Scholars decipher names of Amazon warrior women from ancient pottery
A new study published in the journal Hesperia claims to have deciphered the names of ancient warrior women from Greek pottery dating back 2,500 years. According to the National Geographic,(paywall) linguists undertook a complex process to piece together ancient languages unspoken for millennia, revealing names such as ‘Don’t Fail’ and ‘Worthy of Armour’ ascribed to the warrior women of the Amazons.
Study lead author Adrienne Mayor and J. Paul Getty Museum assistant curator David Saunders managed to translate Greek inscriptions found on 12 ancient vases from Athens dating from 550 BC to 450 BC. The inscriptions appear next to scenes of Amazons fighting, hunting, or shooting arrows.
The inscriptions had long been a puzzle to researchers, as they were written with Greek characters but didn’t form any known words in ancient Greek. The researchers had a hunch that the Greeks may have been writing out foreign words phonetically, and sought to test out this theory.
To do so, they translated the inscriptions into their phonetic sounds, and then submitted the phonetic transcriptions to linguist John Colarusso of Canada's McMaster University in Hamilton, who is an expert on rare languages of the Caucasus. Colarusso, who was not provided with any information regarding the source of the transcriptions, matched the phonetics to Scythian words and names, which mean ‘Princess’, ‘Don't Fail’, and ‘Hot Flanks’. There was also an archer named ‘Battle-Cry’ and a horsewoman named ‘Worthy of Armour’. On one vase, a scene of two Amazons hunting with a dog appears with a Greek transliteration for the Abkhazian word meaning "set the dog loose."
Much more.......
http://www.ancient-origins.net/news-history-archaeology/scholars-decipher-names-amazon-warrior-women-ancient-pottery-002114
The Amazon Women: Is There Any Truth Behind the Myth?
Smithsonian.
Big SNIP
The trail of the Amazons nearly went cold after Herodotus. Until, that is, the early 1990s when a joint U.S.-Russian team of archaeologists made an extraordinary discovery while excavating 2,000-year-old burial mounds—known as kurgans—outside Pokrovka, a remote Russian outpost in the southern Ural Steppes near the Kazakhstan border. There, they found over 150 graves belonging to the Sauromatians and their descendants, the Sarmatians. Among the burials of “ordinary women,” the researchers uncovered evidence of women who were anything but ordinary. There were graves of warrior women who had been buried with their weapons. One young female, bowlegged from constant riding, lay with an iron dagger on her left side and a quiver containing 40 bronze-tipped arrows on her right. The skeleton of another female still had a bent arrowhead embedded in the cavity. Nor was it merely the presence of wounds and daggers that amazed the archaeologists. On average, the weapon-bearing females measured 5 feet 6 inches, making them preternaturally tall for their time.
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/amazon-women-there-any-truth-behind-myth-180950188/
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