Searching for the Amazons

by John Man

  By then the Sarmatians had diversified into a loose federation of two dozen tribes, much as the Scythians had done. The Greeks knew about them at second hand. We know about them from the evidence they left behind.

  Jeannine Davis-Kimball knows a lot about that evidence. From 1992 to 1996, just after the collapse of the Soviet Union, she was co-leader of a fifteen-person team excavating Sarmatian kurgans outside the dusty, one-unpaved-street village of Pokrovka, three days and 1,000 bone-crunching kilometres from Moscow, right on the Kazakhstan border. Her colleague was Leonid Yablonsky, an eminent archaeologist from the Russian Academy of Sciences. Her account of the work is a vivid portrait of the appalling heat, dust, rain, unrelenting labour and finicky expertise that went into the discovery of ‘a cache of bones and artifacts that would help change established notions of a woman’s place in ancient nomadic societies.’ These, the Warrior Women of her book’s title, would have been recognized by the Ancient Greeks as Amazons, if they had met them. In fact, there is a remote possibility, though no shred of evidence, that they could have done, because Pokrovka is only some 300 kilometres north of the furthest point reached by Alexander the Great in the 320s BC and so within reach of the Greek colony he left behind, which lasted another two centuries.

  There were hints from Russian archaeologists that Sarmatian society was rather more complex than the traditional view of pastoral nomads as nothing more than brutal raiders, and that the women had played significant roles. The discoveries gave Davis-Kimball and Yablonsky, with their mix of American and Russian volunteers, a chance to find out the truth. Yablonsky, thick-set with a dense salt-and-pepper beard, was just the man for Davis-Kimball to have as a colleague – he had spent years digging, dusting, lifting and cataloguing in remote areas and harsh conditions.

  Over four years of the excavations, Pokrovka’s mounds – all sandy soil, much eroded and ploughed over – were opened by a mechanical scraper. Then volunteers dug out the pits to reveal skeletons, which were carefully cleaned with scoops, knives and brushes. This was not a valley where permafrost protected the flesh, but bones last well in the alkaline soil. They were well-built people, the men averaging almost 178 centimetres (5 foot 10 inches) and the women 165 centimetres (5 foot 6 inches).

  The soil had no effect on the gold, and very little on the silver and bronze items. Earrings made of bronze wire covered with gold foil were almost as new. Iron arrowheads, daggers, swords and armour plates were badly corroded, but other precious items had survived well: fossilized seashells, jewels, coral, amber, all symbols of status. Stone and clay dishes – Davis-Kimball calls them altars – could have been used by priestesses to grind coloured ores to make body paint, as useful in the next life as the weapons, clothing and jewellery. Other finds included 300 small gold discs, a belt covered with gold foil and Animal-style plaques.

  In all this women were as important as men – perhaps more important: 72 per cent of the high-status central pit burials were of women. The men were almost all warriors, as their arrowheads, swords and daggers showed, but the women had a wider range of items, domestic, artistic and cosmetic, as well as military. The men, it seems, were the specialists; the women multitasking generalists.

  They loved beads, tiny seed-like discs with a hole in them, which were sewn on to fabrics. Though the clothes had long since vanished, the beads remained, evidence that their world reached out far and wide. The beads were not home-made. They were of glass, carnelian and turquoise, from China or Iran or even further west: amber beads, made from fossilized tree sap, came from the Baltic. Bead-makers at both ends of Eurasia were specialists who ground little cylinders of rock or glass, sliced them into discs and drilled holes in them with minute bronze drills.

  Some had spindle whorls, small stones with holes in them which are threaded on to strands of wool. (Once set spinning, it regulates how threads twist to make yarn. Almost all cultures that spun materials into yarn invented spindle whorls independently.) Clearly, spindle whorls represented the female skills of spinning and weaving, which were vital for making clothes that in winter keep everyone alive. At −40°, bare flesh gets frostbitten in minutes. The women, in their own way, had as much power over life and death as the men.

  Oddly, some of the women had ‘pseudo spindle whorls’ made of chalk, which means they were too delicate actually to use. They are a puzzle. Here’s a possible solution: they recall the stone armour made for the spirit warriors of the First Emperor’s Terracotta Army near Xian – too heavy and too delicate to be used, but useful in the spirit world as symbolic protection.21 Perhaps a pseudo spindle whorl was a symbol of spiritual power, the equivalent of a Communion cup in the hands of a Christian priest.

  One oppressively hot July day in 1994, Davis-Kimball was watching a Russian colleague cleaning a skeleton. It lay in a catacomb, beneath a roof less than a metre high. It was small and there was something green on the chest, with an iron dagger by the right leg, and clusters of green, indicating bronze arrowheads, by the left leg. ‘Looks like this might be a female skeleton,’ she said to an American colleague. After more cleaning, Yablonsky lifted the skull and took a close look at the pelvis. ‘It’s a young female,’ he said. ‘Probably between thirteen and fourteen years old.’

  A girl of consequence, as it turned out. Round her neck was an amulet, the cause of the green colour, from a single bronze arrowhead. Another forty lay nearby, along with a quiver. At her feet lay another amulet, a massive boar’s tusk, which had probably hung from her waist as a symbol of her skill as a hunter. Nearby were two oyster shells and a pink cup-like stone that had some sort of dried paste in it, possibly paint for her body or clothing. If so, the shells, stone and paste could have been part of some religious ritual in this life and the next. It seemed she was both a warrior and a priestess, or at least in training to be both when she died, around 300 BC.

  Other female skeletons had similar objects near them. Of forty graves with weapons, seven belonged to women, with quivers, bronze arrowheads, daggers and swords. One had a metre-long sword. A few were buried with legs bent, as if they were riding a horse into the afterlife. They were almost all young, suggesting they trained and fought as warriors as teenagers, but then were taken off military duties when they married and bore children. Though the wooden arrows and bows had long vanished, the arrowheads seemed proof that these girls had become expert in mounted archery, at which they would have been a match for their men. (More on that in the next chapter.) Normally, men, being stronger, were the swordsmen, but perhaps the girl with the sword had shown rare ability and strength. All would have been useful in protecting flocks and families from wolves and human predators. There was no telling how these teenagers had died: their skulls and limbs were unbroken by blows from swords or clubs.

  From the evidence, it seems that Sarmatian religion, like that of the Saka and other Scythian-style cultures, involved the worship of several gods, ancestors and nature. Perhaps they, like the Scythians, honoured the female deity Tahiti as their top god, reflecting the significance of women in Sarmatian society. In any event, it was mostly women who played the main religious roles. Ancient Greeks would have called them Amazonian priestesses. Seven per cent of the Pokrovka women were priestesses, buried with altars, fossilized seashells, bone spoons, Animal-style amulets and mirrors. Several of the bodies were middle-aged and elderly. Theirs was a job for life, not just until they got married. It was they who scorched the shoulder bones of sheep until they cracked and then read meaning into the patterns, advising on war, alliances and new pastures. It was they who performed sacrifices and offered gifts of meat, curd and kumiss on their little altars.

  What happened to the Sarmatians? They migrated, they evolved, they integrated. Their migration, like that of the Turks later, took centuries. By about 300 BC they were dominating southern Russia, making life hard for the Scythians. Locally, in Tuva, they gave way to the Xiongnu (second century BC−second century AD) whom the Mongolians and Chinese refer to as Hunnu.

&nb
sp; In one transformation in their move westward, the Sarmatians became Alans. A wide-ranging sub-federation, they were known as As to the Persians. (It is from their name, by the way, that ‘Aryan’ is derived, l shifting to r in some Iranian languages; thus the tribe so admired by Hitler turns out not to be Germanic at all.) Roman authors mention them in the first century AD. Martial, a sharp-tongued master of epigrams, skewered a certain Caelia and her promiscuous sexual habits by asking plaintively how a Roman girl could give herself to almost anyone, including ‘the circumcised members of the Jewish race’ and ‘the Alan with his Sarmatian mount’, yet cannot ‘find pleasure in members of the Roman race’ – like himself.

  The Alans raided south into north-eastern Turkey, where the Greek historian and general Arrian fought them in the second century, noting the Alan cavalry’s favourite tactic of the feigned retreat (all nomads, from Scythians to Mongols over 2,000 years, did that, almost always to good effect). He made them generous offers and many joined his cavalry. Many didn’t, remaining to nibble at the flanks of the Roman empire. They appear as conquered subjects on the column erected by the Emperor Trajan in AD 113, and a later emperor, Marcus Aurelius, termed himself Sarmaticus after defeating them again. They were forced to provide him with 8,000 troops, 5,500 of whom were posted to Britain, so that descendants of a tribe whose roots were in Mongolian lands ended up keeping watch on Hadrian’s Wall.

  The Alans would eventually form fragments of the explosion of peoples, which usually goes by its German name, the Völkerwanderung, the Migration of the Tribes, that undid the Roman empire. They had a talent for retaining their own identity. In the slurry of wandering peoples, the Alans were like grit, widely mixed, never absorbed, always abrasive. Their remnants in the Caucasus would transmute into the Ossetians of southern Russia and Georgia: the first two syllables of this name recall their Persian appellation, As-, with a Mongol-style plural -ut (so the current name of the little Russian enclave known as North Ossetia-Alania doubly emphasizes their roots).

  At the other end of the empire, they became universal mercenaries, joining the Romans, the Goths on their march into Spain – some derive the name Catalonia from a combination of Goth and Alan – and the Vandals, who swept them up on their flight to North Africa in about 420, and the Huns. So the Sarmatians, aka the Alans, whose women would have been seen as Amazons by the Ancient Greeks and who had started off in the depths of Central Asia, helped to defend and attack the Roman empire, eventually dissipating in the kaleidoscopic mix of tribes that would, in centuries to come, form Europe’s nation-states.

  20 Disputed, but in his History of Central Asia, Vol. 1, Christoph Baumer has a picture of a statue wearing a Sarmatian-style akinates (sword-shield) on the Mangyshlak Peninsula, which juts into the Caspian.

  21 A note on the stone armour, 100,000 limestone flakes, in dozens of suits. In a fight, it would be as much use as porcelain. So what was it for? The First Emperor wanted the best for his spirit army. After their battles in the spirit world, they would need replacement armour. Leather wouldn’t last. Limestone would be eternal. The quarrying, transporting and carving of limestone armour must have spread the idea that stone could provide protection in the next world. (See my Terracotta A, Chapter 13.)

  7

  THE RETURN OF THE MOUNTED ARCHER

  SINCE BOWS HAVE BEEN FOUND IN THE GRAVES OF YOUNG Scythian women, they must have trained to use them as children, learning how to string and shoot them at the gallop, getting used to riding long distances, as Mongolian children do today (children are the jockeys in the annual naadarn races, which are run over about 25 kilometres; using children, who are lighter than adults, allows the horses to run better).

  The bow and arrow was the key to their performance as warriors. Swords and lances are better used by men, because they demand as much muscle power as possible. But horseback archery is all about skill. Of course, if you shot for distance in what is now called flight archery, male arms and shoulders were crucial. The little recurve bows, made of bone and wood, could pack a tremendous punch. The first written source in Mongolian is a stone recording a shot made by Genghis Khan’s nephew Yisungge in 1225. His arrow carried 450 metres and hit some sort of unnamed target. But such a feat was not much use when shooting a wolf or closing on an enemy on a galloping horse. In those circumstances, the skill of the female archers matched that of the men, for 2,000 years.

  But from the fourteenth century onwards, gunpowder blew the horse-archer from history. Within a very short time, the skills that had defined nomadic warriors from Manchuria to the Russian steppes had fallen from use and almost from memory. Mounted archers themselves left no manuals. No one after they vanished from Europe and Central Asia had a clue about how to slide arrows from quivers, load them and shoot them, time after time, while sitting on a galloping horse. No one tried it.22

  Until now. Mounted archery is back, as a sport, bringing a new understanding of how these warriors gained their supremacy. In this sport, women are as good as men, as they were as warriors.

  The revival is almost entirely due to one man: Lajos Kassai, who was, I suspected, the first true mounted archer in Europe since the departure of the Mongols in 1242. The Mongols left from Hungary, so it is fitting that Kassai is a Hungarian.

  I heard of Kassai because anyone who knows anything about mounted archery mentions him. I met him while researching the Huns, but it might just as well have been the Scythians, Sarmatians or Mongols.

  I and my interpreter, Andrea Szegedi, found him in Budapest, about to perform at a fair on Margaret Island in the Danube. He was dressed in a simple wrap-around costume, nomad-style, with three assistants selling his own brands of bow. Could we have a word? A nod, that was all, not even a smile. In a refreshment tent, he fixed me with intense, steady blue eyes in a face blank of expression. It was unsettling, and became more so when I tried for some soundbite responses.

  Where, for instance, did his interest in mounted archery come from?

  ‘Something inside me,’ he replied in halting English, nailing me with a fierce gaze. I rephrased the question. He switched his gaze to Andi and went on in Hungarian, just as abruptly. ‘It was from the inside. I have to do it. That’s all.’

  ‘I understand interest from others is growing?’

  ‘They come from everywhere, from the US, from Canada, to learn.’

  ‘Why do people love it?’

  ‘If I can’t tell you why I do it, I can’t tell you why they love it.’

  He had no patience with me. I was an outsider, the questions were dumb, and he was fiercely concentrated, not on me, but on what he was about to do, on its brutal physical and emotional demands. It was, I guessed, like cornering Andy Murray just before a Wimbledon final and trying to get deep answers about the inner game of tennis. Besides, there was much more going on, which I was too busy with camera and tape-recorder to notice. Andi was a medical student: short-cropped hair, good on a horse, tall, lithe as a thoroughbred herself, and thoroughly professional, fortunately, because it was only later that she confessed the impression he made.

  ‘Yes, he could look scary. But his mood changed in a second. He has this nice smile. Then he was really funny. He swore. Like something was “bitchily good”, as we say. Then sometimes the way he looked . . .’ She was driving us along a flat, straight road over the puszta, but her mind was not on grasslands. ‘We have an expression, that when someone looks at you like that they can see your bones. That was how it felt. He could see my bones. He was looking into my eyes, and he was amazing.’ She paused. ‘He really was. Honestly.’

  It took me another meeting on his home ground, more talk, and respectful observation to understand. Mounted archery is his life’s work, which he explains in his book, Horseback Archery. But even that tells only half the story. The other half emerges in action, in teaching, in the commitment that others give him.

  He is a man whose life perfectly matches what he feels is his destiny. Kassai, like a monk, heard the call, followed,
and arrived at his goal. But, unlike a monk, he did not find the way and the goal through a teaching, or an organization, or a Master. He has all that, but they are all him. He invented the lot. It took him over twenty years.

  Kassai grew up in a world of collective farmers and city-dwellers and factory-workers. As a child, he escaped the drabness of communism into his imagination, inspired by a novel about the Huns, The Invisible Man, by Géza Gárdonyi. It is the story of a Thracian slave, Zeta, who travels to Attila’s court and fights for him. It’s a good, quick, vivid read for children, and never out of print since its publication in 1902. ‘Yes, our ancestors the Huns were the greatest horseback archers of the world,’ says Kassai. ‘I imagined the wild gallops, the horses foaming at the mouth, the drawn bows. What a sensation! I wanted to be like them, a terrifying, fearless warrior.’

  The first step was to become an archer. As a child and then as a young man, living near Kaposvár, 40 kilometres south of Lake Balaton, he made bows by the dozen, experimenting with wood and horn and tendons – tendons on the back of the bow resist stretching, horn on the belly resists compression – arrows for weight and rigidity, arrowheads for their penetration. He became a good shot. Muscles and sinews turned to iron. The three fingers of his right hand became raw from the bow string, then calloused (though he protects them with tape).

  He still had not ridden. There was no one from whom he could learn to ride like a nomad. He had to teach himself. This he did in his twenties with the aid of a spirited creature called Prankish, who baptized him with fire, sweeping him off by galloping under low branches, dragging him by the stirrup and falling on him in mud.

  One day, a wild gallop took him into a dead-end valley. Prankish stopped. In unexpected stillness, Kassai looked around. He suddenly felt as if he had found his place in the world, a place where ‘accepting the sweet solitude of a voluntary exile, I could retreat from this noisy century and develop mounted archery to perfection.’