Heroes of old had encountered Amazons in the martial women’s kingdom, Themiscyra, on the southern shores of the Black Sea. Amazons had invaded Greece, their advance halted in a great battle. Herodotus related how they had been captured, carried away in Greek ships and esc...

 In the grasslands of inner Asia, from the Black Sea to western China, Scythian women had the same skills as their men: wielding bows, riding and herding animals, fighting – and dying from their injuries. Their remains have been found in tomb-mounds from the Crimea to western China.

For cen...

• These warrior women, it is reputed, lived on the river Thermedon (today's Terme), on the southern shores of the Black Sea.
• In legend, they captured men and used them as studs, rearing only female children and killing the males.
• The Amazon nation was the ultimate imagined thre...

• There is no direct evidence that Greeks actually met any 'Amazons', but a story about Alexander the Great suggests that they did
• In 330 BC, the ambitious Macedonian warrior had conquered Persia and was advancing eastward along the shores of the Caspian Sea (in present-day Iran).
...

• Around 1500, a Spaniard named Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo wrote or adapted a series of novels about Amadís, a knight-errant from the fairytale country of Gaula (unconnected with Gaul or Wales).
• In the stories, Califia was a formidable warrior, with a menagerie of 500 griffins that we...

• Archaeological finds have raised intriguing questions about the status of Scythian women.
• In 1969, a farmer noticed something glinting in newly ploughed earth near a 6-metre-high burial mound: a small piece of patterned gold.
• Renowned Soviet archaeologist Kemal Akishev came t...

• In 1993, Russian archaeologist Natalia Polosmak unearthed a body embalmed with a mix of herbs, grasses, and wool, along with a tall headdress, revealing that the body was that of a woman.
• The mummy became known as the 'Ice Maiden' or the 'Ukok Princess'.
• She was taken to Novo...

• This name has been applied to several all-female fighting groups, among them the regiment of female Soviet bomber pilots who fought in the Second World War, the most famous of whom was their founder, Marina Rasksova.
• In the 1930s, the Soviet Union was recovering from years of war, re...

In 2017, Hollywood remade the Amazon myth in a film with the tagline: “Before she was Wonder Woman, she was Diana, Princess of the Amazons.”

The link between the two legends makes a convoluted story, its origins stretching back a century to the struggle for women’s rights.

Wo...