Lara Croft’s Amazon Forerunners Amputated Breasts, Killed Boys
"Spear-Wielding Amazon''
Palatinate Historical Museum via Bloomberg
A bronze sculpture "Spear-Wielding Amazon'' by Franz von Stuck, dated from about 1906. It is on display in the Palatinate Historical Museum in Speyer, Germany, as part of an exhibition "Amazons: Mysterious Female Warriors," through Feb. 13, 2011.
A bronze sculpture "Spear-Wielding Amazon'' by Franz von Stuck, dated from about 1906. It is on display in the Palatinate Historical Museum in Speyer, Germany, as part of an exhibition "Amazons: Mysterious Female Warriors," through Feb. 13, 2011. Source: Palatinate Historical Museum via Bloomberg
"Amazon Battle"
Speyer Palatinate Historical Museum via Bloomberg
"Amazon Battle" by Anselm Feuerbach. It is in an exhibition about the Amazon women warriors, running through Feb. 13, 2011.
"Amazon Battle" by Anselm Feuerbach. It is in an exhibition about the Amazon women warriors, running through Feb. 13, 2011. Source: Speyer Palatinate Historical Museum via Bloomberg
Greek Vase
Palatinate Historical Museum via Bloomberg
A Greek vase dating from 470 B.C. depicts armed female warriors equipped with bows, cap, lances and shields. It is on display in the Palatinate Historical Museum in Speyer, Germany, as part of an exhibition about the legendary Amazons.
A Greek vase dating from 470 B.C. depicts armed female warriors equipped with bows, cap, lances and shields. It is on display in the Palatinate Historical Museum in Speyer, Germany, as part of an exhibition about the legendary Amazons. Source: Palatinate Historical Museum via Bloomberg
They cut off their right breasts to shoot bows and arrows better, hunted on horseback, did battle against men at the gates of Troy and killed their male offspring, according to Greek mythology.
Tales of the Amazons, a tribe of ruthless female warriors described by Homer and Herodotus, have endured for 3,000 years. Yet did they actually exist or were they just a male fantasy? No one has succeeded in pinning down the origins of the myth that created the mold for such modern-day femmes fatales as Lara Croft, or Uma Thurman’s vengeful character in “Kill Bill.”
An exhibition at the Palatinate Historical Museum in Speyer, a German town near Mannheim, seeks to shed light on the facts behind the myths with the help of some startling archaeological finds. Over the past 20 years, since the breakup of the Soviet Union, evidence from graves has shown women in antiquity did indeed fight in battle.
The exhibition opens with an impressive replica of a temple and atmospheric backlit images of stormy skies. Ceramics, reliefs and sculptures illustrate how deeply the Amazon myth was embedded in the Greek psyche. Women in Greece, of course, didn’t fight, and the concept of ferocious, proud female warriors excited a combination of fear and lust.
Stories circulated that Amazons met men just once a year to procreate and returned the boy offspring to the men or even bumped them off, while breeding the girls for battle. Some versions assert that if they wished to marry, Amazon brides had to first kill a man. (It’s a wonder there were enough left to go around.)
Trim Dresses
Often portrayed with one breast exposed (though intact), they wear trim above-the-knee dresses that, in the Greek tradition, were reserved for men. While some images show Amazons on horseback in full attack, most depict them defeated by male foes, supine and powerless, and revealing much flesh. (This is also how Anselm Feuerbach, a 19th-century German painter, portrayed them two millennia later in his erotic “Amazon Battle” on show in Speyer.)
Later Greek images depict the Amazons in patterned Scythian clothing, and this is where myth and historical fact merge, according to the Speyer exhibition. The contents of the graves of Scythian women warriors, unearthed in the vast expanse of land between the Ukrainian steppes north of the Black Sea and the Altai Mountains of Mongolia, are among the highlights: Some are on public display for the first time.
Makeup, Daggers
In previous decades, it was assumed that such graves belonged to men, curator Lars Boerner said during a tour of the exhibition. Only in recent years have scientists performed anatomical tests to identify gender. About 200 female warrior graves have since been discovered in the region altogether, the women buried with their weapons and sometimes the skull of a horse, alongside their makeup tools and jewelry.
Before the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was scant interest in the history of tribes like the Scythians, as Soviet culture was Slav-dominated and the results of such excavations wouldn’t have been published, Boerner said. The new discoveries are helping countries such as Ukraine to learn more about their roots as they establish a national identity, he said.
Siberian permafrost is to thank for the preservation of a 2,300-year-old double grave from the Altai Mountains, belonging to a 16-year-old female warrior and an older relative with a spine condition that suggests he could barely walk. The Scythian “Amazon” was buried with a dagger, ax, bow, quiver and arrows as well as jewelry and a felt cap. Was she his bodyguard, or his battle companion? We can only speculate.
Brazil’s ‘Amazons’
The origin of the word Amazon is unclear: Some believe it comes from the Greek for “without breast,” while others say it may derive from a Persian word for warriors. What is certain is that as Western man traveled further, the Amazons dispersed to ever more remote and exotic locations. A 16th-century Spaniard claimed to have seen them in South America, and it’s his tales of fierce tribal women that gave the Amazon River its name.
Those women warriors later turned out to be men. Perhaps it’s in the nature of the Amazons to be mythical. After all, Lara Croft is fictional too. And although women fight alongside men in today’s wars, military servicewomen are not generally referred to as Amazons.
Does anyone know a real Amazon?
“Amazonen -- Geheimnisvolle Kriegerinnen” (Amazons -- Mysterious Female Warriors) is on show at the Palatinate Historical Museum in Speyer through Feb. 13, 2011. For more information, go to http://www.museum.speyer.de.
(Catherine Hickley writes for Muse, the arts and leisure section of Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are her own.)
To contact the writer on the story: Catherine Hickley at chickley@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Mark Beech at mbeech@bloomberg.net.
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