From the PBS site of the program: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/secrets/previous_seasons/case_amazon/index.html
About The Show:
CASE FILE: Amazon Warrior Women
THE SCENE: Russia and Mongolia
LEAD DETECTIVE: Dr. Jeannine Davis-Kimball
The myth of the Amazons, a tribe of bloodthirsty blond women thundering across arid battlefields to the horror of their male foes, has lingered for centuries. Their exploits seized the imagination of the Greek scribes Homer, Hippocrates, and Herodotus. But proof of their existence had always been lacking. Now, a 2,500-year-old mystery may have been solved, cracked by an American scientist whose ten-year odyssey led her tens of thousands of miles in pursuit of the truth. After unearthing evidence of a culture of ancient warrior women in the Russian steppes, Dr. Jeannine Davis-Kimball followed a trail of artifacts to a remote village in Western Mongolia, where her quest for a living link to a long-imagined tribe ended with a startling discovery. There, among the black-eyed Mongols, Davis-Kimball found a blond child, a 9-year-old girl named Meiramgul. Through DNA testing, Davis-Kimball finds that the DNA sequences of the warrior women and those from the girl of Mongolia are identical.
This painting on a Greek vase depicts an Amazon woman warrior on horseback engaged in battle.
Amazons in myth:
History's first mention of a race of warrior women is found in Homer's ILIAD, an account of the Trojan War, probably written in the 8th or 7th century B.C.. Homer's Amazons, a race of fierce women who mated with vanquished male foes and kept only the female children they bore, were believed to occupy the area around the Black Sea. Amazon women also crop up in Greek myths. One of the labors of Hercules, for example, required him to acquire the girdle of the Amazon queen, Hippolyte. The Amazons of Greek mythology most likely had no connection to the women of the steppes, says archaeologist Jeannine Davis-Kimball. "I think the idea of the 'Amazon' was created by the Greeks for their own purposes," she says.
A history of sorts:
The works of the Greek historian Herodotus, written around the 5th century B.C., describe a group of female warriors who lost to the Greeks at the battle of Thermodon. Herodotus' Amazons were taken prisoner and put on ships, but overwhelmed and killed the Greek crew. Unable to sail themselves, the women drifted to the shores of the Black Sea, to the territory of the Scythians, a nomadic culture of Iranian descent. The women, Herodotus says, intermarried with the Scythian men, and convinced their new husbands to move northeast across the flat grassy plains, high mountains, and searing deserts of the Russian steppes, where the group eventually evolved into the Sauromatian culture.
Golden ornaments such as this bead were found in abundance at a recent excavation of an Amazon warrior woman's grave.
Amazons in Eurasia:
The first direct evidence for warrior women of high status on the steppes of southern Russia comes from excavations of burial sites of the Sauromatian culture dating from the 6th to the 4th century B.C. Judging from their grave goods, Sauromatians were nomadic, experts in animal husbandry, and skilled in warfare. Starting around the 4th century B.C., Sauromatian culture evolves into the Sarmatian culture, also a nomadic people that make their livelihood raising animals and versed in the art of war. The culture, which had been expanding its territory, soon shifts its focus. "They become raiders and traders, with forays to the west to interface with the Romans, and they relocate to cities and to areas along large trade routes," Davis-Kimball says. "Their wealth increases. We see that in their burial items. We see strong, powerful women, but their role changes. We find burials of women that still retain cultic artifacts, indicating that they were a priestess of some sort, but there is much more gold and more secular ornamentation -- more golden cups, more golden jewelry, elaborate things -- and less weaponry. This type of evolution is a normal manifestation of culture."
This nine-year-old Mongolian girl, Meiramgul, is blond and may share genetic traits with the ancient Sarmations.
Clues and Evidence
To uncover the genetic link between nine-year-old Meiramgul, the blond child of the mountains of western Mongolia, and the long-dead women warriors of the Eurasian steppes, researchers examined snippets of a particular type of genetic information called mitochondrial DNA. Each cell in a plant or animal carries two varieties of deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA. Within the nucleus of the cell is the full genetic complement, or genome, representing all of the genes that give an organism its particular characteristics and allow it to function. In humans this nuclear DNA is represented by two sets of 23 chromosomes, one set each passed on by the mother and father. One pair of these chromosomes determines the sex of the individual; a nuclear DNA analysis was used to determine the female gender of the warriors unearthed by archaeologist Jeannine Davis-Kimball and her colleagues during the excavations featured in SECRETS OF THE DEAD: "Amazon Warrior Women."
Mitochondrial DNA, however, is separate from these 46 nuclear chromosomes. It is found within the cytoplasm of cells -- the matrix of proteins, chemicals, fluid, and other structures located outside of the nucleus -- and, in particular, within tiny, pill-shaped compartments called the mitochondria. Within mitochondria, a cell's energy-producing reactions take place. (Some lethal poisons, such as cyanide, work by disrupting the biochemical reactions that mitochondria use to power up cells). Each of the 500 to 1,000 mitochondria inside a cell contain several circular pieces of DNA. There are approximately 16,000 base pairs, the chemical building blocks of DNA, along each strand; human nuclear DNA has about 300,000 times as many base pairs. The mitochondrial strand contains thirteen genes, each used to produce proteins that are involved in energy production. Other bits of the mitochondrial, or mtDNA, strand code for molecules called ribosomal and transfer RNA, which are intermediaries in the chemical process that translates the genes into their respective proteins.
A crucial feature that sets mitochondrial DNA apart from nuclear DNA -- and that allows genetic studies like the comparison of the DNA from ancient bones to that of young Meiramgul -- is that the strands are only passed from mothers to their children. This is because the mitochondria present in a fertilized embryo come almost entirely from the egg and rarely from the sperm. The mtDNA strands would normally be passed from mother to child in perfect form, but occasionally one of the individual base pairs will change, or mutate, producing a slight deviation in the sequence. Molecular biologists have mapped the entire sequence of human mitochondrial DNA and also have measured the average rate at which these mutations occur, which allows them to use slight differences in the sequence as a way of determining how closely related individuals are through their maternal ancestors. For this reason, mitochondrial DNA has frequently been used to examine the genetic relationships of families, population groups, and even the entire human species.Mitochondrial DNA studies revealed, for example, that Neanderthals were not direct ancestors of modern humans.
Mitochondrial DNA analysis also showed that all groups of humans on Earth could be mapped back to a single woman, a "mitochondrial Eve" who lived in Africa 200,000 years ago. (That is not to say that every human on Earth descended from the same woman living 200,000 years ago; rather, she was the most recent common ancestor of all humans, through maternal lines of inheritance). Because an individual cell possesses a thousand or so copies of the mtDNA strand, it is useful in the analysis of ancient or damaged tissue, teeth, hair, and bones, for the simple reason that there is much more of the material to locate and extract than there would be of nuclear DNA. Of course, the examination of any ancient DNA samples is fraught with difficulty, and contamination is a constant risk (for more on the isolation of DNA in Egyptian mummies by ancient DNA expert Scott Woodward of Brigham Young University, see the SECRETS OF THE PHARAOHS Web site, http://www.pbs.org/wnet/pharaohs/secrets3.html) so the analyses are only done in the world's best molecular biology laboratories.
An interview with Jeannine Davis-Kimball
Dr. Jeannine Davis-Kimball Interview with Jeannine Davis-Kimball
As a graduate student studying Iranian art, Jeannine Davis-Kimball knew basically nothing about ancient nomadic peoples, and she never imagined her career would eventually be focused on the enigmatic warrior women who once wandered the Eurasian steppes some 2,000 years ago and provided a historical basis for the myth of the Amazon. Then she happened across carved stone reliefs in one of the palaces of the Archaemedian dynasty, which ruled Persia from 559 to 330 B.C. The reliefs depicted scenes of nomads paying tribute to the kings. In contrast to others honoring the rulers, these people were distinctively dressed, wearing soft boots and tall hats, and they were leading horses. Davis-Kimball was intrigued by the figures, and she thought she knew where she might look for them. "I suspected that I might be able to find some traces of them if I were to go out to the Eurasian steppes," to the north of the Persian empire, "because that is where you would find nomadism," recalls Davis-Kimball, now the director of the American Eurasian Research Institute and its subsidiary, the Center for the Study of Eurasian Nomadism, at the University of California at Berkeley. "Nomadism is based on animal husbandry, primarily raising sheep and horses, and you don't find that in cities because the animals have to have pasture land, wide open spaces."
At the time, more than twenty years ago, American libraries and museums didn't have much, if any, information on nomadic cultures. At museums in Kazakhstan, however, Davis-Kimball, who had been a nurse and cattle rancher before entering graduate school later in life, gained new insight into nomadism in general and specifically into the people who'd once occupied the southern Russian steppes. She soon began excavations of the kurgans, or burial mounds, of ancient Eurasian nomads, and became the first American woman to collaborate in archaeological investigations in Kazakhstan. "Everything that I excavated was very interesting because it all added to our knowledge, but my first big find was at the 1994 excavation at Porkovka," located in Russia near its border with Kazakhstan, "when we discovered artifacts indicating there were women there who were very important within the culture." Finding warrior women who played a prominent role in the nomadic society came as a total surprise to Davis-Kimball, and it led her to focus her career on the investigation of the warrior women of the Russian steppes and other cultures. "I had no idea that these women existed. In history and in art -- for instance, in the stone reliefs of the Persian Archaemedians -- there is no indication that women have any particular status. In fact, women are sort of invisible, because history is always written by men." But Davis-Kimball has found that in reality, warrior women were quite common among ancient Eurasian societies and also among other nomads. "Our new evidence shows that women have always had a pretty prominent place in nomadic societies," she says.
Despite her stunning discoveries, Davis-Kimball currently has no plans to revisit the warrior women of the steppes and undertake more excavations. "Our work is done at Porkovka," she says. "There are several factors involved in excavating -- you have to have a site you want to excavate that has the potential for new discoveries, and you have to consider the cost. It has become extremely expensive to put together an excavation, and a lot of the focus on research in the Middle East has gone to contemporary issues -- Islam, terrorism -- which don't affect me in archaeology, but decrease the availability of funding."
Resources:
Did Amazon warrior women, the Antiope and Hippolyte, belong to an extinct matriarchal warrior society? Or were they simply fictional characters depicted in ancient Greek mythology?
What is known of the actual Amazons within the Aegean is very little, and yet intrigue about a race of dominant warrior women in the bronze age has flourished from ancient times into the present.
Is there more behind these famous warrior women than mere fantasy? Join in a virtual archaeological expedition to fathom this mysterious myth.
Read the entire text online.
A sequence of major events in the Trojan War.
The Trojan War: The Judgement of Paris
According to legend, the chain of events that led to the Trojan War started at a royal wedding.
Credits:
TV Credits:
A production of Story House Productions for Thirteen/WNET New York in association with National Geographic Channels International and ZDF.
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