I was very excited when I came across this image. This is the most accurate depiction of the true Amazons of Antiquity that I have ever seen, their gear and clothing drawn from that of the Sarmatian tribes of what is now the Southern Ukraine. The Sarmatians are known to have had a large number of women who rode as warriors with the entire tribe and were likely ruled by queens.

Of course there is still no ‘definitive’ proof that fully fledged Amazon Queendoms existed. Yet the Greeks certainly proclaimed them to be real and on a quite visceral level. In both Art and Legend the Greek fear of Amazons is clearly related and often.

Now there are those who dismiss such as some sort of sublimated ‘fear of women’, that an entire civilization and culture, one that for centuries supposedly dominated the shores of the Black Sea, The Pontus of Antiquity, could not have disappeared so thoroughly.

However, I shall cite two examples.

The city of Tartessos was well known to both the Greeks and the Phoenicians. It was an important trading society in the Mediterranean and the Bay of Biscay. It existed somewhere in the vicinity of modern Cadiz on the south coast of Spain during the first half of the 1st Millennium BC. But its location has never been found and its language and culture have vanished almost absolutely.

Up until just seventy four years ago as of this writing, there was a large and vibrant Jewish culture that existed in what is now Eastern Poland and Western Belarus. Roughly three million souls with their own language, culture and religion who could trace their roots in that region back five/six hundred years. Yet if you journeyed there now, you would find no trace of the civilization beyond a few of the places where it was consumed.

So, to those who doubt, I would say it is very easy to imagine that the physical remains of a great Amazon civilization could be wiped away by those who feared it. Men are well practiced at such things…