Ancient Scythia's Amazon Warrior Women: A Forgotten History

Penthesilea was a legendary warrior who was the offspring of Ares, the Greek god of battle and violence, and Otrera, the first queen of the Amazons. She sided with King Priam in the Trojan War because of her renown for fighting prowess, but she eventually ran across a stronger opponent. In a fairly evenly matched battle, Achilles prevailed over her, according to Homeric legend.

A mosaic depicting an Amazon warrior armed with a labrys, engaged in combat with a hippeus. (Credit: Jacques MOSSOT/CC-by-3.0/Wikimedia Commons)

According to Adrienne Mayor, author of the book The Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Women Across the Ancient World, "As she's dying, he takes off her helmet and falls in love with her."

Penthesilea was referred to as a strong Amazon queen who led a band of formidable female warriors that were equally skilled and strong as males. They hunted well, were skilled with a bow, and engaged in horseback combat. The concept of fierce female fighters captivated the ancient Greeks, whether or not Penthesilea was an actual historical figure. Heroes like Hercules and Theseus battled Amazons as well; the latter even wed Hippolyta, another Amazon queen and Penthesilea's sister, and traveled to Athens with him. Vases and other Greek artifacts and crafts frequently include Amazons.

According to Mayor, "perhaps it was a way for the Greeks to imagine what it would be like to have a society ruled by women because they had a very male-dominated society."

But because the Amazons left no written records behind, many people doubted their existence—possibly because they held the sexist view that women couldn't have engaged in combat and hunting like men. According to Mayor, "for a very long time, historians and traditional tales believed that the mythology of the Amazon were just pure fables.

At least until a number of burials of female warriors were discovered in Central Asia starting in the 1970s, which may very likely relate to the mythical Amazonians.

Scythia

The Greeks thought the feisty, horse-obsessed ladies originated from far areas to the northeast of Greece; many scholars now think that region to have been Scythia, a huge region that approximately stretched from north of the Black Sea in the west to Mongolia in the east.

The nomadic steppe tribes that lived in Scythia from around the 8th century B.C. until the end of the 5th century A.D. presumably spoke a range of distinct languages, according to Mayor. As a result, the Scythians were not a single society.

Archaeologists had found many burials from this era in this vast area, but it wasn't until the 1970s that they started to find female Scythians buried alongside males with horses and weapons. Some of them had obvious combat wounds, and some ladies were even interred together; in one instance in western Russia, it appeared that three generations shared a single tomb.

"[Women] were buried with the same honors as men, and with the same battle scars," Mayor claims.

According to her, early Greek depictions of Amazons frequently represented them as looking more like Greek women. However, as time went on and the Greeks apparently came into contact with the nomadic tribes of Scythia, the pictures started to show Amazons who looked more like Scythians riding horses and wielding bows.

"They are dressed like the women we find in the graves," Mayor remarks.

Divergent Narratives

Others outside the Greeks also written about these women. Chinese, Egyptian, and Persian writings all made mention to amazons, albeit their descriptions varied slightly. The majority of what we know about the Scythians comes from the other cultures who were in their vicinity because they lacked a written language of their own. Despite the possibility that some of these stories contain some elements of fact, the majority speak more to the culture of the author than to the Scythian women themselves.

Greek mythology frequently had a male hero defeating an Amazon, for instance. They were only able to envision a zero sum game, according to Mayor. She continues, "The battles are always portrayed as very suspenseful." Of course you won't tell tales about foreign women beating your heroes in Greece.

Conflicts and trade with Amazons were mentioned in Persian, Chinese, and Egyptian texts, but the tales are a little more realistic, with more evenly matched clashes that finally led to alliances. To keep wandering tribes at bay, the Great Wall of China was erected. Although the name "Amazon" is not a Greek word and first appears in Greek narratives, some linguists think it may be related to the Persian word "Hamazon," which means "warrior."

Pedikhons, an Egyptian king, fought Serpot, an Amazon queen, for three days before they were both too fatigued to continue and decided to establish an alliance, according to pieces of Egyptian papyrus.

"It's very different from the ancient Greek society," Mayor claims.

These stories would endure for generations, and the name of the Amazon River was inspired by information that European colonial colonists learned about South American tribes that practiced equality.

Ignoring the Past

Some Greek versions were more credible than others; according to one myth, women would have one of their breasts amputated in order to throw spears and draw bowstrings. Even ancient Greek historians rejected the idea of one-breasted Amazons as absurd, according to Mayor, although certain Amazon statues and other representations still feature them.

The idea of an equitable society, or even one where women were in charge, captivated the Greeks because they were a civilization where men predominated. While Mayor notes that given the character of the Scythians, it's likely that some tribes had lost a lot of males in battle and may have been mostly female, at least temporarily, we haven't definitely uncovered proof that the Scythians were all-female or female-ruled.

Archaeologists initially preferred to disregard the Greek myths, seeing them as mere fiction. According to Mayor, "I believe male historians and classicists may have discounted any truth in the ancient Greek tales of Amazons due to sexism."

In a follow-up email, Mayor stated that some contemporary scholars "prefer to claim that Amazons were invented by Greeks to be defeated by male heroes, or that the Amazons were merely symbols of 'others' —'monstrous women who refuse to marry.'" This is despite prominent Greek historians and philosophers like Herodotus and Plato mentioning women in the Black Sea and Caucasus region living similarly to the mythical Amazons.

But according to Mayor, around 300 prehistoric warrior women from the Scythian era have been discovered in the last few years. More discoveries are probably on the way.

Despite the discovery of armed female archaeologists everywhere across the steppes, she says, "it is perplexing to me that some scholars still hold this dated opinion that Amazons were purely symbolic."

If the Scythians ever truly vanished, it is unclear why they did so. Nomadic horse culture persisted in some areas of the area under various identities; the Mongols are just one example.

"There were strong women among the steppe nomads during the time of Genghis Khan," Mayor claims.

Although the status of women in the local nomadic tribes may have changed when Islam expanded throughout much of what was formerly Scythia beginning in the 7th century, Mayor notes that remnants of equality may still be seen in Tajikistan and Kazakhstan.

Source: https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-ea...

New DNA analysis shed light to Indo-European homeland

Credit: PeopleOfAr

BY THE ARCHAEOLOGIST EDITOR GROUP

Detailed paleogenetic research sheds light on Southern Arc migration, farming, and language evolution.

In a trio of papers, published simultaneously in the journal Science, Ron Pinhasi from the Department of Evolutionary Anthropology and Human Evolution and Archaeological Sciences (HEAS) at the University of Vienna and Songül Alpaslan-Roodenberg from the University of Vienna and Harvard University, Iosif Lazaridis and David Reich at Harvard University—together with 202 co-authors—report a massive effort of genome-wide sequencing from 727 distinct ancient individuals with which it was possible to test longstanding archaeological, genetic and linguistic hypotheses. They present a systematic picture of the interlinked histories of peoples across the Southern Arc Region from the origins of agriculture, to late medieval times.

Credit: University of Vienna

The first article by the international team looked at the origins and dissemination of Indo-European and Anatolian languages. The Indo-Anatolian language family's ancestral home is thought to have been in West Asia, according to genetic evidence, with secondary dispersals of non-Anatolian Indo-Europeans from the Eurasian steppe. People with Caucasian origin came into Anatolia in the west and the steppe in the north during the first stage, which took place between 7,000 and 5,000 years ago. These people may have spoken Anatolian and Indo-European languages in their ancestry.

Around 5,000 years ago, Yamnaya steppe herders with Caucasus hunter-gatherer and Eastern hunter-gatherer heritage set off a series of migrations across Eurasia that may be traced to all currently spoken Indo-European languages (such as Greek, Armenian, and Sanskrit). Their southern excursions into the Balkans and Greece, as well as their eastern expansions across the Caucasus into Armenia, left a mark on the region's Bronze Age inhabitants.

The Yamnaya herders' descendants mixed differently with the local people as they grew. Several types of genetic evidence can be used to pinpoint how Indo-European-speaking immigrants from the steppe interacted with locals to create the Greek, Paleo-Balkan, and Albanian (Indo-European) languages in Southeastern Europe and the Armenian language in West Asia. The Yamnaya had a significant influence on Southeastern Europe, as individuals with nearly pure Yamnaya heritage arrived shortly after the Yamnaya migrations began.

The Southern Arc's Anatolia core region, where large-scale data offers a rich picture of change—and lack of change—over time, yields some of the most startling findings. According to the findings, Anatolia was not significantly affected by the Yamnaya migrations, in contrast to the Balkans and the Caucasus. Due to the absence of Eastern hunter-gatherer ancestors in Anatolia, in contrast to all other places where Indo-European languages were spoken, no connection to the steppe can be established for speakers of Anatolian languages (such as Hittite and Luwian).

The southern Caucasus was impacted numerous times, even before the Yamnaya migrations, in contrast to Anatolia's startling impermeability to steppe migrations. "I was surprised to learn that the Areni Chalcolithic people, who were discovered 15 years ago in the excavation I co-led, had ancestry from gene flow from the north to areas of the southern Caucasus more than 1,000 years before the Yamnaya expanded, and that this northern influence would disappear in the area before reappearing a few thousand years later. This demonstrates that there is still a lot of information to be learned through new digs and fieldwork in Eastern Western Asia "Ron Pinhasi says.

"Anatolia was home to varied communities descending from both local hunter-gatherers and eastern populations of the Caucasus, Mesopotamia, and the Levant," states Songül Alpaslan-Roodenberg

"Variations of the same types of ancestry were shared by the inhabitants of the Marmara region, Southeastern Anatolia, the Black Sea, and the Aegean regions."

Credit: University of Vienna

The interconnections of the first farming societies

The second research project investigates the origins of the world's oldest Neolithic populations, which date to around 12,000 years ago. "The genetic findings support the idea that early farming groups had a network of pan-regional relationships. In addition, they offer fresh proof that the Neolithic transition was a difficult process that took place not just in one central region but also in Anatolia and the Near East, "Ron Pinhasi said.

It gives the first ancient DNA data for Pre-Pottery Neolithic farmers from the Tigris side of northern Mesopotamia, which is a critical region for the origins of agriculture and can be found in both eastern Turkey and northern Iraq. The island of Cyprus, which saw the earliest maritime migration of farmers from the eastern Mediterranean, also contains the first ancient DNA from Pre-Pottery farmers. Together with the first information from Neolithic Armenia, it also offers fresh information on early Neolithic farmers from the Northwest Zagros.

By filling in these gaps, the authors were able to examine the genetic history of these societies, for which archaeological research had previously documented intricate economic and cultural interactions but was unable to track mating practices or interactions that did not leave visible material traces. The findings demonstrate pre-Neolithic roots from hunter-gatherers in the Caucasus, Levant, and Anatolia, and they demonstrate that these early farming cultures created a continuity of lineage that mirrored the topography of West Asia. The findings also show at least two waves of migration from the Fertile Crescent's core to Anatolia's ancient farmers.

The historic period

The third piece demonstrates how ancient Mediterranean political systems maintained differences in lineage from the Bronze Age while remaining connected by migration. The findings indicate that while Italians before the Imperial period had a totally diverse distribution, the ancestry of those who resided in and around Rome during the Imperial period was nearly identical to that of Roman and Byzantine inhabitants from Anatolia. This shows that the heterogeneous but comparable population of the Roman Empire, both in its longer-lasting eastern component focused on Anatolia and in its shorter-lasting western part, was plausible drawn to a significant extent from Anatolian pre-Imperial sources.

"Our findings are rather unexpected considering that in a Science study I co-authored in 2019 on the genetic heritage of people from Ancient Rome, we discovered a cosmopolitan pattern that we initially believed to be specific to Rome. Now that we can see it, other parts of the Roman Empire were just as multicultural as Rome itself, "Ron Pinhasi argues.

8,200-year-old burials in Russia contain pendants crafted from human bone

A century-old archaeological excavation in Russia turns up a new surprise.

An illustration depicting the burial of an adult male on the island of Yuzhniy Oleniy Ostrov in Russia. (Image credit: Tom Björklund)

Nearly a century ago, archaeologists excavating a 8,200-year-old graveyard in northwestern Russia took note of a number of bone and animal-tooth pendants buried with the Stone Age people entombed there. But when researchers recently began to re-analyze the bone pendants to determine which species of animal each came from, they were in for a shock. 

Some of the pendants weren't made from animal bone at all. They were human. 

"When we got the results, I was first thinking that there must be some mistake here," said Kristiina Mannermaa, an archaeologist at the University of Helsinki in Finland, who led the research. 

But it was no mistake, Mannermaa told Live Science. Mixed in with ornaments made of bear, elk and beaver teeth were grooved fragments of human bone, including at least two pendants made from the same human femur, or thighbone.

A surprising discovery

These bits of bone were found at a site called Yuzhniy Oleniy Ostrov, a cemetery with 177 burials from around 6200 B.C. in the Karelia region of Russia. The people here were hunter-fisher-gatherers, Mannermaa said, with a diet centered primarily around fish. While some were buried unadorned, others were found with many tooth and bone ornaments, some of which seem to have been sewed onto the hems of long-decayed cloaks or coats or used as noisemakers in rattles. 

As part of a large project seeking to understand how these Stone Age people interacted with animals, Mannermaa and her team had some of these ornaments analyzed with a method that looks at molecular differences in the bone collagen between species. 

Of 37 pendants crafted from fragments of bone from 6 different graves, 12 turned out to be human, the analysis showed. (Another two returned results indicating that they, too, might be human, but the findings were uncertain.) These dozen pendants came from three different graves: two holding single adult men, and one of an adult man buried with a child. There may be other human bone pendants in the graveyard, Mannermaa said, but those artifacts are still being analyzed. 

These two pendants are crafted from the same human femur. (Image credit: Anna Malyutina/ Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera))

Using human bones

Interestingly, the bones didn't seem to be treated differently than other materials by the people who turned them into decorations. They were carved rather quickly, Mannermaa said, with simple grooves notched into their ends where a cord could be wrapped. They were also similar in size and shape to the animal teeth that were found nearby, perhaps indicating that they were used as a replacement for animal teeth that had been lost from the hem of a garment, Mannermaa and her team reported in the June issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports(opens in new tab). Wear patterns on the ornaments suggest they were worn by their owners before being buried with them.

"It gives an impression that when a human or animal died, they didn't see so much difference in the body and the parts," Mannermaa said. 

This apparent interchangeability doesn't mean that people viewed human bone as meaningless, said Amy Gray Jones, a senior lecturer in archaeology at the University of Chester in the U.K. who was not involved in the study. Animal bone pendants and tools from Stone Age Europe are often treated with care and disposed of in particular ways after being used, Gray Jones told Live Science. Unlike today, when animal bone is largely unvalued in Western culture, ancient Europeans may have infused both animal and human bone with great symbolism. 

"It means not necessarily that the human bone and the pendant is just another material, but that perhaps it also has an importance or a meaning like the animal bone," Gray Jones said. 

The archaeological record is thin, however. This is the first such use of human bone from northeastern Europe, Mannermaa said, though human tooth pendants(opens in new tab) from about 6000 B.C. have been found at a site called Vedbaek Henriksholm Bøgebakken in Denmark. In 2020, a couple of human-bone arrowheads were discovered in the Netherlands. There are also a few other scattered examples of carved human bones from around Stone Age Europe, including an arm bone from Serbia with notches cut in it(opens in new tab). 

"We're probably only getting a partial glimpse into what human bone was used for," Gray Jones said. The method of analyzing collagen molecules used in the current study is relatively new, and it's likely that more already-discovered bone fragments would be identified as human if they were tested, she said. 

Mannermaa and her team are now studying the animal bone pendants found at Yuzhniy Oleniy Ostrov to confirm that they were, indeed, worked in similar ways to the human bone. It would be interesting, she said, to try to extract DNA from the pendants to see if the people the bone came from were related to the people who were buried with the pendants. But those studies require the destruction of large amounts of bone, she said, so it's not likely that researchers will pursue that research at this time. 

Originally published on Live Science