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Amazon Tribe's Bones and Artifacts Believed Discovered

About Sappho

The fragmentary remains of Sappho's poems indicate that she taught her art to a group of maidens, to whom she was devotedly attached and whose bridal odes she composed when they left her to be married. Later writers of antiquity, commenting upon the group, accused Sappho of immorality and vice, from which arose the modern terms for female homosexuality, “lesbianism” and “sapphism.”

Sappho wrote nine books of odes, epithalamia or wedding songs, elegies, and hymns, but the extant fragments are few. They include the Ode to Aphrodite, quoted by the scholar Dionysius of Halicarnassus in the 1st century BC.

Sappho's poems are marked by exquisite beauty of diction, perfect simplicity of form, and intensity of emotion. She invented the verse form known as Sapphics, a four-line stanza in which the first three lines are each 11 syllables long and the fourth is 5 syllables long. Many later Greek poets were influenced by Sappho, particularly Theocritus.

"Sappho," Microsoft (R) Encarta. Copyright (c) 1994 Microsoft Corporation. Copyright (c) 1994 Funk & Wagnall's Corporation.

Amazon Tribe's Bones and Artifacts Believed Discovered

(Jan 29, 1997 02:06 a.m. EST) -- Across the vast steppes of southern Russia, where Kazak nomads still herd their flocks, American and Russian archaeologists have uncovered the bones and weapons of women warriors whose existence has been legend since Herodotus first described a mysterious race of "Amazons" nearly 2,500 years ago.

For centuries, the Greek historian's writings have conjured controversy, and none more so than his account of his journey in 450 B.C. to Scythian lands north of the Black Sea, where Herodotus heard tales of armed women riding on horseback out of the Eastern steppes. The women, Herodotus heard from Scythian tribes in the region, were fierce "killers of men," whose tribal laws barred them from marriage until they had slain an enemy in battle.

Long dismissed by scholars as myth, the Amazon mystery may never be solved. But to Jeannine Davis-Kimball, director of the Berkeley-based Center for the Study of Eurasian Nomads, "Herodotus must have had some pretty good information." For after four years of excavating deep inside ancient burial mounds along the Russian-Kazakstan border, she has reported the discovery of graves holding dramatic evidence that she believes could well confirm the Greek historian.

She said in an interview last week, she and her Russian colleagues have found, lying in the graves, skeletons of early Iron Age women who must have held a unique position in society. "They seem to have controlled much of the wealth, performed rituals for their families and clan, rode horseback, and possibly hunted saiga, a steppe antelope, and other small game," she said.

And when their territory or possessions were threatened, they took to their saddles armed with bows and arrows, ready to defend their animals, pastures and clan, according to Davis-Kimball. Thus, she believes, they may well have been the very Amazons that Herodotus described, or at least their contemporaries.

Myths of women warriors have abounded across the world for centuries. Early Spanish explorers wrote about them in South America, and Chinese legends tell of them, too.

Herodotus named his legendary armed women "Amazons," which some historians have claimed derived from a Greek word meaning "without one breast" because legend held that the women removed one breast to carry quivers of arrows more conveniently.

Thus the Spanish explorers named the great river of South America the Amazon because they believed that its territory held the home of the mythical women warriors they heard about.

In last week's interview, and in a report in the journal Archaeology, published by the Archaeological Institute of America, Davis-Kimball described the groundbreaking work of the expedition and the mysterious history of the nomadic tribes known as Sarmatians who, from the sixth to the second centuries B.C., occupied a homeland that stretched from Russia's Don and Volga rivers east to the Ural mountain foothills.

The Sarmatians, whose forebears must have come from far distant Eurasian lands -- perhaps as far off as Mongolia -- are believed to have spread westward centuries later, attacking many Greek cities beyond the Black Sea. And by the fourth century A.D., evidence shows that they were occupying outposts of the Roman empire in the Balkans. Some histories say Roman emperors recruited Sarmatian troops to defend Hadrian's wall against the Britons -- "And it wouldn't surprise me if some of those troops were women," Davis-Kimball said with a laugh.

The Berkeley scientist, a research associate at the University of California's Archaeological Research Facility, has led her expeditions each summer near the Russian town of Pokrovka, with teams of Russian colleagues and groups of volunteers from the United States and other countries.

There, the grasslands of the steppes are dotted with hundreds of large burial mounds called kurgans that loom against the horizon like low hills -- some more than 60 feet high and 350 feet in diameter. The Sarmatians dug their graves in shafts within those mounds, and over the years Davis-Kimball's team has opened nearly 100 graves, most of them long-since robbed of priceless artifacts.

But in seven of the graves, she said, the teams found skeletons that had been buried along with "grave goods," including bronze arrowheads, iron swords or daggers, whetstones to sharpen the weapons, and fossilized seashells that must have served some unknown ritual purpose.

Davis-Kimball's principal colleague, Leonid T. Yablonsky of the Russian Academy of Science's Institute of Archaeology, is a physical anthropologist, and after examining their pelvic regions he identified the skeletons with certainty as female. In the sun-worshipping belief system of the Sarmatians, Davis-Kimball said, the materials left in graves along with the buried bodies were those the dead had ordinarily used in life and would need for the journey into some unknown afterlife.

Some female skeletons inside the kurgans, for example, had been placed with their legs bowed as if they were to be mounted on horseback. But they were not warriors, the archaeologist said, because no weapons were buried with them. Instead, their graves held mortuary offerings like small clay or stone altars, bronze mirrors, bronze spoons and seashells. "They seem to have been priestesses who presided over the spiritual and cultic affairs of the family or clan," Davis-Kimball said.

The bowed leg bones of one 13- or 14-year-old girl are evidence of a life on horseback, Davis-Kimball said, but she was most probably a youthful warrior because her array of arms included a dagger and dozens of arrowheads in a quiver made of wood and leather.

"It seems her amulets were also designed to reinforce her prowess, for she wore a bronze arrowhead in a leather pouch around her neck, and a great boar's tusk, which may originally have been suspended from her belt, lay at her feet," Davis-Kimball said. "A bent arrowhead was found in the body of another woman, suggesting that she had been killed in a battle."

And in a curious find that hints of role-reversals among the Sarmatians, Davis-Kimball said, some graves of men they discovered held clay cooking pots and the skulls of small children. Were they men in a powerfully matriarchal society at the time? The archaeologist can only speculate.

With government and foundation grants now disappearing, and Russia's fierce inflation making future expeditions there far too costly, Davis-Kimball is being forced to delay future expeditions to the steppes of the ancient Sarmatian homeland.

Next summer, however, she plans expeditions to Moldova, an independent republic east of Romania that was once part of the Soviet Union. There, her teams will excavate Bronze Age settlements nearly 6,000 years old and explore an early Roman fortified citadel from the first century A.D. that protected a town which may have been occupied by a late-era Sarmatian king.

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