Uncovering the History of Warrior Women: Exploring the Lives and Legends of the Ancient Amazons

Kenneth W. Gardner: The author did a great job. Recommended.

United States on Jul 27, 2023

Casey Bair: A surprisingly good read, though overly meandering and verbose at times, with some conjectures that aren't supported by the available evidence. There is also occasionally issues with source citation. But despite those issues, it is an enjoyable read, and one I can recommend.

United States on Oct 28, 2022

RSL: This is the best discussion of Amazons and their their historical reality I've seen. Aside from possibly expanding it with more recent archeological data (as it's from 2014), no work will ever top this. Mayor has done a spectacular job of research and making her findings accessible and entertaining. I would recommend buying the hardback. The maps and images are definitely worth it. But then you might want to also buy the Kindle edition, so you can search it and highlight passages.

I will now direct to you the detailed review by Dr W. H. Konarzewski (see below, in reviews from the UK). He nails it and agree with everything he says, so there's no point in going into it here.

If you love Amazons, if you’re interested in the lives of women in the ancient world, if you love history and legends, if you're a fan of Wonder Woman, or you're just curious about a fascinating topic, you owe it to yourself to read this book.

United States on May 20, 2022

nat27272: A book so intriguing, rich and surprising that it sweeps the reader along for 500 pages. The research is both needle-sharp and broad, ranging over countless cultures to assemble a compelling story about the women (and originally, men) known by the Greeks as "Amazons". The author moves effortlessly between linguistics, art history, contemporary archaeology, eighteenth century travelogues, epic poetry etc etc. Sometimes she seems so in love with her subject that she's drawn into some pretty wild speculation ("Amazon sex was robust, promiscuous"), but her enthusiasm for the nomadic tribes she describes is so likeable – and for that matter understandable – that it's easy to forgive. This is one of the few non fiction books I've ever read twice, I'd recommend it highly.

United Kingdom on Apr 30, 2022

Edward B. Crutchley: Adrienne Mayor presents a huge amount of evidence from archaeological discoveries and Greek literature in order present a picture the fighting women known as Amazons. Most of the account covers the period 700 to 300 BC, during which Greeks travelled to, and colonized, regions inhabited by the nomadic people of the Steppes known as the Scythians. The gender equality between Amazons and their male counterparts in battle was aided by their use of horses. The book contains many illustrations, including of Greek vases that portray the Amazons, and includes accounts of the Amazon presence in myths. The book is impressively researched and a pleasure to read, and the author assists the reader in absorbing all the information by from time to time repeating it. I had absolutely no qualms with the work, but my own limitations meant that after about halfway through I began to skip pages to gloss over some of the detail. It is still a very worthwhile book to read.

United Kingdom on Oct 25, 2020

Phil-Don: Adrienne Mayor est sans doute l'auteur de l'étude la plus complète, la plus détaillée, consacrée aux Amazones - les mythiques et celles ayant réellement existé. Le travail de recherche est colossal et couvre une multitude de domaines: Histoire, Géographie, Linguistique, Archéologie, Littérature antique, etc... C'est un travail à la fois de titan et de fourmi auquel s'est livré l'auteur pour être aussi exhaustive que possible. Un tel livre ne peut donc qu'être instructif. Le problème d'un tel ouvrage, c'est que le grand public, non spécialiste de la question, se perd parfois dans trop de détails: trop de références qui lui échappent, trop de noms qui lui sont inconnus, trop d'événements historiques dont il n'a jamais entendu parler. Reste quand même une vision d'ensemble d'un sujet fascinant.

France on Mar 31, 2018

Katherine M. Griffis (Greenberg): Loaded with archaeological, etymological, and linguistic evidence, Mayor makes a compelling argument that Amazons of myth not only existed in the distant past, but that they exist in some form even today. Archaeological evidence alone appears to me to be undisputed in terms of ancient Amazons - women warriors known for their unparalleled horse riding and archery skills, who carried short battle axes, and wore forms of armor - all of this appears in the archaeological remains of the various peoples who lived in the Black Sea regions above Turkey. This encompassing work covers all the various questions one would have about Amazons - their language, their skill with horses, their battle gear, their clothing, their antipathy towards the Greeks - even their sex lives - as far as can be known from ancient texts. Heavily researched, backed up with archaeological, artistic, textual, and oral history evidence - Mayor tells us more about the Amazons than had even been known from Greek sources alone.

United Kingdom on Aug 11, 2017

James H. Boschma III: This book takes a fascinating topic -- the archaeologically observable extreme gender egalitarianism seen among Indo European Steppe Nomads during the Bronze and Iron Ages (extending all the way to female warriors who generated the garbled Greek legends of Amazons) and drowns it in a shower of irrelevant digressions (an entire chapter devoted to Greek fantasies and depictions of Amazon breasts? really? a chapter on Amazon sex, or what Greek sources fantasized Amazon sex might be like?) and pages wasted on art history concerning Greek vase paintings and similar. Most annoying, the author acknowledges the Greek art to be largely inaccurate but then walks us through the corpus exhaustively anyway. My knowledge of the people this work purports to document is not enhanced by the revelation that Greek artists imagined Steppe nomad women clad in skin tight cat suits or that Ancient Greek pornography appears to have had "Amazon Woman" as a genre. Archaeologists have frozen mummies, truly amazing grave goods, intact recovered clothing and on and on to tell us about these people . . . so let's touch on that a bit but then get back to the heart of the matter and talk about another upskirt...

United States on Nov 17, 2016

Jess@NoPithyPhrase: Adrienne Mayor takes on every stereotype and myth about the Amazons and methodically grinds them to dust, from "man-hating" to "single-breasted" to Wonder Woman. Instead of "proving" Amazons existed from a Greek mythological viewpoint, Mayor's use of archaeological evidence and sources outside the Hellenic world paints a realistic world of women warriors in the Eurasian Steppes. Women who were full, rounded people: they lived a warrior's life as well as loving men, having and raising children, and were in no way the wild cardboard cutouts of abnormal femaleness the myths would have us believe.

I have read and re-read this book since I got it, taking notes and cross-referencing other volumes of mythology and non-fiction about women warriors in the ancient world. Mayor's is the most comprehensive and detailed of all I've personally found, and on top of that it's a fun read. NO chapter feels like a college class chore to chew through: the stories she's collected are absolutely intriguing. That warrior horsewomen tales appear in non-Greek histories and myths only reinforces that the real-life basis for the "Amazon" existed and thrived for centuries.

What struck me most...

United States on Jul 04, 2016

Dr W. H. Konarzewski: Adrienne Mayor writes about the Amazon myths from ancient Greece and connects them to the real female horse archers who originated in the territories around the Black Sea, possibly as early as 1500 BC. She tells us that there is plenty of evidence from early Scythian and Sarmatian graves that these women fought as warriors on the steppes between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. Their activities may conceivably have extended as far west as the Danube and as far east as the Great Wall of China – a stretch of about 4000 miles.

Dr Mayor tackles many of the human interest questions that ordinary readers might ask themselves, including romance. There is an engrossing chapter on love and sexuality among the female warriors; elsewhere there are plenty of illustrations showing that they appreciated body art in the form of tattoos (just like the men of the period). Incidentally, the book contains a generous number of illustrations, many taken from Greek vases and sculptures.

The quality of writing is good. Mayor writes in a scholarly way with plenty of references but she is also highly readable and appears anxious to make her work accessible to non-academics. She carefully...

United Kingdom on Mar 14, 2015