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The Amazons: Lives & Legends of Warrior Women Across the Ancient World by Adrienne Mayor, out of Princeton University Press, is one of those historians' books which can't quite decide if it wants to be popular or academic history. I tend to find this annoying, in part because some parties in my field use it to make historical arguments to other professionals without professional citation practice. To her credit, Mayor has not done this; the book is endnoted and festooned with an extensive bibliography.

The main argument Mayor makes is that the "amazons" of Greek mythology are not akin to mythology about centaurs and so on, but refer with their varying accuracy and fantasy to a specific and real group of people, mostly women of the Scythian/Saka people, but confused to different extents with other nomadic Central Asian cultures in which women frequently fought. We can tell because visual depictions from very early Greece accurately and consistently portray Saka clothing, weapons, and body modification, Amazons in visual and literary media frequently have names otherwise attested in Central Asian languages, and the material culture discernible in the Greek images and writing matches the archaeology the better the more the archaeology progresses, and the archaeology includes substantial numbers of female graves with weapons, armor, and healed injuries from combat all similar to men's (iirc something like a full third of identified female graves, far outstripping cases like the Vikings where female warrior graves are known but rare).

This is an academic argument I have participated in albeit about for a much later period, which in this case, hopefully, will help me explain this book. Despite framing her argument in this way, Mayor has actually ransacked just about every credible and semi-credible story about women participating in combat in Eurasia from the Ancient World, every archaeological site, and a lot of much later stuff that should be eliminated simply because what people were doing in the nineteenth century Caucasus can't possibly be evidence for three thousand years before...

Except in the highly specific topic of "female combatants," it kind of is! Under the pernicious influence of Victorian historiography, much of the history profession maintains that stories about women in combat are hilarious and obviously false, with varying degrees of sophistication and tact in their particular comments. The slightly more nuanced version holds that this has changed because of the industrial revolution and/or birth control and/or the totally unprecedented invention of feminism and/or something else in the last 150 years; some of the perpetratrs genuinely do not seem aware of the present existence of female soldiers. So it becomes a sort of black swan situation: you just need one black swan to knock down the "total impossibility" argument, no matter where it comes from, and then you can go and look at the ceramic vessels from the Bronze Age and make your case that if there are women warriors ANYWHERE pre-industrial they could be here!

So I understand why Mayor tried to tackle everything and I'm sympathetic to it, but the book is very long, somewhat repetitive, and while it's clear in every specific incidence whether we're talking about mythological women or historical women or archaeology, I felt that it probably could have cut the two thirds of the book that consist of summarizing every amazon myth and semi-historical account Mayor could find without losing much and been a better book. Also, she says some silly things I find annoying, like that women were able to fight on the steppes because of the equalizing factor of the horse and bow or in China because of martial arts (???); presumably this is why she didn't go into the Viking graves, although it's just as silly when she regularly discusses female warrior graves with lances, swords, and healed injuries similar to male wielders thereof. It additionally suffers from that common problem of feminist historiography where there has been a blind conflation of "women doing something we don't expect" with "women having greater equality and rights than we generally expect in the premodern past" with "women being actually equal;" you can make an argument for this trajectory but you have to make it! Don't just assume!

That said, somebody really needed to do the exhaustive archaeological and plausible historical list, a lot of work went into doing it here, and I am going to cite this a lot now that somebody has. So I can't really complain, and every other attempted overview I've seen on this subject has been considerably less professional. Recommended if this subject is an interest of yours, but probably not otherwise.