Were the Amazons just a “male fantasy”? Here’s the truth behind the ancient world’s warrior women

“There are two ways that we use the word ‘Amazons’. There’s a general way to mean women who fight, and if you want to know whether they existed in the ancient world, for sure they did.”

In other words, some women certainly did hunt, fight and join pitched battles when their cities were under attack. These women slot into the archetypal image of an Amazon woman: fierce fighters who subverted the typical roles of women who lived in the ancient world.

But what about the specific Amazons of Greek myth? The horse-riding warrior queens depicted on temples and vases? Braund argues that these were creations of the Greek imagination, shaped as much by male fantasy as by fragments of reality.

Real women who fought across the ancient world

The notion of women taking up arms was not purely mythical. Ancient sources, and modern evidence, suggest that some women did fight in exceptional circumstances.

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“There were women who certainly went hunting and used weapons, and almost certainly participated in battles at times when their city was under attack,” Braund says.

These women were not part of a single all-female society. They were members of families and communities who took up arms in moments of crisis. The ancient Greeks, however, wove these scattered examples into stories of an entire nation of warrior women – an idea that both fascinated and disturbed them.

The Amazons of Greek imagination

The notion of the Amazons as a unified group appeared as soon as Greek culture began producing literature and art, where they were depicted in combat with heroes like Heracles, Theseus and Achilles.

“The Amazons appear in Greek culture as soon as we start to get Greek texts, Greek ideas and, astonishingly, Greek buildings. When a state takes a decision to create one of these great big public buildings like the Parthenon, what do they do? They put depictions of the Amazons across a large part of it.”

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Scenes of Amazons battling Greeks decorated the Parthenon’s shield and friezes. That Athenians chose to carve warrior women into their most expensive construction project reveals how deeply the myth resonated.

So the idea of the Amazons embodied both danger and allure; women who had to be defeated for Greek order to prevail.

Where did the myth of the Amazons come from?

“In ethnic terms, the Amazons were described as Thracian … [living] somewhere between the lower Danube and the northern coast of the Aegean Sea,” explains Braund.

According to myth, Greek heroes destroyed the Amazon homeland in eastern Europe, which was sitting on the edge of the Greek world. Survivors fled, and some were enslaved and shipped across the continent.

As Braund explains, some of the enslaved survivors wrested control of the slave ships, but – lacking the knowledge of how to sail them – ended up being at the mercy of the waves. They then washed ashore near the Black Sea, where they encountered the Scythians, nomadic horse-riders famed across the Eurasian steppe.

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But how did these lost Amazons react in this hostile territory?

“They’re resourceful, they’re fiercely intelligent, and they really know horses. So, the first thing they do is start trying to find some horses they can steal,” says Braund. Naturally, this brought them into violent conflict with the Scythians, and when the Scythians stripped the armour from dead Amazons, they were astonished.

“They thought, ‘My god, these are women, and yet they can fight; they’re strong!’”

This foundational myth of the Amazon women, crafted by the Greeks, may have reflected Greek awareness of steppe cultures where women did sometimes ride and fight alongside men.

What archaeology tells us about real Amazons

Modern archaeology offers glimpses of reality behind the myths. In Scythian-era burials on the Black Sea steppe, some female skeletons have been found with bows, arrows and even spears. Were these women the Amazons of Greek legend?

“You do have some burials which may well be burials of women [with weapons]. But the fact that the weapon is there doesn’t necessarily tell you a great deal,” Braund cautions.

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Some of these women may indeed have been warriors. Others may have been buried with weapons as symbolic objects.

So, while the evidence can be overstated, it does show that women in steppe societies sometimes played martial roles, perhaps frequently and visibly enough to fuel Greek stories of Amazons.

An ancient Greek male fantasy?

For Greeks, the appeal of the Amazons was not just that they were capable warriors – it was that they represented an inversion of the Greeks’ own society.

“The Greek image of this Amazon society is that they are entirely matriarchal. They have a queen, and these Amazons are quite explicitly beautiful in a way that appeals to men. After all, this is a Greek male fantasy we’re dealing with here, ultimately.”

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According to Braund, then, the Amazons were considered to be women who were desirable but dangerous; admirable yet ultimately conquerable by Greek heroes.

It’s a myth that emphasises the ‘strangeness’ of far-flung lands beyond the borders and control of ancient Greece, while also asserting Greek power.

Between myth and reality

So – were the Amazons real? Not in the way Greek art and epic described them. There was never a nation of matriarchal warrior queens situated along the rivers of eastern Europe.

But there were certainly women who hunted, fought and rode horses in the ancient world, particularly on the fringes of Greece within the nomadic cultures of the steppe.

The stories of the Amazons might tell us less about actual women in antiquity than about Greek men: their fears of female power, their fantasies of beauty and violence, and their fascination with societies that inverted their own values.

This article is based on an interview with David Braund, speaking to David Musgrove on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.

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