Category: book review

Before the mercantile empire of ‘Amazon’ amid the Sea of the Internet, there once was an eponymous band of fierce women warriors whose famed ferocity and fearlessness was enshrined in the Classical literature and history. It is said that they were real women soldiers living in ancient Eurasia with husbands and children who seemed to know something about how to maneuver the sphere of personal life and that of military commitments. The subject of this mysterious ancient militant women from this month’s National Geographic History intends to deconstruct such mysticism surrounding the factual evidence thereof and demystify the origin of the meta women fighters modern feistily feminists and politicians love to panegyrize.

First, the origin of Amazonian warriors comes not from the Amazonian jungle who are believed to be scantily clothed with breasts deformed women prone to attack men without reason. They were, in fact, the female warriors among Scythian and other nomadic Steppe cultures across the Eurasian plain as embedded in Homer’s The Illiad, Herodotus’s Histories, and Plato’s Laws. The recent discoveries of 4 female corpses bearing combat-related injuries, such as slashed ribs, fractured skulls, and broken arms are claimed to be of the lost Amazonians prevalently seen among Scythian women riding to battle alongside their men.

Notwithstanding the above archeological excavation and factual evidence, my personal sentiment toward the adulation of the female combatants is anything but the elevated opinions about them. Although Homer in The Iliad praises Amazonians for being the equals of valorous men, I wonder if he would have wanted to take one of them as his better half in reality. Plato in Laws recommends that boys and girls should be trained for horse-riding, archery, javelin-throwing, etc., which is very indeed commendable, but I opine that no every girl should be forced into such training because every girl is not of the same aptitude or disposition. Of all these complacently abstract perspectives on women soldiers, Herodotus seems to be only one who has a comparatively objective view on Amazonians not as a glorified tribe of female bravery but as a tribe of women freed from conventional conjugality. They were a group of shipwrecked women tended by local men with whom they moved to new lands and happily lived after while maintaining their own separately private lives as something of common law marriage couples.

The modern perspectives on the Amazonians as a manifestation of gender equality in the spheres of domestic and public life exceedingly lionize the necessity of upending what is perceived as traditionally patriarchal gender roles peculiar to the biological characteristic of men and women. Needless to say, the word “Equality” is highly admirable and desirable, especially on the frontline of livelihood, but you can’t force everyone – that is every woman- to be as aggressive or belligerent as these ancient female warriors were in fighting everyday strains of life. Besides, I see there are more widespread issues of racism, classism, lookism, and agism than sexism in daily life because womanliness adorned with beauty and sex appeal armed with the art of seduction can work wonder in every place, helping her to achieve social mobility. Reading the article intent upon the historical evidence of these Amazonians makes me realize that the advocation of public sentiment in practice overrules the consideration of single individuality in theory.