Ancient stories that shaped history

The story of a race of warrior women first appeared in Greek mythology, but excavations across the north and east of the Black Sea region revealed that worrier women like the Amazons really existed.

• In December 2019, the graves of four female warriors from the 4th Century BC Sarmatian region were found in the village of Devitsa - now Western Russia.
• Excavations within the modern borders of Iran have revealed the existence of female warriors.
• Experts have identified depictions of women in battle with Greek men on vases and other ceramics.
• By the 470s, the Greeks began to refer to representations of the Persians as the Amazons.

According to Herodotus, a 5th-Century Greek writer and geographer, the Amazons maintained an idyllic all-female existence in modern-day Turkey. The women pillaged the Persian Empire and procreated with neighbouring tribes, raising the baby girls.

They met their fate in a battle against the Greeks in Thermodon. The Amazons eventually entered Scythia near the Black Sea and joined forces. Their descendants are the Sarmatians.

... are crucial elements of wisdom, realism and maturity. Our love stories excite us to expect things of love that are neither very possible nor very practical.

We learn to judge ourselves by the hopes and expectations fostered by a misleading artistic medium.

Emma Bovary in Madame Bovary (1856) spent her childhood immersed in Romantic fiction. As a result, she’s expecting that her husband will be someone who understands her soul perfectly.

When she does get married to the kind, thoughtful but human. But she is quickly bored by the routines of married life. She is convinced that her life has gone profoundly wrong for one central reason: because it’s so different from what the novels she knows told her it would be.