Bob Young (mayor)

Transcription

MALE SPEAKER: Good afternoon, and welcome to Talks at Google in Cambridge, Massachusetts to most of the people here in the room, and to everyone joining us via live stream. Today, it's my enormous pleasure to introduce Adrienne Mayor. Professor Mayor is here to discuss her landmark new book "Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Women Across the Ancient World." This is the first comprehensive account of warrior women in myth and history, across the ancient world, from the Mediterranean Sea to the Great Wall of China. Reading it, I'm not sure which is more thrilling the stories of the women she makes come alive for us, or the scholarly rigor she brings to her work. This is really an exceptional book, please buy it and read it. Professor Mayor is an independent folklorist slash historian of science who investigates natural knowledge contained in pre-scientific myths and oral traditions. Her research looks at the ancient folk science precursors, alternatives, and parallels to modern scientific methods. She is Research Scholar, Classics and History and Philosophy of Science at Stanford. Stanford is lucky to have her on faculty, and we are fortunate to have her here with us today. Please join me in welcoming Adrienne Mayor. ADRIENNE MAYOR: Thank you. Thank you. I'm really honored to be invited to present my research here at Google, and I want to thank women at Google for sponsoring my talk, and everyone else who made my visit possible today. Well, Amazons seem to be everywhere these days. First, there was "Xena, Warrior Princess," then the animated films "Mulan," "Brave," "The Hunger Games," Atalanta in the recent Hercules film, "The Shield Maidens and the Vikings," the powerful women in Game of Thrones, and now Marvel Comics has actually introduced a female Thor war goddess, and Wonder Woman is actually poised to make a comeback. I hear that she's going to have our own movie in 2017. And meanwhile, women of all ages, we've been talking about this earlier today, are taking up bows and arrows in unprecedented numbers, and horse women archers, calling themselves Amazons, are competing around the world. These are a few of them, you could actually take the lessons from these women to learn to do this. Modern Amazons. At the same time, the news from the Middle East is filled with images of an estimated 10,000 women who are serving in the Kurdistan Peshmerga fighting Islamic state in Syria. And they're fighting because their very lives depend on victory. So today, we're surrounded by images of warrior women. And some 2,500 years ago, the Greeks also surrounded themselves with stories and images of Amazons. The Greeks described Amazons as the equals of men, independent, fearless, foreign horse women who gloried in hunting and warfare. And these are just some examples of some Amazon images from Greek art. These are vases from about 550 to 450 BC. And who were the ancient Amazons in Greek mythology? They were fierce warrior women of exotic lands, they weren't Greek. They were as courageous and as skilled in battle as the mightiest Greek heroes. Amazons played a major role in the legendary Trojan War, and every great Greek champion from Heracles, to Theseus, and Achilles, they all had to prove their courage by killing a formidable Amazon queen. Greek historians never doubted that Amazons had really existed in the remote misty past. And many Greek writers reported that women living the lives of Amazons still dwelled in the lands around the Black Sea and beyond the Black Sea in the immense territory the Greeks called Scythia. Historians and archaeologists still use that word. It's a blanket term, and I'll be using it today. In classical antiquity, Amazons were on view everywhere you looked in Athens and other cities in Greece. They were featured in monumental public sculptures, in mosaics, and in frescoes on public buildings. Amazons wearing patterned trousers and boots, riding horses, shooting bows, hurling spears, swinging battle axes, and dying heroically in battle were wildly popular subjects in Greek vase paintings. More than 130 personal names of Amazons still survive from antiquity. They are on statue bases, they're labels on ancient vases, and they are in many ancient texts. Every Greek man, woman, and child knew exciting Amazon tales by heart. And little Greek girls, we now know, even played with Amazon dolls. These are just two from the collection in the Louvre. They have-- some of them have movable arms and legs like Barbie dolls. They could be dressed in different costumes, and these were found in little girls' graves from classical Greece. So were Amazons real? Or were bold, warlike women nothing but fantasy figures invented by the Greeks? Were they simply the ancient ancestors of Wonder Woman and Katniss Everdeen? Do we have to say the exhilarating world of Amazons was just an elaborate fiction brought to life by the Greek storytelling imagination? Until now, that is what modern historians had been assuming. But now, thanks to spectacular recent archaeological discoveries across what was once ancient Scythia, we have overwhelming proof that women fitting the descriptions of Amazons in Greek art and literature really did exist. So there were historical counterparts to the mythical Amazons. These women were members of a network of diverse, but culturally related nomadic tribes of Eurasia and beyond. Each of those tribes now, of course, they all have their own names, they have their own dialects, languages, and their own histories, but they became known to the Greeks as Scythians. And they-- their cultures were centered around archery and riding horses. They were nomads. As nomads, The Scythians left no written histories, so we have to rely on their neighbors, and their descendants, and on archaeology. Long before modern archaeologists began excavating the graves of real warrior women, the Greek writers had already identified Amazons as Scythians. These warlike tribes have no cities, no fixed abodes, wrote one ancient Greek historian, they live free and unconquered, and they are so savage, that even the women take part in war, he wrote. Amazons, remarked others, were as courageous and as fearsome as their Scythian husbands. The nomad women were first described in detail by Greeks in about 470 BC by the Greek historian Herodotus. He, and later authors, accurately described the Scythian lifestyle and preserved details of their burials in mounds called kurgans on the steppes. And my talk today is going to focus on the evidence from ancient Greek art and modern archaeology. This is a Scythian kurgan. On the left, that's what they look like. They're very large, very complex burials. That one was excavated last year. And you can see the typical finds inside. Among these Scythian nomads, girls learned to ride and handle bows and spears along with their brothers. They knew how to defend themselves. They knew how to hunt, and they knew how to fight just like the men. The lives of those tough nomadic girls and women were so very different from the lives of Greek women in antiquity. In Greece, women and girls were confined indoors to weave and mind children. And that difference in the two cultures made a deep impression on the Greeks. Rumors and descriptions of these horse riding men and women, much feared for their deadly arrows and their expanding conquests across Eurasia, began to filter back to Greece, perhaps in the Bronze Age, and the Greeks first began to directly contact these people in the seventh century BC. And that's when the Greek cities began to establish trading colonies around the coast of the Black Sea. And it's easy to understand then, how genuine knowledge mixed with garbled details, intriguing travelers reports, curiosity, imagination, and a lot of speculation to fill in the gaps, fired up the Greek imagination and lead to an outpouring of exciting stories and vivid pictures of Amazons. We now know about these people because of archaeological excavations of more than 1,000 ancient Scythian graves from the Ukraine, southern Russia, the Caucasus region, and Central Asia. Now before the advent of DNA testing, it used to be taken for granted that any time you find human remains buried with weapons, it was assumed they belong to a male warrior. And that was just taken for granted, that was routine. But scientific analysis is calling all of those assumptions into question, and there have been some spectacular reversals of previous discoveries announced as male warriors. I'll just give a few examples. In the 1960s, in ancient Thrace, that's now Bulgaria. Two grave mounds from the fourth century BC, that's the time when the Greeks were telling stories about Amazons, those mounds were discovered in the '60s. And each mound had many weapons, armor, they were filled with gold and silver artifacts, and richly equipped horses. A pair of human skeletons lay inside each of those mounds, and these remains were announced as too powerful male warriors who were buried with their wives. 50 years later, in 2010, DNA tests were finally carried out, and the results revealed that all four of the skeletons in those two mounds belonged to women. Another stunning discovery of a warrior woman was reported just last month. I think it's in this month's issue of archaeology magazine. Since the 1970s, when the magnificent tomb of Alexander the Great's father, Philip II, was excavated in Macedonia, archaeologists have wondered about the identity of the mysterious second person, another person's remains, buried in other golden casket next to Philip's. You see the two caskets here. A pair of gilded bronze greaves-- greaves, leg armor, shin guards, are shown on the right there. And there was a fabulous golden quiver, you see the golden quiver on the lower left, along with arrows, and parts of a bow. Those weapons posed a puzzle to the archaeologists, because those weapons are not Greek weapons, they're not Macedonian weapons. Those are typical Scythian weapons like those used by the Amazons in Greek art. And even more curious, if you take a look at those greaves, the shin guards, they're mismatched. They're not the same size. Well, scientific analysis of those mystery bones was just taken out, taken a few weeks ago, and the analysis revealed surprising news. The Scythian bow and the quiver and those mismatched leg armor, they belonged to a woman. She was about 32 when she died in 336 BC. Her bones showed the rigors of constant horseback riding. One of her legs had broken and had healed crookedly, leaving her with a-- probably with a limp, and the uneven greaves had obviously been custom-made for her. Now, who was this real life Amazon buried in the royal Macedonian tomb with the King of Macedon? Theories about her identity are being debated as we speak. We can go into that later if you have questions. Now that DNA analysis is available, it's very expensive, but it is available now, we have more than 300 graves of battle scarred women buried with their weapons, and more being found every year. And archaeologists are now going back to previously discovered male warriors to see whether those might be women. The biggest concentration of warrior women's burials are in Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine, southern Russia, the Caucasus, and Kazakhstan, the very places that were identified as prime Amazon territory by the ancient Greeks. In the Scythian kurgans, warrior women were buried. They could be buried alone, along with other warrior women, or with male warriors, they were always buried as equals. Archaeology shows that the Scythian women were laid to rest with the same honors as the men. There was evidence of large funeral feasts by the mourners, lots of sacrificed horses, the women like the men were buried with tools, weapons, golden treasures, personal kits for smoking hemp, and food for the afterlife, a cup of fermented mare's milk, and a chunk of horse meat impaled by an iron knife on a wooden platter. Bioarchaeology and DNA can reveal the sex, the health, the age at death with more than 90% accuracy now. The DNA results tell us that a substantial number, about 25 to nearly 40% of Scythian women were active warrior women buried with their weapons when they died. Many of those armed women had war injuries like the male warriors. The typical grave goods of the women warriors in the heart of ancient Amazon territory included iron spears, massive armored belts, leather and gold quivers filled with bronze arrows, bronze swords, battle axes, shields, necklaces of beads and animals claws, gold earrings, and sometimes even clothing of wool, leather, fur, silk, and hemp has been preserved. The youngest girl warrior ever found here she is-- oh, no, this is the 16-year-old-- I don't have a picture of the youngest girl warrior ever found was about 10. This one was 16. The youngest ever found was 10 when she died, and she was buried in iron armor with two spearheads, evidence that young children, boys and girls, were trained for battle. Also nearby, this was in the Ukraine nearby, another kurgan, or grave mound, held the remains of three young girls. They were aged 10 to 15, and their arsenal included heavy cavalry items, scaled armor, helmets, spears, shields, quivers full of arrows. And those girls also owned tools, gold necklaces, and bronze mirrors. Three of the most ancient, the earliest Amazon graves, were found in the southern Caucasus region, a land strongly associated with Amazons in antiquity. The women's skeletons were buried by their companions about 3,000 years ago in 900 BC. One woman was about 30 when she died, she was interred in a sitting position with her bronze sword across her knees, and a dagger and a spear at her feet. There's the original report on the left there. The jawbone of her horse and her shield were nearby. The left side of her skull has a wound from a battle axe that had begun to heal before she died. The second woman in that kurgan had an arrowhead embedded in her skull, and the third woman wore a necklace of lion or leopard claws. The scientific studies of skeletons are yielding some very striking results and details. Some women's legs were bowed from a lifetime on horseback. These were nomads, who traveled great distances by horse. They suffered arthritis, they had broken bones, probably from constant riding and falls. Some women's hand bones actually reveal evidence of repeated heavy use of a bow. Typical battle wounds of women buried with weapons include ribs slashed by swords, arrowheads embedded in bones, and skulls punctured by pointed battle axes. These are some examples. Pointed battle axes are typical weapons of Amazons in Greek vase paintings. By careful analysis of the bones, bioarchaeologists can often determine the direction of an opponent's attack. They can tell whether the blows occurred while someone was fighting face to face, on foot on the ground, or on horseback, whether they were in motion when the blow was delivered, and whether or not they tried to deflect the blow. Most combat injuries of the women and the men are on the left side, indicating that their adversaries were right handed. All of this archaeological evidence points to a level of gender equality unheard of among the ancient Greeks. So it's no wonder they were fascinated and horrified by the barbarians at the steppes. Their myths, we can see them as a kind of exciting what if story, pitting these daunting strong women against the Greek's mightiest heroes. Here's Achilles fighting and killing Penthesilea on the battlefield at Troy. And on the right is Heracles killing Hippolyta. He looks a little nervous there in that picture. These images were incredibly popular in antiquity, second only to pictures of Heracles. Unlike the restricted lives of Greek girls and women that I explained before, being an Amazon was an option for women on the steppes Why? Because of a series of unique extremely successful Scythian technologies and practices, innovations perfectly suited to their time and place. The Scythian way of life, with opportunities for women unheard of in ancient cultures, other ancient cultures, ensure that mounted nomad culture flourished and dominated on the steppes sweeping over a Millennium from Eurasia to China from about 700 BC to AD 500. In Scythia, young girls were raised to ride horses and shoot bows and arrows, just like their little brothers. And that made perfect sense in a nomadic culture. Think about it. Small groups or bands, isolated on the harsh dangerous steppes, they're always on the move, they're always facing attack from hostile enemies and other tribes. Everyone, male and female, was a stakeholder. Young and old, male and female, they're all expected to contribute, all expected to take part in defense and raids and hunting. On the plane from San Francisco yesterday, it occurred to me that Scythian way of life might be of special interest to Google, and maybe some of you will discern some parallels between their world and your world. The Scythians forged an extraordinary combination of sophisticated technologies and unconventional tactics. They were based on agility, flexibility, speed, innovation, shared capacity, shared knowledge, equality, individual merit, also cooperation, teamwork, within an extensive network of loosely related groups of rivals as well as potential allies. On the steppes, tribes waxed and waned in size and power. Groups were free to split off from the main unit and establish new alliances on their own. Small bands of survivors or rebels might be absorbed into larger tribes or ally with another tribe. The stakes on the steppes were extremely high. Some tribes were decimated, some vanished forever, we have no trace them. Alliances alternated with hostilities, former adversaries, however, sometimes united to pursue larger goals of conquest, control over territory, resources, trade. Tribes often coalesced to meet and defeat powerful invading enemies. The Scythians united, for example, in the sixth century BC to defeat the huge Persian army that was led by Darius the first, and the Persian King, Cyrus the Great, actually lost his life fighting the Scythians beyond the Caspian Sea. And they were led by the warrior queen, Tomyris. Two centuries later, even Alexander the Great's army failed to subdue the Scythians and the step nomads of inner Asia. The eastern Scythians held the upper hand over China for several centuries. I think some step nomads innovations might have had enough magnitude to qualify as moonshots. Do you still use that word, moonshots? The first great leap forward was the domestication of the horse. The Scythians, or their ancestors-- the ancestors of the Scythians-- were the first people to ride horses. First they domesticated it, then they learned to ride them. Horses provided food, drink, clothing, agility in battle, speed, and endurance over vast distances. And riding horses required the invention of trousers. Essential tailored action wear that zoomed to success 3,000 years ago. Think about it, the first tailored clothing. It's interesting that the ancient Greeks actually credited the Amazons with both of those nomad discoveries. They said that Amazons were the first ride horses and the first to wear trousers. Another awesome new technology struck terror into the hearts of their enemies. The nomads of the steppes perfected the small but powerful re-curve Scythian bow. Scythian archers were feared for their terrific aim, and their ability to shoot arrows at incredible speeds. And then they even went on to concoct sophisticated and nasty arrow poisons by mixing viper venom with pathogens so that you didn't even have to have good aim, just a scratch would kill the enemy. The Parthian shot, the feet of twisting backwards to shoot arrows as one gallops away, was another notorious Scythian skill. And they also used a floating anchor, which is an innovation-- or not an innovation-- but is known nowadays and used by people like this modern Amazon of instinctive archery. You don't have a fixed anchor point, you actually use instinctive aim. So you have, it sounds like an oxymoron, but they have a floating anchor. And we see that in the vase paintings of Amazons. By now it might be obvious that the crucial change with exponential advantages for the Scythians was the combination of the horse and the bow. The horse combined archery, that was the great equalizer for women on the steppes. Mounted archery was the catalyst for women's full participation in hunting and warfare and all those other activities. Astride a horse with a bow and arrows, a woman could be just as fast and just as deadly as a man. So among the Scythians, women could achieve the same skill sets as the men, and become outstanding riders, hunters, and warriors, and rise to leadership positions. According to the ancient Greek historians, Scythian women typically formed ad hoc bands. And these bands could either be all women, or men and women, and they formed these bands for adventure, for hunting, and war campaigns. We have the names of historical Scythian women who rose to leadership roles, and devised strategies, and commanded armies. I just mentioned Tomyris was one of them. As the ancient Greeks reported, and as archaeology seems to confirm, young women and girls served as the active duty warriors and raiders, while older women with children could choose to continue that marshal lifestyle or not, depending on what they wished in the circumstances. But in emergencies, because everyone had been trained to same, everyone was capable of riding out to meet the enemy. So whether by choice, or compelled by circumstances, ordinary women of Scythia could be hunters and warriors. In other words, these foreign women could behave just like ancient Greek men, glorying in physical strength and freedom, roaming at will outside, choosing your own sexual partners, chasing game, and killing enemies. So archaeology, as I mentioned, is shedding new light on the ancient Greek narratives and the artistic representations of Amazons, showing how some details in ancient Greek literature and art that were once dismissed as fantasy or just overlooked altogether, now turn out to be accurate representations of step nomad's customs and their life. And the step nomads were the historical counterparts of the mythic Amazons. We're now learning how much the Greeks actually knew, how much they got right, maybe sometimes they were guessing, but they knew a lot about real warrior women of Scythia, and Scythian technologies and practices. And I think I have time for a few examples. As the Greeks learned more and more about Scythians, they revised their portrayals of Amazons, adding realistic details in written accounts and art. In the fifth century BC, for example, Herodotus, I've already mentioned the Greek historian, reported that the Scythians enjoyed the intoxicating smoke from burning hemp. As I mentioned earlier, personal hemp smoking hits like this one are among the grave goods of Scythian men and women buried in kurgans. Amazon clothing and weapons are some of the most striking changes for accuracy in Greek art. The earliest images of Amazons appeared on vase paintings about 2,500 years ago. And those earliest most ancient scenes show the women dressed and armed, or in the custom of heroic nudity, as it's called, they were dressed like Greek hoplite warriors. They're wearing Greek helmets, armor, round shields, and they're fighting on foot with swords. The Greeks just portrayed them as counterparts of their own heroes. But soon, as they got more and more information about the Scythians, the Greek artists began showing the foreign Amazons with Scythian style clothing and weapons, and they show them on horseback. And we can even see two types of horses on the vase paintings. Some Amazons ride tall, mean horses. Akhal Teke is the name now for those horses, they were bred for speed in the desert. And they also rode small sturdy steppe ponies. Both of those types of horses correspond to the two types of horses that are found in Scythian graves. Some of them are actually mummified by the permafrost and dry conditions, as in these examples. Scythian riders rode bareback. They didn't have stirrups. They had light, or no reins at all. They guided their horses with their thighs, knees, and feet, and voice commands. And many Greek vases and sculptures depict Amazons writing barefooted with heel and ankle guards against chafing. And this detailed vase painting shows an Amazon tying on ankle guards or spurs. Greek artists began to equip the Amazons with real Scythian weapons, just like those found in Scythian burials. Amazons were now shown as archers, and they were outfitted with distinctive Scythian style re-curve bows and decorated quivers with flaps that hung up on belts at their waist instead of at the back of their shoulders. And here's another very interesting realistic Scythian cultural detail of Scythian style archery. It's overlooked by the art historians. When I showed vase paintings of Amazon archers to some archery experts, they immediately noted that the women are using the nomad style thumb draw, and also instinctive archery with no fixed anchor. The thumb draw is sometimes called the Mongolian draw. They were using those techniques with their small bows instead of the Mediterranean release used by the Greek archers, using their bows in vase paintings. You can see an example of that in the upper left. And as we've already seen, Greek artists illustrated Amazons twisting around on their horses to shoot arrows backwards in the notorious Parthian shot. That re-curve bow used by Scythian archers was an equalizer, as I mentioned, for women. And the bows' curves store a lot of extra force under compression because of those curves. And that makes it very difficult, impossible to string, unless you know the trick. Instead of brute physical strength, one has to learn the special technique. To attach the string, you have to brace the bow onto your knee while you're sitting or kneeling, and there are images on ancient coins, as you can see above on the left, and on vases showing Amazons and Scythians. But especially interesting that they show Amazons stringing their bows using this special Scythian technique. It can also be done standing if you brace one foot against a rock or a helmet as shown on this vase from the Smithsonian on the right. Some Greek images of Amazon archers have been misunderstood by scholars until now. For example, there's a vase painting here that shows an Amazon archer between two riders, one of them identified as a Scythian, the other one is Greek. The archer is bending very far backwards, seemingly aiming randomly at the sky. The ancient vase specialists and art historians have interpreted this scene as quote, a dying Amazon collapsing in battle. But in fact, the archers stance is an accurate portrayal of flight archery, shooting an arrow a very long distance. The Greek and the Scythian on the horses appear to be observers of a flight archery contest. And flight archery contests were described by ancient Greek historians, and we even have some of the record distances recorded on an ancient inscription on the Black Sea. The Scythians were famous for their accuracy and their long distance shooting. Amazons were shown on Greek vases holding more than one arrow while drawing their bows. That sometimes puzzled art scholars, they thought it might be a mistake by a careless vase painter. But instead of a mistake, those images depict the proper technique for speed shooting arrows. It allows an archer to shoot in quick succession without having to constantly reach for arrows from the quiver at their waist. Scythian archers were also famous for their speed shooting, and they could probably estimate-- estimates today are that they could probably release an arrow every one to three seconds. They would be daunting enemies. Besides bows arrows, Amazons were often shown with swords, battle axes, and a pair of spears, the typical weapons that are found in Scythian burials of men and women as in these examples from vase paintings and one mosaic there. And this is a rather famous vase painting they're using all of the weapons at hand. A unique and beautiful vase painting in the Metropolitan Museum in New York shows an Amazon taking aim with a sling. Her two spears, you can notice, are stuck in the ground on the left. According to slinging experts that I've talked to, her stance is quite accurate. Piles of sling pebbles have been found among the weapons buried with Scythian women in their kurgans. Several ancient Greek writers describe step warrior women skills with the lasso, and they told how they use them to rope their enemies in battle, and then finish them off with battle axes. So I was pretty delighted when I came across this rare vase painting of an Amazon on horseback twirling a lariat, just like Wonder Woman's golden lasso. That Amazon there is charging toward a Greek warrior, you can't see him, but he is cowering underneath his shield, decorated with a snake there, in the upper right. This action scene decorated a Greek woman's jewelery or cosmetics box. A lot of women's objects contained images of Amazons. This Amazon is wearing a patterned tunic and leggings, as you can see, that kind of sensible practical action wear invented by the nomads, whose lives centered on horses. And the wild patterns, and textures of the leggings and sleeves worn by Amazons in Greek vase paintings match the textiles in garments that have been recovered from Scythian graves. Amazons in the vase paintings are shown in long sleeved shirts and trousers decorated with geometric designs, and sometimes even griffins, lions, and deer, as in the upper right. They wear high leather boots if they're not barefooted, and soft pointed caps with ear flaps and spotted leopard skins. And all of those items are found in the burials of Scythians. These are some artist reconstructions of warrior women's garments from clothing that was found in Scythian kurgans. The Greeks were fascinated and appalled by Amazons trousers. That was something no Greek man or woman would ever be caught dead in. Greeks wore simple rectangles of cloth held in place with pins, like most people around the Mediterranean. Trousers, as I mentioned, were tailored. They were stitched together from fitted pieces. And who invented trousers? According to the Greeks, it was the Amazons. And in fact, trousers were, as I mentioned, invented by the men and women who first began riding horses. These are some pictures of clothing that has been found in Scythian graves. And you can see the patterns, decorations, look very similar to what is portrayed on Amazons in Greek vase paintings. The earliest pair of trousers were found preserved in Scythian graves from nearly 3,000 years ago. I think I mentioned that trousers were not just sensible and practical, they were necessary for life on horseback. And they were equalizers. I think I have time for one more example of an ancient artifact that demonstrates how Greek artists incorporated realistic features of Scythian culture and life in illustrations of Amazons. This beautiful golden ring was made in about 425 BC, classical Greece. You can see it on display in the Museum of Fine Arts here in Boston. The full significance of the scene has alluded understanding until now. At the Boston Museum, the museum text says it shows on Amazon on a horse with her dog, hunting a deer. The Amazon is wearing a belted tunic, as you can see, her hair and the cape or cloak are blowing back to indicate speed and actions. She has the reins choked up tight to control the spirited horse as she is about to spear the deer with her javelin. And the deer on this tiny ring is so exquisitely detailed that we could even determine the species. It's a spotted fallow buck with-- they have broad palmate antlers. Her hunting dog is a type of sighthound still used in Central Asia today. And it's attacking from the rear, you can see that the deer's left hind leg-- I think it's the left-- left hind leg is broken. And what about the large bird? What-- why is that included in the scene? The scholars just ignored that detail. But I was looking at photographs of traditional hunters on horseback in Kazakhstan and Mongolia, when I suddenly realized the significance of that bird on the ring in the Museum of Fine Arts. This is Makpal Abdrazakova of Kazakhstan, and she's an eagle hunter. Falconry, training raptors to hunt has very ancient roots among the step nomads. I learned about a discovery in Central Asia of a fully clothed mummy of a horse woman in the Tarim Basin area, she lived when this ring that I showed you was being made in Greece. And she was buried with the huge leather mitt on one hand, just like the one on this modern female falconer's arm. I also learned that the bird perched on the arm is a golden eagle, and that is the favorite bird of prey to train for traditional hunting on the steppes by the nomads. They hunt rabbits, deer, foxes, and even wolves with golden eagles. These are few more young women who are eagle hunters or apprentices learning the traditional skill again. So that bird hovering above the deer's head is not just a random decoration as assumed by the scholars. It's an eagle with a hooked beak, spread wings and tail, it's about to attack the deer. So this stunning golden ring illustrates an Amazon eagle hunter on horseback accompanied by a sighthound. All four, the Amazon, the dog, the horse, and the eagle are focused on the prize. By training these three animals, the nomads made the harsh, unforgiving steppes into a land rich with accessible game. The scene on the ring is compelling evidence that the classical Greeks had heard about, or maybe even observed, horse women of Eastern lands who trained eagles to hunt. Amazon figures may have served many symbolic functions for the Greeks, but archaeology now proves that warrior women were not merely figments of the Greek imagination, and the many examples of naturalistic details and ethnographic features in ancient artworks provide very strong evidence that the Greek images and ideas of Amazons were certainly influenced by real nomadic horse people. The Greeks interwove threads of fact with imaginative storytelling to create a panoramic world of Amazons. It seems fair to say that Amazons as a dream and as a reality have always existed. Sometimes they're hidden or suppressed, but at other times, the Amazons among us come blazing into popular culture and history. And there are strong signs that a powerful Amazon spirit may be awakening today, and as the ancient Scythians would tell us, that just makes good sense. Thank you. Happy to take questions if anyone has one. AUDIENCE: So you explained how popular the Scythians and Amazons were with the Greeks. Did the Greeks attempt to adapt any of the horse riding or the trousers or the roles of women in their fighting? ADRIENNE MAYOR: No. AUDIENCE: No, OK. But did they notice that it was successful, or they said, that's just not for us? ADRIENNE MAYOR: The Greeks had such a strong aversion to covering the arms and legs. They thought that was just an outrageous and barbaric style of dressing. And they often mocked the Persians for-- the Persians actually did adopt the Scythian way of dressing because they became horse people. They copied the Parthians and the other Scythian tribes. And the Greeks mocked the Persians for wearing these effeminate styles. Leg coverings and sleeves. A manly man wore a miniskirt. And it's interesting that Xenophon wrote a manual on horsemanship for the Greeks. And he does not-- he's a horse rider-- he does not-- he's in fifth century BC-- and he does not recommended Greek men wear trousers to ride horses. But he does say make sure that you arrange your cloak under you so that you do not, especially when you're getting onto the horse, so that you do not present a shocking spectacle as you mount your horse. So even a horsemanship manual could not bring itself to recommend trousers. AUDIENCE: Excuse me, did you come across any evidence in your research that the tribes were either matriarchal, or matrilineal, or was it simply equal opportunity, and it is the female leaders that we've heard about? ADRIENNE MAYOR: As I mentioned, the Scythians didn't leave any history, so we have to go by what their neighbors said and the archaeology and then also look at-- you can do comparative ethnography by looking at people who are following a Scythian style of life on the steppes in modern times, you can compare. So we don't have any evidence of matriarchal societies across the steppes. What we have is evidence of equal opportunity, as you said. In that kind of lifestyle, women could give counsel in making decisions, and of course, they rose to leadership positions because we have actually documented by the neighbors that there were women leading armies against Persians, against Egyptians, against Chinese. So we know that they did have equal opportunity in leadership. We don't have any evidence for matriarchy. AUDIENCE: I guess my question is slightly related. OK, so the Greek girls have dolls of Amazons, the Greek women have icons of Amazons. Is there any correlation between-- I mean, the way the Greeks treated women was terrible, but it wasn't uniformly terrible-- so is there any correlation between how women were treated in different city-states in different periods with the popularity of the artifacts among the girls? ADRIENNE MAYOR: The popularity of the Amazon images on women's perfume bottles, on their jewelry boxes, on some of their items for sewing and weaving, I think that really points to a mystery about Greek life that we don't really-- we can't explain. I mean Amazons were also a popular, very popular, image on crockery that we know was in a shape that was given to newlyweds. Why would you give newlyweds pictures of Amazons? There's something going on there that we don't know. It's really very interesting. AUDIENCE: I mean, I know a lot of feminists like to say, OK Wonder Woman is going to be a great icon for girls to empower them, and I'm just wondering, did that happen? ADRIENNE MAYOR: According to most scholars, classicists have argued and maintained that all of these images of Amazons were like domestic propaganda to discourage girls from taking up archery, horseback riding and asking for equality. But the fact that the images are so popular among girls and women, and it shows them in such a powerful way, I don't think that argument has any traction anymore. Yes? AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] archeology question. So my question is, has anybody examined the bodies of the people whose tombs you talked about, and seeing if there's asymmetrical development on the long bones of the upper body? Because I think we would expect with archers to find one side more developed than the other, and it would be a way of determining who got these grave goods because of their occupation, and who got it because of their social status or their life cycle. ADRIENNE MAYOR: For one thing, the modern mounted archers that I've spoken to, the ones who are using the instinctive archery technique and especially the Parthian shot, they shoot both sides, they can shoot with both arms. They can just switch. So we know that these nomads on the steppes were practicing archery since they were kids, little kids. So I don't think we would see that. But I did mention, I didn't call it out, but I didn't mention that they have found differences in hand bones of the women that have sh-- one hand might show heavy use of a bow-- consistent with heavy use of a bow. So I think that's the kind of evidence you're looking for. AUDIENCE: Somewhat similar question. So the name Amazon comes from a-mazos, which is this myth that Amazon women would remove the breast so they could shoot arrows better. Is there any evidence of that? ADRIENNE MAYOR: No. AUDIENCE: OK. ADRIENNE MAYOR: But that idea sticks like glue. It's just like super glue. AUDIENCE: Is that a modern idea, or did that trace all the way back to the Greeks? ADRIENNE MAYOR: It's such an interesting idea, wrong idea, that I devoted an entire chapter to Amazon breasts. So quickly, the name has absolutely nothing to do with breasts. It's not a Greek word. The Greeks borrowed the word Amazonis, and no one knows where it came from. Most linguists believe that it might be an ancient Iranian word that derives from [INAUDIBLE], which simply means warrior. So that makes a lot of sense. But the Greeks had an obsession with making non Greek words in their language into Greek words for patriotic reasons. So there was an etymologist in the fifth century BC-- he was actually an historian dabbling in etymology. And he said, well let's figure out what-- this must be a Greek word, and so it sounds a little bit like a-mazos. Which, in Greek, would sound a little bit like without, a, mazos, breast. But he was immediately challenged by other historians of his day, who said, that's ridiculous of course not. There is not one ancient representation of an Amazon with only one breast. And as, if you watch the Hunger Games, or you looked at any of the pictures I was showing, it is physiologically ridiculous. And yet the idea just won't go away. It's the one thing everyone knows about Amazons. Yeah. AUDIENCE: This is fascinating, the combination of the archaeological evidence, and the documentary evidence, the imagery and so on. So you've mastered art history, and archaeology, Greek sources. But I'm going to ask you if you've also looked at HIttite and Persian and so on sources. And if they say anything, or if there's evidence that they need to be re-read in the light of what you've found. ADRIENNE MAYOR: I haven't looked at Hittite sources, but there is a chapter on Persian stories about Amazons in my book. The Persians did tell stories about step nomad women, and we have them. They're preserved for us because of the Greeks who went to Persia and preserved and recorded the stories told by the Persians. There was a Greek doctor named Ctesias who served as a physician for the Persian King. He wrote a book about Persian stories about step nomads. So we have his reports. We have the names of many step nomad warrior Queens who fought Persians, and we have their stories. So yes, other cultures bordering Scythia who encountered step nomads definitely had stories about warrior women, Amazon like women. There was a papyrus found recently, and then even more recently, has been finally translated and it's in tatters, but you've got enough of the story to see that the title is The Egyptians and The Amazons. And it's about an Egyptian prince who goes out to fight an Amazon queen and her warriors. So many, many other ancient cultures told stories about warrior women. AUDIENCE: At what point do the Amazons start vanishing from the historical record? Because I know the bow eventually turns up in Mongolia and is used by the Mongol-- the Mongol horde to devastating effect against the Chinese and much of Europe at that point. And the Mongol women also shot, but at what point do the Amazons disappear from the record? ADRIENNE MAYOR: It's interesting that as you read the ancient Greek and then the Latin, Roman sources, they tell an exciting story about historical warrior Queens who are from Scythia, and then they say, and then with her death, the Amazons disappeared. And then the next writer that you read says, but there were pockets of them, there were vestiges, and they keep reappearing. So I don't think there's any end point. As you say, the Mon-- there's a book called The Secret History of the Mongol Queens that is about Genghis Khan's granddaughters saving his empire. The story, my last chapter is on China. And we have Chinese chronicles about warrior women from those step tribes. What's really interesting is all of these other groups from antiquity who tell about Amazon like women have a radically different script for the stories. They want them as lovers, as allies, whereas the Greeks kill them all. All of the Greek mythic script dooms them to death, whereas all these other cultures say no, we want them on our side. So I don't think there's any historical endpoint unless you get to the Arab conquest and then Islamic era. But even then there are stories in the Middle Ages about women who go to war, and it goes all the way up through the Middle Ages. And now it's back. OK, thank you.