The Amazons probably had real models in Scythian women buried with their weapons
Greeks never doubted the Amazons were real, and modern archaeology is finding reasons to agree. Graves across the Eurasian steppe hold women buried with arms, some bearing the injuries and musculature of mounted fighters. In 2019 a tomb near Voronezh held several generations of armed Scythian women in golden headdresses.
In Greek myth the Amazons were warrior women famed for riding, archery and strength, living in a society closed to men. They kept their daughters and sent sons back to the fathers, meeting men only briefly to conceive. They appear in the Iliad, the Argonautica and the labours of Heracles, and legends credit them with long campaigns from Thrace and Scythia as far as Arabia and Egypt, and with founding cities such as Ephesos, Smyrna and Sinope. Most writers set their kingdom in Pontus, on the Black Sea's southern shore, with a capital called Themiscyra beside the Thermodon river.
The popular Greek explanation of the name, from a word meaning breastless, gave rise to the story, repeated by the Roman historian Justin, that Amazons removed one breast to shoot better. Ancient artists never showed this: Amazons always appear with two breasts, one often covered, and Philostratus says their babies fed from both. The historian Adrienne Mayor argues the false etymology created the myth. Linguists instead suggest an Iranian word for warriors, or other roots, and none is certain.
Greek writers found many labels for them. Herodotus used words meaning manslayers, and reported that Scythians called them Oiorpata, from their words for man and to kill. Aeschylus called them men-loathers and husbandless, and in Euripides' Hippolytus the hero is son of the horse-loving Amazon.
The steppe finds point to the horse cultures of Scythians and Sarmatians as the likely inspiration. A 2017 find in Armenia revealed an Iron Age woman, buried with jewellery, whose skeleton showed the wear and wounds of a horseback warrior. Still, many classical scholars treat the Amazons as pure invention, a set of anti-women or stand-ins for Persians, and similar tales of warlike nomad women come from Egypt, Persia, India and China.
Source: Amazons
