Comments on: The Amazons

By: Urban IX

Urban IX — Sat, 17 Jan 2015 00:02:42 +0000

Mithradates:

Maybe so, but that doesn’t explain the Mongols or various migration-period nomads (like the Huns, Khazars, Bulgar, etc.) and the lack of written evidence for it. That said, I mean, I’m open to the possibility if the evidence is there, so yes on the book.

By: Mithradates Eupator

Mithradates Eupator — Fri, 16 Jan 2015 20:23:56 +0000

Perhaps we should read the actual book before speculating about what reviewers say about it.

Urban IX, things changed for women after the Arab/Muslim Conquest.

By: Anomaly UK

Anomaly UK — Fri, 16 Jan 2015 16:06:12 +0000

The relevant fact is surely that it’s hard to keep your women locked up in your house if you don’t have a house. Stealing women was routine in Temujin’s time and forms a large part of his back story; I assume it was nothing new.

By: Scipio Americanus

Scipio Americanus — Fri, 16 Jan 2015 15:57:39 +0000

That’s a problem for horse arches in general, Isegoria. Their greatest fear is a body of competent foot archers. This is even more apparent now that we know the typical steppe archery technique was to ride up to spitting distance, machine-gun a bunch of arrows into the footmen, then ride away before they could retaliate.

By: Anomaly UK

Anomaly UK — Fri, 16 Jan 2015 15:51:05 +0000

While modern participation in equestrian sports is overwhelmingly female, the top rankings of eventing are slightly more male than female.

By: Urban IX

Urban IX — Fri, 16 Jan 2015 14:51:33 +0000

The problem with this is that, other than overspeculating from little evidence, the question as to why steppe nomads from known history were all so damned “patriarchal”.

By: Isegoria

Isegoria — Fri, 16 Jan 2015 14:48:30 +0000

Yes, the emphasis on equality is silly, but I appreciate the point that women can become effective horse-archers. They shouldn't try to harass archers with more powerful bows though.

By: Scipio Americanus

Scipio Americanus — Fri, 16 Jan 2015 13:49:41 +0000

Beware of second-hand articles like this. There’s an unfortunate tendency in the last 30 yrs or so in archaeology, whereby any confirmed female burial in which so much as an axe- or arrow-head is discovered within 50 ft is instantly a “warrior woman.”

While I think it’s very likely that women were commonly hunters in the steppe tribes, the bit about bows making them the equal of men in battle struck me as overstated. Certainly the disparity is less than in hand-to-hand combat, but it’s far from an even playing field.

By: Bob Sykes

Bob Sykes — Fri, 16 Jan 2015 13:33:01 +0000

And they were Indo-Europeans. No wonder feminism is a Western phenomenon.

Anthropologists keep digging up the Kurgans, trying to find out how these people lived and what they believed. But Hinduism is the last survivor of Indo-European paganism. Why aren’t the living Hindus being studied for information on the steppe people, or are they?