[sacul]

So this has been bugging me for a while. I’ve been reading a book called The Lost Sisterhood, and it talks much about the amazons. However it seems to refer to them as a culture, not a race. Whereas the regulars here probably would define Amazon as a ‘tall, buff and beautiful woman.’ So that got me wondering, how do we define the term? Are they considered a race? Or are they a warrior culture?

Me personally, I think i actually prefer the culture rather than a race. What do you think?

[khuddle]

Culture. The Amazons were racially Greek — that’s why they’re mentioned a lot
in Ancient Greek History.

[AlexG]

A cultural phenomena, which can span a range of degrees from that of a matriarchal society, where lineage is reckoned by way of through the female, and not by the male, to that of the general acceptance of the existence warrior women and/or having leadership roles within the culture – i.e. ancient Scythian, Celts and Germanic tribes, and the Norse/Vikings. Warrior woman don’t seem to have been strictly limited to Asia Minor, or Central Asia, but appeared throughout other regions of Greco-Roman contact such as Gaul, Britain, and Germania.

The Greeks, like the Romans, were patriarchal societies, and hence the general negative attitude towards the concept of such women that not only didn’t live at the dictates of men, but, if need be, were readily able to meet them in armed combat in their own defense.

Link: http://www.amazonation.com/Archaeology.html

Link (via Internet Wayback Machine): http://web.archive.org/web/20021212101324/http://emuseum.mnsu.edu/prehistory/aegean/amazons/amazonindex.html

“I like a good story well told. That is the reason I am sometimes forced to tell them myself.”
~ Mark Twain / Samuel Clemens (1907)

[unkn0wnx]

Neither. As amazon culture is a Greek myth and there were never any recorded amazonian culture. Its fiction. If there were an Amazon empire, it would had been more of culture but can be both.

[Author]

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