Sep 29, 2025
Artist: Giorgos Tsolis
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Artist: Giorgos Tsolis
one of my goofy drawings + my attempt at a goddess. ngl i think it slaps ᕙ༼◕ ᴥ ◕༽ᕗ
What was the role of the female warrior in Bronze Age societies and how did it integrate with that of the man?
To answer this question I must start from some general premises: the Bronze Age - as regards the vast area that we call Eurasia and which we are examining here - developed starting from 2000 BC, in some areas slightly earlier and in others slightly later. It is characterized by being the period of maximum clash between the emerging patriarchal civilizations and the previous matrilineal and matrifocal societies. The first waves of peoples who swarmed towards present-day Europe, organized internally according to an iron hierarchy of command and who entrusted the success of their conquests to the systematic use of weapons, had begun at least 2000 years before: they were the Kurgan, of spoken by Marjia Gimbutas, and Jeannine Davis Kimball, also called – due to the languages they spoke – Indo-Europeans, or Ari. The following Iron Age marked the victory of patriarchal cultures.
This age is therefore a sort of middle period, in which interests, lifestyles, myths and religious beliefs, family and political institutions, forms of housing and role attributions linked to sex which are of opposite sign collide but also mix. Therefore, throughout the European territory, from Gibraltar to the British Isles, from Italy to Anatolia, from Scandinavia to Egypt, prevarications, violence, resistance and situations of temporary adjustment are the order of the day and give rise to more or less stable and different compromises, but nevertheless aimed at erasing the great civilizations of the Neolithic and affirming male dominance in all fields. And the battles were fought not only with fire and iron, but also with myths, which were rewritten and rearranged to legitimize the new masters, the Warlords.
Coming to the work and exceptional discoveries of Kimball they are related precisely to the world of the Kurgan, and more generally to the vast world of the Eurasian nomadic populations in the Bronze Age period, and reveal on the one hand that these societies were internally rather egalitarian with regards to sexual roles, and on the other confirm the existence of female warriors, or Amazons, whose existence up until now had only been fabled, lacking material evidence - alongside literary and pictorial evidence - of their historical reality.
Kimball, working in collaboration with Russian archaeologists, has brought to light numerous tombs (kurgans) – in some cases intact – in which women unequivocally used to riding horses, equipped with weapons and splendid clothes often covered with gold leaf and all the priestesses' furnishings. Males and children, often together, occupied the peripheral sides of these tombs. It therefore appears that, alongside the traditional role of "women of the hearth" (revealed by 75% of the tombs), the remaining 25% of tombs belonged to important warrior-priestesses and this data indicates a social and religious structure in which women were not at all marginal or submissive.
Artist Jonathon Earl Bowser