Amazon.com Review
Readers who associate "Amazon" primarily with a South American River or an online retailer are in for a big surprise. In
On the Trail of the Women Warriors,
Lyn Webster Wilde investigates the original Amazons, independent women warriors who lived without men. First mentioned by Homer, who considered them "women the equal of men," Amazon women fought bravely and ruthlessly in the Bronze and Iron Ages (2000 BC-300 BC), and sought out masculine society only once a year to conceive.
Webster Wilde concentrates her study on the Amazons of Greek mythology, and with clarity, wit, and detail, she examines various possibilities as to what the source of their images and myth may have been. Unlike most scholars, she examined--firsthand--Amazon remains: she traveled to the Ukraine, Russia, and the shores of the Black Sea to investigate graves of Scythian women warriors and the lost city of Themiscyra. Her findings reveal fascinating information about not only the Amazons and the societies that validated their myth, but also "our understanding of what women and men are, and what they can be, if we remove our ideas of what they should be." For example, in Classical Greece, women were utterly suppressed and misogyny was rife, while democracy ironically evolved. In the powerful myth of the Amazon and the subliminal recognition of female power as expressed in religious rites, however, women experienced the liberation denied them by society at large.
A glossary, maps, footnotes, photos, and timeline make her already accessible results even more relevant and coherent. So, did the Amazons exist as portrayed in Greek mythology? Probably not, the author concludes, but all the components of the myth most likely existed in different times and places, and "pieced together, they make an image close to the Amazon archetype." On the Trail of the Women Warriors allows readers to draw their own conclusions. --Bertina Loeffler Sedlack
From Publishers Weekly
Pursuing her elusive subjects like a detective, Wilde exults in the process as well as in her discoveries, contending that the idealized Amazons of recent feminist lore are the real myth, and that they were actually capable of intense violence. Her book will no doubt cause significant controversy among anthropologists, archeologists and historians, many of whom argue that women warriors never existed. Yet Wilde, a broadcast journalist and filmmaker, writes with authority as she interviews archeologists, examines antiquities (e.g., sixth-century black-figure vases), myths and scholarly works to discover who the Amazons actually were. Traveling from the labyrinthine stacks of the London Library to the sites of former Greek colonies on the Black Sea and in the Ukraine, she delves into Greek and Anatolian myths, revealing that androgyny, gender bending and role reversal were also part of the Amazonian persona. Drawing on archeological grave digs in the Ukraine and Moldova that, she says, uncovered women warriors, Wilde theorizes that the Amazon myths, based on real female warrior groups, were part of an evolutionary process from a society oriented toward the Mother Goddess to a patriarchal one. She also explains how warrior women were revered as goddesses and priestesses by the Greeks, Sumerians, Hittites, Africans in Dahomey and others, even as women were subjugated in those same societies. Wilde's passionate, well-researched treatise on the Amazonian warriors of the classical Greek world illuminates myth and history. 16p b&w photos, 4 maps and 1 chart. (July)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
