Kurgan warrior women with bowed legs, from a lifetime astride horses in their formative years, are found buried with wounds from battle as a probable cause of death. These women were actually young girls, when we assess their age from the perspective of modern standards. They are hardly more than teenagers. It is conjectured that some females rode as warriors until their time for child bearing at which time they retired from fighting and turned their talents to raising the new generation. Archeological identification of the Kurgan Queens is determined by the richness of their burial artifacts and as well as being devoid of male companions sharing their graves.
The Amazons have captured the imagination of generations of women and men from the time of early records. Amazon is the Greek name for Goddess-worshipping tribes in North Africa, tribes also in Anatolia (present day Turkey) and in the Black Sea area.13 In times past, there was a myth that the name Amazon came from “breastless” a-mazos, because some writers said that the women warriors cut off their right breast in order that it not hinder their ability to shoot with bow and arrow. Greek depictions of Amazons shown in pottery and frescos show no such mutilation. More likely, the Amazon women, akin to their modern athletic sisters, did not develop the heavy-breasted characteristics of lactating women who are birthing children. Today, the name Amazon is thought to derive from “moon women.”
Roman historian Suetonius (c. 70–122 CE) said “Amazons once ruled over a large part of Asia. As late as the 5th century CE, the Black Sea was still known as the Amazon Sea.” Greek Herodotus (5th century BCE) spoke of Libyan Amazons and Deodurus, 1st century Greek historian called them “the warlike women of Libya”.14
“In Amazon myths, the Goddess was often worshipped as a mare: India’s mare-mother Sananyu; mare-headed Demeter or Cretan Leukippe, the white mare whose priests were castrated and wore female dress.”15
The mythology of the White Mare as a Goddess symbol for women warriors will carry forward more than a thousand years to Jeanne d’Arc and become folklore once again as the maidens speak of waiting for the arrival of their knight in shining armor, riding on a white horse.
Greek legend has it that the Amazons occupied Cappadocia, Samothrace, and the island of Lesbos. They are said to have founded the cities of Smyrna, Ephesus (in Turkey), Cymes, Myrine, and Paphos, all leading centers of Goddess worship in the ancient world.
The Amazons aided matriarchal city of Troy during the Trojan War. The Amazon Queen Penthesileia was killed by Achilles who raped and violated her dead body. While Homer wrote that this act of necrophilia was due to love of her beauty, more likely it was a desperate act to nullify her spirit and diminish the power attached to her. Greeks were very much afraid of the ghosts of slain Amazons. They called them the “Beautiful Ones” and built shrines to them, making offerings to the Amazons centuries after the war was over.16
Theseus, king of Greek Attica, violated the Amazons’ law of matrilocal marriage by kidnapping their Queen whose name was said to be either Hippolyta, Antiope or Melanippe (Black Mare). By whatever name, Theseus killed her, and Hercules killed her sister. This so enraged the Amazons that they became hereditary enemies, invaded the Greek mainland, ransacked coastal towns and finally overthrew Athens, the Greek capital.
The Amazons occupied several islands in the Mediterranean Sea called Taurus (the bull), Lemnos and Lesbos, where men were not permitted to live. Amazon women would leave their islands at those seasons when they desired to conceive children. Only then did they permit sexual intercourse with men of neighboring islands, after which Amazons returned home to their own territories.
The Greeks, who were their contemporaries, were convinced that the Amazons were all-powerful females both in body and in spirit. Later, however, Greek writers and subsequent generations attempted to relegate these powerful females to the nether region of myth, having no real counterpart on earth, perhaps to discourage future generations of women from having such a dramatic role model to emulate.
However, in the original and central Amazon territory surrounding the Black Sea, “women retained certain Amazon customs up to the 18th century CE: dressing in men’s clothes (trousers), riding horseback astride (rather than side saddle), and fighting beside men in war.”17
The Amazon tradition of matriarchy and women warriors later spread to Northern Europe, taking the form of the Valkeries, warrior-maidens of Vallhalla. Real Amazons, female ship captains and war chieftanesses, were among the Vikings of Norway. “As late as the 10th century CE, a Norwegian fleet invaded Ireland, devastated Ulster and the Northeast under the command of a warrior Queen called the Red Maiden. Another Viking warrior Queen Olga, was one of the first rulers of Kiev, Russia, when the Vikings ruled there.
Medieval historians said Amazons ruled the city of Ulm from before the time of Abraham to the time of the Greek Alexander the Great. Ulm was named for the sacred elm grove where the Amazons worshipped Diana/Artemis as Goddess.18
The first expedition of colonists to ancient Ireland (according to the Book of Conquests: Lebor Gabola Erenn) were led by women. Ireland had female soldiers up to the 7th century CE, after which Christian “reforms” forbade women to bear arms. Yet the ancient tradition continued in a curious bride’s costume which until the 17th century included the Amazonian-Kurgan-warrior-priestess-Queen tradition of wearing a knife/dagger at her belt.19
According to Jeannine Davis-Kimball’s book on the archeology of ancient Kurgan steppe women Warrior Women, until recently her fellow archeologists were reluctant to identify these people with the Amazon traditions.
Amazing golden Animal-style plaques and large bronze, decorated cauldrons (replete with representations of golden deer and crouching tigers), made by Greek craftsmen for royal Sythians, found as they were buried in the great Neolithic and early Iron Age Kurgan mounds of the Don and Volga River valleys, as well as in the Eurasian vastlands, fascinated 19th Century scholars, Russian Czars as well as the archeologists. But none ever identified them (the Sauro-Sauromatians who were Eastern neighbors of Sythians) with the Amazons, as Greek historians of the 5th century BCE had done.20
At first the Russian archeologist Sergie Rudenko, excavating Kurgan mounds in the Siberian Altai mountains (1950–60’s), identified the extensive art in the burial mounds as Sythio-Siberian and dismissed the women buried as wives accompanying husbands and not as women who were queens, priestesses or warriors. However, several others had written articles defining the Sauromatians as a female dominated tribe.21 But in 1982 another Russian found more of these same Sauro-Samatian nomad Kurgan burial sites in the Southern Ural Steppes and identified the population who lived in the lower Don River region in the 4th century BCE as Amazons. His colleague, Maria Moshkova extended the research, publishing articles on these people.22 Dr. Davis-Kimball elaborates that these people were a variegated culture of Caucasoid (the ancestors of Caucasians or white people) in which women enjoyed a measure of power and prominence far beyond what previous researchers had ever imagined. The “steppe maidens and matrons who fought bravely on horseback or made prognostications with the aid of bronze mirrors had counterparts the world over.”23
These findings do not refute the concurrent practice of “suttee” burials, also verified, during which entire households were killed for the purpose of being buried with the male chieftain to make his way easier in the afterlife.
All these Steppe nomads, as we now know, had Goddess-worshipping priestesses, Kurgan Queen/Priestesses and women warriors who were blue-eyed, often had reddish- blonde hair, and were tall white women interfacing with a predominantly dark-skinned, brown-eyed population who had curly dark hair. Most Old European or Middle Eastern men and women were probably shorter than the Steppe women.
Ancestor worship persisted from Neolithic to Bronze Age. Ritual feasting at the communal burial site indicates horsemeat, horsebones and skulls placed around the burial mound, and evidence of hallucinogenic plants used, harkening back to the sacred poppies, cannabis, and mushrooms which were known to be pa
rt of sacred culture throughout the Steppes, Old Europe, the Middle and Near East and North Africa.
These graves, with their preparations for an afterworld elsewhere, are very different from the burials of the Old Europeans in womb or egg-shaped tombs intended as temporary way-stations on the road back to life on this earth.
For the Kurgan women, “Sacrificial altars of carved stone and fired clay were the hallmark of priestesses, and among their uses they may have served as mortars to grind the colored ores into powder; these magical colors then become body or textile paint.”24
However, Davis-Kimball classified the burials into three categories, regardless of sex, in order to discover the status of the buried. She says that “three predominant status emerged: hearth person, priestess, and warrior.”25 Curiously, no children were found buried with women; however, 3% of men had a child by their side.
Twenty-five percent of the women were warriors, warrior-Priestess, or Priestesses. Seventy-five percent were hearth women buried with functional clay spindle whorls, bronze spiral earrings covered with gold foil. The beads these women possessed were made of glass, carnelian, turquoise and other materials not found in their own homelands. They are evidence of either trade or raid, (or both) with Chinese, Indo-European Persian and other Central Asian trades people. “Hearth women’s graves also contained bronze mirrors that were deliberately broken, signifying no other use for them in the otherworld.”26
Davis-Kimball goes further by saying that her archeologists were usually able to determine the sex of the initial burial figure occupying the high-status central burial pit: 72% of the time, the high status figure was a woman. What is most interesting about these findings is that they lead to a conclusion previously unnoticed: These Sauro-Sarmatians Steppe tribes might have been matriarchal societies, because the high status position of burial was also for hearth women and not just female priestesses and warriors, nor even for males. She summarizes
Our evidence strongly suggests that the egalitarian nature of the modern steppe societies is rooted in ancient customs, prefigured in the variety and wealth of women’s funerary artifacts, in their central positions in the Kurgans, and in accounts of their high tribal status. As keepers of the hearth, with all that implies both on a practical and symbolic basis, women seem to have been accorded a measure of power and wealth that many scholars still have trouble reconciling with their vision of the fierce, male-dominated warrior societies that fill history books. Nor was women’s influence confined to domestic matters; the hand that rocked the cradle could also wield a sword and decide a tribe’s fate on the throw of sheep bones (as priestess).27
Now the Steppe tribes moved from north to the south, from Asia and Persia into Greece, the Middle East and Mesopotamia. From 2000 BCE onward, this migration was sporadic but continuous, altering, once again, the course of human events.
About 530 BCE, a warrior Queen named Tomyris, of the Massaget Saka tribe, led her warriors into battle against Cyrus the Great, after he attempted to take her territory and annex it into the Achaemenid Persian Empire. Her Sakas won, but the Queen’s son was taken prisoner during the battle and committed suicide. The furious and grieving warrior Queen Tomyris found Cyrus, decapitated him and put his no longer “Great” head in a container made of animal skin, filled with blood. She is reported to have declared, “But even as I threatened, so will I do, and give thee thy fill of blood.”28
Herodotus, Greek historian born 484 BCE in Anatolia, was particularly fascinated by the “Sauromatians who lived between the Don River and the Caspian Sea and, like the Scythians and the Saka, were fair-skinned, long limbed, Caucasoid who spoke an Indo-European language.”29
Perhaps Herodotus’ fascination with the Amazons is even more understandable when one remembers that Greek women of his time in Athens were virtual prisoners in the second floor quarters of the houses belonging to their husbands.
On the other hand, Troy was a city retaining its matrilineal traditions, which is probably one reason that Helen of Troy had to be returned after the Trojan wars.
The Greek Islands were under various rulers, some Amazonian, some Minoan influenced, some Goddess-worshipping descendents from Old Europe who migrated south at the end of the Neolithic, during successive invasions. Greeks called the warrior, horse-riding women who rode the Russian steppelands “Amazons,” while the Scythians called them “Oiropata” or “killers of men.” Herodotus version of Amazon customs: “it is the custom that no virgin weds until she has slain a man of the enemy; and some of them grow old and die unmarried because they cannot fulfill the law”30
The Scythians and Amazons eventually procreated, but the Amazons were not willing to accept assimilation with the Scythian population because they knew the two groups of women did not share common traditions. Amazons rode horses, did battle and ruled their own destiny. Scythian women worked in the camps at crafts and weaving. So the two tribes mated but did not live communally.
The progeny of the two, Amazons and Scythians, became known as Sauromatians or Sauromatae to the Greeks who wrote about them. “The religious leaders of these ancient nomads were almost always women, perhaps because that sex was credited with greater intuitive powers that would facilitate communion with the gods.”31
They had unbroken copper mirrors for divination and healing, stone and clay sacrificial altars, chunks of ochre, cinnabar and chalk ores for body tattooing and painting and amulets of specific Animal Style decorations, most often a snow leopard, which again harkens back to the Neolithic spotted wildcat decorations, as a continuous theme. Food stuffs and seeds of psychoactive hemp plants, which still grow in these lands, are also discovered. The combination of spotted leopard and psychoactive plants found together once again remind us of Catal Huyuk, thousands of years before. Then there was an association with the sacred mushroom and opium poppies, producing the ever-present theme of the leopard spots, and the large lion cat motifs in temples, on home walls and in artifacts.
The pigments for body painting are similar to that found on mummies of Eurasian women, identified as priestesses. Their faces, arms and hands were decorated not only with geometric designs, such as the now-familiar Neolithic energy and Goddess signs, but also with Animal Style zoomorphs. The priestesses were buried with their legs arched out in what has been called the riding position, as though straddling a horse, but it is also the receptive position for sexual intercourse, and sometimes even for giving birth.
Distinctive headgear was an important part of the priestess costume. Small gold feline pieces of jewelry were found attached to the priestess’s headdress. Some women even had elaborate gold crowns set with amethysts, turquoise, coral and garnets. Many other gold and silver artifacts have been found with these women, too many to be just a matter of chance or of individual wealth.
Sometimes the crown was a pointed hat with symbols, jewels and a scarf. But that style originated much earlier in Anatolia whose priestesses and their Goddess wore a “brimless high square headdress called a polos, a style that might have been assimilated by the Scythians as depicted on their gold plaques.”32 Davis-Kimball notes also that a priestess was buried wearing a red leather diadem with gold foil heraldic deer and eagles portrayed standing before a stylized Tree of Life.
Another astonishing find of a fifth century BCE Saka Priestess, of 25 years old when she died, and was mummified, revealed a “three-foot high conical hat that commanded a full third of the hollowed out fir log serving as the priestess sarcophagus. This imposing headdress consisted of molded felt stretched over a wooden frame which was decorated with images of light savage felines (probably Tien Shan snow leopards) and birds perched on branches of a tree (of life) all carved from wood and covered with gold foil.”33 This type of decoration, known as Animal Style, is synonymous with steppe art and religious beliefs. The nature symbols are celebrated on all objects from burial sarcophagi to personal body tattoos.
Deer and snow leopards, as mentioned, had particular significance for priestesses. T
he artisans went beyond literal animals regularly encountered in nature, and they created magical creatures such as griffins with an eagles head and lions body. Hybrid zoomorphs were found in Ukok priestess grave, such as winged snow leopards on her large necklace and the “tattooed deer with griffin heads at the end of its antlers, a vivid design that graced (was tattooed on) her left arm.” The people also engaged their horses in these magical transformations, such as outfitting them with elk antler headdresses and painted decorations before sacrificing them as sacred equines.34
Beautiful works of art amazingly decorated with life-giving symbols of energy, such as the high-pointed priestesses headdresses, her symbol of status and power with the universe, would centuries later become sabotaged into the medieval “witches hat” in solid black, devoid of any other color or decoration, made synonymous with all that is sinister. And, as shall be seen repeated over and over again, that which was originally the highest female quality of the divine, the sacredly sexual, the healer, the embodiment of the deity, will be turned upside down, inside out and regurgitated back into social culture as that which is only dark, sinister, dangerous, suspicious and finally.… evil.
These religious practices and social customs are important to understand because it is these nomadic tribes from the North and East who repeatedly invade the existing stabilized agricultural matriarchal enclaves, first in Old Europe, then going south to the Middle East and Mesopotamia. Their influence was not to replace the Goddess religions or worship, but to gradually infuse into the overall culture the initial concepts of a god who is personified by a male image, a dualism that deemed light as good and dark as evil. So, the Caucasoid nomads who came with horses to conquer brought with them values of instability, mobility and male sky god to dominate, but they also bore witness to a powerful class of women who ruled in their own right, owned property in their own right, were healers and priestesses and diviners and Queens.
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