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from the Why-aren't-the-Amazon-women-located-in-the-Amazon? dept.
Amazons Were Long Considered a Myth. These Discoveries Show Warrior Women Were Real:
For a long time, modern scholars believed that the Amazons were little more than a figment of ancient imaginations.
[...] Some historians argued that they were probably a propaganda tool created to keep Athenian women in line. Another theory suggested that they may have been beardless men mistaken for women by the Greeks.
[...] In a landmark discovery revealed this month, archaeologists unearthed the remains of four female warriors buried with a cache of arrowheads, spears and horseback-riding equipment in a tomb in western Russia — right where Ancient Greek stories placed the Amazons.
The team from the Institute of Archaeology at the Russian Academy of Sciences identified the women as Scythian nomads who were interred at a burial site some 2,500 years ago near the present-day community of Devitsa. The women ranged in age from early teens to late 40s, according to the archaeologists. And the eldest of the women was found wearing a golden ceremonial headdress, a calathus, engraved with floral ornaments — an indication of stature.
[...] Earlier excavations have turned up similar evidence, though not always so well preserved. In 2017, Armenian researchers discovered the remains of a woman in her 20s who they said resembled Amazon myths. They found that she died from battle injuries. Their report in the International Journal of Osteoarchaeology noted that she had an arrowhead buried in her leg and that her bone and muscle structure indicated she rode horses.
The new discovery in Russia marked the first time multiple generations of Scythian women were found buried together, according to the researchers. The youngest of the bodies may have belonged to a girl roughly 12 or 13 years old. Two others were women in their 20s, according to the researchers, and the fourth was between 45 and 50.
[...] The discovery also represents the first time such a remarkably well-preserved headdress was found on a warrior woman’s head. According to the researchers, the headdress was 65 to 70 percent gold — a far higher portion than is often found in Scythian jewelry, which is typically about 30 percent.
An Early Armenian female warrior of the 8–6 century BC from Bover I site (Armenia), International Journal of Osteoarchaeology (DOI: 10.1002/oa.2838)
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Arik on Friday January 03 2020, @07:39PM (3 children)
But lightly armored youths, boys or girls, might have been able to ride them nonetheless. If that did happen, if some steppe youngsters figured out how to ride, they would be able to move quite quickly cross country. More quickly than their elders could manage, which would make them very useful as scouts, a role in which they could have been seen by the Greeks and given rise to some of their ideas. But the ability would have been very useful in peacetime as well, for herdsmen who often need to track down animals that for one reason or another wander and get lost.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by Mojibake Tengu on Friday January 03 2020, @08:02PM
A female warrior concept is quite common in many cultures in Asia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onna-bugeisha [wikipedia.org]
Tomoe Gozen herself was a knight.
And in Armenia, Queen Tomyris is a national legend. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomyris [wikipedia.org]
It's not just some post-modern anime character cliché.
The edge of 太玄 cannot be defined, for it is beyond every aspect of design
(Score: 3, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Friday January 03 2020, @08:21PM (1 child)
So have a lot of other people (2014) [nationalgeographic.com]
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/06/24/7408365/
(Score: 4, Funny) by tangomargarine on Friday January 03 2020, @10:25PM
Oh, that makes the URL make more sense.
Okay, sure.
Errr...okay, we're going with an analogy to the movie/book here
historian back then, okay
wait what
this is turning into word salad
okay okay, I'm opening the damn article already!
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 03 2020, @07:53PM (6 children)
Can anybody who knows archeology comment how strong this evidence actually is?
On the service it sounds pretty superficial to me. ("herp, derp, I found one person who claims to be Anonymous, who wants to overthrow the US government, so all of Anonymous must be a terrorist organization trying to overthrow teh US government"). On the other hand, that is really old, so maybe that is par for the course.
I'd feel this would be more compelling if they found villages, numerous women in armor, battle damage on numerous skeletons, artwork, and more. A collection of 4 people could have been a rich family cosplaying... but then my standards may be unreasonable considering how old it is.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 03 2020, @08:48PM (3 children)
Just read the link [nationalgeographic.com] that JoeMerchant gave above.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Friday January 03 2020, @09:35PM (2 children)
Heretic! To suggest that someone actually read a link? This is a tech-oriented site. If the technology doesn't exist to do it automatically, it ain't happening!
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 3, Touché) by tangomargarine on Friday January 03 2020, @10:21PM (1 child)
There definitely are screen readers to do that for you.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Friday January 03 2020, @10:30PM
Ha! Ever try using one? I've tried several. All real pieces of shit. You can't graft an audio interface onto a visual interface and expect seamless results.
Only a UI that is designed from scratch to pre-process the data and put it into memory in a form that can be read without hassles by speech engines will work. You can keep the screen as well, so others can follow along, but people using screen readers don't need visual styling, images, javascript menus, gesture interfaces, and all the other crap.
"Man's inhumanity to man? You want to start a real argument, try talking about man's inhumanity to women."
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Friday January 03 2020, @10:46PM
There's a stunningly long list of myths that turned out to be real. That is, once the ridiculous embellishments are stripped away, the rest is real.
In this case, the sheer quantity and spread of material over many centuries, such as the artwork on vases, suggests that the Greeks weren't just making up exotic fantasies. And now, these burial mounds, in combination with advances in DNA analyses, have provided corroboration.
A myth such as Atlantis is trickier. There isn't as much material. It is actually an invention of Plato. But maybe Plato didn't make it up from nothing. He may have been inspired by a real place, which might be the island of Santorini.
Another problem is a religious agenda. Cranks frequently make fantastic claims, and try to connect Biblical passages with archaeological work, for purposes of impressing the rubes, rather than any concern for science. Occasionally, they get it right. But more often, they just muddy the waters and arouse further skepticism.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Joe Desertrat on Saturday January 04 2020, @12:40AM
I suspect a large part of myths and legends from long ago are distortions based on actual events, especially as the stories have "evolved" over time. Much of the Bible is a prime example. Centaurs were myths that probably evolved from Greek tribesmen that practically lived on horseback, chased from their homeland they became raiders in the night, when it was difficult to tell where a horse ended and a man began. I can certainly believe that the myths of Amazons had a similar history, there have probably been several instances of groups of women, possibly survivors of wars in which the men of their tribes were for the most part destroyed, who continued the fight on their own. It does not take long among humans for facts to metamorphose into something quite different from reality.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 03 2020, @09:03PM (4 children)
I should have been born 2000 years ago. I would have got myself captured by the amazons and died in bliss of snoo snoo.
(Score: 3, Funny) by MostCynical on Friday January 03 2020, @10:30PM (3 children)
More likely you'd have been put to work, then killed or left to die when it was discovered your keyboard skills were no use herding goats
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Friday January 03 2020, @10:33PM (1 child)
Ancient tech for an ancient time and all that :-)
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 04 2020, @02:08AM
Perhaps he can use the mouse to scare the goats. It works on elephants.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 03 2020, @10:41PM
Me SNOo Snoo. Yu hurd goat.
goatfucker.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 03 2020, @09:19PM
Herodotus described in his "historie" whole lot of peoples and things that were originally deemed fantasical tall stories, but several later were found to have a reasonable basis, like wool grown on tree (i.e., cotton), flying snakes (gliding snakes), but others like giant ants piling up gold dust hills languishes in whachamacallit.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Friday January 03 2020, @11:05PM (2 children)
I suspect that too many women showed the men up, so they invented patriarchies with a lot of silly rules to help keep the women in line.
In all of the animal world, and especially in the mammal world, mothers are just as capable, just as deadly, as the father. In fact, they are almost always more capable, because the fathers wander into the sunset, leaving mother to teach the offspring how to get along.
Sure, women generally don't move the same way men do, they won't use a sword or other weapon just as a man does - but that doesn't mean they are any less deadly. If women just get past their psychological barriers to violence, they can kick ass. And, a houseful of kids whining that they're hungry, or whatever, is worth a lot of motivation to get out there and kick some ass.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by loonycyborg on Saturday January 04 2020, @12:27PM (1 child)
Of course they are capable. I'm sure when current gender stereotypes were established being exempt from participation in war wasn't seen as demeaning by women but as privilege granted in exchange of their capability to give birth. It's more like strict gender specialization meant to increase birth rate. Apparently it was so effective that patriarchal communities just crowded out non-patriarchal ones. And amazon myths are mere traces of old ways. Nowadays promoting birth rate isn't so advantageous given that there already are lots of people, very close to earth's ability to sustain them, and medicine makes it possible for a woman to get away just with one-two births per lifetime to sustain population growth. So it's time for gender equality to return.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 04 2020, @05:37PM
Strict gender roles are a feature of most sedentary societies, and it's not surprising that ancient nomads didn't have similarly strong restrictions (especially when you see the similarities in the successive nomadic cultures). It mostly comes down to economic interest in the end; farmers work the land, and pass the land down to their progeny (and every sedentary society that I've heard of used patrilineal succession, probably because men are generally stronger, and farming is very labor intensive work). Nomads herd livestock, which aren't as troublesome to divide among descendants or use as dowry, and don't require as much raw physical strength to handle. Once the cultural "rules" are set, and usually backed up religion, patrilineality becomes the norm, and women only have value as tools to form blood connections and pump out babies. In the modern era, industrialization, followed by shifts to the even less labor-intensive service and information economies, have once again changed the economics and caused a relatively rapid shift towards gender equality.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Friday January 03 2020, @11:57PM (3 children)
Could they not have belonged to a tribe like the Vikings where the women fought alongside the men?
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by cykros on Saturday January 04 2020, @05:13PM (2 children)
It's worth noting that the time period being discussed in this article (okay, summary...nobody actually READS the articles...) is 2,500 years ago. That is, 1,300 years prior to the start of the Viking Age. Also perhaps worth noting that while there are plenty of attestations of shield maidens among the Norse, it was still far from the norm, and there was a significantly high ratio of men:women on the battlefield. Even in the History Channel's "catch that historical error" drinking game show "Vikings", it's notable that there are still only a handful of women alongside hundreds if not thousands of men, even despite their taking a good few liberties to work in some modern feminist ideas with some good old fashioned historical revisionism. (I'll cut this rant short; I could go on for hours nitpicking this show...).
Basically, a society having some female warriors isn't really the same thing as a society where the women make up the majority of military force.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Saturday January 04 2020, @08:34PM (1 child)
But does finding 4 female warrior bodies together mean the whole army was women?
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 04 2020, @08:42PM
Maybe they all died together, or a family grave, or slaves/servants being ritually killed to accompany a matriarch in their afterlife?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 04 2020, @01:40AM (4 children)
It was known that there were female warriors in ancient times, for example the celts with Boudica. But a female-only society is not sustainable neither is a male one.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday January 04 2020, @02:02AM (2 children)
It can be in the near future. Artificially created embryos or human cloning along with artificial wombs could enable a female-only or male-only society. Whether it is sustainable or not probably depends on the leadership. It could also require post-apocalyptic conditions, extreme isolation, or cult-like behaviors.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 04 2020, @02:58AM
Vandread [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday January 04 2020, @05:05AM
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Saturday January 04 2020, @06:22PM
Even if a female-only society isn't sustainable, a society that looks women-only to outsiders might be. Take 5-alpha-reductase deficiency [wikipedia.org], an intersex condition best known in the "guevedoces" of the Dominican Republic. This condition causes children to look like girls, with a short penis that could be confused with a clitoris, until they enter male puberty. If 5-ARD were to become common in a population, all children would end up raised as girls, causing there to be less of a sense of a gender binary and more acceptance of femme presentation by all no matter the person's XX/XY karyotype.