Quotes from Adrienne Mayor

We know their names: Hippolyta, Antiope, Thessalia. But they were long thought to be just travelers' tales or products of the Greek storytelling imagination. A lot of scholars still argue that. But archaeology has now proven without a doubt that there really were women fitting the description that the Greeks gave us of Amazons and warrior women.

Before I began concentrating on writing, in my free time I was an artist, making and selling etchings illustrating stories based on my readings in classical literature.

The Ephesians took great pride in their temple, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Amazons had worshipped here, and the fabulously rich King Croesus built the original temple.

I think that the Greeks were extremely ambivalent about the stories of Amazons: they found them both thrilling and rather daunting at the same time.

I find writing a book a slow, intricate process, a kind of obstacle course punctuated with great rewards. But research is always thrilling, and I tend to incorporate newfound material up to the very last minute.

The Greeks first identified the Amazons ethnographically, as a nation of men and women distinguished by something outstanding in their gender relations. Later, any ambivalence or anxiety that knowledge of this alternative gender-neutral culture evoked among Greeks was played out in their mythic narratives about martial women.

Male buerkitshi are certainly more common than females today, although eagle hunting has always been open to interested girls. Archaeology suggests that eagle huntresses were probably more common in ancient times.

Indeed, many ancient Greek writers do treat Amazons as a tribe of men and women. They credit the tribe with innovations such as ironworking and domestication of horses. Some early vase paintings show men fighting alongside Amazons.

Historical records show that Abenakis and other Natives encountered European explorers and traders in Canada looking for sources of ivory to compete with the Russian trade in Siberian fossil mammoth ivory - these traders routinely asked about ivory 'horns' and teeth.

In the non-Greek stories, Persia, Egypt, even China, Central Asia, in oral traditions and written literature, anyone who fights Amazons admires their courage and beauty, and they want to be allies of the Amazon; they don't wanna kill them.

If Queen Amezan and Queen Penthesilea could somehow meet in real life, they would recognize each other as sister Amazons. Two tales, two storytellers, two sites far apart in time and place, and yet one common tradition of women who made love and war.

I've always been interested in oral traditions and mythological stories and legends from antiquity that have to do with nature, attempts to explain mysterious or puzzling, or very striking phenomena from nature. Things that people observed or heard about in nature.

Evidence pointing to eagle hunting's antiquity comes from Scythian and other burial mounds of nomads who roamed the steppes 3,000 years ago and whose artifacts abound in eagle imagery.

An ancient Scythian nomad skeleton buried with an eagle was reportedly excavated near Aktobe Gorge, Kazakhstan. Ancient petroglyphs in the Altai region depict eagle hunters, and inscribed Chinese stone reliefs show eagles perched on the arms of hunters in tunics, trousers, and boots, identified as northern nomads (1st to 2nd century A.D.).

I have discovered that if you take all the places of Greek myths, those specific locales turn out to be abundant fossil sites, but there is also a lot of natural knowledge embedded in those myths, showing that Greek perceptions about fossils were pretty amazing for prescientific people.

We are used to thinking of Amazon myths in terms of violence against uppity women, but the ancient evidence also reveals a vision of gender equality.

I just had a hunch that there might be kernels of truth or reality - scientific or historical reality - in stories about nature that are perpetuated in oral myths. That's how I got interested in it.

In the seventeenth century, a French missionary in Canada reported a 'strange legend' circulating among the Hurons. They told of a monster with a 'horn' that could pierce anything, even rock.

The Amazons were notorious for their freedom: their sexual freedom, their freedom to hunt, to be outdoors, to go to war; and the Greeks, both men and women alike, were fascinated by these stories. Maybe it was a safe way to explore the idea of women who could be equals of men.

Pictures of Amazons on vase paintings always show them as beautiful, active, spirited, courageous, and brave.

The cultural center of Asia Minor, Pergamon boasted a vast library of 200,000 scrolls, a spectacular 10,000-seat theater, and a monumental Great Altar decorated with sculptures of the Olympian gods defeating the Giants. People came from all around the Mediterranean seeking cures at the famous Temple of Asclepius, god of medicine.

From about 700 B.C. to A.D. 500, the vast territory of Scythia, stretching from the Black Sea to China, was home to diverse but culturally related nomads. Known as Scythians to Greeks, Saka to the Persians, and Xiongnu to the Chinese, the steppe tribes were masters of horses and archery.

Many scholars are not used to perceiving natural knowledge expressed in mythological language. If the study of fossils was not mentioned by Aristotle or Thucydides, and it wasn't, then it just didn't exist for many classicists and ancient historians.

It's sort of fair to say that Amazons, both as reality and as a dream of equality, have always been with us; it's just that sometimes that fiery Amazon spirit is hidden from view or even suppressed.