A Brief History of the Amazons by Lyn Webster Wilde

( Diodorus claimed that Myrinas rule predated the Amazons of Themiscyra, and that it was she who sailed north to Greece and founded many of the Amazon cities.)īut Amazons are not found only in museums and the pages of Greek mythology. The most prominent Amazons include Penthesilea, who fought Achilles in the Trojan War Antiope, won in a raid by Theseus and taken away to be his concubine (the Amazons invaded Athens to get her back, but they were defeated) and Myrina, queen of a race of African Amazons. Themiscyra, their capital city, was rumored to be located on the Black Sea coast (near present-day Samsun, in northern Turkey), but Amazons were also associated with the goddess-worshipping city of Ephesus on the Aegean coast (now western Turkey).Īmazons were feared and admired for their athletic beauty, and their images survive in ancient art. Male offspring were given away, lamed or slaughtered. According to legend, Amazons abhorred men and lived in women-only communities, taking lovers once a year to procreate. Other Greek writers embellished the details, describing ferocious fighters and skilled horsewomen who cut off one breast in order to shoot arrows better.

Herodotus described them as descendants of shipwrecked Greek women and Scythian men. The legendary group of women was well recorded by ancient Greeks in history and mythology. The Amazons galloped onto the stage of history in the pages of Homer, who called them In the hidden world of the Hittites, near the Amazons' ancient capital of Thermiscyra in Anatolia, she unearthed traces of powerful priestesses, women-only religious cults, and an armed, bisexual goddess - all possible sources for the ferocious women.Ĭombining scholarly penetration with a sense of adventure, Webster Wilde has produced a coherent and absorbing book that challenges preconceived notions, still disturbingly widespread, of what men and women can do.Golden-shielded, silver-sworded, man-loving, male-child-slaughtering Amazons.

North of the Black Sea she found archaeological excavations of graves of Iron Age women buried with arrows, swords and armour. Did they really exist? For centuries, scholars consigned them to the world of myth, but Lyn Webster Wilde journeyed into the homeland of the Amazons and uncovered astonishing evidence of their historic reality. 'Golden-shielded, silver-sworded, man-loving, male-child slaughtering Amazons,' is how the fifth-century Greek historian Hellanicus described the Amazons, and they have fascinated humanity ever since.

A Brief History of the Amazons by Lyn Webster Wilde