It may be the worship in spring of certain deities demanded it as a necessary rite (Abercromby, 1891, p177-178). Still other researchers identify inherited traits of the Amazons among another ethnic groups in the Northern Caucuses called the Circassians, a formerly independent mountainous country on the northeastern shore of the Black Sea. The Geography of Strabo: With an English Translation by Horace Leonard Jones.
By the time the European Middle Ages rolled around, and lacking any Amazons to ask directly, historiographers came to the conclusion that the Amazons had migrated to what was in those days being called Scythia, and more specifically, Sarmatia (roughly Ukraine and Southern Russia), identifying certain cultural practices among an Iranian ethnic group called the Sarmatians (recorded as thriving between about the 5 Century A. The Sarmatians, though without fixed habitations, were possessed of a certain social organization, being divided, at any rate, into nobles and vassals, many of whom were only slaves.
They were also separated into exogamous tribes, for marriage within the tribe was regarded as incest, and punishable with death, perhaps by drowning, as was recently the case.
The whole duty of man lay in fighting, robbing, avenging the death of relatives, man stealing, and, for those that lived on the coast, in piracy.
Still, the wild, untutored instinct that glorified acts like these was tempered by a sentiment that made a virtue of generosity and hospitality on the part of the nobles, and demanded respect towards old age from all ranks of society.
The rulers (chun-chang) of Fu-lin send males to them every year to couple with them. several centuries before the compilation of the Hsin-t’ang-shu.
It is their custom not to bring up male children they have born.” The same authority (ch. 6), speaking of the Tung-nu (“eastern women”) in Central Asia, says: “On the western sea there are likewise women with a female government, which is the cause of these [in Central Asia] being called eastern women.” A parallel passage is contained in the Ta-t’ang-hsi-yu-chi, the account of Hsuan Chuang’s journeys, chiefly derived from Sanskrit sources, and completed in A. One is, in the face of the identity of this account (as well as of part of what the Hsin-t’ang-shu says about Persia) with the text of Hsuan Chuang’s work, in a temptation to assume that much of the information received in China regarding Fu-lin, perhaps also regarding the ancient Ta-ts’in, has come thither through Indian sources translated by Buddhist linguists,—a view lately put forward by Dr. There is certainly no doubt that, Hsuan Chuang’s being the older work and not a compilation like the T’ang-shu, the account of the Amazons must have been derived from it (Hirth, 1885, p200-202).Perhaps the belief that a woman could not bear courageous children, and was unworthy of becoming a mother, unless she herself had given proof of her own courage by slaying at least one tribal enemy, gave rise to the usage that a girl might not marry till she had killed one, perhaps three individuals.And reciprocally it is far from improbable that among a race of warriors a man might not take a wife till he had shown his bravery in battle by bringing home at least one head.Katherine Hepburn once mused, “Sometimes I wonder if men and women really suit each other.Perhaps they should live next door and just visit now and then”. Hepburn probably never suspected that she was succinctly espousing the social philosophy of Classical Antiquity’s first organized feminist movement, the fierce and formidable Amazons, a nation of all-female warriors reported to have flourished during the Greek Dark Ages (roughly 1100-800 B. The Amazons were a force to be reckoned with, often doing battle with the ancient Greeks, and popping up at significant events such as the Trojan War (e.g.Hence the Sarmatian women still preserved the customs of the Amazons; they carried bows and javelins, and wore the same clothing as the men, sat on horseback, and rode with or without their husbands to the chase or to battle, and no maiden married till she had slain an enemy; “so that some never married at all, because they were unable to satisfy this rule.” The language of the Sauromatae was the same as the language of the Scythians, but they spoke it badly, because the Amazons had never perfectly learned it.