What is this?
The rectangular silk fragment containing a single medallion shows two symmetrical, strong, fearsome female figures riding horses, arrows drawn, ready to hunt down their prey. Each warrior is single-breasted: it was thought that each Amazon was so dedicated to her craft that she would cut off her right breast in order to have better control over her bow.
No one knows for certain whether the Amazon women were only a myth, a figment of Greek imagination, or whether they were real women warriors. In a National Geographic article, Adrienne Mayor, author of The Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Women across the Ancient World, works to assert their historical existence. Archeologists have discovered remains of Scythian women who were buried with weapons and war injuries matching the description of the ancient Amazons. The Scythians were warrior nomads who lived in the areas around the Black Sea. The graves left behind for these women provide evidence to support the existence of women like the Amazons. One woman’s remains showed that she was bow-legged from constant riding, while others were buried with their weapons. The Scythian women were warriors, and it is possible this is where the Greek ideas of Amazons developed.
These archaeological discoveries was made in the early 1990s by a joint U.S and Russian team who discovered over 150 graves while excavating 200-year-old burial grounds outside Pokrovka, a remote Russian outpost in the southern Ural steppes near the Kazakhstan border. These graves belonged to the Sauromatians and their descendants, the Sarmatians. The finds outside Pokrovka then caused a reappraisal of older discoveries. These warrior women not only existed but were masters of their craft, buried with weapons and evident injuries from battle.
