These golden snake bracelets were found near Samsun on the Black sea coast in Turkey, in the region where the writers of Ancient Greece place the Amazons' great city of Themiscyra. The snakes date from Hellenistic times (ie after the time of the Amazons) but are a reminder of the tradition of female spiritual power which once existed here. You will often see such bracelets on the arms of Amazons in art. The Hittites, who lived in this area of Turkey during the Bronze Age, were a mysterious Indo-European people, whose women were skilful magical practioners. With the help of a Hittite scholar I studied ancient writings which revealed that there was a caste of "magic-women" who had enormous power in the early era of the Hittite empire: they were the guardians of the symbols of kingship; they controlled the throne-room where coronations happened. They had the ritual power to endow the king with his sovereignty - and maybe to deny it to an unworthy candidate. This meant that they were feared and hated by the male courtiers and politicians, who muttered darkly about them in the early Hittite documents. Could these formidable women be part of the inspiration for the matriarchal Amazons?
Puduhepa was a priestess-queen who played a big part in the building of the rock shrine of Yazilikaya, a holy place where Hittite masons carved a wonderful procession of gods, goddesses and mythical beings, including an androgynous warrior-goddess called Shawushka. Shawushka wears a high hat and a long kilt, pulled up to show her lower torso and make clear her bisexual nature. She is half-unveiled and winged. Could she be a pointer to the source of the Amazon myth? Certainly there were many versions of a fearsome, androgynous warrior 'goddess' in the lands of western and central Asia at this time, including one incarnation of Ishtar.
This is a photo of me standing in the fortress of Giresun, not far along the coast from the site of Themiscyra. Behind me is the 'Island of the Amazons' which appears in the Argonautica of Apollonius Rhodius. He links it firmly with the Amazons. He wrote:
they went to the temple of Ares to offer a sacrifice of sheep and in haste they stood around the altar, which was outside the roofless temple, an altar built of pebbles, within which a black stone stood fixed, a sacred thing, to which of yore the Amazons used to pray. Nor was it lawful for them, when they came from the opposite coast, to burn on this altar offerings of sheep and oxen, but they used to slay horses which they kept in great herds.
The Amazons were known as 'daughters of Ares' and were usually associated with horses (their names often have the Greek word for horse - 'hippos'- in them, as in 'Hippolyta' and 'Melanippe'), so maybe there is some truth in Apollonius's tale. Certainly the whole area around Samsum and Giresun is a treasure-trove for anyone wanting to investigate the Amazon myth.