Hell Hath No Fury (3 page)

Faced with this fiction, traditional historians have been able to dismiss the Amazons as pure myth. Feminist historians, too, have been uncomfortable with the Amazon story, finding it an all-too-convenient reinforcement of the inevitability of male domination, since the Amazons are always finally defeated, raped, and enslaved by or married to victorious men.

But the written accounts, ranging from the gossip of travelers and storytellers to the work of otherwise reliable historians, are too numerous and coherent to ignore. There is far more evidence, both literary and archaeological, for the existence of the Amazons than survives for other tribes such as the Hittites or the Massagetae of Iran, whose existence is unquestioned. The Amazons are described by classical writers as diverse as Pliny, Strabo, Herodotus, Aeschylus, Diodorus, and Plutarch, all of whom treat their existence as fact. In one of many such accounts, the Greek historian Herodotus reported on the aftermath of a battle of the fifth century
BCE
when the Greeks were taking several boatloads of Amazons away as slaves. Raising a mutiny on the Black Sea, the “slaves” overthrew their captors, took command of the ships, and made their escape.

Narratives like these receive historical support from the numerous rituals, sacrifices, mock battles, and ceremonials of later ages, which were confidently ascribed to Amazon origins by those who practiced them. Amazons were seen in action, too. The Romans, who never admitted women into their own armies, frequently record encountering women in the ranks of their enemies, especially those to the north of Italy, while the Scythians included women fighters in military campaigns as a matter of course. Numerous Iron Age Scythian burial sites from around 600
BCE
contain women who have been buried with their swords, spears, armor, and other trappings of war, along with more typical female items such as mirrors and spindles (essential for spinning wool into yarn, which was always women's work). At one site, the body of a girl aged between ten and twelve was found buried in full-body chain mail, which suggests that she was already trained for combat and considered fit to fight.

The original Amazons appear to have lived in Libya, where rock drawings have been discovered dating from around 2000
BCE
showing women armed with bows. During the Heroic Age of Greek civilization, around 1600
BCE
, they emerged in mainland Greece, where relief carvings and vase decorations invariably show them sporting (and cheerfully exposing) both breasts. Their heyday came around 1250
BCE
in the time of the great Greek heroes Heracles and Theseus, the latter the founding father of Athens, and just before the Trojan War of around 1200
BCE
.

The internal wars of the Greek city-states have left records of a number of real-life Amazons such as the war leader and poet Telesilla of the fifth century
BCE
. Telesilla took command of her city-state of Argos after its defeat by the Spartan leader Cleomenes and used her verses to rouse the female occupants to such fury that they attacked and drove out the enemy. She later composed a battle hymn in honor of the event, and her grateful fellow citizens raised a statue to her in the temple of Aphrodite.

The first literary reference to the Amazons is found in the
Iliad,
the ancient Greek poet Homer's account of the Trojan War, written around 750
BCE
; he describes them as “women the equal of men.” But the Greece of the classical era from about 500
BCE
onward was not interested in women's equality. When Athenians evolved the world's first “democracy,” women were specifically excluded, along with slaves, criminals, foreigners, and the insane. The gradual subjection of women throughout Greece, and indeed the rest of the civilized world, is mirrored in the story of the Amazons, whose fortunes fell as those of the heroes rose. Powerful, deadly, glamorous, gifted, and free, they represented a type of woman who had no place in the new world of father gods and men of might, and one who still has to fight for her right to exist.

Reference: Lynn Webster Wilde,
On the Trail of the Women Warriors: Amazons in Myth and History,
1999.

ARAB WOMEN WARRIORS

Seventh Century

During a fierce fight against the Byzantines in the early struggles of Muhammad, the chronicles report that the wavering forces of Islam were rallied by a tall knight muffled in black and fighting with ferocious courage. After the victory, the “knight” reluctantly revealed herself as the Arab princess Khawlah bint al-Azwar al-Kind'yya.

Even losing in battle could not break Khawlah's spirit. Captured at the battle of Sabhura, near Damascus, she rallied the other female captives with the challenge, “Do you accept these men as your masters? Are you willing for your children to become their slaves? Where is your famed courage and skill that has become the talk of the Arab tribes as well as of the cities?” Ordering each to arm herself with a tent pole, she formed them into a phalanx and led them to victory. “And why not,” the narrator of their story concluded, “if a lost battle meant their enslavement?”

This question betrays the mixed feelings of Arab and Islamic commentators about the women warriors who were an established feature of pre-Islamic culture in the Middle East. For centuries, Muslim women in different struggles and communities joined men on the front lines of war, fighting and dying at their side. Another honored battle heroine and war leader of the early Islamic era was Salaym bint Malhan, who fought in the ranks of Muhammad and his followers with an armory of swords and daggers strapped around her pregnant belly.

The list goes on. A warrior called Safiyya bint 'Abd al-Muttalib is reported on the battlefield at Uhud, one of Muhammad's early engagements, lashing about her with her weapon in her hand. The most famous female warrior of the period is the Ansari woman Nusaybah bint Ka'b, also known as Umm 'Umara. Armed with sword and bow and arrow, she fought at the battles of Uhud and Mecca in 630
CE
with her husband and two sons, and was still active at Khayber, Hunayn, and al-Yamama in 633–34
CE
.

At Uhud, fighting alongside her mother according to some accounts, she valiantly defended Muhammad when the tide began to turn against the Muslims, sustaining severe injuries in the process and later losing a hand. Muhammad himself is recorded as saying, “On the day of Uhud, I never looked to the right nor to the left without seeing Umm 'Umara fighting to defend me.”

The Prophet's own female relatives were also active in Islam's wars; his young wife, 'A'ishah, threw off her veil to take command at the Battle of the Camel, and his granddaughter Zaynab bint Ali fought in the Battle of Karbala. Another woman, Umm Al Dhouda bint Mas'ud, fought so magnificently at the Battle of Khayber that the Prophet allotted her a share of the spoils equal to a man's.

Not all women accepted Muhammad's cause. Many fought against Islam as it set out to replace the existing faith in the Great Goddess with the insistence on one father God. Countless women who worshipped “the Queen of Heaven,” “the Lady,” and “the Mother of Life and Death” took up arms to resist. Foremost among them was the Arab leader Hind al-Hunnud, who led the opposition of her tribe, the wealthy and powerful Qu'raish, to the forced imposition of Islam.

The climax of her campaign came at the terrible Battle of Badr in 624, where she succeeded in exchanging blows with Muhammad himself, but her father, uncle, and brother were killed. For a time she directed a guerrilla war of vengeance, but she was eventually outnumbered, surrounded, and forced to submit and to convert to Islam. In her heyday, al-Hunnud had been not only a warrior and a leader in battle but also a priestess of the Great Goddess in the incarnation of “the Lady of Victory.” After she submitted to the will of Allah, nothing more was heard of this brilliant and unusual woman.

Despite defeats like this, the tradition of women fighters in the Arab world was slow to die out. The twelfth-century memoirs of the Syrian notable Usama bin Munqidh describe the women combatants of his own day, including his mother. In fifteenth-century Yemen, the Zaydi chieftain Sharifa Fatima, daughter of an imam, conquered the city of San'a, and as late as the eighteenth century, Ghaliyya al-Wahhabiyya led a military resistance movement in Saudi Arabia to defend Mecca against foreign incursions.

But the tide of repression had long been turning against women warriors. Islamic authorities began to question the martial activities of their own women warriors who had helped Muhammad to victory, and later chroniclers made much of the case of an obscure woman companion of the Prophet by the name of Umm Kabsha, who is said to have been refused permission to accompany Muhammad in battle. This was taken to mean that the earlier permission given to women to participate in battles had been withdrawn.

As the oppression of women under Islam gathered strength, male religious authorities concluded that women could take no part in jihad. For centuries, albeit with a few rare exceptions, the women in the East were denied basic physical freedoms and autonomy and subordinated to the control of men, destroying the heritage of women fighters at its source.

With the encouragement of generations of misogynists and fundamentalists, the insistence that only men could fight or participate in a holy war hardened into dogmatic certainty. This view was revised as soon as the male war makers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries realized the potential of the burqa-clad female body to carry explosives undetected, and thereby to advance their cause (see
Suicide Bombers,
Chapter 10).

Reference: Azizah al-Hibri,
Women and Islam,
1982.

BOUDICCA

British Queen, d. 61
CE

Dubbed by the Romans “the Killer Queen,” Boudicca became the ultimate symbol of the fighting Amazon, despite having only the briefest of military careers to her name. She leaps into history for one short campaign, blazing like a comet across the sky with her enduring cry of “Death before slavery!” before falling into oblivion. But in the space of a few months, she succeeded in giving the Romans one of the greatest shocks their vast empire ever faced, driven to make war by a series of insults and cruelties so savage that all the tribes of East Anglia rose in rebellion and flocked to her side.

Boudicca was queen of the Iceni, one of the most powerful tribes in Europe, based in the modern English counties of Norfolk and Suffolk. Women fighters were a continuous element of Celtic culture, and the Celts had many war goddesses, two of which—Boudiga and Andraste—Boudicca invoked for victory.

Boudicca's tragedy was to face the invading Romans as a female ruler in a society whose women enjoyed exceptionally high status and whose queens often ruled in their own right (see
Cartimandua,
Chapter 1). Celtic queens were seen as embodying the spirit and sovereignty of the land, and as women, their royalty was only a step away from the divinity of the Great Goddess, who was worshipped everywhere.

Boudicca's link with the Great Goddess is evident in her name, which derives from
bouda,
or victory, investing her with all the force of the goddess in her warlike incarnation as Boudiga, “the Lady of Victory” (see
Arab Women Warriors,
Chapter 1). The Romans by contrast denied their women almost all legal or civil rights. Faced with Celtic queens, they insisted on imposing their own rules. When Boudicca's husband, Prasutagus, died in 61
CE
, leaving her with two young daughters, Roman law did not permit royal inheritance to be passed down in the female line. In addition, the Celtic royal households were stocked with cattle, grain, jewelry, and gold; the chance was too good to miss. Looting and pillaging, the Romans attacked the palace and hauled Boudicca out to be stripped and flogged. Next she was forced to watch while her two young daughters were raped by the soldiery.

This was more than simple physical abuse. As females, Boudicca's daughters shared the divinity that attached to women of royal birth. Rape destroyed their virginity and thereby robbed them of their special powers, making it impossible that they could ever claim priestess status or inherit their mother's semidivine role.

To the Celts, the insult was intolerable. All the tribes exploded in revolt. “The whole island [of Britain] now rose up under the leadership of Boudicca, a queen, for Britons make no distinction of sex in their appointment of commanders,” recorded the Roman historian Tacitus, whose father-in-law, Agricola, as a senior officer, encountered Boudicca on the battlefield.

Boudicca's perceived divinity may explain the passion and courage of her followers. Her appearance in battle seems to have struck fear in friend and foe alike, as the Roman historian Dio Cassius described her, writing a century later:

[She was] tall, terrifying to look at, with a fierce gaze and a harsh, powerful voice. A flood of bright red hair fell down to her knees; she wore a golden necklet made up of ornate pieces, a multi-coloured robe and over it a thick cloak held together by a brooch. She grasped a long spear to strike dread in all those who set eyes on her.

Dio Cassius also recorded with true Roman superiority that she was “possessed of greater intelligence than is usually found in the female sex.”

Boudicca rapidly moved her army south, where she sacked the city of Camulodunum (modern Colchester) and routed the Roman relief force. Londinium (London) and Verulanium (St. Albans) were next. Racing south from crushing another outbreak, the Roman governor in Britain, Gaius Suetonius Paulinus, reached London before the rebels but then decided that the city was indefensible. Ignoring what Tacitus calls “the lamentations and appeals” of the Roman merchants, he withdrew his forces and left the settlers to their fate.

The sacking of London was particularly savage, with most of the Celts' fury falling on the Roman women. The male inhabitants were given no quarter as the Celts swept through the city, looting and killing the settlers indiscriminately, and Tacitus estimates that seventy thousand died. But for the women, the victors reserved a special fate. They were rounded up, taken out of the city to a wooded grove sacred to the Celtic war goddess Andraste, and sacrificed to her there in an elaborate ritual of startling cruelty. Boudicca and her warriors impaled them on outsize skewers, suspended them from trees, then cut off their breasts and stuffed them into their mouths or stitched them to their lips in a ghastly parody of mothers giving suck.