Adrienne Mayor

Historian

1946-04-22

Adrienne Mayor is an American historian of ancient science and classical folklore. She is known for scholarship on ancient myths, natural history, and warfare, including work on the concept of Amazons in antiquity. She is affiliated with Stanford University as a research scholar.

Quotes by Adrienne Mayor

Historical records show that Abenakis and other Natives encountered European explorers and traders in Canada looking for sources of ivory to compete with the Russian trade in Siberian fossil mammoth ivory - these traders routinely asked about ivory 'horns' and teeth.
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I write in two very different places: my desk in Palo Alto, California, is piled high with myriad jumbled books and papers whose stratigraphy is a challenge. Summers in Bozeman, Montana, I write in a spare space, surrounded by interesting rocks and fossils instead of books, on an old oak table with nothing but my laptop.
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It's sort of fair to say that Amazons, both as reality and as a dream of equality, have always been with us; it's just that sometimes that fiery Amazon spirit is hidden from view or even suppressed.
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We know their names: Hippolyta, Antiope, Thessalia. But they were long thought to be just travelers' tales or products of the Greek storytelling imagination. A lot of scholars still argue that. But archaeology has now proven without a doubt that there really were women fitting the description that the Greeks gave us of Amazons and warrior women.
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Pictures of Amazons on vase paintings always show them as beautiful, active, spirited, courageous, and brave.
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The real Amazons were long believed to be purely imaginary. They were the mythical warrior women who were the archenemies of the ancient Greeks. Every Greek hero or champion, from Hercules to Theseus and Achilles, had to prove his mettle by fighting a powerful warrior queen.
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The nomads' egalitarian lifestyle astonished the Greeks, who kept their own women indoors weaving and minding children. The exotic Scythian lifestyle fueled the Greek imagination and led to an outpouring of myths about fierce Amazons, 'the equals of men.'
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