A Brief History of the Amazons by Lyn Webster Wilde

***** Les matricultures sont manifestement absentes des archives historiques. The heuristic is Marie-Françoise Guèdon’s concept of matriculture (see Introduction, this Issue), specifically the following: matriculture is culture approached as a whole, taking the female world as primary and as a cultural system in the Geertzian sense of the term. This article surveys the historical record for Western perspectives regarding matricultures and introduces a summary of the evolution in outsiders’ thought about these societies ranging from the Classical era to the 21st Century. Why is this? The hypothesis of this article is that, due to the overpowering historical influence exerted by a corrupted Classical concept of the Amazon as man-killer, Western writers were unable to accurately perceive cultures where women held and continue to hold central social and cosmogenic positions (i.e.: matrilineal, matrifocal, matrilocal, or matriarchal societies).

This results in many analyses and descriptions which do not provide a reliable emic account of the matricultural community in question. Societies where women play a central role do have a presence in Western historical accounts – but mostly through words written by men who are not members of the culture and who generally fail to understand the cultural system in question (for example, the Jesuit account of the matricultural Mohawk). Combining scholarly penetration with a sense of adventure, Webster Wilde has produced a coherent and absorbing book that challenges preconceived notions, still disturbingly widespread, of what men and women can do.Matricultures are glaringly absent from the historical archive.

In the hidden world of the Hittites, near the Amazons' ancient capital of Thermiscyra in Anatolia, she unearthed traces of powerful priestesses, women-only religious cults, and an armed, bisexual goddess - all possible sources for the ferocious women.

North of the Black Sea she found archaeological excavations of graves of Iron Age women buried with arrows, swords and armour. Did they really exist? For centuries, scholars consigned them to the world of myth, but Lyn Webster Wilde journeyed into the homeland of the Amazons and uncovered astonishing evidence of their historic reality. 'Golden-shielded, silver-sworded, man-loving, male-child slaughtering Amazons, ' is how the fifth-century Greek historian Hellanicus described the Amazons, and they have fascinated humanity ever since.

A Brief History of the Amazons by Lyn Webster Wilde