Recently, someone asked why I like writing about fierce female warriors.

Because they were real women

For generations, we’ve been told that women warriors were the stuff of fantasy—convenient plot devices in Greek epics, symbols rather than people. But what if the most radical thing about the Amazons wasn’t that they existed in myth, but that they may have been inspired by actual women who lived, fought, and died on their own terms?
The archaeological record is telling us a story that challenges everything we thought we knew about ancient gender roles. And it’s far more interesting than the myths.

When Graves Tell the Truth

Here’s what we know: In the burial mounds scattered across the Eurasian steppes, archaeologists have found the remains of women interred with weapons, armor, and battle scars. Not occasionally. Regularly. These weren’t ceremonial objects or symbolic gestures—these were working weapons, worn by bodies that show evidence of the kind of injuries you get from combat and hard riding.
These women were Scythians, members of nomadic tribes who dominated the steppes from roughly the 9th century BCE to the 1st century CE. And they weren’t just present on the battlefield—they were integral to it.
Recent archaeological and DNA analysis has revealed that many of the so-called “warrior graves” previously assumed to contain men actually contained women. For decades, archaeologists made assumptions based on grave goods—weapons meant warriors, warriors meant men. We’re now correcting centuries of misidentification.

Function over Gender

What made Scythian culture remarkable wasn’t just that women could fight—it’s that their society seems to have organized itself around functional roles rather than rigid gender categories. If you could ride a horse and draw a bow (essential skills for steppe nomads), you were valuable, regardless of your sex. This isn’t a story about women “proving themselves” in a man’s world. It’s a story about a world built from the ground up.
Take Tomyris, the Scythian queen who defeated Cyrus the Great of Persia in 530 BCE. Historical accounts portray her not as an anomaly but as a ruler who commanded respect through strategic brilliance and military prowess. When Cyrus killed her son through deception, her response was swift and brutal. She didn’t need male approval or permission to lead armies. The question itself would have been meaningless in her context.

The Amazon Paradox

So what about the Amazons?
The answer is complicated, which makes it more interesting. The Amazons of Greek mythology—women who cut off one breast to draw a bow better, who killed male children and kept only daughters—were almost certainly Greek fabrications, designed to represent everything that threatened Greek social order.
But the Greeks didn’t invent these stories out of nothing. They encountered cultures through trade, war, and exploration, where women rode horses, used weapons, and held power. The “Amazon” legends may represent Greek attempts to process and contain the unsettling reality of women who didn’t fit into their categories.

What This Means Now and Why does any of this matter to us today?

Because the stories we tell about the past shape what we believe is possible in the present. For too long, women’s history has been presented as a slow march from oppression toward liberation, with occasional “exceptional” women who managed to break through despite their circumstances.
But the Scythian evidence suggests something more complex: that gender roles aren’t universal or inevitable, but culturally constructed and remarkably variable. There have been societies—functional, successful societies—that organized themselves around principles very different from the ones we inherited.
This isn’t about idealizing the past or suggesting we should all become nomadic horse archers (though that does sound appealing some days). It’s about recognizing that the limitations we’re told are “natural” often aren’t. They’re historical–which means they’re changeable.

The Power of Reframing

All images created on Canva

The most radical legacy of these ancient women isn’t inspiration—it’s evidence. Evidence that different ways of organizing society have existed and worked. Evidence that women’s capacity for leadership, strategic thinking, and physical courage isn’t a modern development or a feminist fantasy.
When we look at Scythian women buried with their weapons, or read about Tomyris outmaneuvering one of history’s greatest conquerors, we’re not looking at exceptions. We’re looking at what was normal in their context.
And if it was normal then, in that place, under those conditions, what else might be possible now?
The stories of these women don’t just belong in the past.

They’re part of an ongoing conversation about who gets to hold power, who gets to be dangerous, and who gets to define what’s “natural” for half the human population.

And that’s why I love writing about them.