Bold with the bow and arrow: Amazons and the ethnic gendering of martial prowess in ancient Greek and Asian cultures.
Item
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Title
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Bold with the bow and arrow: Amazons and the ethnic gendering of martial prowess in ancient Greek and Asian cultures.
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Identifier
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AAI3334675
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identifier
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3334675
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Creator
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Penrose, Walter Duvall, Jr.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Sarah B. Pomeroy
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Date
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2008
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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History, Ancient | Literature, Classical | History, Asia, Australia and Oceania
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Abstract
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Did the Amazons of Greek Mythology exist? The answer is predicated upon the definition of the Greek term "Amazon." The Amazons are variously defined in Greek literature as a single-sex society of women, as women who crippled and disabled their male kin but used them for procreation, or simply as women warriors who lived among and fought alongside men in ethnic groups defined as Thracian, Scythian, and Sauromatian by the Greeks. Utilizing the former paradigms, Classicists have largely come to the consensus that Amazons never existed. The latter model, presented in the Epic Cycle as early as 750 BCE, has received little attention from philologists, but is well supported by the archaeological record. All too often the Amazons have been misunderstood as an ethnicity unto themselves. The term Amazon is a Greek epithet that signified a woman warrior, but not necessarily an ethnic identity, as a reference to the "Amazon Penthesilea of the Thracian race" in the Aithiopis of Arctinus suggests (apud Proclus Chrestomathia 2). A refusal of many scholars to acknowledge that the cultures of ancient Asia and even North Africa had a different gender-based division of labor, particularly with respect to martial prowess, also lies at the core of the dismissal of the veracity of the Amazons. Whereas courage in warfare [andreia] was mostly considered to be a male trait in ancient Greek thought, the societies of Asia and Libya with whom the Greeks came into contact did not necessarily share this ethnically specific gendering of martial prowess. This is evidenced by Greek anecdotes of historical warrior queens, such as the Carian Artemisia or Pheretime of Cyrene, anecdotes of women soldiers and calvary in places ranging from Media to Scythia, and even women bodyguards in Ancient India who can be verified in native texts and artwork. Even within Greece, Spartan and perhaps even Argive women were taught to use weapons, unlike their Athenian counterparts. Amazon studies to date have been largely conducted in a vacuum that fails to look outside of ancient Athens. Amazons did, indeed, exist, but they have been misunderstood for centuries.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy Restricted.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.