M.'s ambitious, wide-ranging and painstakingly collected survey of legends and realities of the Eurasian female warriors embraces a wealth of approaches and methods – some of them refreshing in the extreme. Part 1 is mostly devoted to localising the reader and to establishing the point that instead of a single-gender society of warriors the Greek idea of ‘Amazons’ reflects women of the steppe cultures, who often also happened to be capable warriors. Some of the best-known myths and narratives about these Scythian females are reiterated, and many of the themes interwoven into the rest of the book are established. Part 2 offers a thematically organised review of the ‘real lives’ of historical nomad women of the Eurasian Steppe, with a wealth of archaeological material presented in a helpfully condensed form. Rather than their ‘real’ lives – about which burials can always tell only so much – the most fascinating information concerns the viscerally real deaths of these individuals. Even if the argument is occasionally expressed in somewhat sensationalist, presentist and cliché-strewn style, it also disproves such misconceptions as the supposed one-breastedness of the Amazons and the single-sex nature of their societies. Part 3 elaborates on the Greek stories about Amazons, including many little-known variants and episodes – some of the most interesting of which are unfortunately buried in the endnotes. Part 4 looks beyond the ‘Amazon heartland’ around the Black Sea and the Greek sources dominating that area, taking in Persian, Arabian and Central Asian traditions before ending the grand tour in China. The sample is almost by necessity more patchy and arbitrary here, but the external perspective is welcome.
Considering M.'s readiness to modulate the Greek narrative material about the Amazons with archaeologically-informed corrections and linguistic data, she trusts certain other claims in the classical scholarship with surprising confidence. If the reader omits perusing the voluminous and enlightening endnotes, they might remain unaware that, for instance, the epic poet Aristeas’ identity and in particular the actual extent of his ‘travels’ are very much still unclear. On the basis of M., one might get the impression that not only was Aristeas an astonishingly wide-travelling ‘adventurer’ – reaching the Issedones, whose country ‘Issedonia’ is entirely speculatively localised in the modern Altai region – but that assessing the contents and source value of his lost Arimaspea is an unproblematic task. Herodotus’ Skythikos logos, our primary evidence for whatever Aristeas was thought to have written, is by and large treated as an autoptic and trustworthy collection of facts. Repeated assertion frequently brushes over nuances and gradually de-hypothesises possible insecurities, so that by the end of the book many cautiously introduced suggestions have become treated as facts. Fact and fiction frequently lived side-by-side in Greek traditions about the Amazons, certainly, but this makes it even more important to flag clearly the limits of our own knowledge.
Occasionally readers may find themselves groaning at some unnecessary and rather Cartlandesque attempts at titillating the audience's imagination – which, granted, may be a touch of conscious irony in a book devoted to a subject that did arouse sexualised imaginings in many past cultures. Another frustration – and possibly more dangerous because more prone to influence M.'s interpretation of the relevant nomad cultures – is the occasionally anachronistic-seeming insistence on the essential egalitarianism of the horse-riding steppe cultures. This notion is clearly very precious to the writer, but one wonders if such a perception should not have been treated with more nuance. Some steppe societies certainly do seem to have experienced more equality between the sexes when compared with Greek culture in particular, but this wistful leyenda alba projected into the past obliterates the differences that must in fact have existed from place to place at different times. In many instances throughout the book, much of the linguistic, archaeological and literary/mythological evidence is handled with the firm conviction that there was a unitary cultural reality behind them all.
That unitary culture (often handily called ‘Scythian-Sarmatian-Massagetae-Saka’) is also presented in a way that makes it sound not only palatable but even admirable to modern readers: egalitarian, adventurous, cannabis-loving and sexy; the comparative readings from modern anthropology are for the most part chosen to support this angle. Often this tendency ends up flattening the ‘steppe cultures’ into a caricature which barely grasps the variations through time and place. This encourages the writer to use, for example, linguistic evidence from any languages of ‘Amazon cultures’ to reinforce observations about written sources in any Greek context. In many cases the languages in question have been documented several hundreds of years later than the purported context of the loans – some of them are still primarily oral languages – but this problem is repeatedly brushed aside in order to get to the etymologies. Without being an expert in Caucasian linguistics, it remains difficult to assess the claim about the morphological and phonetic conservativeness of this varied and very challenging regional set of languages belonging to at least seven separate families – supported in the endnotes by the scholarship of M.'s research associate J. Colarusso, with many references pointing back to the article they and D. Saunders published in 2014 in Hesperia 83, where the same claim is likewise surprisingly lightly asserted. The attempt to use Greek vase-inscriptions containing strings of letters meaningless in Greek in order to see whether they ‘represent or capture the sounds of words, phrases, and names in ancient forms of Indo-Iranian, Circassian, Abkhazian, and other language families’ (p. 241) is an innovative method, and one should hope to hear a wider sample of Caucasian scholars weigh in whether the conclusions and etymologies stand the test of the historical linguistics.
Undeniably, M.'s detective-work has produced a very useful compilation. But despite its tremendous scope and ambition, this Encyclopaedia Amazonica also has omissions, whether intentional or not. Nero's appropriation of Strongylion's Amazon ‘Euknemon’ statue is referred to (p. 153), as is his supposed Amazon-style bodyguard of women (p. 336); either instance would have provided a good place to discuss at least briefly the sculptural decoration from the Aphrodisias Sebasteion, where the personification of Armenia and Nero are depicted in the pose of Penthesileia and Achilles. While M.'s mythical and folkloristic Amazons range anywhere between Etruria and the Syrtes in the west and China and Nagaland in the east, it tells a great deal about her assumptions as to the underlying anthropological realities that the strong women warriors of the north-western barbarians do not feature even as a source for comparisons. This is surprising particularly as Illyrian examples are included, yet the possible connections – if only in terms of shared iconospheres about European barbarians – to the ‘Celtic’ and ‘Germanic’ groups are not explored. There would be much to compare: the toponymic vestiges connected with the ‘Gallic Sack’ of Roman prehistory compare in many ways to how the Athenians chose to localise the legendary Amazonomachy in the fabric of their city, and the Roman anxiety mixed with amusement regarding the muscular and aggressive northern women (e.g. Amm. 15.12.1) and the projection of gender-egalitarian or polygynous/polyandrous societies to the northern lands stands in obvious connection with the Greek ideas and topoi.
Throughout the book, statements like ‘Amazons were …’, with the relevant sources only subsequently clarified and contextualised, should warn the reader that they are not departing on a shared voyage with M., inspecting and assessing the available evidence, but should instead expect to be told what to think about the Amazons and how to locate each individual piece of evidence within the monumental whole of ‘reality’, the shape of which M. has already settled upon. But for anyone not minding this and interested in the details of ancient Amazoniana, this encyclopedistic take is a very valuable companion. If a piece of evidence has got anything to do with either Scythian women or the Amazons of literature and legend (leaving aside most of their reception), there is a good likelihood that it can be found in these pages.
