Warrior Women

A couple of nights ago I was watching ‘Mama Mia’ on TV.  I have seen it on stage twice, once in Chicago and once in NYC.  But seeing it on TV was a first and I was totally enjoying it when suddenly something about Meryl Streep made me think of Amazons…warrior women.  There was something about her in a couple of scenes where her strength came shining through.  Part of it, I’m sure, was the scene and the story line, but part of it was her….as the person she is. 

For whatever reason, my mind made a gigantic leap from ‘Mama Mia’ to a show I saw on PBS a few years ago.  It was titled ‘Secrets of the Dead:  Amazon Warrior Women’ and featured the work of Jeannine Davis-Kimball.  Ms. Davis-Kimball is an archeologist whose work eventually led her to focus on warrior women who once wandered the Eurasian steppes some 2,000 years ago and provides a historical basis for the myth of the Amazons.

The PBS documentary recounted parts of the ‘Iliad’ where the warrior women were captured by the Greeks and were put on board a ship.  In short order they killed their captors and took over the ship.  Unfortunately they did not know how to sail so drifted aimlessly in the Black Sea until they finally ran aground on the northern most shore of what is now Kazakhstan.  It was there that Ms. Davis-Kimball excavated burial mounds where she found remains suggesting a warrior woman of high rank.  The remains were in such condition that she was able to extract DNA samples.  From there she postulated that it would be possible to find direct descendants of this warrior woman among the Mongol nomadic tribes still in existence today. 

And so she began her search, driving by Land Rover across the steppes of Russia where after many months, she made her find…..a nine-year old light skinned, fair-haired, blue eyed girl  whose DNA was a direct link to the warrior queen!

This might be one of those situations where you have to see the show yourself, but that discovery gave me goose bumps.  To know that in the 21th century there is archaeological evidence that supports the existence of these fearsome women and, thus, historians and scholars have largely dismissed the ancient accounts as being purely mythological…..

Wow!!!

Enough said!