Some of my friends were influenced by Maria Gimbutas, an archaeologist who confounded the male dominated world of archaeology by saying that the many ancient female images found in European excavations were evidence that an age of matriarchy preceded the age of patriarchy. She stated that this matriarchy was a time of peace, of co-existence and of culture because such civilised values were central to the lives of women unlike men: "Its people did not produce lethal weapons or build forts in inaccessible places." Instead, inspired by the gentle influence of the goddess, they lived in "comfortable houses," in an "age free of strife." This glorious age in Europe ended suddenly and violently she said with the arrival of the Kurgan marauders who brought with them warfare, military technology and patriarchy. (Ref. Her 1974 study "Gods and Goddesses of Old Europe" and in her later "The Language of the Goddess: Unearthing the Hidden Symbols of Western Civilisation " (Harper & Row, 1989)), Men have reinforced her theory by claiming the warrior role as their own.
In my search for women warriors, I thought too of the Amazons said to be depicted on the friezes of the Parthenon . I visited the Parthenon (and the marbles in the British Museum, researched the ancient Greek writings and learnt that their existence seemed well documented. At a time when Grecian men lorded it over their women folk, the Amazon women were controlling their own lives in lands to the north and far to the north east of Greece . It was not that the Amazon women lorded it over men. They simply lived without them except when they wanted children - and fought them in wartime.
I found it interesting that women have found in different lands and times that they needed to separate themselves off from men to develop skills and talents and to simply be themselves. This was done by the Beguine, by Aborigines with their single women's camps - and by the Amazons.
They gained their warlike reputation because of reported attacks they launched on the lands of Greece and Asia Minor from the plains north of the Black Sea. According to one classical account, they were besieging Troy when Archilles killed their queen, Penthesilea, and then fall in love with her dying face. They were given credit for founding many cities such as Ephesus, Smyma, Cyme and Myrine. Monuments and tombs are ascribed to them on the plains and mountains about Thermodon. The Amazons were eventually driven from these cities. It was not recorded by the Greeks if they had come to free their Grecian sisters - if so, they did not succeed
Aristotle and Plato gave witness to what Greek men expected of women. Aristotle noted that a good Greek woman was submissive to her husband and should be trained by him as was appropriate to one of an inferior nature. Plato regretted that it was not possible to turn cowardly soldiers into docile women. (ref. P187 of Condren.).
Some accounts spoke of the Amazons as once having a homeland north of Greece in the land of Kosovo, recently a land of hideous atrocities and of NATO bombing. The Amazon custom of women warriors may have continued here in another form perhaps influenced by folk memories. Local women warriors led guerrilla bands against Hitler's forces. Some of these had a special status, lived as men and did not marry. Rene Cremaux in "Third Gender" documented 20 such women warriors. In Bosnia a Muslim from Mostar took me to a very ancient grave yard where the carvings on the tombs depicted many running horses and beardless small-chinned warriors with swords and shields who could be women although this was not certain. He told me these were of a people who lived here long ago.
But, by all accounts, the principal land of the Amazons lay north east of the Black Sea near the Caucasus Mountains. The Greeks said that the Amazons were a self-sufficient society of women without men, in which women ploughed the fields, looked after cattle and particularly trained horses. They reported that this society was the result of a rebellion of women who, in company with some other rebellious women from the Greek related cities of the Thacians and Euboeans, set up their own army and founded independent settlements.
They were said to be consecrated to Cybelle, the Mother Goddess of Nature , whose rites included much dancing and music. These were traditionally presided over in the Middle East by priestesses including some who were transgendered. We do not know if transsexual women were welcomed among the Amazons but given their traditional link with Cybele this was entirely possible. Walter Tyrrell, n 62 b of b
For procreation they had an agreement with the neighbouring Gargarian people (those whom Gimbutas accused of having introducing patriarchy to Europe some 2 to 4 millennia earlier) to meet once a year at a spring festival ritual held on a mountain between their territories. Afterwards the Amazons would lie in the dark with Gargarian men selected at random for the purpose of gendering children. The boys born from these encounters would be returned to the Gargarians.
The retention of political independence made it necessary for the Amazons to become warriors both to defend their lands and perhaps to extend their territories. They also hunted on horseback and made their shields, helmets and clothes from the skins of animals. They used a wide range of weapons including the bow and arrow, the sagaris and especially the javelin. It was said, in accounts I have read in translation, that they would cut off their right breast if it interfered with their throwing of the javelin..) I know from bitter personal experience that the left breast can get in the way of the string of a powerful bow (you should have seen the bruises!) but I do not quite understand how the right impeded a javelin throw. Such customs may also have suited transsexual females to males - who tend to be omitted from most historical accounts but must also have existed - for in our society such people have mastectomies
Another race known to the Greeks may have had transgendered women warriors. Greek writers reported that the warrior elite of the Scythian nomads who lived not to far from the Amazons to the North of the Black Sea were "the most impotent of men" due to spending so much time in trousers and on horseback and that: "the great majority among the Scythians became impotent, do woman's work, live like women and converse accordingly ... they put on women's clothes, holding that they have lost their manhood... and suffered from "the female sickness" ref. p211. Some of these were said to have been smitten by the Goddess in order to make them prophets and diviners.
Around the time I was exploring my own cultural roots, archaeologists were discovering that women warriors also lived in societies to the east of the Caucasus. Between 1992 and 1995, a team led by Jeannine Davis-Kimball, director of the Center for the Study of Eurasian Nomads in Berkeley, California, excavated a site of Neolithic kurgans (burial mounds) near Pokrovka,. The skeletons they uncovered were of women that were on average two inches taller than the average modern American woman, at five foot six. These were buried with weapons by their side. Arrayed next to one young female was a quiver containing forty bronze-tipped arrows. Her skeleton had bowed leg bones possibly from a lifetime spent in the saddle. Wonderful tattoos decorated her arms and shoulders. Male warriors were also found nearby. It seems that gender roles were fluid among these people of the steppes.
These armed and prosperous women belonged to the Kurgan nations - the very people whom Gimbutas said were led by male chauvinists who had brought to an end a gentle age of women by introducing patriarchy when they swept into Europe from the steppes with a first wave between 4500-4300 BCE and a second wave 3000-2800 BCE.
Lotte Motz, an expert on Germanic mythology in "The Faces of the Goddess" (Oxford, 1997), argued against Gimbutas that the images of men and animals are just as prolific as goddess imagery in early European cultures. "There clearly was no introduction of warrior gods and warrior values," she wrote, "no imposition of a patriarchal system, and no humiliation of the Goddess." Others have argued strongly that some of the many images Gimbutas interpreted as female were in fact of hermaphrodites - as is the oldest image yet found in the British Isle. (A figure with penis and breasts carved in ash wood and found under a track near Glastonbury.) Such figures represented possibly a Divinity that held both genders.
Davis-Kimball on a later trip through the museums of central Asia found evidence of female warriors and priestesses "all over the place" including in the remains of what she believed was an ancient culture dating to around 2000 BCE unearthed in the Takla Makan desert by Chinese archaeologists.
In this ancient Eurasian culture there is ample evidence of the powerful positions occupied by women as shamans, priestesses and warriors. There are also similarities between what was discovered in China and near Pokrovka especially in implements such as cultic spoons and mirrors as well as in the spiral tattoos on mummified faces, arms and hands. It seems this older Eurasian culture may have influenced the later nomads.
There is evidence that in the British Isles and Ireland, a male dominated society replaced not a matriarchy but of a society in which women and men worked together as equals with safeguards and pledges to possibly control an innate male aggressive tendency - as is still the case in some Australian Aboriginal communities, despite the cultural damage inflicted by white society.
According to ancient legends the kings of Ulster had to pledge that they would look after the women's rights. Specifically they had to pledge that the harvest would be provided every year to the families, that there would be no lack of supplies of cloth dyes to the women and that medical supplies and midwives would be provided so that no women need die in child birth. If they broke this pledge they could apparently be deposed.