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Hi! I'm an ancient history teacher, and I'm answering voicemails. Let's give one a listen.
“Hi David. What is the evidence of women warriors in the past? Not just individual
instances of women who have fought, but women being brought into military units or having
their own military units and serving careers as soldiers in various cultures. Thank you.”
And thank you for your question.
The search for actual women soldiers from ancient history hasn’t turned up a whole lot.
The most commonly-heard-about female fighters from ancient sources would be queens who led armies:
women like Samsi of Qedar, Teuta of Illyria, Zenobia of Palmyra, Mawiyya of the Tanukh,
the Ptolemy queens, Rhodogune of Parthia, the Trung sisters and Lady Trieu of Vietnam,
to name a few. Most of them rode with their armies and were capable
strategists but didn’t do much fighting themselves. There are a few exceptions.
Artemisia I of Caria, who ruled over the city of Halicarnassus, stands out as an interesting
example. She was a naval commander during the Second Greco-Persian War on the side of Persia.
She led ships in the battles of Artemesium and Salamis in 480 BCE. Herodotus says that
“her ships were reputed the best in the whole fleet after the ships of Sidon.”
Alexander the Great had a half-sister by the name of Cynane. She is a rare example of a woman
royal who personally engaged in fighting. The Greek writer Polyaenus says this about her:
“Cynane, the daughter of Philip was famous for her military knowledge: she conducted armies,
and in the field charged at the head of them. In an engagement with the Illyrians,
she with her own hand slew Caeria their queen; and with great slaughter defeated the Illyrian army.”
Amanirenas was a queen of Kush in the first century BCE. In 24 BCE,
she and her army defeated the Roman troops of Aelius Gallus, the prefect of Egypt,
at Syene and Philae in Lower Nubia. The Romans describe her as being active in the fighting,
fierce and with one eye. We presume she had lost an eye in a previous battle.
Maybe you’ve heard of Boudicca. She was queen of the Iceni in Britain, who led a rebellion
against the Romans in 60 or 61 CE. She destroyed the Roman garrisons at Camulodunum, Londinium and
Verulamium. The Roman writer Cassius Dio describes her as tall and terrifying. If you want to hear
more, I did a video covering her, so I will leave a link for you if you want to check it out.
Now in ancient sources, there has been occasional mention of women who were not rulers
that engaged in fighting, usually in response to a crisis or other unusual circumstances.
For example, there is a story about Telesilla, the famous poet from Argos, who with a group of women,
slaves and young people, defended the city successfully against Cleomenes,
the king of Sparta, in the 5th century BCE, after he had killed all the male soldiers.
The only problem is we don’t know if the story is true.
Telesilla was a real person and a poet, but the earliest account about her defense of the city
comes from the writer Pausanias, who lived centuries after the fact.
What about Spartan women? Weren’t they trained to be soldiers? No, not really. They did go through
a physical regimen, which was designed to make them athletic and strong, so that they would bear
physically fit babies. But unlike men, they did not train for combat.
During wars they would help in various ways, but not actually on the battlefield.
Ah, you might say, but I have heard there were female gladiators in ancient Rome.
Surely they could be considered women warriors. And yes, that is so. Gladiatrices, as they have
been called in more recent times, did exist, though mention of them in ancient sources is rare.
They seem to have been a rarity and were considered exotic. A relief from the second
century CE depicting two female gladiators was found in Turkey, and below their feet are their
names: Amazon and Achillia. A bronze statue from around the first century shows a female thrax
gladiator holding a raised sica in triumph. The figure stands in a triumphant pose with the sica
held high, bare-chested, in only a loincloth. We can see that female gladiators, just like the men,
fought topless in only a loincloth, minimal armor protecting the shins and arms, and a helmet.
If we put together a list of women warriors from mythology, it would be very substantial.
There are a ton of them. But we would find that a large portion of them would be goddesses,
and when it comes to the question of real-life female warriors, we clearly can’t include them.
Now you might wonder why there are so many goddess warriors. Doesn’t that indicate a
belief that women could be fighters in real life? Not necessarily. Deities by design are
supposed to be larger than life, better than human - they are super beings. So they are deliberately
exaggerated. They’re not run-of-the-mill. So the representation of goddesses as warriors
doesn’t necessarily mean that women had those kinds of professions in reality.
There are other significant women warriors in myth - not goddesses, but semi-divine characters,
such as the Amazons from Greek myth, and the Valkyries from Viking myth. Were they real? No,
these figures cannot be considered historical. But might these mythical women warriors be based
on actual true-to-life women warriors? Possibly. The best evidence we have for women warriors comes
from archaeology. A discovery was made recently at the site of an ancient cemetery in the Ukraine
dating to the 4th century BCE. In one of the barrows, four women of different ages were buried:
two young women in their late 20s, a teenage girl of 12-13 years old and a woman of 45-50 years old.
The Institute of Archaeology at the Russian Academy of Sciences identified the women as
Scythian nomads. The tombs had mostly been robbed, but two of the women’s skeletons were untouched.
They were laid on wooden beds that were covered by grass. One of them belonged to a young woman,
who is said to have been buried in the position of riding a horse. She had an arrowhead buried in
her leg, and her bone and muscle structure indicated she did, in fact, ride horses. Under her left
shoulder there was a bronze mirror, to her left there were two spears, and on her left hand there
was a bracelet made of glass beads. Between her legs there were two vessels.
The second untouched body was a woman of
45-50 years old. She was buried in a ceremonial headdress, the plates of which were well-preserved
and decorated with floral designs and the rims with pendants in the shape of amphorae.
Along with the older woman, an iron knife was laid wrapped into a piece of fabric and an iron arrowhead
of quite a rare type, having a forked end. In many of the headlines, the discovery was
billed as proof that the Amazons existed. While it's possible that the Greeks may have
encountered Scythians and maybe even some female fighters, there is nothing concrete
to link these women warriors to the Amazon stories. Still, it does show a culture that had
women who fought. How common they were among the Scythians we can’t tell at this point.
I hope that helped to answer your question. If any of you have any other evidences for
women warriors that I left out, please say so in the comments below the video.
If anyone else would like to leave me a question on my voicemail,
you can do so at speakpipe.com/DavidMiano.
I can’t guarantee that I'm going to answer every single voicemail. It all depends on how many
I get and what you ask me about. If it's a question about prehistoric times or medieval times,
I am less likely to answer it. Ancient history questions are best, and also how interesting I think
the general audience will find it. That's important too. Thank you for watching. We’ll see you next time.
You might like my little e-booklet, Why Ancient History Matters. It’s designed to persuade people
that the subject is important, even in the modern world. You might also wish to use it to help
spread the word. So feel free to share it with someone you know. It’s free for anyone who wants
it. I’ve left a link in the description box below the video for you to grab a copy. Catch you later!