‘Amazons’ — One more challenge to the myth of male dominance

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SOCIALIST ACTION DECEMBER 2014 9 Book Review: Adrienne Mayor, “The Ama­ zons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Wom­ en Across the Ancient World.” Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014.

Marx and Engels, when developing their understanding of the relationship be­ tween class society and the oppression of women, relied heavily on the ethnol­ ogy and archaeological science of their day. They wrote on these questions in the wake of publication of many articles by the most famous and controversial theo­ rist of a matriarchal stage of cultural evo­ lution, Johann Jakob Bachofen.

Bachofen’s opus, “Mother Right: An In­ vestigation of the Religious and Judicial Character of Matriarchy in the Ancient World” (1861), pointed generations of scholars to the examination of Greek myth, in which the overthrow of non-patriarchal social norms seemed to be a strong theme.

In the 1970s, Bachofen’s ideas were pop­ ularized in the United States by a Double­ day translation from the German of the 1930 text, “Mothers and Amazons: The First Feminine History of Culture,” by Hel­ en Diner (Bertha Eckstein-Diener), and in­ fluenced a generation of young feminists eager to find evidence of any kind that the patriarchal nuclear family was a relatively recent development in human social orga­ nization.

Today, virtually all students of academic anthropology believe that gender roles and social organization in prehistory were variable; the degree to which alternatives to male dominance existed is always in debate in the academy.

Collections of works by Marxist feminist anthro­ pologists such as Eleanor Burke Leacock are kept in the public eye thanks only to small radical publishing houses. And so, when academic publishers commit to printing a new book that challenges the mainstream on these questions, it should be celebrated.

The recent publication, and attention in popular magazines such as National Geographic, to the new book by Adrienne Mayor entitled “The Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Women Across the An­ cient World,” deserve notice. Mayor, who is an inde­ pendent scholar of Classics and the History of Science with an affiliation to Stanford University, has done re­ search in diverse areas, including the ways in which fossil discoveries in the ancient world contributed to myth. But her work is unified in that in all of it she investigates scientific realities embedded in myth and classical antiquity.

In “The Amazons,” Mayor provides documentation for the historical existence of the women warriors that obsessed the ancient Greeks. She makes use of physical evidence gleaned from nomad skeletons from Central Asian kargans; the services of an expert on rare languages such as Circassian, Abkhazian, Os­ setian, and Ubykh; recently translated ancient Greek and Egyptian texts; oral traditions from Central Asia that only began to be put into written form in the So­ viet era; and contemporary studies of nomadic cul­ tures.

In response to Classicists who argue that the Ama­ zons so prevalent in ancient Greek vase painting, myth, and history writing were merely a symbol of gender anxiety in a male-dominated society or standins for fearsome Persians, Mayor persuasively argues that Central Asian nomadic society in the first millen­ nium BC included not only skilled women warriors and leaders but a broad range of possible social roles for women and men. She puts one more nail in the coffin of an anthropology and an archaeology that still begin, more often than not, with the assumption of a normative male dominance.

... Capitalist hype (continued from page 7: “Low-wage workers unite for $15 Now”)

their government “representatives” at every level to collude with banks around the world to estab­ lish tax havens to shelter their profits from U.S.

taxation (see several reports from the Bureau of Economic Analysis). Separating the truth about the functioning of the corporate world from the “fake”

world created by its paid media defenders is a not an unimportant issue. Capitalism’s “democratic”

election antics—today virtually year-round, cor­ porate-organized, and almost theater-like spec­ Some of the more spectacular finds anchoring Mayor’s work in myth, folklore, and linguistics have been in the field of oseteoarchaeology, also called bioarchaeology, or the study of human remains from archaeological sites. This new discipline has recent­ ly been used by Jane Peterson (“Sexual Revolutions: Gender and Labor At the Dawn of Agriculture”) to study the relationship between types of work carried out by each biological sex before and during the Neo­ lithic period.

Osteology, which now can determine biological sex from skeletal remains, is overturning a lot of previ­ ously held assumptions about gender and social or­ ganization. For example, bioarchaeologists have fairly recently determined that a large number of the graves of Scythian warriors from the fifth and fourth cen­ turies BC, which had been assumed because of the nature of the goods found within them to be holding the skeletal remains of males, were in fact the resting place of females.

In one instance, in the ancient Thracian-Scythian region that lay between the Danube and Don rivers, archaeologists discovered 112 graves of women war­ riors, most of them between 16 and 30 years of age. In the area in which the ancient Greek historian Herodo­ tus located the Samartians, an archaeologist recently found 40 additional graves of female warriors. Anoth­ er group of excavators has recently determined that in the Black Sea-Don-Volga region, up to one fifth of the graves that contain weapons are those of female burials.

Archaelogist Elean Fialko found 130 graves from the same time period in southern Ukraine in which women were buried with lances and arrows. Natalia Berseneva, who opened Sargat Culture mounds from the sixth to fourth centuries BC, found that 20 percent of the female graves contained weapons.

The skeletal remains often indicate a lifetime on horseback and the reality of life-threatening combat. The archaeological record as a whole suggests, May­ or argues, that hunter-warrior horsewomen “were a historical reality across a great expanse of geography and chronology, from the western Black Sea to north­ ern China, for more than a thousand years” (page 64 tacles—are designed to camouflage the daily theft from working people of their livelihoods.

The unprecedented rejection of this reality in 2014 was an act of wisdom of the great majority. In time it will be reflected in massive working-class mobilizations in the streets and at the point of production, and in the formation of a mass fight­ ing workers’ party that will challenge the capital­ ists for government power and open the path to socialism. This fundamental organization of the working class and all its allies requires the patient building of a revolutionary socialist party deeply rooted in the day-to-day struggles of workers ev­ erywhere. n (Left) “Wounded Amazon” in New York’s Metropolitan Museum. Roman copy of a Greek sculpture, c. 425-450 BC.

of 519 in the Kindle edition). In some cases, warrior women were buried with their chil­ dren. In other cases, the children were bur­ ied alone with biologically male skeletons, suggesting that gender assignments were anything but normative by contemporary standards.

Another amazing scientific advance al­ lowed Mayor to be confident in her as­ sertions about the historical reality of the women warriors that populate so many Greek vase paintings. For a century of study, the writing accompanying the portrayal of Amazon warriors in combat on Greek vases was assumed to be “gibberish.” The letters did not form words in Greek, and thus were considered to be nonsense and simply deco­ rative.

On a hunch, Mayor and the curator of the Getty Museum translated these inscriptions into what would be their phonetic sounds in Greek. They then sent these phonetic transcriptions without any explanation to a linguist, John Colarusso, who is an expert on the rare languages of the Caucasuses. He was able to translate the inscriptions into proper names in ancient forms of Iranian, Abkhazian, Circassian, Ubykh, and Georgian, yielding at least 70 new names of warrior women cel­ ebrated on Greek vases that can be added to the other 130 already known from Greco-Roman literature, his­ tory, and art.

These new names have deepened the certainty that these combatants and “queens” were actual person­ ages that roamed the edge of and sometimes intrud­ ed into the world known to the ancient Greeks. The proudest event in Greek mytho-history, says Mayor, was the defeat of an Amazon army led by one Ori­ thyia, which swept across the Aegean, invaded Attica, besieged the Acropolis, and was only defeated by the Greek founding hero Theseus and his Athenian co­ horts. Mayor assumes that this was a mythic scenario based on the need to bolster spirits in the face of the real Persian threat but rooted in the historical real­ ity of female-led Scythian and Samartian conquests in the ancient world.

Mayor departs from the traditional explorations of Amazons in Greco-Roman myth and historical ac­ counts alone to look at the oral traditions of Cauca­ sia, Persia, North Africa, Arabia, China, and Central Asia. The prevalence of stories of “autonomous fight­ ing women who behaved as the equals of men” in the ancient and oral literary traditions beyond the Greek world, she argues, “lay to rest the Hellenocentric ar­ gument that Amazons were the exclusive creations of fantasizing Greeks.”

One can only hint at the abundance of stories, some myth, some history, that she found of the lives of “rid­ ers, hunters, herders, raiders, fighters, lovers, and leaders who happen to be women” that seemingly correspond to figures buried with their horses and bows in the many hundreds of Scythian archaeologi­ cal sites described above.

It is not surprising that these stories have played little role until now in the exploration of gender di­ versity in the ancient world. It was only in the Soviet era and the mid-20th century that the oral myths, ancestral lore, and folk memories of the many ethnic groups of Central Asia were recorded into writing. Many of them are set in medieval times, but linguists note elements that suggest archaic roots.

Mayor bolsters the specialists’ claims by introducing customs still visible among steppe peoples in contem­ porary Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turk­ menistan, and Tajikistan. These include horse races, wrestling matches carried out on horseback, and other matches of combat skills by prospective brides and grooms, all reminiscent of folkloric battles said to assure companionable marriages based on mutual physical strength and respect.

In these days when cartoonish Amazonian action figures with voluptuous bodies dreamed up by greedy game designers with bad politics populate the video­ game world, young feminists might give Adrienne Mayor’s “Encyclopeda Amazonica” only a passing glance. That would be a mistake. She offers a glimpse into the hard science that can burst apart the biggest myth of all time—what Eleanor Leacock called the myth of male dominance. n

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... Outrage at racist verdicts (continued from page 1: “Justice for Eric Garner!”)

Watch Patrol Unit, told Socialist Action, ”When someone is killed, we’re going to take any step that is necessary.” After the Ferguson decision, Lasalle partici­ pated with hundreds of others in shut­ ting down FDR drive, a major highway, and later marched from Times Square to Harlem, where protesters closed the Triboro Bridge. As for the role of the Rev. Al Sharpton and other Democrats, Lasalle warned, “They’re really just pacifying the people. We need to rely on our own people.”

On Dec. 1, thousands of students na­ tionwide, including in Ferguson, ig­ nored the rules and walked out of class to protest the grand-jury decision. It is clear that a whole new generation of anti-racist activists has proven that it is up to the challenge!

At our press time, the protests are continuing unabated. On Nov. 30, five players for the St. Louis Rams football team captured national attention when they entered the stadium displaying the “Hands Up! Don’t Shoot!” gesture that has been repeated in protests across the country. Although they have had to endure condemnation in the media for their action, the Rams play­ ers affirm that they wished to show solidarity with their community. “Prosecutor” defends Wilson Ferguson, a city of 21,000, is 70% Black. The police department is 94% white. The grand jury in the case was made up of six white men, three white women, two Black women and one Black male. Grand juries are conduct­ ed without cross-examination and are usually considered easy to obtain an indictment from—if prosecutors really want to.

St. Louis County Prosecuting Attor­ ney Robert McCulloch is a “tough on crime” Democrat; his father, a cop, was said to have been killed by a Black man. Tens of thousands signed a petition de­ manding that McCulloch step down in favor of a special prosecutor. But Gov. Robert Nixon (Dem) brushed aside the demand, and McCulloch refused to step aside. The wheels of racist injustice kept turning.

Numerous legal observers have said that Darren Wilson needed to be tried for the simple reason that he had shot an unarmed man. During delibera­ tions, however, McCulloch acted like a Tony Savino / Socialist Action defense lawyer for the police officer. McCulloch put much of his focus on un­ dermining witness accounts. In addi­ tion, he took the highly unusual step of not suggesting a specific charge. Noah Feldman, who teaches constitutional law at Harvard, said, “The prosecutor didn’t want an indictment … and didn’t want to be blamed for not getting one.”

Outrageously, Michael Brown’s body was left to rot in the sun for four hours by police as a symbol—just as the Klan used to do. The Ferguson police inves­ tigator didn’t even photograph Michael Brown’s body due to “dead batteries,” leaving items like the position of the body and the location of the spent car­ tridges unavailable for detailed study. The investigator even said that he had discarded much of his own notes of the murder scene!

On top of it all, Officer Wilson was permitted to drive himself back to the station unaccompanied and then wash the blood off his hands. He was also allowed to carry his gun to the police station himself, eject the magazine, and place it in an evidence bag without any supervision. Incredibly, fingerprints were never taken from the weapon.

The story line given by Wilson to the grand jury was vague and inconsis­ tent—as well as being contradicted by witnesses—and demonstrates why a court trial is so necessary. Wilson testified, for example, that he thought Brown had hit him with his right hand, although he did not have a clear view since he was shielding his eyes with his arms. Yet he told the prosecutor a mo­ ment later he was certain that Brown was holding a box of cigarillos in the same hand as he hit him..

A member of the jury asked Wilson whether, since his vehicle’s engine was running, he had thought of driv­ ing away from the confrontation with Brown. His answer, which sheds light on his state of mind at the time, quite likely would have been explored fur­ ther if he had been indicted: “No, I didn’t. … You know, we’re trained not to run away from a threat, to deal with a threat, and that is what I was doing.” Added to that, Wilson described Brown to the grand jury as “a demon” from a “not very well-liked community.”

After Wilson shot Brown at the po­ lice car, Brown ran away while Wilson chased him with his gun drawn. Sud­ denly, said the police officer, the youth turned and faced him. Sixteen witness­ es testified that Brown had his hands up, although Wilson’s testimony made no reference to it. According to Wilson, Brown then “charged” into his smok­ ing gun, only to be shot many times: “At this point it looked like he was almost bulking up to run through the shots, it was making him mad that I’m shoot­ ing at him. And the face that he had was looking straight through me, like I wasn’t even there, I wasn’t even any­ thing in his way.”

There is no indication in Wilson’s tes­ timony that he had bothered to consid­ er that Brown might have been gravely wounded at that point, and in pain and shock. The final shot, apparently while Brown was bent over deeply at the waist, was one that Wilson aimed at the young man’s head.

The (in)justice system in action In Ferguson, where protests were on­ going since Aug. 9, Gov. Nixon, an anti-abortion, pro-death-penalty Democrat, declared “an emergency” and a “no fly zone.” He sent in the Missouri National Guard to supplement Ferguson’s rac­ ist cops. Rep. John Lewis, once a civil rights activist and now a Democrat, had called on Obama to declare “mar­ tial law” in Ferguson to “protect people as they protest.” The Democrats got their wish!

Under martial law, Ferguson looked