Other fears about the power of women surface in the legend of the ferocious Amazons. Its resonances have gone wide and deep, so that when sixteenth-century Portuguese explorers found fighting women in a region of the Brazilian rainforest, they named the regions and its principal river accordingly - the Amazon. The precise meaning of the word Amazon is unclear, but one possibility is that it means "without a breast" -- a-mazos in ancient Greek. According to the legend, Amazons had only one breast. Hippocrates discussed the Amazons at some length, saying that mothers cauterized their daughters' left breast region before puberty so that it would not later develop. The purpose was to facilitate shooting with the bow, during which the breast might get in the way. Although this idea seems far-fetched, women archers today do use a leather restraint to keep their breast clear of the bowstring -- but in this case the right breast. If Amazon women once existed, why would they have wished to remove the left breast? One answer is that it would have been difficult to wear a chest restraint while riding. The steppe nomads rode small, agile, fast horses, and they had to combine strength with suppleness to control them. In modern archery the reason the right breast is restrained is that the longbow draw goes back to the right-hand side of the body. With a short, composite reflex bow fired from horseback, however, the draw is short and across the body. The left nipple is in the firing line, and the firing line would not have been a good place to be, when one considers the power of these bows: they could fire armor-piercing arrows with a speed approaching that of a crossbow bolt. Another possible explanation of the one-breasted story is that it is symbolic, representing women who were half men. Some of the hermaphroditic deities of India are depicted with one side of the body female, with a voluptuous breast, and the other side male and flat. It is also possible that both things are true: that it was a real practice with symbolic overtones. According to Hippocrates, Amazon women fought until they had killed and scalped three of the enemy, at which point they were free to marry and have children (for whom they would need their remaining breast). Subsequenlty they had no need to ride "unless compelled to do so by a general expedition." Herodotus says something similar and gives us the indigenous name for these women: Oiorpata, which meant "slayers of men." Herodotus records a tale about the Amazons that purports to explain the origin of the strange half-Scythian language spoken to the east of the Don River in Sauromatia. A band of young male Scythians skirmished with an alien band, the story goes. When they stripped the dead of their armor, they discovered that they were in fact women -- the Amazons. They decided not to fight the Amazons anymore but instead to court them, figuring that the offspring of their matings would be noble and ferocious warriors. The Scythian lads pitched their camp opposite the Amazon camp and waited about noon, when the women would come out in pairs to urinate. Two of the Scythians crept up on a pair of Amazon women and, being received by them, had sex with them. Although neither could speak the other's language, they resolve to return the next day, each bringing another friend. So it went, until the two camps were lustily amalgamated. The Scythians could not learn the Amazons' language, but the Amazons showed rather greater ability in learning, albeit imperfectly, the Scythian tongue. The Scythians then suggested that the Amazons return with them to their parents' dominions to be their wives. But the Amazons retorted, "We cannot live with your women. For we and they have not the same customs. We shoot the bow and the javelin and ride horses but, for 'women's tasks' we know them not." The Scythians settled with the Amazons in what was Sauromatia, and because the Amazons never quite mastered the Scythian language, Sarmatian arose as a dialect variant. Herodotus's mythical account indicates that the area to the east of the Don River, known in classical times as Sauromatia, would be the place for archaeologists to look for traces of these warrior women. Burials of warrior women first came to notice in the mid-nineteenth century, when some graves in the Caucasus Mountains on the Terek River were opened. One grave contained a skeleton of strongly female type, buried with armor, a sheaf of arrows, a slate discus, and an iron knife. A series of graves from a nearby site at Aul Stepan Zminda contained many female warriors and their mounts, although they were dated later that the Scythian period. Modern excavations around the royal barrow of Chertomlyk in Ukraine found that four out of fifty warrior graves were of this "Amazon" type: one of them was buried with an arrowhead embedded in her back, another had a massive iron shield, and a third had a small child. This last burial suggests a slight variation on the accounts given by Herodotus and Hippocrates.

The Prehistory of Sex
Four Million Years of Human Sexual Culture
by Timothy Taylor
Bantam Books, NY. 1997.
For $12.76 through Amazon.com.