''The myth of the Amazons, a tribe of bloodthirsty blond women thundering across arid battlefields to the horror of their male foes, has lingered for centuries. Their exploits seized the imagination of the Greek scribes Homer, Hippocrates, and Herodotus. But proof of their existence had always been lacking. Now, a 2,500-year-old mystery may have been solved, cracked by an American scientist whose ten-year odyssey led her tens of thousands of miles in pursuit of the truth. After unearthing evidence of a culture of ancient warrior women in the Russian steppes, Dr. Jeannine Davis-Kimball followed a trail of artifacts to a remote village in Western Mongolia, where her quest for a living link to a long-imagined tribe ended with a startling discovery. There, among the black-eyed Mongols, Davis-Kimball found a blond child, a 9-year-old girl named Meiramgul. Through DNA testing, Davis-Kimball finds that the DNA sequences of the warrior women and those from the girl of Mongolia are identical.''

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/secrets/case_amazon/about.html

hmmm.....

For more on this, research Kurgans (like the Highlander character), Scythians, and Sarmatians.

-Akolouthos

lol  sorry it has been moved to "Quarantine / Archives" forum!

There were two types of Scythian tribes in the north of Iran: Saka Haumavargau (Amyrgioi Scythians) and Saka Haumazanu (Amazon Scythians), "Zan" in Persian language means woman and in Zoroastrianism "Hauma" is a sacred drink and also a powerful deity, in the middle Persian language, Haumazanu was simplified to "Mazan" and Mazan is the name of women who still live in Mazandaran province in the north of Iran.

Mazandaran Province (Amazonia)

If you remember I had posted a topic about Nizam-e Madarshahi dar Iran (The system of Mothers' reigning in Iran) in our old forum and I said there "From 7,000 years ago women started to organize small empires in the northern villages of Iran. These women always chosed their husbands from out of their villages and after one year living with them, they usually beheaded those poor men and used their bloods to fertilize their farms."

It is a fact which has been mentioned in Avesta, in modern times women don't kill men but it can be said that these are still women who rule in the villages of Gilan and Mazandaran in the north of Iran.

It seems strange but men work at home and women do hard work in the farms and other places!

You can hardly find a statue of a man in Mazandaran!

http://www.parstimes.com/women/employment_rural_women.html

"Case studies show the situation of women and their labor force. In the villages of Gilan and Mazandaran provinces, women are considerably active and have a high share in productive activities. In the village of Ahandan in Gilan, women form 76 per cent of the labor force in rice-planting and 80 per cent in tea- planting."

"In most villages in Gilan and Mazandaran, a group of women under the supervision of a woman who is called "Mobasher" (Supervisor) go to the neighboring villages for weeding and planting seedlings."

What did the amazon wariors have common with Iran or Mongolia, or orthern Africa?  Did Scythian women went to Troy, to fight Greeks, centuries before their first existance? I believe no, they didn't. Because the true myth of Amazon wariors was actually the myth of Hittite warior women of Anatolia, protecting sacred texts and shrines.

Sources of the Woman Warrior myth Xena (I confess I have a soft spot for her) is but the latest in a long line of magnificent Amazon warriors. The 'golden-shielded, silver-sworded, man-loving, male-child slaughtering Amazons' appear for the first time in Homer as 'women the equal of men' fighting at the Trojan war. Herodotus calls them 'Oiorpata' - 'mankillers'. Other writers tell us that they were crack horsewomen who used bows and arrows, and even sometimes cut off one breast in childhood in order to fire their arrows better. They lived in women-only communities, setting off once a year to meet men from a neighburing tribe and copulate with them. Of the resulting offspring they would keep only the girls, packing the boys off to live with their fathers - or, in some versions of the story, laming or killing them - so that they would not turn against their mothers. That's the core myth, and since it was created the Amazons have had many incarnations, from Penthesilea, slain by Achilles at the Trojan War through to Xena Warrior princess, zapping the baddies with her chum Gabrielle on our TVs today. In between there were many travellers' tales which linked the Amazons with all sorts of civilisations, in Africa, Central Asia, South America and the Caucasus, to name a few. So - there are many possible sources for the Amazon myth, many clues to follow to get to the enigma which they embody - women who are like men in their strength and toughness and yet don't lose an iota of their feminine allure.

The Mysterious Magic-women of the Hittites These golden snake bracelets were found near Samsun on the Black sea coast in Turkey, in the region where the writers of Ancient Greece place the Amazons' great city of Themiscyra. The snakes date from Hellenistic times (ie after the time of the Amazons) but are a reminder of the tradition of female spiritual power which once existed here. You will often see such bracelets on the arms of Amazons in art. The Hittites, who lived in this area of Turkey during the Bronze Age, were a mysterious Indo-European people, whose women were skilful magical practioners. With the help of a Hittite scholar I studied ancient writings which revealed that there was a caste of "magic-women" who had enormous power in the early era of the Hittite empire: they were the guardians of the symbols of kingship; they controlled the throne-room where coronations happened. They had the ritual power to endow the king with his sovereignty - and maybe to deny it to an unworthy candidate. This meant that they were feared and hated by the male courtiers and politicians, who muttered darkly about them in the early Hittite documents. Could these formidable women be part of the inspiration for the matriarchal Amazons? Puduhepa was a priestess-queen who played a big part in the building of the rock shrine of Yazilikaya, a holy place where Hittite masons carved a wonderful procession of gods, goddesses and mythical beings, including an androgynous warrior-goddess called Shawushka. Shawushka wears a high hat and a long kilt, pulled up to show her lower torso and make clear her bisexual nature. She is half-unveiled and winged. Could she be a pointer to the source of the Amazon myth? Certainly there were many versions of a fearsome, androgynous warrior 'goddess' in the lands of western and central Asia at this time, including one incarnation of Ishtar. This is a photo of me standing in the fortress of Giresun, not far along the coast from the site of Themiscyra. Behind me is the 'Island of the Amazons' which appears in the Argonautica of Apollonius Rhodius. He links it firmly with the Amazons. He wrote: they went to the temple of Ares to offer a sacrifice of sheep and in haste they stood around the altar, which was outside the roofless temple, an altar built of pebbles, within which a black stone stood fixed, a sacred thing, to which of yore the Amazons used to pray. Nor was it lawful for them, when they came from the opposite coast, to burn on this altar offerings of sheep and oxen, but they used to slay horses which they kept in great herds. The Amazons were known as 'daughters of Ares' and were usually associated with horses (their names often have the Greek word for horse - 'hippos'- in them, as in 'Hippolyta' and 'Melanippe'), so maybe there is some truth in Apollonius's tale. Certainly the whole area around Samsum and Giresun is a treasure-trove for anyone wanting to investigate the Amazon myth.

http://www.womanwarrior.co.uk/Hittite.html