The legend of a race of women warriors known as the Amazons has been around since ancient Greek scribes wrote them down. That’s where we got our greatest comic book superhero, and indeed, the Amazon River and rain forest were named after them. But are they a myth in the same vein as Zeus and Poseidon, or were they a story meant to be taken as fiction even in its time? Or could there be some basis for the tale in reality?
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Until fairly recently, it was believed that the Amazons were created from scratch by the patriarchal Greeks as a device to highlight things like the supposed inherent superiority of males. For example, in the myths, while the Amazons were frequently praised for their skill as warriors, they usually lost to the Greeks in the end. (After all, Theseus made Antiope his concubine, and when her Amazon friends came to Athens to free her, they were defeated as well.)
However, in the early 1990s, archaeologists Renate Rolle and Jeannine Davis-Kimball independently discovered evidence that began to challenge the traditional beliefs about the Amazons. Later research by Stanford historian Adrienne Mayor would go on to use this and other evidence to rather convincingly argue that there really was a group of warrior women that inspired the legends.
Read about that evidence, and what it tells us, at Today I Found Out.
Source: neatorama