Zitat des Tages von Adrienne Mayor:
Anyone who's watched 'The Hunger Games', or female archers, knows that that is an absolutely physiologically ridiculous idea.
Indeed, many ancient Greek writers do treat Amazons as a tribe of men and women. They credit the tribe with innovations such as ironworking and domestication of horses. Some early vase paintings show men fighting alongside Amazons.
If Queen Amezan and Queen Penthesilea could somehow meet in real life, they would recognize each other as sister Amazons. Two tales, two storytellers, two sites far apart in time and place, and yet one common tradition of women who made love and war.
It's sort of fair to say that Amazons, both as reality and as a dream of equality, have always been with us; it's just that sometimes that fiery Amazon spirit is hidden from view or even suppressed.
Just as a fossil is 'petrified time,' so is an ancient artifact or text.
The Greeks first identified the Amazons ethnographically, as a nation of men and women distinguished by something outstanding in their gender relations. Later, any ambivalence or anxiety that knowledge of this alternative gender-neutral culture evoked among Greeks was played out in their mythic narratives about martial women.
In the non-Greek stories, Persia, Egypt, even China, Central Asia, in oral traditions and written literature, anyone who fights Amazons admires their courage and beauty, and they want to be allies of the Amazon; they don't wanna kill them.
In April 2001, I visited Big Bone Lick State Park in Kentucky. The heaps of mastodon and other large skeletons that used to loom out of the brackish backwaters along the Ohio River here are long gone, though the occasional big bone sometimes comes to light.
From about 700 B.C. to A.D. 500, the vast territory of Scythia, stretching from the Black Sea to China, was home to diverse but culturally related nomads. Known as Scythians to Greeks, Saka to the Persians, and Xiongnu to the Chinese, the steppe tribes were masters of horses and archery.
Pictures of Amazons on vase paintings always show them as beautiful, active, spirited, courageous, and brave.
The nomads' egalitarian lifestyle astonished the Greeks, who kept their own women indoors weaving and minding children. The exotic Scythian lifestyle fueled the Greek imagination and led to an outpouring of myths about fierce Amazons, 'the equals of men.'
Unlike settled, patriarchal societies such as classical Greece and Rome, where women stayed home to weave and mind children, the lives of nomadic steppe tribes centered on horses and archery.
The strong bond of sisterhood was a famous trait in classical art and literature about Amazons. But it was modern people who interpreted that as a sexual preference for women. That started in the 20th century. The Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva declared that Amazons were symbolic of lesbianism in antiquity.
I find writing a book a slow, intricate process, a kind of obstacle course punctuated with great rewards. But research is always thrilling, and I tend to incorporate newfound material up to the very last minute.
The 'Iliad' covered only two months of the great ten-year war with Troy. At least six other epic poems preceded or continued the events in the 'Iliad', but they survive only as fragments.
We know their names: Hippolyta, Antiope, Thessalia. But they were long thought to be just travelers' tales or products of the Greek storytelling imagination. A lot of scholars still argue that. But archaeology has now proven without a doubt that there really were women fitting the description that the Greeks gave us of Amazons and warrior women.
