- Forget Wonder Woman's golden lassos and tiaras.
The Amazons of ancient myth were much more gruesome
than any DC comic heroine.
According to the legends,
they were man-hating, baby-killing war machines
who cut off their own breasts
just so they could shoot their arrows better.
Amazons were the fearsome, worthy opponents
that male heroes had to defeat
to prove their battle prowess.
- But were these warrior women even real?
Images of fiercely independent Amazons
could be found on countless vases, sculptures,
and buildings from antiquity.
Yet over time, they faded into myth
along with the dryads and centaurs.
Scholars have debated their existence for decades,
but recent archeological discoveries
might have finally solved this mystery.
(lilting music)
- [Moiya] TV shows like "Xena: Warrior Princess"
and comics like "Wonder Woman"
paint a seemingly contradictory picture of Amazons
as terrifying but attractive,
isolated from the world but still compassionate enough
to aid those they deem worthy.
Modern media also gives the distinct impression
that Amazons were merely figures of fantastical myth.
These depictions surely wouldn't have sat well
with ancient Greek writers who saw Amazons as very real,
but savagely brutish people.
The oldest surviving written mention of the Amazons
can be found in Homer's "The Iliad," penned around 700 BCE,
a time when the boundary between myth and history
was so fuzzy it was almost non-existent.
"The Iliad" tells the story of the Trojan War,
which supposedly happened five centuries
before Homer's time, though modern archeologists
are skeptical that a war of quite that scale
actually happened the way Homer described.
Still, the Amazons' presence in the story
suggests that they were in the Greek cultural zeitgeist
as far back as the Bronze Age.
Recent findings from grave sites
in parts of Russia and Ukraine have scholars thinking
that his descriptions of the warrior women
may have also been exaggerated.
But first, let's take a closer look
at how Amazons have been depicted in literature and art.
- [Emily] The great Heracles was rumored to have fought
the Amazons and emerged victorious
during the ninth of his 12 famous labors.
The Amazon Queen Hippolyta wore a leather girdle, or belt,
that was supposedly gifted to her by her father Ares
for being her people's fiercest fighter.
King Eurystheus, who assigned Heracles his labors,
had a daughter who coveted Hippolyta's belt,
so Heracles was sent to retrieve it.
He sailed with a small armada across the Black Sea
to the Amazons' distant and mysterious homeland.
When he arrived, Hippolyta agreed
to give him the girdle without bloodshed,
but the goddess Hera had other ideas.
She convinced the Amazons that their queen was in danger,
so they attacked Heracles' forces.
Hippolyta was struck down in the ensuing battle,
and Heracles took her belt back to Tiryns
and its greedy king.
Despite his many impressive opponents,
the moment where Heracles defeats Hippolyta
is one of his most oft-depicted laborers in classical art.
What a convenient way for artists to uphold male heroism
while simultaneously reminding women what can happen
if they stray from their designated roles.
In other later versions of the story,
either Hippolyta or another powerful Amazon named Antiope
was stolen away to Athens to be King Theseus' bride.
The Amazons besieged Athens to bring her home,
but were ultimately defeated by this mighty city state.
This battle known as the Amazonomachy
is featured on the west side of the Parthenon.
- In Homer's epic poem and other accounts of the Trojan War,
the Amazons were led into battle by their Queen Penthesilea
to fight for Troy after their hero Hector
was slain by Achilles.
Penthesilea's motivation for joining the war effort
is unclear, perhaps she was repaying a debt
to her old foe Priam, the last king of Troy,
or maybe she and her army were paid mercenaries
hired by a desperate monarch.
Some say she was seeking retribution through glory
for murdering one of her fellow Amazons.
Whatever her reasoning,
the story of Amazons in the Trojan War
ends much like every other Greek tale
featuring these fearsome warriors.
They fought with enough bravery and skill
to diminish the Greek ranks,
but not enough to turn the tide of war.
Queen Penthesilea herself was eventually slain
by the Greek hero Achilles,
who according to some writers like Arctinus of Miletus,
fell in love with her beauty
after her helmet was removed in death.
You're a worthy opponent,
but no match for the great Achilles.
- I think I can handle a little boy
talks about himself in the third person.
- Who are you? You're weak.
You're despicable, you're disgusting.
(gasps) You're beautiful!
Oh, no, what have I done?
I love you, my Amazon queen!
But wait, don't I also love Patroclus?
Why can't these writers just make up their minds?
In this story, the Amazon serve
as little more than convenient plot devices
designed to bolster the reputation of Greece's military
and give their greatest hero a sharp but romantic edge.
Thanks to misogyny and the fact that no writing survived
from anyone who clearly fit the Amazon description,
these stories were dismissed as obvious fiction
over the next two millennia.
The fearsome Amazons were written off
as pro-Athens propaganda,
or reimagined as beardless male foreigners
who the Greeks mistook for battleworn women.
That is until a Swiss law professor named Johann Bachofen
published a paper in 1861
making the radically feminist claim
that Amazons were more than just myth,
and that early humans were naturally matriarchal
before the disease of patriarchy set in.
- But there was no proof of the Amazons' legitimacy
until the 1970s when genetic testing technology
made it possible for archeologists
to accurately determine the sex of ancient remains.
Because despite what some corners of the internet claim,
you cannot tell the sex of a long-deceased person
just by looking at the shape of their skeleton.
In the 1940s, archeologists uncovered
hundreds of burial mounds called kurgans
in the Great Steppes of eastern Europe and central Asia,
a region of dry open grasslands to the northeast of Greece.
The kurgans were left around the fifth century BCE
by the myriad nomadic tribes famous for their horse handling
known to the Greeks as Scythians, Thracians or Sauromatians.
Hey boss, I found a grave site.
- What's in it?
- A bow, some daggers, a cool headpiece.
- It's a male warrior!
- Do you wanna look at the actual remains first?
- Oh no, that'd be silly.
What can those bones tell me
that the weapons and my rigid notion of gender roles cannot?
- Originally, the archeologists assumed the bodies buried
with weapons were all male because well, of course they did.
2,500 years after Homer and our scientists
still couldn't imagine a society that allowed,
let alone encouraged their women to fight.
But the genetic testing revealed
that one third of the kurgans were eternal resting places
for female warriors, buried with weapons, armor,
and evidence of battle wounds just like the men.
Suddenly the puzzle pieces started falling into place.
Most myths have a kernel of truth in them
if you know how to look for it,
and this archeological evidence
was the magnifying glass scholars had been waiting for.
Adrienne Mayor, a folklorist and historian
who literally wrote the book
on separating Amazon fact from fiction,
believes Scythian women were the real world inspiration
for ancient Greece's mythical opponents.
Early artistic depictions of the Amazons
even showed them wearing Scythian fashion.
- There has never been evidence
of an all-female society of warriors across the Black Sea
who modify their chests and murder their male children,
but we do know that the Scythians were active
and roaming near the Black Sea by 900 BCE.
By the time Homer wrote "The Iliad,"
Greeks interacted with Scythians regularly,
and it's not hard to imagine
how they could have invented such monstrous figures
by embellishing some of their northeastern neighbors'
more unfamiliar traits.
Homer was an author trying to write a memorable story,
after all.
The reality of Greek mythology's favorite war girlies
is much more mundane.
The Great Steppes are a harsh environment
with few resources,
so the Scythians had to travel and fight to survive.
This bred a culture
where girls learned to ride their prized horses
and shoot their innovative bows just like the boys did.
Still, many of the men were likely to have died
during hunts or raids, giving the impression
that there weren't many of them around.
- The myth about Amazons killing
or abandoning their male children could have arisen
from the common nomadic practice of fosterage
where a family leaves their son with a neighboring tribe
for safety, education, or to strengthen an alliance.
It was also a convenient way
for the Greeks to support their false claim
that Amazons shunned all men.
Oh, and that myth about their chests?
That one is just flimflam from the fifth century BCE.
So-called historian Hellanicos
was trying to derive the meaning of the word Amazon
by using Greek roots, even though it wasn't a Greek word.
He claimed it meant "without breast,"
but Amazons were almost never shown
with this particular adaptation in art,
and even his contemporaries dismissed his idea as absurd.
The true origin of the word Amazon remains a mystery.
- So it seems that the brutal misandrist Amazons of lore
didn't really exist,
but they were caricatures of a real culture
remarkably different from ancient Greece,
one where women weren't relegated
to prim and proper domestic roles.
Consider me disappointed, then,
that Greek writers didn't include some of the coolest
and most deviant aspects of Scythian culture
into their monstrous myths, like the abundant tattoos
or the fact that most of them carried hemp-burning kits
in their travel packs.
Most of the world was fooled
by the Amazons' descent into myth,
but there's a tiny island off the coast of Turkey
that still honors the memory of the real Amazons,
women of the Eurasian nomadic tribes
who fought with just as much bravery and skill as the men.
This Aksu festival on Giresun Island
is celebrated every May
and heavily features the sacred Hamza stone,
which locals believe was worshiped by the Amazons
who lived there millennia ago.
- [Emily] We can learn so much from Giresun Island
about the power of local memory.
Imagine how different the last 2000 years might've been
if we had all remembered
that women can fight ferociously enough
to give demigod heroes a run for their money
in even the most biased stories.
Unlike Homer, we can't change history
through our embellishments, but moving forward,
we can all embody more
of what Adrienne Mayor calls the "Amazon spirit."
Essentially, this is the belief
that women are equal to men in courage and skill.
You know, the very message that characters
like Wonder Woman and Xena were created to convey.
- [Moiya] Now it's time for the next pantheon pick,
and I'm excited to bring some Amazon spirit
to our utopia with Hippolyta.
- Yes! - Yes!
I feel like our utopia needs some leadership energy
and it doesn't have to be a monarchy.
We can choose whatever type of government we want,
but we need someone who can lead the people
and if that person can also defend
against any incoming raids, then that's great.
- Added bonus.
I think that's a great pick and I like the idea
of taking almost like a demigod
or someone more human and adding them
'cause what's utopia without diversity?
- [Moiya] Exactly. I love it.
So that's our pantheon pick for this episode
but be sure to tune in for the rest of the season
because we will be picking a new deity
at the end of every episode.
And next time it's Dr. Z's turn to pick.
- I can't wait to see what you think!
With Dr. McKees- McKees?
(Moiya laughs)
I gotta go.
- Dr. Mc-
- Oh my God, you almost did it too! McKee.
- Dr. McKee. - Dr. McKee!