Shaman Huntresses of History and Their Animal Familiars
The image above shows a 5th Century BCE gold ring of Greek design showing a Scythian woman warrior, the inspiration for the Classical Greek myths about ‘Amazons,’ hunting with her eagle and sight hound. She wears the short toga, or battle kilt, and long cloak later adopted by Spartan, Macedonian, Mycenaean and Greek warriors and noblemen. Her horse has no bridle, but only a loose halter and no girthed saddle.
Horses have worked with humans and their hunting dogs, raptors and other animal allies from earliest times. Female shamans, eagle hunters and chieftains of the Eurasian Steppe were sometimes buried with their eagle mitts still on their hands; several have been disinterred from the frozen tundra, mummified, with all their grave goods and clothing well preserved.
The mummified eagle huntress found still wearing her leather eagle-hunting mitt, found in the Tarim Basin and dating from the 4th-3rd century BCE and held in the Urumqi Museum, is one such. She would have flown her raptor from horseback, with her sight hound or large feline, hunting techniques later awarded to the great Janyl Myrza, the legendary warrior woman, eagle huntress, chieftain and heroine of a famous Kyrgyz epic poem.
A recently discovered 9,000-year-old burial of a female hunter, and analyses of other hunter burials, suggests that early hunter-gatherer women in the ancient Americas hunted big game just as much as the men did. The findings are published in a study in the Nov. 4th, 2020 issue of the journal, Science Advances. “These findings sort of underscore the idea that the gender roles that we take for granted in society today — or that many take for granted — may not be as natural as some may have thought,” said lead author Randy Haas, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of California, Davis.
