AMAZON WOMEN WARRIORS PART - 8

THE AMAZONS IN ANTIQUITY AND MODERN TIMES

BY

GUY CADOGAN ROTHERY

ILLUSTRATED BY ALLAN BARR

LONDON : FRANCIS GRIFFITHS 1910

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How Amazons started :

Two Princes Hylinos and Scolopotos who were Scythian were in exile and they carried with them whole horde of men, women and children. The Scythian men were mostly massacred by the enraged neighbours because of that their widows and orphans raged violently against the slayers of their husbands and fathers. The women of Scythians founded a state without men and remained unmarried and but during spring they mated with their neighbour men only to have children.

Important points and paragraphs from the book "The Amazons in Antiquity and Modern Times :

In this case we have reference to a cabal against two youthful Scythian princes, who, being ordered into exile, carry with them a whole horde of followers men, women, and children. There is the story of their settling down, of their casting off of the old Scythian simplicity before a growing desire for riches, which leads to conquest and ultimately to their undoing—the men being mostly massacred by their enraged neighbours. Then comes the extraordinary violent rage of the widows and orphans, first against the slayers of their husbands and fathers, and later against men in general, this aversion bringing about the founding of a state that is to be manless, the women throwing aside their girdles, that priceless symbol of the unmarried, only for a brief spell in the spring-time, when by commerce with their male neighbours means should be taken to guard against the extinction of the race.

That such a myth should have sprung to life and gained credence is not difficult to understand. To the inhabitants of the Archipelago and Magna Grecia, no matter whence they originated, distant Asia and the regions to the north-east of the Black Sea and round about the Caspian were lands of peril shrouded in mystery, out of which fierce hordes swept down bent on rapine and conquest.

Beyond the fringe of the nearer Mediterranean coast there were worlds of darkness, peopled by the fertile Greek mind with many unnatural but by no means illogically conceived monsters; for the makers of the myths had hardly emerged from the influence of animistic interpretation of nature. All phenomena were explainable in the terms of human emotions, and man acknowledged himself the relation, and not always the superior relation, of the beasts of the field, nay, even of the stocks and stones. To such men, nomadic tribes from the sandy Asian wastes bursting out of clouds of dust on their fleet horses to pillage and slaughter and then as swiftly pass away, had suggested the Centaur myth, the man-horses lying behind the woods ready to swoop down upon the unwary. The aborigines of forest districts, whose attacks were as dangerous and unexpected as that of the wild boar and wild goat, naturally suggested the satyrs.

That yet older terror, the herds of wild buffaloes with their irresistible onrush and indomitable fierceness, had given birth to the superhumanly cunning winged man bulls of Assyria. Successive waves of invasion rolling seaward from the north-east made utter Scythia a constant source of danger, and when the reflux waves carried the over-swollen coast population north-eastward, they entered an inhospitable country, where pitchy lakes and unctuous soil belched forth fire, smoke, and steam, an ominous presage of what might be expected beyond.

Towering above stood a further barrier of rugged black mountains, inhabited by a race of savage warriors whose very women fought with all the ferocity of lionesses. This ever menacing danger, with dim recollections of an outworn stage of development, when a matriarchal polity prevailed, and the nearer, more ghastly remembrance of the worship of cruel, sensual Astarte, that moon huntress goddess who came out of the Far East smeared with human gore, surrounded by her women priests, evolved in the brains of men whose thoughts were prone to take the dramatic form the idea of a truly monstrous state, the very existence of which was a perpetual threat against humanity.

Indeed, the Amazonian state, with its population of women warriors, ruled by a queen who banished all men save a few crippled slaves, and banded together with the express purpose of making war upon mankind, perfectly symbolised the peril that Greece had to face. For the myth told not merely of war, but of unnatural war, which if successful foredoomed family and civic life. It is symbolic however we look upon it.

A noteworthy fact is that certain legends made the Amazons worshippers of Artemis, while others declared them to be deadly enemies of that goddess and her followers. In art we find Amazons wearing the crescent moon on their heads; possibly, too, the triple-towered crown; while their shields were either crescent-shaped or round—these, with their spears and bows and arrows, are the emblems of the moon huntress goddess, both in the guise of savage Astarte and of her Hellenised, humanised counterpart, Artemis.

And here, it is likely enough, the myth was founded on solid fact, for it is well-nigh certain that the savage horde from Scythia paid homage to some prototype of Astarte.

Her worship is undoubtedly of Eastern origin; this being so, one more reason would be added for the Greeks looking with mingled anxiety and abhorrence to the north-east. Among the several great cities of antiquity which were said to have been founded by queens leading successive swarms from the great parent hive of the Amazonian state was Ephesus (place in Turkey).

We know that its celebrated Temple to Diana (Artemis) was attended by eunuch priests and probably contained statues of Amazons due to the chisels of the foremost of Grecian sculptors. Though her servants cried aloud, "Great is Diana of the Ephesians," she was really a mild version of Astarte, tamed by the influence of Greek art and thought.

Another significant fact is that in its earlier forms the myths of the Amazons and gryphons are represented as implacable enemies, and even in quite late art they are jumbled, up with the wars of the centaurs and the gigantomachia, which points to the realms of fancy.

All this, of course, does not do away with the historic fact that out of those dark regions warrior. Women came, now as leaders, at other times in bands both as camp followers and in the fighting ranks. The phenomena, indeed, can hardly be said to be peculiar to any age or clime. Our own island history records the valour of Boadicea, queen of the Iceni, her sudden tempestuous appearance, leading in the slaughter of the Roman legionaries, the sacking of Roman camps and cities, and noble in her reverses. History and art tell us that the women of Germania and Gaul fought against the Romans.

And such incidents repeat themselves again and again. In 1792 the French Revolution brought forth an Amazonian brigade, and it is not without interest to note in passing that a worthy French historian had years before claimed that the Franks were direct descendants of the Sarmatian Amazons.

The eighteenth-century brigade comprised the gross dames de la Halle and the women of the Faubourg St. Antoine, who, their blood aflame with the lust of killing, decked themselves out, with some dim thought of classic times (that heroic age which fired the thought of a whole revolutionary generation), in short petticoats, red Phrygian caps, and carried most business-like pikes. Plutarch tells us of the valiant women of Argos who defended their city against the Spartans so well that they were allowed to dedicate a statue to Mars, and the women were thenceforth permitted to wear false beards on their nuptial day.

We have circumstantial accounts of the invasion of Persia in the time of Cyrus by "barbarians" led by women.

Rumors of warrior women are very persistent in further Asia, and the tradition culminates in the comic-opera squadron of 150 Amazons enrolled under Ranjeet Singh of Lahore. In the Caucasus travellers reported the existence of bands of fighting women down to comparatively recent times, but they were part of the community, not representatives of a female state. The fashion spread westward, for we find Amazonian bands in Bohemia during the eighth century, and we have tales of an attempt to establish a matriarchate among those turbulent people.

From Africa we have early tales of Amazons, partly, no doubt, founded on the real existence of great queens and their women guards, but largely coloured by the Greek myth.

We have stories of Amazons to the south-east of Egypt and that other land of terrors, which Lady Lugard has so graphically described, a land to the south of the civilised portion, a country of the Nem-nems, or the Lem-lems, or the Rem-rems, or the Dem-dems, or the Gnem-gnems (for the savages always bore a repeat name, and do so down to these days), and those who wrote of them invariably added, "who eat men."

Curiously enough, Greek authors refer both to the African Amazons of the east and middle north, who are said to have overrun Asia, and also to a great Amazonian invasion coming from Ethiopia in the west. Some, indeed, would have us believe that these were descendants of the Scythian Amazons, who had wandered across the Mediterranean, passed through the Straits, and reached the Hesperides, whence they attacked Ethiopia, and, marching eastward, entered Egypt, crossed over to the Ionian Isles and Asia, to be finally overthrown by Hercules.

It is a most curious story this eastward invasion, with its plausible account of an alliance with Horus, son of Isis, a sun goddess, consort and successor of that primeval moon and corn god and king, the great, all pervading Osiris, and herself identified with human sacrifice and mutilation. Now, the history of Africa north of the equator shows that there had been persistent penetrations from the east by a people of Asiatic origin coming through Arabia and westward by Africanised Asiatics, who, finding penetration from the Mediterranean shores slow, appear to have overrun the Atlantic coast and pushed eastward to blend with Nile infiltration.

Did the fighting women come with the invaders, then truly descendants of the Amazons in the sense that these dames of spear and buckler had fought for many centuries side by side with their trucculent men-kind? or did the civilised Egyptians and Berbers, advancing cautiously, ever struggling with the black bi-named eaters of men, find lands of armed maidens ready to dispute their way? If so, we have a spontaneous growth, later to be exaggerated by the declamatory Greeks. Certain it is that we have early evidence of fighting bands of African women, perhaps the most famous of which are the eunuch-tended Congo and Dahomeyan Royal Guards, then the less definitely authenticated matriarchal countries of women-fighters on the eastward side, but no credible accounts of a woman-governed, manless state.

We know that there were women priests, and in certain stages of evolution the priest is a leader and warrior.

We have representations of Amazons, their warfare with the gryphons and barbarians, their defeat by Hercules, their victories and repulses before Athens. We have them in groups and as single figures, not assuredly ideal female forms, for, although splendidly developed, and even in the vigorous postures of hand-to-hand combat, on foot or horseback, always graceful, there is a subtle suggestion in form and mien that is not quite feminine. The faces are generally strong, beautiful in outline, often tender in expression. There is, in fact, no hint of the virago in anything that the Greek sculptors have left for us, but there is that hint that these women were not as other women were.

This is strictly in accordance with later Greek conception of the Amazons as a splendid race of women, sternly suppressing natural inclinations in the interests of their community and ideals.

There is also a notable variation in the matter of costume, ranging from the short tunic or the chiton to the armour-clad female warriors with their Athenian helmets and crescent-shaped shields, and then to the Persian type of Amazon in close-fitting tunics and trousers, with Phrygian caps, which is often in startling contrast to the starkness of their adversaries.

The Amazons of Antiquity :

Running through the works of early Greek writers we find a moving and circumstantial story of the rise and fall of a nation of women, who, having been deprived of their husbands, sons, and brothers through the fortunes of battle, and then persecuted by the cruelty of their enemies, took up arms to avenge their wrongs. Thus having tasted blood, these women, we are told, acquired an unappeasable longing for the lust of carnage, and spurred on by the exaltation of victory, they decided to forswear the rule of man and become their own mistresses. Banishing, or mutilating, the few males left in their midst, they set about laying the foundations of a state, and, either through the necessities of the case or a liking for the calling, adopted arms as a national career. This monstrous experiment succeeding, the boundaries of the state were, if we are to believe various writers, vastly extended, the fame of the women warriors flying swiftly before their advancing legions, carrying terror into distant countries.

Occasional war alliances were then formed with neighboring people, to enable far-off and hazardous expeditions to be undertaken with greater ease. The women swept west as far as Bohemia, and some say into Gaul, reached the Mediterranean, penetrated India with conquering Dionysius, invaded Northern Africa to make treaties with Horus, son of Osiris and Isis, attacked Attica, actually sat down before proud Athens and almost beat her to the dust, founded colonies in Europe and Asia Minor, and built many cities renowned in history.

It is a curious tale this story of the Amazons, disturbingly elusive when the positive evidence of monuments or other contemporary records are inquired after: a tale full of contradictions and pitfalls for the unwary, yet in its main outline consistent enough.

It is impossible to date the story, though many compute it to have commenced between 2500 and 1500 years before our era, and others much earlier, taking into account the far-off expeditions and their merging into the realms of mythology. At all events, in some nebulous period and in an equally cloud-obscured region, the distant lands north-east of the Caucasus barrier, a conspiracy arose among the Scythians against two of their princes, named, we are told, Hylinos and Scolopotos, with the result that the milder alternative of banishment was resorted to.

The princes and their families, their followers and their families, their partisans and their families - a nation in miniature - were pushed over the borderland, and came rushing to the foot and up the slopes of the Caucasus like the swollen yellow flood of an overfull river. Naturally they slew and stole, settling down to fill places high and places low of the dispossessed. Then, as we might expect, came an uprising of the oppressed when least looked for, but an uprising so successful in its first deceptive appearance that the festering sore caused by the implanted strangers was well-nigh wiped off the face of the land.

The slaughter of the Scythian men was terrific, and of a thoroughness characteristic of those good old times. But the women of the hardy race, inured to hardships by their tribe's recent experiences, retired fighting to the dark mountains. In exile from their own ancestral homes, suddenly deprived of their mankind, and fearing the dire humiliation of subjugation by the vanquishers, in the solitude of their mountain refuge, they came to the desperate resolve to form a women's state. Their first step was to idopt the sacred girdle, that almost universal symbol in the east and Eastern Europe of the unmarried condition; then expelling or mutilating the few males left in their midst, they elected two queens, who alternately presided over home affairs while the other organized defense. But from the defensive the dauntless women soon took the offensive and re-conquered their late homes. Such a condition of affairs naturally leading to constant reprisals, the man less state insensibly became organized on a perpetual war footing, an organization which inevitably led to conquests beyond the original borders.

Hence a new problem in statecraft: the ravages of time and the sword woefully thinning the population brought urgently under the attention of their rulers the imminence, more or less postponed by possible recruits, of complete extinction.

A remedy had to be found. So truces were periodically declared, and those of the younger members of the state who had slain men in battle, discarding their girdles, visited their neighbors and formed temporary unions, then returning, reassumed the magic circle. Of the children born of such unions, the males (some report) were sacrificed, or (as others say) mutilated and retained as serfs or sent back to their fathers. The girl babes being fed on mares' milk, on the pith of water-reeds, and as speedily as might be on the flesh of game, were brought up rigorously, and early made acquainted with hardship, with the use of arms, and with horse exercise. They wore a scanty tunic, protected themselves with small shields, and wielded the bow and arrow, the lance and the battle-axe. The better to secure the utmost freedom in archery, the right breast was either amputated or atrophied by searing with red-hot irons, or by close binding; and so the Greeks, when they came into contact with them, called them Amazons, or the breast less. With reminiscences of the steppes of their ancestral home, they cultivated horse exercise assiduously, and are said to have fought equally well on foot and on horseback. Thus were various pre-cautions taken against the dying out of the race.

With a war organization perfected and adopted as the basis of the social economy, and a population on the increase, conquest became necessary to the community. Great queens arose who led forth the restless swarms. Marpesiais among the first named of these militant rulers, riding at the head of armies to seize upon adjacent kingdoms, making good their hold on the Caucasus. Climbing the comparatively easy northern slopes, they descended the rugged southern declivities and overran Cappadocia, finally settling on the Thermodon, which empties itself into the Euxine (Black Sea), and built thereon their capital of Themyscira, which became the second and greatest cradle of their race. Thence they pushed their way down to the Egean Sea, swept over most of Asia Minor into Syria, founding many towns, such as Ephesus and Smyrna. We are told of their ever-restless energy, of their organizing harassing expeditions, threatening both ancient and rising civilizations, clashing with the armed Trojans in Phrygia, reaching Egypt by way of Syria, and in the train of Dionysus passing through Parthia and so on into India, where, some say, they founded colonies, and then, after harassing the Grecian settlements, flaunted Athens itself.

Ancient writers mostly speak of the Caucasus as a continuation of the Taurus range, entirely within Asia, something far away and little known, but others give graphic descriptions of this the original home of the Amazons. Pliny says that it is "of immense extent, and separating nations innumerable; after taking its first rise at the Indian Sea, it branches off to the north on the right-hand side, and on left towards the south. Then, taking a direction towards the west, it would cut through the middle of Asia were it not that the sea checks it in its triumphant career along the land.

It accordingly strikes off in a northerly direction, and forming an arc, occupies an immense track of country, nature, designedly, as it were, every now and then throwing seas in the way to oppose its career: here the Sea of Phoenicia, there the Sea of Pontus; in this direction the Caspian and Hyceanian, [Western and Eastern Caspian], and then opposite to them the Lake Maeotis. Although somewhat curtailed by these obstacles, it still winds along between them, and makes its way even amidst these barriers, and victorious after all, it then escapes with its sinuous course to the kindred chain of the Riphaean mountains. Numerous are the names which it bears, as it is continuously designated by new ones throughout the whole of its course.

In the first part it has the name of Imaus [Hindu Kush], after which it is successively known by the names of Emodus, Paropanisus, Circius, Cambades, Paryadres, Choatras, Oreges, Orandes, Niphates, Taurus, and, where it even out tops itself, Caucasus. Where it throws forth its arms as though every now and then it would invade the sea, it bears the name of Sarpedon, Coracesius, Cragus, and then again Taurus. Where it opens and makes assage to admit mankind, it still claims the credit of an unbroken continuity by giving the name of gates to these passes.

In addition to this, when it has been cut short in its onward career, it retires to a distance from the seas and covers itself on the one side and the other with the names of numerous nations," so that, among the many others, there were the Amazonian and the Scythian chains. He mentions two flaming mountains (probably due to natural gas or naphtha) in Syria. Strabo places the Amazons among the most eastern developments of the Caucasus, overhanging the Caspian Sea and forming a barrier between the Albanians and Iberians. He also points out that the plains of Scythia and the whole coast of Themyscira, "named the plain of the Amazons," are alluvial, and offer a strange contrast to their mountain refuges. Pliny, speaking of the geography of this locality in his day, says: "Upon the coast" [of the Euxine] "there is a river Thermodon, which rises at the fortified place called Phanarcea" [Thermea?] "and flows past the foot of Mount Amazonius" [Mason Dagh?]."

There was formerly a town of the same name as the river, and five others in all Amazonium, Themyscira, Satira, Amasia, and Comana. It will be seen from all this the vastness and uncertainty of the whole great black range which connected the Pontus with the far-off regions hidden in a mysterious chaos of mountains, forests, network of rivers and seas and dreary plains.

All the numerous nations referred to above were equally awe-inspiring. Strabo says: "The Amazons are said to live among the mountains above Albania. Good authors, however, say they live at the foot of the Caucasian mountains.

When at home, they are occupied in performing with their own hands the work of ploughing, planting, pasturing cattle, and particularly in training horses. The strongest among them spend much of their time in hunting on horseback and practice warlike exercises." In his own day the people living on the south side of the Caucasus were pirates, who left no peace to their neighbors; divided into small tribes, ruled over by tyrants, they lived by brigandage.

Strabo also refers to certain "perfectly barbarous" tribes of the Caucasus who worshipped the earth (the Mother), and offered and ate human sacrifice, though they would neither sacrifice nor eat females of any kind. Clearly the underlying principle impelling these earth-worshippers in this matter was the desire to secure a continuation of species. To this pre occupation we must attribute the honour they meted out to their aged of being strangled by near kins-folk, here too the males being eaten, while the women were returned to the bosom of the great Mother Earth.

The same regard to the bearing principle in nature distinguished the Albanians and Iberians, whom some said were the near neighbours of the Amazons. For these people, though they worshipped chiefly two gods, the sun (Jupiter) probably "The Unknown God," Creator and the moon, paid special devotion to the latter, as being the closer influence. There was a temple to the moon near Iberia, and here the priest of the pale goddess was next in importance to the king, and had governance over extensive and popular tracks of sacred land attached to the shrine. Many of the temple attendants and others were given to prophecy. If anyone became violently possessed and went about the woods alone, he was seized, bound by the priest in consecrated fetters, and maintained in luxury for a year. Then he was brought forth and placed among the other victims for sacrifice.

We have earlier hints of this in the ancient "Argonautic," attributed to Orpheus, but almost certainly written by Onomacritus of Athens, who flourished 520-465 B.C. Here in we read much concerning dangerous and ferocious peoples who dwelt round about Lake Maeotis and farther south, among them being the Tauri, a homicidal race, who performed direful sacrifices to Artemis, filling the consecrated cup with human blood. Of the Scythian stock we have terrible tales. They too worshipped the sun and moon and minor gods of the elements - air, fire, water with sacrificial rites. Scalps of fallen enemies floated as an awful fringe to the bridles of their war-horses.

That powerful and mysterious race, the Hittites, came from the Caucasus, and no doubt originally from the same Scythian stock. They worshipped some nature goddess such as Ashtoreth, and their monuments in Asia Minor show that they sacrificed human lives in their religious ceremonies, had guards of priests and priestesses, and observed certain orgies at the vernal season.

Herodotus declares that the Tauri sacrificed all shipwrecked persons and all Greeks who happened to be driven to take refuge in their ports, these human offerings being made to a virgin goddess. In fact, three centuries of ceaseless warfare and adventure are said to have elapsed between the rise of the Amazons and the period of their greatest activity in Asia Minor, when, we are told, the pressure became so intolerable to the Greeks that Bellerophon (redoubtable descendant of Helios, the sun god, and Poseidon, the sea god), fresh from slaying the Chimsera, was sent by the King of Lycia to repel their advance. This task too, like others of great difficulty, he brought to a successful issue, breaking up the Amazon power for the time being.

But events showed that the encroaching power of barbarism had merely been pushed back. Bellerophon gone, the bulwark against the restless tide was removed. Again the Amazonian threat became insistent. Greece was so hard pressed that the queens and their doings rose into an overshadowing prominence, and one or the twelve labours imposed upon Hercules by Erysthesus is, king of the Mycenae, was the extraordinarily hazardous duty of capturing the girdle of the Amazon leader, that girdle which was so thoroughly symbolical of Amazonian ideal, and, therefore, most sacred to them. It was the opening up of great events.

Hercules, most of the authors agree, was accompanied on his expedition by Theseus, King of Athens, and the flower of Greek youth, who all embarked on a fleet of splendid galleys. Sailing over the Egean Sea, they passed through the Bosphorus and Black Sea, and reached the mouth of the Thermodon unmolested. They made their way up the river to Themyscira before Antiope, the home-keeping queen, had time to prepare for effective resistance, or recall Orithya, her sister and co-queen, who was away on some distant war expedition. With all due ceremony, heralds were dispatched by Hercules to Antiope, demanding the surrender of her girdle, which was tantamount to a demand to capitulation, a request promptly refused.

So both parties made ready for battle. The Greeks laid siege and attacked in regular form. On their side the weakened garrison of Amazons defended their capital with great obstinacy, and under the leadership of the queen sallied forth to deliver a bloody onslaught. The fighting was fiercest round about Hercules and Theseus. Hercules, invulnerable under his lion's skin, did wondrous deeds, slaying with his own hand eleven Amazon captains who with undaunted valour came on one after the other to the attack. Diodorus Siculus, indeed, tells us that Hercules challenged the foremost of the leaders to single combat. Aella, the swift-footed, he slew as she turned and fled; Philippis fell at the first blow; and Prothoe, who had killed many men in hand-to-hand fights, was no luckier; Artemis, the huntress, and several others were quickly tripped up and their spirits sent to the Shades: still Hercules remained untouched. In the end victory rested with the Greeks, who were by no means slow to reap the reward thereof, as their own writers testify.

If we accept the general version, Orithya's army, beaten though not without honour, for they were retreating with their arms and under the safeguard of a sworn peace and having erected images in several temples as thanks offerings, were nevertheless ashamed to go back to Themyscira with the mission unfulfilled. Passing with the male Scythian allies once more through Thessaly, they reached Scythian settlements in Thrace, where a new Amazon state was founded, which later on sent offshoots farther west. Apparently these settlements were formed under laxer laws, for the organisation gradually broke up, and, merging into the surrounding population, this branch of the warrior women returned to a natural mode of life.

Apollonius Rhodius in his "Argonautic" gives us glimpses of two forms of Amazons. He tells how the bold navigators going in search of the Golden Fleece visited the island of Lemnos, which they found inhabited solely by women and ruled over by the gentle Hypsipile. Jason and his companions were received with a considerable show of suspicion, for the women appeared in battle array "Hypsipile assum'd her father's arms Andled the van, terrific in her charms."

But when it became evident that the Argonauts had no evil intentions, the youthful queen told them. Of the early eastern exploits of the Themysciran Amazons we are told in connection with the legends of Dionysus, that protean hero-god who represents springtide and the arts of husbandry, more especially the wealth of the vine. Of him, it must be remembered, the poets say that this "twice born" was brought up at Nicsea, went to the rescue of his father Jupiter in the war against Saturn and the Titans, sharing in the success, aided, some say, by the valiant Amazons. With them he went through Asia as far as India, and on his way back took in Egypt as part of his conquest. Dionysus of the earlier Greek fables was a handsome youth. Then we know him as a beautiful hero, glorying in his eastern exploits and bringing back the vine, which had been destroyed during the Deucalion deluge.

Wherever he went, and was received, he brought with him prosperity. His Amazonian guard appears to symbolise his sterner aspects. Undoubtedly it was this phase of the myth that was uppermost in the minds of many observant travellers in India. For instance, Niebuhr, describing the rich profusion of carvings on the rock-hewn temples of Elephanta, says: One woman has but a single breast, from which it should be seen that the story of the Amazons was not unknown to the old Indians." He gives a picture of this supposed Amazon, of which many examples maybe found scattered up and down India wherever Brahmanical influence has made itself felt.

The truth is, this is no Amazon, but the mighty Arddhanarishwara, representing the union of the "moon crested" god Shiva with the female principle Uma, or of his wife Parvati. Many are the stories, full of philosophical meaning, told of this dual personality, teaching that the complete life cannot be one-sided, the sexes being interdependent.

One point is to be noted: unlike the Greeks, who held their wars against the Amazons as amongst their most splendid feats of arms, the Indian prince holds quite another view, although he dreads both their' strength and their snares. Probably the Brahmins have moralised the tale, with a view to show that the prince only escaped disaster by resisting allurements and bringing the adventure within religious bounds.

Palladius, Bishop of Hellenopolis, in his De Gentibus Indice, writes of another order of affairs, for he says that the Brahmin men in the valley of the Ganges lived on one side of the river and the women on the other, the husbands visiting their wives for forty days in June, July, and August, but that when a child was born the husband never returned. Here, again, we seem to have a garbled rendering of the two phenomena, the long absence of men from their villages during seasons of work, and the segregation of the sexes during certain periods not altogether unconnected with physiological reasons and religious observances resulting there from.

Of the state where men were ruled over by women we have a hint from Hiuen Tsang, who says that on the northern borders of the Bramaputra he found the kingdom of Kin-chi ("of the golden family"), which was governed by a queen. Her husband was named king, but he did not rule.

We are not told whether this was customary, or merely an accident due to a weak consort mated to a domineering rani, but the Chinese philosopher rather conveys the idea that this was the normal condition of affairs.

Probably the most circumstantial account of the late survivals in the Caucasian regions is given by Father Angelo Lamberti in his careful Relation de la Colchide, published in 1654, as the result of his long stay in the country. The good priest declines to discuss the whole question of an Amazon state or race, but says that when he was in Mingrelia the king of that country was notified that a large body of troops had left the Caucasus, and splitting up into three divisions, one party went into Muscovy (Grand Duchy of Moscow), and the other two set about attacking local tribes. They were beaten off, and among the dead were found a great number of women, who had taken an active part in the fighting.

They were all in armour, which was beautifully wrought and decorated with a true feminine love of elegance. This armour comprised helmets, breast-plates, jambieres, cuissards, etc., all constructed of iron plates so skillfully put together that the wearers retained perfect freedom of movement. Attached to the breastplates were short skirts of woolen material dyed a bright red. Their half-boots were ornamented with brass discs strung on threads of exquisitely plaited goats' hair. The women carried bows and arrows, the latter having long gilded shafts, the heads being of iron, not pointed or barbed in the usual style, but in the form of a sharp cutting edge, like the blade of a knife or a pair of scissors. Their cutting edge was placed at right angles to the shaft. These must, therefore, have been only short-flight darts, intended for use at close quarters, and having a severing or slashing rather than a piercing action. This form of the arrowhead is so extraordinary that it is rather suggestive of a modified form of the crescent-headed arrow, so much heard of in the East as a mystic weapon of great power.

Ram, the demigod-hero of the Ramayan, did wonderful deeds with his irresistible crescent-shaped arrows. So did Rajah Arjun, as related to us in the Mahabharat. It is true that the latter lost his life through one of these, but it was the only weapon that caused him harm. It was shot, too, by his own son, the rajah who dwelt in a magnificent palace encircled by walls of gold in the city of Manipur, itself walled about by battlemented ramparts of silver.

He was a man who had converse with diverse dealers in magic, such as the King of Serpents. When he sped the sacred arrow in anger against his unknown father, it severed Arjun's head, which, however, was subsequently reunited to the body, and life restored, thanks to the jewel borrowed from the King of Serpents. In all these cases the crescent arrows were sacred weapons. Indeed, this form of the dart was symbolical, and was used in sacrifices by the large following of lunar deities in the East. Sin, the second of the great Babylonian gods, was a moon god, and his terrible daughter, Ishtar, wore the crescent as her symbol. And, as we know, there were sanctuaries to moon gods in the fastnesses of the Caucasus, where human sacrifices were offered even in late days.

Thus it looks as though the weapons described by Father Lamberti were actually survivals in a degraded form. Lamberti says that various pieces of armour and feminine gear were brought in, but apparently the king's offer of a handsome reward to anyone who would bring him a real live Amazon proved ineffective.

Nevertheless, it is said that the women were constantly at war with the Kalmuks, who, as we have seen, respected their valour and called them aemetzaines. These rumours continued quite late, and even in the middle of the nineteenth century we hear of fighting women.

A notable instance is that of a kind of modern Thalestris, a certain Kurdish chieftainess known as the "Black Virgin," who at the opening of the Crimean War headed a body of 1000 cavalry, and having paraded before the Sultan's palace at Constantinople, went off to fight under Omar Pasha against the Russians on the Danube.

Amazons of Africa :

Diodorus Siculus, quoting Dionysius the historian, says that there was a prodigious race of Amazons who rose, flourished exceedingly, and disappeared long before the Trojan War so long before, indeed, that their renown had been obscured by the newer glory of the Amazons of the Pontus. The more ancient race had its origin in Libya, that Africa which lay between Egypt and Ethiopia on the east, the Atlantic on the west, bounded on the north by the classic strip of Mediterranean shore, and on the south by the imaginary Oceanus River, a land harbouring many curious things and peoples. These regions, according to "ancient histories," unfortunately not cited, were at one time famed for their "warlike women of great force."

Among these were the Gorgons, who dared to make war on the gods and the Greeks, and against whom Perseus, that prince of high virtue, son of Jupiter and foremost of Grecians of his day, fought under many difficulties and at much hazard to himself, so terrible were the women's valour and might. From which whole-hearted acceptance of the gorgonomachia we have fair warning to be cautious of these "ancient histories." Diodorus, it is interesting to note, writes of the Gorgons as of a numerous tribe or nation, rather than as the classic trio of sisters whom the gentle-eyed Pallas Athene and the aristocratic Perseus treated so scurvily with fire and sword.

We are also told that Tritonia was ultimately submerged, being swallowed up by the sea after a tremendous earthquake, a statement which inclined many to identify the African Amazonia with the lost Atlantis, though that would certainly not tally with the other curious topographical details given by Diodorus.

Our Sicilian historian goes on to say that the Amazons soon conquered the whole of the island, with the exception of Mene, the sacred city of the "fish-eaters." They wore no armour, clothing themselves in the skins of snakes, which approximates these women to witch doctors or priestesses of some form of sun worship, for snakes are connected with magic and the sun.

Down to these days snakes are among the most treasured fetishes of the natives of this part of the country, and another sun animal, the crocodile, was associated with the modern royal Amazons of Dahomey.

The ancient ones had for arms the bow and arrow and the sword. Thus they are clearly differentiated in religion and war panoply from the Themysciran Amazons.

In Africa, as in Asia, the lust of conquest proved irresistible. Queen Merina, assembling an army of 30,000 infantry women and 2000 horse, entered the Land of the Blacks, attacking the Atlantides, capturing their chief towns, and putting every man to the sword.

This politic rigour had the desired effect: the whole country submitted to the yoke of the Amazons, who placed the men under vassalage to be ruled over by women governors, and recruited fresh warriors from among the strongest of their own sex. Apparently while Merina was away, Hercules, coming west, had marked the extreme limits of his conquests by erecting his Pillars (the triumphal and thanksgiving columnos usually built as symbols of possession) on the twin rocks of Calpe and Abyla, where the Iberian peninsula most nearly touches the African coast, passed over to the Hesperides, attacked the Amazons, destroying their power in the west, as he had attempted to do in the east. Other writers say that Hercules delivered his crushing blow to the strength of the Libyan Amazons either in the Ionian Isles or in Egypt.

The Indians of Brazil declared that the Amazons obtained their treasured amulets from a lake close to Jamunda, a high mountain near the supposed original site of Manoa del Dorado. The Amazons gathered together by night, and, having ceremonially purified themselves, worshipped the moon, invocating her as the Mother of the Greenstones.

Then, when the moon was reflected on the waters, they plunged into the lake, and received the stones from the goddess. Moon-worship was general in the plains of the Amazon. She was the creator of all plants, especially of maize; her subject gods were the increscent and decrescent moons, each of which ruled over minor gods, who were the geni loci of woods, glens, mountains, streams, and lakes, which is the crude form of the belief we have seen existed in Mexico.

Herodotus has a curious story about the Libyan Auseans, who dwelt on the shores of Lake Titonis. Their maidens once a year held a feast in honour of Minerva. This we may take to be Neith or Nit, that is; Night, whom the Egyptians regarded as one of the trio of primitive gods, as the Mother, Nature, or in some sense the First Principle, and whom they depicted as a nude black, female, arched over, resting on finger-tips and toes, bespangled with stars to represent the vault of heaven. At these celebrations it was the custom for the girls "to draw up in two bodies and to fight with staves and clubs." The loveliest maiden was clad in armour, of Greek design in the days of the chronicler, who wonders, but cannot guess, what manner of defensive gear they had worn before they came into contact with the Hellenes. Those of the girls who fell in the fight were declared to be "false maidens."

Herodotus goes on to say that the Auseans held that Minerva (Neith) was the daughter of Neptune and Lake Titonis, and was adopted by Jupiter. The whole of this is suggestive of religious celebrations carrying out the idea of conflict between two elements or powers, good and evil, with the underlying notion of the benefits to be derived from sacrifice.

In another quarter Father Lamberti records that a tribe in the northern parts of the Caucasus, living in elevated fortified villages, did not bury their dead, but placed their bodies in hollow trees, and hung the deceased's clothing on the branches. Now, both the Asiatic Adonis and the Egyptian Osiris were originally tree gods, and their bodies were concealed in trees, so that it came about that human sacrifices were hung on trees. We find allusion to this custom in the Mahabharat, where we are told that the Aswamedha horse led Rajah Arjun to a land wherein men and women grew on trees, hanging there from, flourishing for a day and then dying.

The same story occurs in connection with the women's island of El-Wak-Wak, the fruits crying out "Wak-wak" when they were ripe and then dying. Burton suggests that these trees were the calabash, "that grotesque growth, a vegetable elephant, whose gourds, something larger than a man's head, hang by a slender filament." This fruit of the calabash or baobab, the "monkey bread," contains an acid pulp which plays no insignificant part in the matter of provisioning; so here, as with the pine tree of Adonis and the palm of Osiris, and possibly the oak of the Caucasus, all food trees, we have an explanation of the arboreal hangings. It is at the base of the whole philosophy of the widespread worship of the Tree of Life - often the Tree of Death, death being the preliminary of renewed life.

It is remarkable that the ancients in writing of the African Amazons, and American Indian traditions, describe the warrior women as a "white" race. It has been argued from this- that both the African and American Amazons must have been emigrants from Europe or Asia. But assuming that there was foundation for the reports, the fact would be capable of quite another interpretation. It would point, indeed, to an exclusive class.

Captain John Adams, writing about the Congo (in 1823), says: "One of the conditions by which a female is admitted into the order of priesthood is leading a life of celibacy and renouncing the pleasures of the world." This renunciation was certainly the prevalent idea as regards the Dahomeyan (African kingdom - Republic of Benin) Amazons in the early days, and perhaps also, so far as regards the queen, in the regions of the White Nile. At least one of the Portuguese missionaries declares that the queen of the Abyssinian Amazons was looked up to by her neighbours as a goddess, and the same was said of the mysterious foundress of that equally mysterious second great will-o'-the-wisp golden city of the continent, Dobayba, about which Vasca Nunez de Balboa and his successors on the Isthmus of Darien heard so much and dared many perils in vain to seek.

Certain legends said that Dobayba was a mighty female who lived at the beginning of time, mother of the god who created the sun, moon, and all things - in fact, the supreme Nature goddess. Others asserted that she was a powerful Indian princess who had held sway among the mountains, built a beautiful city, enriched with gold, and gained widespread renown for her wisdom and military prowess. After her death she was regarded as a divinity and worshipped in a golden temple.

Traditions were persistent of a rich concealed temple, where neighbouring caciques and their subjects made pilgrimage, carrying offerings of gold and slaves to be sacrificed. Neglect of these rites brought drought, most dreaded of Nature's punishments. Farther south we hear much the same tale of the Brazilian warrior women (who were "whiter than other women") in Nuno de Gusman's letter to the Emperor Charlesv.

Two matters may be touched upon lightly: the association of the Amazons with sun and moon worship and with cannibalism. Strabo is our authority for the sanctuary to the moon god in the Caucasus and the shrine to Venus Apatura, while we know the Greeks all declared the Amazons worshipped Artemis (Astarte) and carried crescent shaped shields.

In Africa such records as we have connect the women warriors with the sun god, as evidenced by their use of snake skins, alligator and tortoise emblems, and their alliance with Horus; but Ptolemy refers to the Moon Mountain in Central Africa, apparently in the regions where the Abyssinian and White Nile Amazons were placed. In America we find the association with moon-worship both through the legends and the greenstone fertility amulets. In the mountains of the upper reaches of the Amazon River, however, we find great peaks crowned by temples bearing symbols both of the sun and moon, and other mountains called the Mansion of the Sun, the Seat of the Sun, and so on.

The connection with cannibalism is rather more vague except in so far as it concerns the Far East. Certain Greek writers say that the Amazons of the Thermodon drank out of human skulls, and many of the Asiatic legends refer to the dwellers in female colonies as eaters of men. But this expression of "eaters of men" may generally be taken as a figure of speech, on the one hand paying a doubtful tribute to women's wiles, and on the other referring pictures quely to their fighting powers. An army that carries all before it "eats up" the enemy, just like a cloud of locusts. In this sense, to "eat up" men is to slay, to wipe out, although it must be allowed that the figurative may originally have been truly descriptive. This is undoubtedly the case so far as Africa is concerned. The usual Greek qualifying epithet applied to the women was the milder "slayer of men."

The Eastern legends - those related of Ceylon, of the great Indian forests, and of the imaginary El-Wak-Wak clearly allude to anthropophagy as a habitual practice of the women.

Now, both the temporary colonies of women evolved by natural everyday causes, and those feminine camps brought about by an abnormal concatenation of circumstances, would obviously have to organise for defence in savage and barbaric stages of evolution; and where the women had been accustomed to aid and abet their men in warfare, which is generally the case among nomadic tribes and mountaineers or forest dwellers, this organisation might be carried very far indeed. There were, then, we may conclude, women banded together to defend their homes, and others who joined the ranks, or even led men in warfare. But the fighting organisations as such were not the outcome of unisex "nations," they belong to the domain of religion.

The god-king would have his armed guard, and these, we have seen, were often armed women, either because of the form of the worship or because of their fierceness, and such guards were, at all events in the earlier periods, a sacrificial body; and then the priest-king would strengthen his guards, converting them from his jailers, or perhaps more correctly from those who assisted him in his personal self-immolation, into ministrants of his own personal cult and policy, as exemplified by the King of Wydah and his thousands of "wives" who executed the royal sentences.

When such guards grew numerous, it must often have become a matter of convenience and expediency to assign them special quarters, or even provinces, thus forming the nations, as we are told was the case in the Congo, and seems probable in connection with some of the sanctuaries in the Caucasus and Asia Minor. In such cases the women warriors would naturally come in time to form castes or perhaps we had better say a privileged circle within the nation and not a "nation" by themselves. They formed part of the social economy, and were not outside of it, though they might appear to be so when coming into contact with other races. And so we shall conclude by rejecting the idea of a long- sustained women's state, or even tribe (allowing for the exception of a transitory accident), while accepting the "women's islands" in a modified form, and the fighting Amazons as religious, or regal-religious, bodies.