Seisyllwg

A question came to my mind, were the Amazons real? I mean the Sarmatians had warrior women but I am talking about a full on woman dominated culture in the past. Were they fact or fiction?

If they were real what was their culture like in general?

Salah

There were tribes along the Amazon (hence its name) supposedly dominated by, or consisting exclusively of, female cannibals. Apparently they would capture men from other tribes, have said captives copulate with every member of the tribe, and then kill and eat them. Male babies would also be eaten, female babies would be brought up as the next generation of the tribe.

As with the Amazons of Classical mythology - there's no way of gauging how much of this we are supposed to believe.

Mandate of Heaven

The legend could be the remanant memory of the earlier matrilineal society which is also evident in other places in Greek culture.

Tairusiano

Salah the name of the amazon woman tribes was Icamiabas in the indian mythos these woman warriors eat the male babies and his fathers but if the father is a great warrior the Icamiabas spared the man giving to him a talisman the Muiraquitã for the male partner never forget the amazon
most tribes in the amazon river still believe that the warrior woman still exist today


A suposed real Icamiaba made Muriaquitã

Anna James

I thnk there is more to the Amazons than a mere cultural memory. Archeological finds also support their exstence, among the Scythians.
"...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...."
Archaeological Finds Pertaining to the Amazons

Also, military tatoos were preserved on the skin of women. 68 bronze military articles were found in those female graves. Now, this is not to say that Amazons were a tribes of women all living by themselves - it's more like that in the ancient Scythian tribes women as well as men were entitled to be warriors, without the society they lived in to have been matrilineal.

This fact may have impressed so mcuh the Greek historians with the total difference it made with their own gender roles, that they spun a fairy tale around the possible fact that women were allowed to be warriors too.

Louise C

It seems very unlikely. The Amazons in Greek legend were always defeated by the Greeks, and it is likely they were invented to show the chaos that can result from a reversal of the natural order of things.

Anna James

People don't invent stuff out of the blue; at best they build on some long lost in their cultural memory fact. There are historical facts behind all the myths, from the Mynotaur to the Unicorn, the question is how much of those facts are historcal and how many cultural ones.

beorna

The myth may have a true core, but there is no evidence neither for nor nor for the whole myth. So what these true core was, is impossible to say.

Louise C

People invent things out of the blue all the time. Th Greeks also invented
Centaurs, who had no basis in reality at all.

Mangekyou

I would say are definitely examples of cultures of women warriors, but to what extent they are similar to the Amazons of classical myth, I do not know.

There are theories of origin on the centaurs and where/why the Greeks made them into a hybrid creature, so its not completely out of the blue. Most myth has its origin rooted in some form belief/genesis.

Note: Im not saying centaurs literally existed, just in case you misinterpret me

Centaur - New World Encyclopedia