Xena (I confess I have a soft spot for her) is but the latest in a long line of magnificent Amazon warriors. The 'golden-shielded, silver-sworded, man-loving, male-child slaughtering Amazons' appear for the first time in Homer as 'women the equal of men' fighting at the Trojan war. Herodotus calls them 'Oiorpata' - 'mankillers'. Other writers tell us that they were crack horsewomen who used bows and arrows, and even sometimes cut off one breast in childhood in order to fire their arrows better. They lived in women-only communities, setting off once a year to meet men from a neighburing tribe and copulate with them. Of the resulting offspring they would keep only the girls, packing the boys off to live with their fathers - or, in some versions of the story, laming or killing them - so that they would not turn against their mothers.
That's the core myth, and since it was created the Amazons have had many incarnations, from Penthesilea, slain by Achilles at the Trojan War through to Xena Warrior princess, zapping the baddies with her chum Gabrielle on our TVs today. In between there were many travellers' tales which linked the Amazons with all sorts of civilisations, in Africa, Central Asia, South America and the Caucasus, to name a few. So - there are many possible sources for the Amazon myth, many clues to follow to get to the enigma which they embody - women who are like men in their strength and toughness and yet don't lose an iota of their feminine allure. Did they really exist? Browse through these pages and make up your own mind. Were the first Amazons: