While perhaps not as iconic as some of the other myths that I have written about previously, the Amazons are nonetheless fairly well-known. Although today the name “Amazon” is more likely to bring to mind online shopping, it meant something completely different to the ancient Greeks. To them, the Amazons were fearsome female warriors. Now, pop culture would tell you that the Greeks believed that the Amazons cut off and cauterized their breasts so they didn’t get in the way of shooting arrows. But this idea is false, Amazones was not even a Greek word. The idea that it meant “lacking breasts” was invented by the Greek philosopher Hellenikos when he tried to combine a foreign word a that meant without and the word mazos that sounded somewhat similar for the Greek word for breast. However, this idea was rejected by his contemporaries at the time and was only taken up again relatively recently. Many of their queens were prominent characters in the stories of heroes such as Heracles, Theseus, Achilles and Odysseus. Even the misogynistic Greeks respected their capabilities, to the point where in the Iliad Odysseus’s men would boast about having killed them in battle, seeing it as a feat of arms.

In fact, over time the Amazons became more and more important to the Greeks, specifically the Athenians. They believed that the defeat of the Amazons was one of the major catalysts for the foundation of Athens itself. The only problem was…they had no proof. Eventually the historian Herodotus postulated that the Amazons eventually intermarried with the Scythians, and their descendants became nomadic warriors known as the Sauromatians. After this there was no more real evidence to support this idea until a U.S-Russian archaeology team discovered nearly 150 Sauromatian graves near the Russia-Kazakhstan border. The female corpses showed signs of being warriors; bow legged from riding on horseback and often buried with their weapons. In addition, they were nearly 5 feet 6 inches which was extremely tall for that time period.

In all likelihood the Amazons did exist in some capacity, most likely as the Scythians and their descendants. The Scythians were a nomadic people who ranged from the Black Sea to Mongolia, and about one-third of their women seemed to have fought beside their men. They had a tribal society in which everyone was expected to pull their own weight, which explains why both men and women were taught how to fight. So, while the idea of an all-female society that mutilated themselves to increase efficiency in battle may not have been true, the Amazons were a very real group of people. They were fearsome enough warriors that the Greeks respected them, and even told legends about them.