongolia plus a bit more. After escaping from Chinese control, Tuva was briefly an independent mini-nation, then part of the Soviet Union, and is now a semi-autonomous part of Russia. They speak Tuvan (a Turkic language, the Turks having dominated these parts before the Mongols came), they are famous for herding and riding reindeer, they’re Buddhist and (like their neighbouring Mongolians) they have terrific throat-singers. The 300,000 or so Tuvans share huge spaces of forest, mountain and grassland. This was the heartland from which the Scythians originally came before migrating west. Tuva, with its extreme temperatures (–50° or below up to +40°), is about as far from any salt water as it is possible to get,fn3 and is usually described as ‘remote’, though not by the Tuvans, for whom their homeland is the centre of the universe. It is only right that they should have an important place in the evolution of a way of life that dominated central Eurasia for several thousand years.

  The earliest evidence for Scythian ways comes from two immense kurgans, known as Arzhan 1 and 2, after the nearby village in the valley of the Uyuk River. This is a fine, gentle pasture, with not much snow in winter – a rarity in these austere regions, and a focus for Scythian nomads for many centuries as they migrated between summer pastures in the mountains and winter pastures along the Uyuk. The valley is (appropriately) an arrowhead of grass, 50 kilometres long and 30 wide at its base, fenced by mountains. There are some 300 burial mounds, so many that they call it the Valley of the Kings.

  These Scythians, of the so-called Uyuk Culture, were not just simple nomads, surviving off their herds. As many sites reveal, they had their tents, but they ate freshwater fish, grew millet, built log cabins and made stone tombs with domed roofs. They mined for copper and iron, which demanded specialist miners, tools and good knowledge of the geology. Stone pillars carved with spirals, rosettes and circles suggest they worshipped the sun. They believed in an afterlife and made sure their leaders were well prepared for it, preserving their bodies wherever they died and bringing them back to ancestral cemeteries for burial. They worked metals into animal shapes, like curled-up snow leopards and birds of prey, perhaps admired for their strength, agility and vigilance.

  Most of their mounds are not obviously royal, more like a collection of family tombs, with multiple burials. From them archaeologists have gleaned what looters left, showing that the women cared a lot about their looks, even in the afterlife. Tombs contained earrings, pectorals, beads, rings, neck decorations made of bronze wire and gold, belt buckles in the shapes of animals, bronze mirrors in leather pouches hung on belts, combs of iron or wood, and pins made of iron, bronze and bone. Small cylindrical and conical cases made of horn, many well carved with animal shapes, probably contained the equivalent of make-up. And lots of horse fittings – bridles, bits, rings and badges. Some pottery, though they were not much good at it, preferring wooden dishes and cups, or an enemy’s skull for special occasions.

  The royal tombs were on a different level of sophistication. They are only on the edge of our subject, because the women, being of the ruling class, were not warriors (unlike their legendary sisters), but the two Arzhans reveal the upper-class wealth of the culture that produced the real Amazons.

  The Valley of the Kings: Arzhan 1 alone would justify the title. Its start date was around 750 BC, about the time Homer was writing the Iliad and Odyssey, making it the oldest known kurgan. Once, it was a huge platform, 110 metres across, with a surrounding wall and a 4-metre-high dome. Almost all kurgans are of wood and earth; this one was uniquely covered in stones, which turned it into a giant refrigerator. Over the years, looters mined it, locals used it for their July celebrations, and in the 1960s bulldozers ground across it as part of the Soviet-era campaign to turn steppes into farmland. Even so, when archaeologists arrived in 1971, they found wonders: a wheel-shaped complex of seventy interlocking wooden chambers (though some had been torn up by the bulldozers). These chambers surrounded a central space that enclosed a 4 x 4-metre larchwood tomb, with two coffins containing a chief – ruler, king, terms vary – and a woman, presumably his wife. (Or was she the dominant partner, the ‘queen’? Was she or he killed to be a companion in the afterlife? We cannot tell.) Round the tomb were eight hollowed-out logs holding the bones of retainers, killed to accompany their master and mistress into the next world. Nearby lay the remains of six horses, richly decorated wit
h gold, as the surviving unlooted items showed.

  All this was right in line with Herodotus. Having been carried around and mourned in outlying areas (he says), the king is buried in a roofed pit. ‘In other parts of the great square pit various members of the king’s household are buried beside him … all of them strangled. Horses are buried too, and gold cups … and a selection of his other treasures.’

  No expense had been spared: sables and four-colour woollen clothes for the retainers, horse-trappings of bronze and gold in the shapes of snow leopards and boars, even a golden coiled panther in the Animal style familiar from neighbouring cultures as far away as the Black Sea (and reminiscent of the deer-stone designs from 1,000 years earlier). In the surrounding chambers were another 160 horse skeletons, almost all of 12–15-year-old stallions, along with several ‘grooms’, plus numerous daggers, arrowheads, a torc (a semicircular sheet of gold worn around the neck), gold earrings with turquoise inlays, and pendants. Who knows how much had been there originally, before the looters arrived. All of this was built by 1,200–1,500 people in one massive week-long operation: 6,000 mature larches, stripped and roughly joined to form the seventy chambers, with passageways to link them; thousands of rock slabs up to 50 kilograms in weight, cut, collected and placed; and the 2.5-metre wall built around the whole thing. Then, to complete the ritual, the people held a huge feast outside the wall – or perhaps it was an annual affair; anyway, they left the remains of 300 horses and uncounted numbers of cattle, sheep and goats.

  Arzhan 2, made about a century after Arzhan 1, proved even more remarkable, both for its contents and for the fact that it had been largely untouched.fn4 The builders had got smart, as the excavation team discovered when they dug it up in 2000–4. The two central pits were mock-graves, which had fooled would-be looters. The main burial was 20 metres off-centre. Digging almost 4 metres down into the mound, Pavel Leus, a Russian heading a small team of local labourers, found a layer of larch logs.fn5 Lifting one, he glimpsed in the shadows two skeletons and a glint of yellow. ‘Guys,’ he called up to his bosses, ‘we’ve got a problem. We need the police.’