Roman Emperor Dressed As Egyptian Pharaoh in Newfound Carving

An ancient stone carving on the walls of an Egyptian temple depicts the Roman emperor Claudius dressed as an Egyptian pharaoh, wearing an elaborate crown, a team of researchers has discovered.

In the carving, Emperor Claudius, who reigned from A.D. 41 to 54, is shown erecting a giant pole with a lunar crescent at the top. Eight men, each wearing two feathers, are shown climbing the supporting poles, with their legs dangling in midair.

Egyptian hieroglyphs in the carving call Claudius the "Son of Ra, Lord of the Crowns," and say he is "King of Upper and Lower Egypt, Lord of the Two Lands." The hieroglyphs say he is raising the pole of the tent (or cult chapel) of Min (an ancient Egyptian god of fertility and power) and notes a date indicating a ritual like this took place around the summertime researchers say. It would have taken place even though Claudius never visited Egypt. A cult chapel is a place of worship and a tent could also be used for this purpose. [See Photos of the Egyptian Carving and Emperor]

The elaborate crown on Claudius consists of three rushes (plants) set on ram horns with three falcons sitting on top. Three solar discs representing the sun (one for each plant) are shown in front of the rushes. Egyptian rulers are shown wearing crowns like this relatively late in ancient Egyptian history, mainly after 332 B.C., and they were worn only in Egypt. The Roman Empire took over Egypt in 30 B.C., and while the Roman emperors were not Egyptian, they were still depicted as pharaohs Egyptologists have noted.

In the recently discovered carving, the god Min is shown wearing his own crown and has an erect penis, because Min was a god of fertility, the researchers said. The hieroglyphs describe Min as "the one who brings into control the warhorses, whose fear is in the Two Lands." Min tells Claudius, "I give you the (southern) foreign lands," which researchers say could be a reference to the deserts surrounding the Nile River, where minerals could be quarried.

The scene was discovered on the western exterior wall of the Temple of Isis at Shanhur, located on the east bank of the Nile River about 12 miles (20 kilometers) north of Luxor. It is an Egyptian temple built and decorated during the Roman occupation under Augustus (who reigned from about 30 B.C. to A.D. 14) through to Trajan (who reigned from A.D. 98 to 117). The pole-raising scene was first found during the 2000-2001 excavation season and was recorded in full during the 2010 epigraphic (recording) season. The temple originally had 36 scenes on each of its eastern and western exterior walls, and this new scene, protected for millennia by a layer of dirt, is one of the best preserved.

The study was published recently in the journal Zeitschrift für ägyptische Sprache und Altertumskunde by Martina Minas-Nerpel, a Reader (the American equivalent of an associate professor) at Swansea University in the United Kingdom, and Marleen De Meyer, a postdoctoral researcher at KU Leuven University in Belgium. Careful line drawings of the scene were done by Troy Sagrillo, a senior lecturer at Swansea University.

Roman pharaohs

Although Cleopatrais often called the "last pharaoh of Egypt," the Egyptian priests depicted the Roman emperors as pharaohs up until the fourth century A.D. The Roman emperors allowed, or even encouraged, these depictions in Egyptian temples in order to keep Egypt — which was an important Roman province — stable. [Cleopatra & Olympias: Top 12 Warrior Moms in History]

"Although we know that Claudius, as most Roman emperors, never visited Egypt, his rule over the land at the Nile and the desert regions was legitimized through cultic means," Minas-Nerpel and De Meyer wrote in the journal article. "By decorating the exterior temple wall with this ritual, Claudius theoretically received Min's characteristics and thus his ability to rule over Egypt."

The researchers noted that similar scenes showing a pole being raised for the god Min date as far back as 4,300 years ago, during the age when pyramids were being built in Egypt. This tradition of creating pole-raising scenes was continued into the period of Roman rule.

Real-life ritual

In addition, the date on the carving indicates that a ritual like this took place in real life, the researchers said, adding that people may have climbed the central pole of the chapel of Min. In fact, a priest may have stood in for the absent Claudius, and a statue could have been used to represent Min, Minas-Nerpel said.

"What we see depicted on the temple scene is the ideal scenario," Minas-Nerpel told Live Science. She added that, even before the Romans took over Egypt in 30 B.C., Egypt's pharaohs were unable to take part in each temple ceremony in person, and stand-ins would have been necessary.

Lettuce scene

Another ritual offering at the Shanhur temple depicted at the axially corresponding scene on the eastern exterior wall shows Claudius giving an offering of lettuce to Min, which symbolizes the continuedfertility of Egypt. It is located on the east wall and did not have to be excavated. In this scene, the Egyptian god Horus (shown as a child) is depicted between the two.

"[Take for] you the lettuce in order to unite it with your body (or phallus)," Claudius says to Min in hieroglyphs shown on the depiction. At one point, Claudius says, "One is in fear when seeing your face."

The two scenes highlight fertility and victorious power, both of which were important for legitimizing the rule of an absent Roman emperor who wanted to control Egypt, Minas-Nerpel and De Meyer wrote. 

The Shanhur project and team

In 2009, Minas-Nerpel (principal investigator) and Harco Willems, a professor of Egyptology at the KU Leuven in Belgium, were jointly awarded the research grant by the Gerda Henkel-Foundation of Düsseldorf, Germany, to continue research at the temple of Isis at Shanhur in Upper Egypt. The project was also sponsored by the Engineering and Physical Science Research Council in the United Kingdom. The international team also included De Meyer, Peter Dils (of the Universität Leipzig in Germany), René Preys (of the Facultés Universitaires Notre-Dame de la Paix in Namur and KU Leuven), and Sagrillo. In Egypt, the mission was supported by the Supreme Council of Antiquities, theDeutsches Archäologisches Institut, Cairo (DAI) and the Nederlands-Vlaams Instituut in Cairo.

Source: LiveScience

An article on Shanhur temple by De Meyer and Minas-Nerpel can be seen on the UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology athttp://escholarship.org/uc/item/5hc3t8dh.

3,200 Year Old Tree Is So Massive It’s Never Been Captured In A Single Image. Until Now.

(Distractify) Cloaked in the snows of California’s Sierra Nevada, the 3,200-year-old giant sequoia called the President rises 247 feet. Two other sequoias have wider trunks, but none has a larger crown, say the scientists who climbed it. The figure at top seems taller than the other climbers because he’s standing forward on one of the great limbs.

The trunk is 27 feet wide and the his mighty branches hold 2 billion needles, the most of any tree on the planet. On top of that, he still adds one cubic meter of wood per year – making him one of the fastest growing trees in the world.

Giant sequoias exist in only one place, where The President and smaller trees that make up his “House” and “Senate”, reside. On the western slope of the Sierra Nevadas in California, at 5000-8000 ft above sea level.

The team painstakingly put together a set of pulleys and levers to climb the tree. It took 32 days and the piecing together of 126 separate photos, but they managed it!

Source: The Mind Unleashed

Is the Lycurgus Cup Evidence of Roman-Era Nanotechnology?

Glass is, in the modern world, nearly ubiquitous.  It’s everywhere.  Glass has been one of the most useful inventions ever made, though invention isn’t really the right word, it was more of a discovery.  The art of making glass is relatively simple, though it certainly isn’t easy.  What actually happens to the constituent materials is anything but simple, however.

You’re probably familiar with the term vitrification.  If not, here’s a crash course.

Glass is, by definition, an amorphous solid material that exhibits a glass-transition.  A less-than-helpful definition to be sure, but essentially that means that it’s a non-crystalline material that, at different temperatures, transitions between a hard and brittle substance to a semi-liquid molten substance (and vice versa).  This is similar to a phase-transition, but is a distinctly separate process.

There are several types of glass, based on the above definition, but what we commonly know as glass is generally a mixture of silicon dioxide, sodium oxide, and lime (as well as various other additives in small amounts) that, through a process of heating and rapid cooling is changed from its constituent form, to a molten form, and then to an amorphous solid form.  It’s that last step, super-cooling a viscous liquid into a solid form, that’s called vitrification.  A more generally held definition is the melting of sand (or the silica/quartz in sand) and then cooling it into a solid material, the result often being visually similar to glass.

As a term, vitrification is widely misunderstood, and is commonly used to describe the process of making glass.  It isn’t limited to the common idea of glass though, so that isn’t really correct.  The term vitrified sand refers to a group of natural and man-made processes that result in melted sand.  It’s caused by lightning strikes (fulgurite), super-heated meteorites (tekkite), nuclear detonations (trinitite), and in the process of making glass (frit).  There’s also volcanic glass, which isn’t really vitrified sand, because often it’s isn’t made up by quartz or silica, but more stratified molten material

A typical example of fulgurite

Any way you slice it though, glass making is pretty neat.  Even though, as mentioned, glass making isn’t exactly easy, the simple process is even undertaken by Mother Nature herself, and the results are often spectacular.  Fulgurite in particular, sometimes called petrified lightning, which is most often found as tubes of fused quartz at locations of lightning strikes, produces some stunningly gorgeous formations.  There are people who collect fulgurite and there’s even jewellery made out of it.

The Fortean Community is not unfamiliar with vitrified sand, as there are many examples of what appear to be trinitite in antiquity, such as that at the vitrified forts in Ireland and Scotland.  Some conspiracy theorists contend that those examples of vitrified sand are evidence of atomic blasts and advanced weaponry in pre-history, though analysis of these sites suggests that they are actually examples of fulgurite and/or tekkite, rather than trinitite.

There are glass related mysteries that don’t rely on conspiracy theory though.

Glass has some interesting properties, not the least of which is its ability to hold refreshingly cold liquids at the ready for consumption.  It has the ability to both reflect and refract light, which is a pretty handy thing, when it comes down to it.  That inherent property is what makes it so useful to us, beyond kitchenware.

The Lycurgus Cup when back lit appears red

When Sir Isaac Newton discovered that a prism has the ability to separate the spectrum of visible light, and subsequently invented the spectrometer and later built the first practical reflecting telescope, he found a use for glass that ultimately revolutionised science.  And while he is credited with formulating the Theory of Colour, it seems he wasn’t the first to figure out that glass has the ability to produce some surprising colour effects.

Made, it’s believed, in the 4^th century AD by Roman artisans, there is a cup that seems to defy logic with its ability to change colour based on light that’s shone through it.  The only surviving example of a Roman cage cup, the Lycurgus Cup – named so because it bears a relief image of the legendary lawmaker Lycurgus of Sparta – is the earliest known piece of manufactured dichroic glass.

What’s dichroic glass?  Funny you should ask.

It actually refers to two specific types of glass.  The first being the modern manufactured glass used in thin-film optics (such as LCD screens) and stained glass, where ultra-thin layers of various metals are used to alter the refraction angle of light as it passes through the glass, resulting in different colours when viewed from different angles.  The second is the kind used in the Lycurgus cup, wherein nanoparticles of silver and gold are included in the vitrification of the silica or quarts, which results in the glass actually changing colour based on the position of light sources and the observer.

It makes for a beautiful effect, as you can see from the pictures, but there’s a problem.

The same cup appears green when front lit (in this case by camera flash)

As mentioned, this is an example of a Roman cage cup or dietretum, which means that the glass was painstakingly ground and cut away leaving a decorative “cage” at the original surface-level.  We know that they were a common possession for elite Romans, but due to the delicate nature of the cup, only this one example has survived the ages.  There are a few other examples of Roman dichroic glass, all of which are small shards, and through analysis, it seems the Romans were fairly adept at manipulating the content of their frit, though, in the case of dichroic glass, we’re talking about microscopic nanoparticles of the metal here, achieving a very specific colloidal mixture in the molten glass in order to create the desired effect.

How did they do that?  Is this evidence that Roman scientific knowledge was more advanced than we previously thought, in this case far more advanced?

Modern scholars are unable to explain exactly how they achieved this feat, which even today is difficult. It’s thought, by the mainstream scientific establishment, that they stumbled onto it accidentally, which to some is a painfully inadequate hypothesis.  There are those who declare that the Roman Empire, and perhaps even cultures that predate them, had or were familiar with nanotechnology.  This isn’t a new claim of antiquity, but it is one of the only cases of speculation in that regard that isn’t easily dismissed.

Is this yet another example of what a growing number of people claim is evidence for a lost global knowledge fund?  The Lycurgus cup and the other examples of Roman-era dichroic glass were made deliberately.  The craftsmen responsible knew precisely what they were doing…the question is, how did they know it?

Source: Mysterious Universe

1,300 year-old mummy and her intimate tattoo

Wrapped in bandages and caricatured as figures of terror in Hollywood movies, Egypt’s mummies have long captivated and bewildered scientists and children alike.

Now a new exhibition at the British Museum will disclose the human side of the mummies of the Nile.

Eight have been – scientifically speaking – stripped bare revealing secrets taken to the grave thousands of years ago.

Subjecting the corpses to the most advanced scientific techniques, including sending the mummies to hospitals around London for CAT scans – the museum’s Egyptologists have been able to build up the most detailed picture yet of what lies beneath the sarcophagi and bandage-wrapped bodies.

The exhibition called Ancient Lives: New Discoveries, which opens in May, will show mummies in a new – and often ordinary – light.

The new analysis has unearthed evidence that, just like modern man, ancient Egyptians suffered from high cholesterol and agonising toothache. They even had tattoos.

CT scan 3D visualisation of the mummified remains of a Sudanese woman (Trustees of the British Museum)

The exhibition is likely to be one of the most successful ever staged by the British Museum and follows in a fine tradition of blockbuster displays based on archaeological finds from ancient Egypt. The Treasures of Tutankhamun, staged at the museum in 1972, attracted more than 1.6 million visitors.

The new exhibition looks at those living along the ancient Nile from royalty to more ordinary inhabitants.

Mummification, the curators are keen to point out, was not the sole preserve (pardon the pun) of pharaohs. Curators have deliberately chosen mummies from different eras and different backgrounds to cast them in a new light.

The oldest of the mummies to undergo scientific testing is more than 5,500 years old and dates back to 3,500 BC. The most recent example is a female aged between 20 and 35, who lived about 1,300 years ago.

CAT scanning of one the mummies (JULIAN SIMMONDS)

The mummies range in ages from two years at the moment of death to 50. Some were discovered by explorers more than 100 years ago while others were found as recently as 2005 on the banks of the Nile in what is now Sudan.

Over the course of several months, the mummies were taken at night to hospitals and subjected to scans normally reserved for living patients.

CAT scans – or computed tomography to give it its technical term – generate three-dimensional images of patients’ organs, bones and tissue using X-ray technology. Some of the mummies were so well preserved that the scans revealed parts of the brain and other vital organs still intact.

The CAT scan images of the mummies were then combined with other forensic detective work, such as infra-red “reflectography” and carbon dating, to build up a picture of ancient lives.

“What we are doing in the exhibition is investigating the lives of eight people from the past,” said John Taylor, head curator in the Ancient Egypt and Sudan department at the museum.

“We want to promote the idea these are not objects but real human beings. We want to capture the humanity of these people.”

Dr Taylor said: “We took the mummies to hospitals mainly around London. We used the facilities after hours. We used a sophisticated dual energy scanner that gave us X-rays of different layers.

“We captured some amazing images and discovered a lot about these mummies even though some of them have been here at the museum for 100 years or more. Most of the remains have never had the bandages taken off.”

CAT scans of the pelvic area enabled the team to age the corpses, based on wear and tear of the bones. The scans also showed how the ancient inhabitants of the Nile suffered from heart disease and toothache.

Displays at the British Museum (JULIAN SIMMONDS)

Two of the eight mummies appeared to have suffered from heart problems. The two mummies were found to have suffered from plaque in their legs. Plaque is made up of cholesterol, calcium and tissue and as it builds up arteries narrow.

Daniel Antoine, the museum’s curator of physical anthropology and curator of the coming exhibition, said: “The scans showed two of them with plaque in the leg.

“That is an indication of cardiovascular disease that can lead to a heart attack or stroke. This might have been caused by lifestyle which means a diet rich in fat or it might be genetic. The other major find was that the majority of adults had terrible dental health. They had huge abscesses.

“In some cases the mummies have such multiple abscesses that it might have contributed to the death. You can get such severe inflammation of the throat that can lead to asphyxiation.”

The ancient Egyptians ate a varied diet that included fish, a little meat, beer, bread and sugar-rich fruits such as dates.

The scientists at the British Museum even studied bread found with the remains of the mummies to see if it had a high content of abrasive sand that might have contributed to tooth decay – it didn’t.

One of the mummies, whose remains were found just seven years ago, was so well preserved that archaeologists could almost make out the tattoo on her skin on the inner thigh of her right leg with the naked eye. Infra-red technology helped define it more clearly.

The woman, aged between 20 and 35, had been buried wrapped in a linen and woollen cloth and her remains had mummified in the dry heat. The tattoo has been deciphered by curators and spells out in ancient Greek – M-I-X-A-H-A, or Michael.

The owner of the tattoo was a woman who died in about AD 700 and lived in a Christian community on the banks of the Nile.

A photograph, left, and an infra-red reflectography of the tattoo found on the mummified remains of a Sudanese woman (Trustees of the British Museum)

The tattoo represents the symbol of the Archangel Michael, who features in both the Old and New Testaments. The symbol has previously been found in ancient churches and on stone tablets, but never before in the form of a tattoo.

“You can see her tattoo really clearly using infra red reflectography,” said Dr Antoine, “The tattoo on her right inner thigh represents a monogram that spells Michael in ancient Greek.

“She is the first evidence of a tattoo from this period. This is a very rare find.”

The woman was about 5ft 2in tall and was found in 2005 on an archaeological dig in a cemetery in Sudan. Other ancient Egyptians who were mummified had their organs removed before being preserved.

“The scan of the Sudanese mummy showed her internal organs are remarkably well preserved,” said Dr Antoine. “We can only speculate why she had a tattoo. Perhaps for protection.”

The Sudanese mummy will go on public display for the first time in May. Each day thousands of people will see her tattoo.

It is not clear who did the tattoo in ancient Sudan, and whether it was visible to other natives.

High up on her inner thigh, it may or may not have been out of view. And for all its scientific expertise, the British Museum admits to being unclear as to what exactly was the fashionable length of skirt worn by an ordinary Nile dwelling female in AD 700.

Source: The Telegraph

Colossal pharaoh statues of Amenhotep III found in Egypt’s temple city Luxor

ARCHAEOLOGISTS have unveiled two colossal statues of Pharaoh Amenhotep III in Egypt's famed temple city of Luxor, adding to an existing pair of world-renowned tourist attractions.

The two monoliths in red quartzite were raised at what European and Egyptian archaeologists said were their original sites in the funerary temple of the king, on the west bank of the Nile.

The temple is already famous for its existing 3400-year-old Memnon colossi — twin statues of Amenhotep III whose reign archaeologists say marked the political and cultural zenith of ancient Egyptian civilisation.

“The world until now knew two Memnon colossi, but from today it will know four colossi of Amenhotep III,” said German-Armenian archaeologist Hourig Sourouzian, who heads the project to conserve the Amenhotep III temple.

The existing two statues, both showing the pharaoh seated, are known across the globe.

The two restored additions have weathered severe damage for centuries, Ms Sourouzian said.

“The statues had lain in pieces for centuries in the fields, damaged by destructive forces of nature like earthquake, and later by irrigation water, salt, encroachment and vandalism,” she said, as behind her excavators and local villagers washed pieces of artefacts and statues unearthed over the past months.

“This beautiful temple still has enough for us to study and conserve.”

One of the “new” statues — its body weighing 250 tonnes — again depicts the pharaoh seated, hands resting on his knees.

It is 11.5 metres tall, with a base 1.5 metres high and 3.6 metres wide.

Archaeologists said with its now missing double crown, the original statue would have reached a height of 13.5 metres and weighed 450 tonnes.

The king is depicted wearing a royal pleated kilt held at the waist by a large belt decorated with zigzag lines.

Source: The Australian

The digital unwrapping of the Egyptian priest Neswaiu

In the 19th century and even later, there was no shortage of people eager to watch the unwrapping of an Egyptian mummy.

In 1908 in Manchester, some 500 people gathered in a lecture theatre to see prominent Egyptologist Margaret Murray supervise the unwrapping of a body from the Tomb of the Two Brothers from Manchester Museum's mummy collection.

As Egyptology and archaeology evolved, the destructive practise came to an end, but it didn't mean researchers and the public were any less curious about what lies within a mummy.

Now 21st Century technology is being used to virtually unwrap mummies without causing any damage to the body and wrappings.

Museums around the world, including the very same Manchester Museum, have been sending their mummies to hospitals to undergo computed tomography (CT) scanning, creating density maps of their insides for researchers to analyse.

And now comes a chance for the public to digitally unwrap a mummified body themselves.

Stockholm's Medelhavsmuseet, the Museum of Mediterranean and Near Eastern Antiquities, has been working with the research group Interactive Institute Swedish ICT to digitally scan their eight human mummies as part of preparations for a new permanent exhibition.

The results for one of their mummies, the Egyptian priest Neswaiu, are now on show in the form of a digital autopsy table in an "embalmment room" beside his real mummified remains and coffins.

Egyptologist Margaret Murray, front centre, supervised an unwrapping in front of an audience of 500 people in Manchester in 1908

Using the table, visitors can virtually open the two coffins and then unpeel each layer of the mummy from his highly decorated cartonnage (the mummy's outer layer) down to his skeleton. They can also cut a cross-section through the multiple layers of the coffins and body.

Sofia Häggman, museum curator, told the BBC she wanted users to be able to "see this information first hand" and not always have to count on researchers explaining what can be found on this mummy.

"Now you can simply unwrap it virtually yourself," she said.

The autopsy table uses software called Inside Explorer developed by the Interactive Institute Swedish ICT.

The group first developed the platform for use in hospitals and by medical students but they've since gone on to work with the British Museum on a virtual autopsy table for the museum's Gebelein Man, a naturally mummified Egyptian man some 5,500 years old.

They've also worked with London's Natural History Museum, the Smithsonian in Washington and the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago.

The Interactive Institute Swedish ICT say the Neswaiu project represents their most advanced work yet, combining data from both CT scanning and photogrammetry, by which 2D pictures of the coffins and mummy were taken from multiple angles to build an accurate 3D surface model using Autodesk's Recap Photo software.

"CT scanning gives you information about the interior of the mummy but it doesn't give you any colour or surface information," the research institute's Thomas Rydell told the BBC.

"So we continued the process by doing laser scanning and photogrammetry and that process gave us information about the surface and textures and colours of the mummy and then we're taking all that data and putting it on the table and making it accessible for museum visitors."

Neswaiu's coffins and mummy were photographed from multiple angles and the results used to generate a 3D surface map

Visitors can strip Neswaiu down to the tissue and bones and reveal the array of amulets which were placed on the body

Visitors can also cut through the coffins and mummy in cross-section

Neswaiu lived in the third century BC at the temple of the god Montu in Thebes - modern-day Luxor. His remains were gifted to the Medelhavsmuseet in 1928 when it first opened.

"We know that his mother's name was Takerheb and we also know that he belonged to the upper classes of Egyptian society because he could afford an expensive mummification. Not everybody could," said Sofia Häggman.

"He also has a gilded cartonnage, he has two coffins and he has a lot of amulets on his mummy, small pieces of jewellery that would aid him into eternal life."

Researchers have tried to see what was inside his mummy before. His stomach was opened in 1962 and a tissue sample removed and X-rays have also been taken previously. But the digital autopsy has added much more detail to their understanding.

"He was healthy, pretty muscular apparently. He lived until he was 50 or 60 years old which was comparatively old in ancient Egypt and he might have died from an infection in one of his teeth which affected the bone and could have caused blood poisoning," said Ms Häggman.

The scanning process has also given them further insight into the mummification process.

"You can see the cut where the internal organs were taken out. You can see the wrapped packages of intestines, of the lungs and the liver they put back inside the body and you can see how the cut was then resealed and they put an amulet in the shape of the embalmer's two fingers across the cut to protect it."

Scanning also pinpointed in three dimensions where 120 amulets found on his body were placed, including a falcon-shaped one. The data was used to 3D print a mould and then cast an exact replica of the falcon while leaving the original undisturbed on the mummy.

What Neswaiu doesn't have any more is a brain - that was not preserved. Humans, the Egyptians believed, thought with their hearts.

Source: BBC News

The Amazon Women: Is There Any Truth Behind the Myth?

Strong and brave, the Amazons were a force to be reckoned with in Greek mythology—but did the fierce female warriors really exist?

Watching the “Wonder Woman” TV series when I was a girl. I never wanted to dress like her—the idea of wearing a gold lamé bustier and star-spangled blue underwear all day seemed problematic—but the Amazonian princess was strong and resourceful, with a rope trick for every problem. She seemed to be speaking directly to me, urging, “Go find your own inner Amazonian.” When I read the news that Wonder Woman was going to be resurrected for a blockbuster movie in 2016, Batman vs. Superman, it made me excited—and anxious. Would the producers give her a role as fierce as her origins—and maybe some shoulder straps—or would she just be cartoon eye candy?

The fact that she isn’t even getting billing in the title makes me suspicious. It wouldn’t have pleased Wonder Woman’s creator either. “Wonder Woman is psychological propaganda for the new type of woman who should, I believe, rule the world,” declared the psychologist and comic book writer William Moulton Marston, offering a proto-feminist vision that undoubtedly sounded quite radical in 1943. “Not even girls want to be girls so long as our feminine archetype lacks force, strength and power. Not wanting to be girls, they don’t want to be tender, submissive, peace-loving as good women are.”

Over the years, the writers at DC Comics softened Wonder Woman’s powers in ways that would have infuriated Marston. During the 1960s, she was hardly wondrous at all, less a heroic warrior than the tomboyish girl next-door. It was no longer clear whether she was meant to empower the girls or captivate the boys. But the core brand was still strong enough for Gloria Steinem to put her on the cover of the first newsstand issue of Ms. magazine in 1972—with the slogan “Wonder Woman for President.”

The creators of Wonder Woman had no interest in proving an actual link to the past. In some parts of the academic world, however, the historical existence of the Amazons, or any matriarchal society, has long been a raging issue. The origins of the debate can be traced back to a Swiss law professor and classical scholar named Johann Jakob Bachofen. In 1861 Bachofen published his radical thesis that the Amazons were not a myth but a fact. In his view, humanity started out under the rule of womankind and only switched to patriarchy at the dawn of civilization. Despite his admiration for the earth-mother women/priestesses who once held sway, Bachofen believed that the domination of men was a necessary step toward progress. Women “only know of the physical life,” he wrote. “The triumph of patriarchy brings with it the liberation of the spirit from the manifestations of nature.”

It comes as no surprise that the composer Richard Wagner was enthralled by Bachofen’s writings. Brünnhilde and her fellow Valkyries could be easily mistaken for flying Amazons. But Bachofen’s influence went far beyond the Ring Cycle. Starting with Friedrich Engels, Bachofen inspired generations of Marxist and feminist theorists to write wistfully of a pre-patriarchal age when the evils of class, property and war were unknown. As Engels memorably put it: “The overthrow of mother-right was the world historical defeat of the female sex. The man took command in the home also; the woman was degraded and reduced to servitude; she became the slave of his lust and a mere instrument for the production of children.”

There was, however, one major problem with the Bachofen-inspired theory of matriarchy: There was not a shred of physical evidence to support it. In the 20th century, one school of thought claimed that the real Amazons were probably beardless “bow-toting Mongoloids” mistaken for women by the Greeks. Another insisted that they were simply a propaganda tool used by the Athenians during times of political stress. The only theorists who remained relatively unfazed by the debates swirling through academia were the Freudians, for whom the idea of the Amazons was far more interesting in the abstract than in a pottery fragment or arrowhead. The Amazonian myths appeared to hold the key to the innermost neuroses of the Athenian male. All those women sitting astride their horses, for example—surely the animal was nothing but a phallus substitute. As for their violent death in tale after tale, this was obviously an expression of unresolved sexual conflict.

Myth or fact, symbol or neurosis, none of the theories adequately explained the origins of the Amazons. If these warrior women were a figment of Greek imagination, there still remained the unanswered question of who or what had been the inspiration for such an elaborate fiction. Their very name was a puzzle that mystified the ancient Greeks. They searched for clues to its origins by analyzing the etymology of Amazones, the Greek for Amazon. The most popular explanation claimed that Amazones was a derivation of a, “without,” and mazos, “breasts”; another explanation suggested ama-zoosai, meaning “living together,” or possibly ama-zoonais, “with girdles.” The idea that Amazons cut or cauterized their right breasts in order to have better bow control offered a kind of savage plausibility that appealed to the Greeks.

The eighth-century B.C. poet Homer was the first to mention the existence of the Amazons. In the Iliad—which is set 500 years earlier, during the Bronze or Heroic Age—Homer referred to them somewhat cursorily as Amazons antianeirai, an ambiguous term that has resulted in many different translations, from “antagonistic to men” to “the equal of men.” In any case, these women were considered worthy enough opponents for Homer’s male characters to be able to boast of killing them—without looking like cowardly bullies.

Future generations of poets went further and gave the Amazons a fighting role in the fall of Troy—on the side of the Trojans. Arktinos of Miletus added a doomed romance, describing how the Greek Achilles killed the Amazonian queen Penthesilea in hand-to-hand combat, only to fall instantly in love with her as her helmet slipped to reveal the beautiful face beneath. From then on, the Amazons played an indispensable role in the foundation legends of Athens. Hercules, for example, last of the mortals to become a god, fulfills his ninth labor by taking the magic girdle from the Amazon queen Hippolyta.

By the mid-sixth century B.C., the foundation of Athens and the defeat of the Amazons had become inextricably linked, as had the notion of democracy and the subjugation of women. The Hercules versus the Amazons myth was adapted to include Theseus, whom the Athenians venerated as the unifier of ancient Greece. In the new version, the Amazons came storming after Theseus and attacked the city in a battle known as the Attic War. It was apparently a close-run thing. According to the first century A.D. Greek historian Plutarch, the Amazons “were no trivial nor womanish enterprise for Theseus. For they would not have pitched their camp within the city, nor fought hand-to-hand battles in the neighborhood of the Pynx and the Museum, had they not mastered the surrounding country and approached the city with impunity.” As ever, though, Athenian bravery saved the day.

The first pictorial representations of Greek heroes fighting scantily clad Amazons began to appear on ceramics around the sixth century B.C. The idea quickly caught on and soon “amazonomachy,” as the motif is called (meaning Amazon battle), could be found everywhere: on jewelry, friezes, household items and, of course, pottery. It became a ubiquitous trope in Greek culture, just like vampires are today, perfectly blending the allure of sex with the frisson of danger. The one substantial difference between the depictions of Amazons in art and in poetry was the breasts. Greek artists balked at presenting anything less than physical perfection.

The more important the Amazons became to Athenian national identity, the more the Greeks searched for evidence of their vanquished foe. The fifth century B.C. historian Herodotus did his best to fill in the missing gaps. The “father of history,” as he is known, located the Amazonian capital as Themiscyra, a fortified city on the banks of the Thermodon River near the coast of the Black Sea in what is now northern Turkey. The women divided their time between pillaging expeditions as far afield as Persia and, closer to home, founding such famous towns as Smyrna, Ephesus, Sinope and Paphos. Procreation was confined to an annual event with a neighboring tribe. Baby boys were sent back to their fathers, while the girls were trained to become warriors. An encounter with the Greeks at the Battle of Thermodon ended this idyllic existence. Three shiploads of captured Amazons ran aground near Scythia, on the southern coast of the Black Sea. At first, the Amazons and the Scythians were braced to fight each other. But love indeed conquered all and the two groups eventually intermarried. Their descendants became nomads, trekking northeast into the steppes where they founded a new race of Scythians called the Sauromatians. “The women of the Sauromatae have continued from that day to the present,” wrote Herodotus, “to observe their ancient customs, frequently hunting on horseback with their husbands...in war taking the field and wearing the very same dress as the men....Their marriage law lays it down, that no girl shall wed until she has killed a man in battle.”

The trail of the Amazons nearly went cold after Herodotus. Until, that is, the early 1990s when a joint U.S.-Russian team of archaeologists made an extraordinary discovery while excavating 2,000-year-old burial mounds—known as kurgans—outside Pokrovka, a remote Russian outpost in the southern Ural Steppes near the Kazakhstan border. There, they found over 150 graves belonging to the Sauromatians and their descendants, the Sarmatians. Among the burials of “ordinary women,” the researchers uncovered evidence of women who were anything but ordinary. There were graves of warrior women who had been buried with their weapons. One young female, bowlegged from constant riding, lay with an iron dagger on her left side and a quiver containing 40 bronze-tipped arrows on her right. The skeleton of another female still had a bent arrowhead embedded in the cavity. Nor was it merely the presence of wounds and daggers that amazed the archaeologists. On average, the weapon-bearing females measured 5 feet 6 inches, making them preternaturally tall for their time.

Finally, here was evidence of the women warriors that could have inspired the Amazon myths. In recent years, a combination of new archaeological finds and a reappraisal of older discoveries has confirmed that Pokrovka was no anomaly. Though clearly not a matriarchal society, the ancient nomadic peoples of the steppes lived within a social order that was far more flexible and fluid than the polis of their Athenian contemporaries.

To the Greeks, the Scythian women must have seemed like incredible aberrations, ghastly even. To us, their graves provide an insight into the lives of the world beyond the Adriatic. Strong, resourceful and brave, these warrior women offer another reason for girls “to want to be girls” without the need of a mythical Wonder Woman.

Source: Smithsonian Magazine