Penthesilea's Wish [Vol.2]

Chapter Three

Included in the professor's stack of readings, chosen over the next nights from his home, were past academic journals he had kept over the years. He had been privileged to know, several decades before, a few of the UC Berkeley archaeologists who had done seminal work in Eurasia on the nomadic horse tribes. Though it was not his expertise or interest previously as a field, the professor now turned to these writings, along with other selected publications from his vast personal library, combing historical details for relevant information. These particular Cal colleagues, through their seminal work excavating burial kurgans left by the horse cultures on the Eurasian steppes, had established critical facts for scholars to ponder on the nature of nomadic women living and dying in the region long before and about the time Greece's Classical Period was at its peak.

Though it had been stressed in these studies that more work needed to be done on the ancient inhabitants from this little-understood region of the world—and about a people who had left no written records of their social system or achievements, the professor re-read the original publications with new insight. He hoped to revisit certain theories hinting at a physical connection to the Amazon legends, stretching back, according to Greek historians, much further in time than their own Classical Period.

On the broad plains extending largely from the Black Sea coastal regions up into the frozen Ukraine, the skeletons of female warriors had been found remarkably buried with their horses and weapons. This UC Berkeley work presented the compelling hypothesis that there were actual inter-cultural encounters with such formidable women warriors fighting sometimes alongside their men and sometimes separately. The writings of Plato, Herodotus and other Greeks suggested, according to ancillary studies of inscriptions, that such a cultural phenomenon of females, adept in the art of war did, in fact, exist in the dark, half-forgotten time of the Greek heroes. This was during the Mycenaean Age of 1600 -1100 BCE.

The legends of these isolated women, roaming the hinterlands as enemies of the ancient Greeks and seemingly all others who may have confronted them, became an absolute obsession of artists on the Attic peninsula of Greece some eight-hundred years later. This flowering of expression had as a popular motif the battles between Greek soldiers and Amazon warriors found on many of the decorative arts throughout the Greek mainland and some islands. Such spectacular artwork can be seen in the peak of the Greek Classical Period, a two-hundred year epoch generally accepted to be from around 500 – 300 BCE.

Later, in the European Middle Ages, and as a result of the Crusades which transferred peoples and ideas from both Western and Eastern points across Europe, there was a resurgence of these artistic renderings of women warriors and their related legends. To many, the idea of a nation of all women defending themselves and their territory was a phantasmagorical idea. It was thought to be merely a romantic notion that there could have been, somewhere in the unexplored world, a race of warlike women, reported to be living collectively and practicing total isolation from men.

Intriguing and even more entertaining was the idea that these women reportedly used men chiefly for reproductive purposes—killing or returning their male offspring to the nomadic peoples from where they were sired, usually during an orgiastic summer. The notion was that the Amazon women kept the young girls produced to foster and preserve their own culture as future, valiant fighters. This made for irresistible lore down through the centuries—particularly to the predominantly male explorers and adventurers who heard these tales en route to new lands, and no doubt, while isolated, vulnerable to attack, and perennially sequestered from their own women.

As the Renaissance Period developed in Europe around 1450 CE, and commercial interests promoted an age of further discovery and advanced trade with the edges of the unknown world, these Amazonian stories first reached the South and Central American jungles—presumably by sailors who had heard them from their long-past origins in the Mediterranean.