Amazon Warriors' Names Revealed Amid "Gibberish" on Ancient Greek Vases 

Amazon Warriors' Names Revealed Amid "Gibberish" on Ancient Greek Vases

Translations reveal Amazons\' names such as Don\'t Fail and Hot Flanks hidden in ancient "nonsense" inscriptions.

This Greek cup, dating from around 510 B.C., depicts an Amazon warrior on a horse. Scholars suggest wording on the vase names the woman Worthy of Armor in ancient Circassian.

Ancient Greek vases have revealed the hidden names of Amazons, mythology\'s warrior women, in a report deciphering ancient languages unspoken for millennia.

In the forthcoming study of pottery dating from 550 B.C. to 450 B.C., study lead author Adrienne Mayor and J. Paul Getty Museum assistant curator David Saunders translated Greek inscriptions into their phonetic sounds for 12 ancient vases from Athens. The inscriptions appear next to scenes of Amazons fighting, hunting, or shooting arrows.

They next submitted just the phonetic transcriptions without explanation to linguist John Colarusso of Canada\'s McMaster University in Hamilton, who is an expert on rare languages of the Caucasus. He translated the inscriptions into names—such as Princess, Don\'t Fail, and Hot Flanks—without knowing the details of the pictures of Amazons.

gives linguists unparalleled insight into languages last spoken more than 2,500 years ago around the Black Sea. This area was the realm of Scythian nomads, who fought and traded with the Greeks.

Essentially, the ancient Greeks seem to have been trying to re-create the sounds of Scythian names and words on the Amazon vases by writing them out phonetically, the study authors suggest. In doing so, the Greeks may have preserved the roots of ancient languages, showing scholars how these people sounded on the steppes long ago.

"I am impressed, and I find the conclusions quite plausible," says archaeologist Ann Steiner, an expert on ancient Greek vases at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, by email. The results give weight to the suggestion that Athenians first learned of Amazon legends and names from foreigners in their midst, she says.

Amazons were thought to be solely mythological until archaeologists unearthed Scythian burials of real women warriors, says Mayor, a visiting scholar at Stanford University and author of the just-released

The Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Women Across the Ancient World

"Amazons were clearly exotic and exciting to the Greeks. Clearly there is respect and admiration mixed with ambivalence," says Mayor. "Women lived much more separate and unequal lives in the Greek world, so the notion of women who dressed like men and fought like them was pretty exciting to them."

On the Amazon vases, Colarusso found an archer named Battle-Cry, a horsewoman named Worthy of Armor, and others with names such as Hot Flanks that probably had erotic connotations. On one vase, a scene of two Amazons hunting with a dog appears with a Greek transliteration for the Abkhazian word meaning "set the dog loose."

The other figures shown, such as Hercules and Achilles, were also named on the vases, leading the researchers to think the Amazon labels were meant as names, not descriptions.

The names were probably nicknames or heroic appellations given to Amazons, rather than real family names. Even today, Colarusso says, speakers of modern-day languages in the Caucasus region often use public, descriptive nicknames rather than reveal their real names.

Vases from Athens were a hot commodity in the fifth and sixth centuries B.C., traded across the Mediterranean. Often they held wine or were used as decanters during symposia, celebratory drinking parties for men. The vases were often painted with legendary scenes intended to provoke debate at the event, and a minority were inscribed with words.

Ancient vases carrying images of Amazons reflect a long-running Greek fascination with the female warriors.

More than 1,500 vases preserved from the era contain "nonsense" inscriptions that mostly use combinations of Greek letters but don\'t form words in ancient Greek (an analogy in English would be "dosud" or "hisme," which use the Latin alphabet but don\'t form meaningful words). Some of these also include depictions of women warriors.

Athenians had a long-running fascination with Amazons and began depicting them in art before 550 B.C., says the Getty\'s Saunders, a study author. After a Scythian incursion into Thrace, the region north of Greece, Amazons were more often shown wearing Scythian tunics, trousers, and hats, sitting on horses and carrying bows and axes.

Mayor realized the images on the vases matched clothes found in Scythian burials. "It all started from a hunch," she says. "What if these illiterate gibberish scribbles on ancient Greek vases depicting Amazons and Scythians meant something?"

To find out, Mayor first asked Colarusso, an expert on rare languages such as Circassian, Abkhazian, Ossetian, and Ubykh, to translate nonsense inscriptions on a vase that didn\'t have images of Amazons.

"I had goosebumps when I realized we were really deciphering sounds perhaps 3,000 years old," Colarusso says now.

The goosebumps came, in fact, from the New York Goose Play Vase, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The vase, dating to 400 B.C., depicts a scene involving a policeman and a dead goose in a basket.

On the vase, some characters speak decipherable Greek phrases, but the policeman says something that sounds like "noraretteblo," meaningless in Greek. Colarusso, blind to the scene on the vase, translated the phrase into "This sneak thief steals from the man over there" in ancient Circassian.

Remarkably, Athens is thought to have employed Scythian constables in the era of the lost play depicted on the vase, suggesting the Greeks depicted foreigners they were familiar with.

"Deciphering that very exact phrase told me we had something," Colarusso says. The languages of the Caucasus region still contain words with repeated hard, friction-filled sounds, such as "kh," he says, making them diagnosable as archaic Scythian sounds rendered phonetically in Greek phrases on the vases.

To test the translations, Mayor also sent Colarusso true Greek-inflected gibberish, which he couldn\'t translate.

In other instances, Colarusso translated words that are nonsense in Greek into phrases from other, archaic dialects. For example, without seeing the image on a vase depicting a Scythian archer next to a dog, he translated the inscribed words into "the dog is sitting by him."

"They\'ve taken a great deal of trouble to make it a really convincing case," says classicist Anthony Snodgrass of the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, who was not on the study team.

The only limitation of the study, Snodgrass says, is the small number of vases used in the research, a dozen of the 1,500 known.

"It all raises a lot of questions: Why would the Athenians want these phrases on their vases?" Saunders says. Many of the vases were exported to northern Italy, where Scythians must have been quite rare, and were found in Etruscan burials there.

All in all, the translations point to the wide interconnection of the ancient world, he says, where Bronze Age trade routes were used to carry goods from Iberia to Siberia.

"It certainly has made me a lot more careful about what I call nonsense," Saunders adds.

I like how we find these things right in front of eyes, in the museum!

That\'s really cool though I\'d reiterate that these are Scythian names, not Amazon names since Amazons are legends not real people that the Greeks encountered.... dissertation and years of study into this legend.

"Why would the Athenians want these phrases on their vases?" Why do Americans get French and Latin phrases and Chinese characters tattooed on their bodies? Because foreign words are fascinating and cool, and apparently that was true 2500 years ago, too. 

...this is nothing new. The Germans for example were called Alemani in Latin, meaning "all men" for when they fought the women would dress up like the men and join them in battle against the enemy... thus the Romans name for their tribe of "there are no women among them, they are all men".

I don\'t think those are meant to be names. It sounds more like the "names" are captions of the images on the vases, much like the marketing you might see on cups today. Set the dogs loose gives it away (there are two women in the image. If they were names, where is the other woman\'s name?"

You folks know the oldest language in Europe is Lithuanian. That is somehow connected to sandscrit.

It\'s such a marvelous aspect of our human history. It excites me as much as the sculptures do. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IS4fvVVCrsQ&list=UUGPsCIlwM_m7HhxQvjkwZ0A

\'"It all raises a lot of questions: Why would the Athenians want these phrases on their vases?" Saunders says.\'

Does it have to be any different from "Why do people want Far Side cartoons on their coffee mugs?" (even after all these years, they do!)

I walk through stores with shelves lined with vases, bowls, cups and stuff with crap written on them all the time. Why do we ascribe such lofty airs to these ancients that they wouldn\'t want "Nice Butt" on a vase, especially after we\'ve seen their ancient porn, and it\'s no different from ours?

It would be interesting to see a comparison with modern Central Asian languages as well, since Scythians,Kipchaks,Massagetae,etc. lived there before. The Greeks wrote about the Queen of Massagetae, Tomiris as well. 

If we believe the mythographers, the Amazons enjoyed their heyday in the region of Asia Minor with attacks on Greece before and after the Trojan war (1600-1000 BC).

If these cups are datable to 500 BC they could be copies of much older artifacts from that time; the Amazons were said by historians to have Cimmerian husbands whom they saw at set times and spoke the same language, and it seems they made inroads into Greece at several points

Has anyone considered that these are one of the first examples of a language learning tool to familiarize others with the Scythian language before they encountered them?  The method of showing a photo of an activity and hearing it spoken has become a standard in computer based language learning.

While Anthony Snodgrass praises this research, he dings the authors\' findings because Mayor et al. based their article on only a dozen out of perhaps 1500 known vases with "nonsense" inscriptions. Creating a larger data base would of course be desirable, but it would be a 13th labor for Hercules, if his brain matched his brawn. Mayor has already published powerful evidence that fossil remains of prehistoric animals could have influenced Greek vase painters\' depictions of monsters (The First Fossil Hunters, 2000). This article presents a dozen well-explained examples of linguistic detective work that open up a whole new interpretation of the imagery on these vases. It\'s fascinating.

A  thousand people named Shwartz smile knowingly.

This was a very interesting article - Ancient languages have always fascinated me, as well as Greek pottery/artwork.  It\'s nice to know that these things aren\'t lost entirely.

Fascinating.  I wish I knew how to do this sort of translation.  Wonderful.  Like Brick Wahl said, it would be really nice to know what feats of each woman were to be so fine as to find their way on to a vase. 

Spendid work by the Getty team here. I\'m really hoping this pans out, for Hot Flanks alone.

@Manar Doughouz Me too. I am guessing many of these "Scythians" were Colchis/Maotians; ancestors of Abkhazians-Circassians.

@Luis T. Puig actually, to find non-Greek names next to Amazons and Scythians on Greek vases is something new and rather unexpected

@Luis T. Puig interesting. i always thought it was because they drank ale

@Crys Walker that vase is fragmentary, see photo, so we don\'t have all of the inscriptions

some of the inscriptions on the vases studied describe the action or make other comments and some are "nicknames"

@helena 65 some Amazon names in ancient Greek art and literature are  ancient Iranian (Persian) . See the appendix of Adrienne Mayor\'s The Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Women across the Ancient World.

@Algis Kemezys All Indo-European languages, including Sanskrit and Lithuanian, are related to one another. English is related to Sanskrit and Lithuanian, as well as Old Church Slavonic, Romanian, Frisian, Tocharian, Hindi, Persian, Albanian, and so on. It\'s not that Lithuanian is so old, just that it preserves some old features of proto-Indo-European (as, by the way, does English, including the separation between /v/ and /w/, lost in other branches).

@Fabia Vio Yes that would be a good project to pursue if one could find qualified historical linguists of indigenous Central Asian languages of antiquity

@Fabia Vio I  wish i could figure out what Lithuania was doing at that point?

@Lawrence Freil good point. The co-authors consulted with some computer-language experts

@Lawrence Freil you mean like....monkey see, monkey do? Yes...

@michelle maskiell No one "dinged" anyone. Consider the actual words written rather than inserting your agenda.

@Jim Balter @michelle maskiell  I agree with Michelle; Snodgrass did attempt to discredit the authors\' research based on the small sample size. It\'s not an unfair criticism, but at least Michelle contributed to the intellectual discussion here by elaborating on the authors\' work rather than just inserting their own useless opinion.

@Amy Gorin @Brick Wahl LOL   good one and i think you have got it.

@James Schuessler @Jim Balter @michelle maskiell I believe that Dr. Snodgrass was simply pointing out some of the unavoidable limitations of this kind of study. 

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