The myth of the Amazons: Box office smash Wonder Woman celebrates the feats of an Amazonian princess. But, as a new book reveals, they were invented by the Greeks so men could write stories about crushing them

Girl power: Wonder Woman star Gal Gadot

Girl power: Wonder Woman star Gal Gadot

Strikingly gorgeous in her skimpy armour, she crashes through windows, magic shield in one hand, deadly sword in the other, her long black hair flying behind her.

She hovers, leaps, climbs sheer walls, dives from clifftops, an all-woman warrior sweeping aside mere men. This is Diana, Princess of the Amazons, newly arrived among us from the all-female land of Themyscira to be Wonder Woman and sort out our earthly woes.

Once a figure in comic books, she is now breaking cinema box-office records, pulling in almost $250 million (£196 million) worldwide in the action film’s opening weekend. The Mail’s film critic welcomed her this month with an exuberant ‘Wham, bam, thank you ma’am’.

Pure fantasy, of course, but perhaps a sign of the times. We could do with a superheroine to sort out our troubles.

Sadly, as a timely new book about the myth of the Amazons reveals, superheroines have never been quite what they seemed.

It is one of the most enduring legends in human history. We are all familiar with the story of a literal no-man’s land ruled by fierce, virginal warrior women who cut off their right breasts to facilitate the swift dispatch of arrows from their death-dealing bows.

But according to author, anthropologist and historian John Man (an unfortunate surname, in the circumstances) this is all ‘rubbish, nonsense, balderdash, twaddle and totally daft’. Because such women didn’t exist. They were a figment of men’s imaginations.

The Amazons, he argues, were invented some 2,750 years ago by men in classical Greece, who made up graphic tales about a tribe of superwomen simply to show how terrific men were in conquering them, first on the battlefield and then in bed.

From the 7th century BC, stories abound of these aggressive women from distant lands beyond the Black Sea who mate once a year, smother their boy children at birth and train their daughters to hunt, ride and make war. But for all their prowess and strength, they meet their match in Heracles (aka Hercules in his Latin form), who kills their Queen, Hippolyte, and steals her symbolic golden girdle.

In other heroic stories it is Theseus, the founder of Athens, who destroys the Amazons, only for them to re-emerge centuries later in Homer’s tale of the Trojan Wars, the Iliad.

In this version, Hippolyte’s sister, Penthesilea — whose beauty ‘frightened and dazzled’ — is eventually impaled on a spear (phallic symbol alert) by Achilles, the bravest of all Greek heroes.

But that wasn’t the end of the Amazons. Alexander the Great supposedly ran into them in the Caucasus when he trekked east in search of India, and bedded their queen at her request so she could conceive. Her passion was such that, according to the Greco-Roman essayist Plutarch, ‘13 days were spent in satisfying her desire’ before a presumably exhausted Alexander could move on.

The Amazons’ supposed history is not only a matter of written record. Classical sculptors got in on the act, and the British Museum has stone friezes brought back from Greece by the Victorians in which Amazonian heroines in diaphanous dresses fight naked Greek men.

In fact, the Amazons crop up so often in Greek history-cum-mythology that they amount to an obsession, according to Man.

Why? Because Greece was a rampantly masculine culture in which women always needed to be reminded of their place.

Get feisty and pugnacious and we men will slap you down every time. That, in fact, is the message of the Amazon myth.

‘The whole Amazon industry was an exercise to shore up the Greek male idea of themselves,’ says Man. But, as so often with myths, there was a grain of truth behind them.

For just beyond the civilised world as the Greeks knew it lay Central Asia, where nomadic tribes known as Scythians rode across the vast plains and steppes of what is now Russia and Kazakhstan, stretching as far east as Mongolia.

Travellers must have brought back tales of how, in some of these tribes, women played a more equal role. Like their men, they rode horses and were hunters, helping to protect their flocks and families from all predators.

Greek men in Men in combat with Amazons mounted on horseback

Greek men in Men in combat with Amazons mounted on horseback

And they went into battle, as the archaeological record shows. Burial mounds discovered in modern times contain the remains of women decked out as warriors and buried with quivers of arrows, battleaxes and lances. They have arrow and sword wounds on their bodies from fighting.

In one area, Russian archaeologists found that seven out of 40 graves with weapons in them belonged to women. One had a metre-long sword. A few were buried with legs bent, as if they were riding a horse into the afterlife. The presence of arrowheads implied they had mastered shooting from a moving horse.

They were almost all young, from which it can be deduced that some Scythian women trained and fought as warriors as teenagers, but were taken off military duties when they bore children.

These, then, were the real-life Amazons — not the female-only nation invented by male Greek fantasists to boost their self-esteem, but multi-tasking women sharing duties with their menfolk.

They provide the actual roots of the legends that Greek men latched on to and embellished.

Not that stories of the Amazons ended with the Greeks and Romans. They had become so compelling that later cultures seized and built on them.

One common feature is that all the legends place these powerful, threatening women just beyond the limits of the known world at the time, in a limbo where anything was possible.

Consequently, as that world expanded and extended, so the mysterious lands of the Amazons shifted geographically, too.

By the 15th and 16th centuries, the idea of Amazonia was so ingrained in Western culture that adventurers setting out from Europe for the New World had it on their explorers’ wish-list alongside El Dorado, the land of gold.

Alexander the Great (pictured) supposedly ran into the Amazons in the Caucasus when he trekked east in search of India

Alexander the Great (pictured) supposedly ran into the Amazons in the Caucasus when he trekked east in search of India

Hernando Cortes, conqueror of Mexico, wrote to his king, Charles V of Spain, that he had heard tell of an island inhabited only by women. The women were visited at pre-arranged times by men from the mainland and when it came to giving birth, ‘they keep the female children but the males they throw away’. The island was, of course, ‘very rich in pearls and gold’.

Another conquistador, Francisco de Orellana, led an expedition into South America that was attacked by tribesmen who were reportedly led by a handful of ‘robust’ women who were ‘white and tall and have their hair very long. They go naked, with their privy parts covered and, with their bows and arrows, do as much fighting as ten Indian men’.

Believing they had entered ‘the land and domain of the Amazons’, the Spaniards gave that name to the area and the mighty river that ran through it.

But when they tried to track down these female warriors, natives told them they lived a long way away, in 70 villages ruled over by a queen.

Yet again the Amazons were over the next mountain range, beyond the next waterfall, always out of reach.

The avaricious Spanish explorers were probably just projecting their own fantasies because, Man asserts: ‘There never was a tribe of Amazons in the rainforest, any more than there was a gold-rich kingdom there’.

Still the legend lived on. Sir Walter Raleigh, the English explorer, recounted a story he had heard about how kings in what is now Guyana assembled to party and procreate with what he called ‘queens of the Amazons’.

‘For one month they feast, dance and drink of their wines in abundance; then they all depart to their own provinces,’ he enthused. ‘These Amazons are said to be very cruel and bloodthirsty. They have likewise a great store of plates of gold.’

In the increasingly enlightened centuries ahead, however, serious thinkers lost interest in the Amazons. Voltaire dismissed them as ‘nothing more than a poetic fiction’ and the 18th-century historian Edward Gibbon, author of The History Of The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire, concluded that ‘it is almost impossible that a society of Amazons should ever have existed’.

Yet in the 1920s they sprang back to life in modern form thanks to William Marston, an American writer and experimental psychologist whose special area of study was bondage and domination.

He knew all about powerful women because there were three of them in his life — a wife, a mistress and an academic assistant who also acted as lover and babysitter. They indulged in threesomes and foursomes, ostensibly for their academic research, but it was an arrangement that seemed to work for all those involved — not least, it seems, because the women wore the trousers. Based on his experiences, in 1937 Marston published a collection of self-help essays in which he declared: ‘Women have twice the emotional development, the ability for love, than men. They will clearly come to rule businesses and the nation and the world.

Sir Walter Raleigh recounted a story he had heard about how kings in what is now Guyana assembled to party and procreate with what he called ‘queens of the Amazons’

Sir Walter Raleigh recounted a story he had heard about how kings in what is now Guyana assembled to party and procreate with what he called ‘queens of the Amazons’

‘The next 100 years will see the beginning of a nation of Amazons, in a psychological rather than a physical sense.’

The Press loved it. ‘Neglected Amazons to Rule Men’ reported the Washington Post.

That same year, 1937, also saw the birth in the U.S. of a new literary phenomenon: comic books. With Superman and Batman suddenly huge sellers, a publisher hired Marston as a psychology consultant.

His first suggestion was to create a counterbalancing female superhero with the strength of Superman plus all the allure of a good and beautiful woman. The publisher was doubtful. Surely a strong woman would put men (and boys) off. ‘No,’ replied Marston. ‘Men actually submit to women now. Give them an alluring woman stronger than themselves and they’ll be proud to become her willing slaves!’

Marston agreed to write the comic strip himself and so, in December 1941, Wonder Woman burst into life — a sprinting figure in a sporty star-spangled skirt, with bracelets on her wrists and a tiara holding her dark, curly hair.

The opening text of the comic strip read: ‘At last, in a world torn by the hatreds and wars of men, appears a woman to whom the problems and feats of men are mere child’s play. With a hundred times the agility and strength of our best male athletes and strongest wrestlers, she appears as though from nowhere.

‘As lovely as Aphrodite, as wise as Athena, with the speed of Mercury and the strength of Hercules, she is known only as Wonder Woman.’

Then came a detailed explanation of how Amazons were once the foremost nation on earth, until Hercules arrived to mess things up. The survivors fled to a new island home where, blessed with eternal life, they lived in peace ‘aloof from men’ until Princess Diana fell in love with a man.

Marston’s character was an instant mass-market hit.

In January 1942, Wonder Woman became the third superhero, along with Superman and Batman, to have her own series. She has never been out of print since — and now she has made it to the big screen, the mightiest Amazon of all.

  • The Amazons: The Real Warrior Women Of The Ancient World, by John Man, Bantam Press, £20. © John Man 2017. To order a copy for £15, visit mailbookshop.co.uk or call 0844 571 0640. P&P free on orders over £15. Offer valid until June 24, 2017.