Ana Esfandiari is an American filmmaker whose main concern is to make films with substance and integrity that teach and inspire while maintaining a character-centered focus. She received an AA degree in Liberal Arts from Los Angeles Pierce College, a BA degree in Communication from The University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB) and an MA degree in Video from Middlesex University in London. She aspires to make documentaries as well as dramatic feature films. She is currently researching one of her areas of interest: Pre-Islamic Persian History, Persian Mythology, the Amazons of Greek Mythology and the Origins of Pre-Imperial Iranian Peoples. The Medes, also known as the Medians, were an ancient Iranian people. Ana is half Azeri on her maternal side so she may have some Median blood coursing through her veins. She is most definitely a mixture of Persian and Scythian. On her paternal side, one of her ancestors was the installed Sassanid King, Jamasp. He was king for only two years. He stepped down from his position so as to restore the throne to his brother, Kavadh I, who had preceded him as king. He left for the Pontic Steppes (Ukraine) in the 5th century, some time during or after the year 498, for religious reasons (he was a very pious Zoroastrian). Ana’s family stayed there for two hundred years before returning to their motherland – the Land of the Aryans – the Land of the Iranians. The first five letters in the word Median spells “media” which ties in nicely with film since film is a medium – a channel or system of communication, information, and/or entertainment. Medium also means something in the middle position, likewise “median” means in the middle or intermediate position. She is neither an inexperienced filmmaker nor is she a highly experienced filmmaker – she is in the middle. It should now be clear why she selected “median films” for the URL address of her website. Ana’s favorite figure from Persian Mythology is Gordafarid - one of the heroines in Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh. Gordafarid – resembling the classic image of an Amazon - is a very bold woman usually clad in armor like a man. In the unique pastoralist equestrian warrior society of Sakas/Scythians (nomadic Iranians of the steppes), women fought alongside men. However, these young warriors, as evidenced by the archaeological remains of their costumes and jewelry, remained “feminine as well as female”. In recent years, kurgans wherein Iranian female warriors have been entombed for countless centuries, lend credence at last to Greek mythic tales of mounted Amazons. It is generally agreed that the capital city of the Amazons was Themiscrya, in Pontus, on the banks of the River Thermodon in central northern Turkey. Many writers place Amazon country in the Caucasus Mountains east of the Black Sea (formerly known as the ‘Sea of Amazons’) way up into the steppes of the Ukraine and Russia. Others place it in the plains near the Caspian Sea, between Caucasian Albania (southern Dagestan and most of Azerbaijan) and Caucasian Iberia (eastern and southern parts of Georgia). From their Thermodon base, the Amazons made war against the people of Scythia, Asia Minor, the islands of the Aegean Sea such as Crete and Samothrace, and perhaps even lands as far-flung as Syria, Egypt and India. Legend has it that the Amazons were beautiful, bloodthirsty warrior women thundering across arid battlefields. The name Amazon is probably derived from the Iranian ethnonym, ha-mazon-, originally meaning “warriors”. Herodotus called them Oiorpata (“man-killers”). He clearly writes that the Amazons are maternal ancestors of Sarmatians, an Iranian people akin to the Scythians, inhabiting the edges of Scythia in Sarmatia. The first literary reference to the Amazons is made by Homer who wrote around 750 BC about events that are thought to have happened around 1200 BC, just before the fall of Mycenae and the decay of Crete. In the Iliad, Homer writes that the Amazons fought in the Trojan War. The Trojan king, Priam, describes the Amazons as being women the equal of men. The wild-eyed ferocity and savagery of the Amazons caused the Argonauts to dread them more than the armies, kings, monsters and magic spells that they were all about to face. According to J. Vurtheim, the Amazons were of Greek origin: “all Amazons were Dianas, as Diana herself was an Amazon”. The colonizing Greeks and the wandering Scythians who met up in the steppe lands of the Ukraine got on well enough to live together in the Black Sea colonies, where they traded as well as influenced each other’s art, and where they no doubt intermarried furiously. There is a myth that Herodotus tells us about Hercules in Scythia. While Hercules is searching for his lost horse, he meets a snake-woman, structurally a typhon (top half woman, bottom half snake), who promises to return his horse if he agrees to sleep with her. He obliges and begets three sons, one of which not only grows up to use his father’s bows and girdle, but becomes the progenitor of the Scythian race. This here is a classic case of patriarchal hero meets the uroboric Great Mother. The Greeks were well aware that women were a force to be reckoned with: deep down they must have known their patriarchal idyll would not last forever and that they would rudely be roused from peaceful slumber by the chthonic energies evoked by big barbarian Amazon women! One of the accounts as to where and how the Amazon culture came into being involves two Scythian royal brothers, Hylinos and Scoloptos, who were banished along with a large entourage of family members, slaves, and other followers. These princes marched their citizens to the Caucasus and up the foothills. They plundered and stole, making themselves generally loathed by the indigenous people who decided to fight back. The locals succeeded in wiping out nearly the entire male population of Scythian men, leaving behind a “nation” of displaced females and children. The women, though grief stricken, were not prepared to throw in the blanket, so to speak. They refused to be absorbed into the communities of the murdering enemies and instead turned their rage against their neighbors, and men in general, by fighting. This took a toll on the population and, in due time, they found it necessary to replenish their numbers. These women decided to make a truce by fornicating with the “enemy”. They may have had a yearly agreement to meet with the neighboring Gargareans for sexual relations aimed at providing them with offspring. Another account chronicles the end of the Amazons. Herodotus tells us that when the Greeks tried a second time to destroy the Amazons, they mounted a serious attack against them on their home ground at the Battle of Thermodon. This time, the Greeks were successful. They took three shiploads of prisoners before setting sail for home. Though the Amazons were defeated captives, they were not subdued. As the ships made way across the Black Sea, the Amazons staged an uprising against the ships’ crew, getting rid of each and every Greek that manned the ships by throwing them overboard to their doomed fate. The Amazons were now free, in a sense, but they were not free of trouble. Without crewmen alive with knowledge of the vessels, they were soon hopelessly floundering on a stormy and unforgiving sea. At the mercy of the winds, they drifted into the banks of Cremni – the land of the Scythians. As they marched inland in search of inhabitants, they soon discovered a herd of horses grazing which they mounted and rode. They were starving so they stole cattle. They soon caught the attention of the Scythians with the ruckus they had raised as they galloped and pillaged the countryside. The Scythians mistook them for a rowdy bunch of men so they rounded them up and engaged them in battle. The skirmish was brief since the Amazons were unarmed. It is only after the horse-riding marauders were dead that the Scythians realized they were women! Once the Scythian leaders had heard about these brave, bold women, they demanded that remnants of the Amazons be found so that young Scythian men could marry them. Once found, the Scythian men made it clear to the Amazons that they had come in peace. Their proposals of marriage were met with flat refusals. In time, relations between the two groups softened and they were able to live on peaceful terms. However, the young Scythian men wanted to return to their homeland. The Amazons refused to go back with them as their proper wives. Instead, they suggested to the men that they return home to collect some of their parents’ property as an inheritance, followed by their return to the Amazons to resume a life of unmarried bliss. Meanwhile, the Amazons had softened up quite a bit. When the men returned, the Amazons suggested that they all move to a land on the other side of the Tanais (Don) River. The Amazons were never again to return to Themiscrya. They moved into the steppes to a place which is now known as the land of the Sarmatians. The offspring of the Amazons and the Scythians were the Sarmatians. In the eastern ‘Sarmatian’ parts of the Ukraine, above the sea of Azov near the Molochnaya and Dnieper rivers, there are graves of women that date from the 5th century BC and the first half of the 4th century BC. This is exactly the area where Herodotus’ Amazons are supposed to have migrated after they teamed up with the young Scythian men. Albeit archaeologists have found weapons within the graves of Sarmatian women, they are not the kinds of weapons one would expect Herodotus’ Oiorpata or man-killers to have – the only fighting weapons found are bent swords, thus suggesting ritual use. In the town of Pokrovka, Russia, near the Kazakhstan border, a different team of archaeologists have unearthed the 2,500-year-old remains of Sarmatian women alongside an array of weapons and other articles of war. There is clear and undeniable evidence that there were women warriors, though no doubt some were also priestesses, living in the steppe regions north of the Black Sea during Classical Greek times. An estimated 25% of Scythian and Sarmatian warrior graves found in the Ukraine belong to women. The oldest Amazon grave documented has been found in ancient Colchis (eastern Georgia), which dates from the end of the second millennium BC. After the battle of Issos, in 333BC, Alexander the Great succeeded in bringing all of Asia Minor under his rule. Diodorus tells us of an incident which occurred when Alexander returned to Hyrcania (“Land of the Wolves”). The Queen of the Amazons at the time was Thalestris. She ruled the Amazons who lived between the Caucasus and the Phasis River in Georgia. Thalestris marched with some 300 Amazons to Alexander’s camp. He received the queen and listened to her proposal to have him father a super-hero girl-child by her. Alexander must have liked the sound of the offer for he agreed to it. Subsequently, the pair spent a period of thirteen days and nights together, thirteen (half a menstrual/moon cycle) being a sacred number to the Amazon moon-worshipers. At the end of this period, Thalestris believed that she was indeed pregnant for she decided to leave the camp. Alexander moved on with his army to Parthia. According to Diodorus’ account, however, no child was borne from their efforts and Thalestris perished in a battle shortly thereafter. Centuries later, Plutarch writes of the tale, citing many other authors, some of whom reported the story as historical fact, while most assumed it to be fantasy. This story may have arisen from another tradition that tells us Alexander was offered a Scythian princess in marriage. Alexander refused to marry her but if this indeed happened then it might have been the kernel from which the Thalestris legend grew. The real Thalestris may have been a nomadic warrior-princess from Bactria offered to Alexander by her father in about 329 BC. The Massagetae were an Iranian people of antiquity known primarily from the writings of Herodotus. Tomyris was queen of the Massagetae, a people close to the Scythians in their love of horses and war as well as in the way they dressed and lived. They had promiscuous sexual customs and their homeland was in what is now Iran. In Herodotus’ account, the Persian king, Cyrus the Great, encountered Tomyris when he was building his empire, and captured her son, Spargapises, by playing a trick on him. When Spargapises was released, he committed suicide in shame. Herodotus goes on to say that the battle between Tomyris’ troops and those of Cyrus was the fiercest between non-Greeks there has ever been. Most of the Persian army was wiped out and Cyrus was killed, too. After the battle, Tomyris ruthlessly searched out his corpse and, when she found it, shoved his head into a wine-skin filled with human blood to avenge the death of her son! The Persians later won the battle and recovered Cyrus’ body. Tomyris is considered to be one of the last Amazons. The Persian Empire was burgeoning in the east under Darius I. The Persians were seen as barbarian, smooth-faced trouser-wearers in funny hats that threatened the basis of Greek civilization. The Persians seemed like effeminate men; the Amazons were like masculine women. They both dared to challenge the Greeks on their own ground and they both reeked of a different way of life that both attracted and repelled Athenian Greeks. After the excursions of the Amazons to Persia, their dress began to show aspects of Persian influence. Their short tunics became longer covering their bodies with spotted or striped close-fitting sheaths underneath, and their crested helmets got replaced by hats which resembled those worn by Persians at the time. What seems to bolster this argument are the costumes that have been pieced together of Scythian Amazons which are not far different from the illustrated Amazons on Greek vases – all of which suggest that some of these scenes may have come from real life. The Amazons may have originally come from Scythia. There is a theory that the main waves of horse-riding Indo-Europeans came into Asia Minor and Greece via the south coast of the Black Sea, so as to avoid the mountain route to Greece. If one of these groups had a female leader who had some female soldiers in her army, then maybe she deserves the title of Amazon queen. There are several theories for the existence of the Amazons but, thus far, only a nugget of factual basis for Amazon warrior woman has been found in connection with Sakas/Scythians and Sarmatians. It is likely that these Amazons may not be the same as the ones that flourished in the Bronze Age, just before the time of the Trojan War in 1200 BC. Nevertheless, seeing as how Scythian and Sarmatian warrior women are traceable historically, Ana is determined to some day make a factually based historical drama about the Amazons. The heroes of yore had to slay the female monster – whether she took the form of a dragon or an Amazon. Such things have been known to happen in the name of progress but something always gets lost along the way. We must go back and retrieve some of what has been lost because some of that awareness and appreciation must re-enter our collective consciousness, for us to, perhaps, do something new and different with it. The heroes and heroines of today face a new dragon fight (the egoic structure itself). Just as the male once rescued consciousness from the chthonic matriarchate, the female might today help rescue consciousness from the mental-egoic patriarchate.
To be firmly grounded in the present, one must embrace one’s past without dwelling in it. We are all created equal that is why it is our innate will to fight for our inalienable right which is for each and every one of us to be seen for what we really are – equal to one another in the Eye or, rather, I of Spirit. My fascination with the past is in how it shapes and forms the present and, unless mended, the unbending legacy of the past will carry on into the future. –- Ana Esfandiari |
