Amazon Graves Found in Kazakhstan
                     By Alexey Schetnikov

ALMATY, Apr 27, 2001 -- (Times of Central Asia)

Amazons - strong warlike women - were mentioned by many ancient historians,
including Herodotus, who traveled through Asia. The Scythians were tribes
that inhabited the vast areas around the Caspian Sea and modern Kazakhstan.
The most populous and strongest were the Scythian tribes that lived in
Northern Kazakhstan. Herodotus wrote about Scythian nomads and Scythian
farmers who lived in the northern Caucasus -it was a well-developed
civilization for that time. Herodotus also wrote about the Scythian men who
married warlike women from Amazon tribes. In his opinion, this explains the
Scythian customs according to which a young woman may not marry until she
kills an enemy.

The Amazons were very cruel to tribes they conquered, particularly to
captive men, whom they killed with great cruelty. According to Herodotus,
Amazons cut their right breast off and then burned the wound with hot iron
in order to prevent them from hunting and drawing a bow in battle.

However, despite evidence from Herodotus and other trustworthy historians,
many scholars believe that the tale of the Amazons is just a beautiful myth.
But the recent excavations conducted by Russian and American archaeologists
have shed new light on this amazing legend. Kazakh archaeologists assisted
greatly the Russian-American expedition because Kazakh scholars were greatly
interested in finding evidence to prove that the Kazakhs are direct
descendants from the Scythians, and Salmats, who later replaced them. After
a thorough examination all finds will be displayed at the Astana Historical
Museum in Kazakhstan.

The excavations were conducted at an area that can be called the Gate of
Peoples. Here, between the Caspian Sea and the Stone Belt mountains, many
ancient tribes moved from the east to the west, driven by an unknown force.
In the 6th-4th centuries BC an area of the Tobol River in Western Siberia
and the entire range of northern Kazakhstan was inhabited by Salmats, a
warlike nomadic tribe. In the 3rd century BC they ousted the Scythians from
the area around the Black Sea and the Caucasus. Here they found a common
language with the Amazons and married them.

The expedition found 40 women's graves, seven of which contained items not
typical of the gentler sex - armors, weapons, and horse harness. All these
things - bronze arrowheads, daggers, and swords - were of normal size and
showed signs that they had been used frequently for military purposes. This
rules out the suggestion that all these articles were just symbolic and used
for only ritual purposes.

The only difference was that the handles of the swords and daggers found in
the women's graves were shorter than those found in the men's graves.
Probably these weapons were made especially for women, with their
comparatively small hands. One can also suggest that these were hunting
weapons. However, the Amazons' graves contained many sheep, horse, and
camel skins and bones but no bones of wild animals. This proves that these
tribes were not hunters but nomadic cattle-breeders.

Another fact, proving the Amazon theory is that military tattoos on the
remnants of the skin of both the men and women. According to many ancient
sources, including Herodotus, a warrior made a special tattoo after killing
each enemy soldier. Such tattoo emblems varied from totem animals (like the
heads of a wolf or bear) to the skull crossed with bones.

The archaeologists also found 68 bronze articles, including spearheads,
axes, daggers with beautifully decorated handles, and decorations shaped as
armors.  But the most interesting finding was that these articles originated
from four regions - the Caucasus, Volga basin, Kazakhstan, and Central Asia.
So this ancient treasure testifies to direct contacts between the Caucasus,
Central Asia, and other Eurasian regions.

Chemical analysis of these finds revealed a wide diversity of different
kinds of bronze. So, daggers and axes were cast from the arsenic bronze and
some  arrow-heads and armors - from tin-arsenic bronze. These kinds of
bronze originated from different and very distant areas of the Caucasus,
Ural, and Kazakhstan.

On this territory archaeologists have already found weapons in Scythian
women's graves in the 1950s, but these were just occasional finds that could
not make up the full picture. Today, after the discovery of such a large
Amazon grave, the international archaeological community will probably be
convinced that women played a role in ancient nomadic tribes.

"If we find in a grave weapons beside a men's skeleton, we are sure that he
was a warrior. So a similar conclusion is logical when we deal with women's
remnants," agreed an outstanding American archaeologist, Philip Cowell. The
results of the Russian-American expedition have been recognized by the Royal
Geographic Society, which was a co-sponsor of the excavations. It has been
also decided to finance further excavations in this region.

                     (C) 2001 Times of Central Asia

WARRIOR WOMEN OF THE
                        EURASIAN STEPPES

                         BY JEANNINE DAVIS-KIMBALL
 
 

     he warrior women known to ancient Greek authors as Amazons were long thought to be
     creatures of myth. Now 50 ancient burial mounds near the town of Pokrovka, Russia, near
the Kazakhstan border, have yielded skeletons of women buried with weapons, suggesting the
Greek tales may have had some basis in fact. Nomads known as the Sauromatians buried their
dead here beginning ca. 600 B.C.; according to Herodotus the Sauromatians were descendants of
the Amazons and the Scythians, who lived north of the Sea of Azov. After ca. 400 B.C. the
Pokrovka mounds were reused by the Sarmatians, another nomadic tribe possibly related to the
Sauromatians. In general, females were buried with a wider variety and larger quantity of artifacts
than males, and seven female graves contained iron swords or daggers, bronze arrowheads, and
whetstones to sharpen the weapons. Some scholars have argued that weapons found in female
burials served a purely ritual purpose, but the bones tell a different story. The bowed leg bones of
one 13- or 14-year-old girl attest a life on horseback, and a bent arrowhead found in the body
cavity of another woman suggested that she had been killed in battle. The Pokrovka women
cannot have been the Amazons of Greek myth--who were said to have lived far to the west--but
they may have been one of many similar nomadic tribes who occupied the Eurasian steppes in the
Early Iron Age.

The body had been attired in boots, trousers, and a leather tunic (caftan) decorated with some  2,400 arrow-shaped gold plaques. Plaques of horses with twisted torsos decorated scabbards  that held an iron dagger and a sword. Ceramic, silver, and bronze vessels, a bronze mirror, and flat wooden dishes and beaters for koumiss (fermented mare's milk)were also found in the tomb.

                                      CSEN

One girl 13 or 14 years old was buried with 40 bronze arrowheads in a quiver at her left side and an iron dagger at her right, along with amulets (objects worn for protection) including a                        bronze arrowhead in a leather pouch around her neck and a great boar's tusk -- probably once suspended from her belt and at her    feet.

                                       June 2, 1997
                                Burial sites may prove Greek
                              Amazon warriors of myths
                                               By Kathy Sawyer / Washington Post

Kathy Sawyer, in Were Amazons More than Myths?, an article from
 the July 31, 1997 Salt Lake Tribune, suggests "the notion of such
women... [who] replenished their numbers by mating with men from other tribes, keeping the daughters and killing male infants ... sprang from ... an imaginative impulse in the male-dominated Greek
society ...." But Germanic tribes had women warriors and Mongol families accompanied the armies of Genghis Khan, so the presence of women warriors was well attested even before Dr. Jeannine Davis-Kimball "spent five years  excavating more than 150 burial mounds of 5th century B.C. nomads near
 Pokrovka, Russia."