DonRetrasado wrote:Sorry, the claims of female idols haven't been exaggerated, and there's evidence of a female priesthood. What I meant was, the claims of a matriarchal society have been (apparently) exaggerated. I never felt like there was any strong evidence for or against it, honestly, but there were almost definitely female priests, so that's neat I guess.
Ah, I see what you mean. Yeah, as far as I know it's never been proven one way or the other if there was actually a matriarchal society there. Though one could argue that the Greek myths along with accounts from Ancient Greek historians such as Herodotus* who talked about them as though they were real, coupled with archaeological evidence that there was an actual civilization there at the right time, who have been shown already to worship strong female deities, is already more evidence than other ancient history we take for granted is based off of. Especially without stronger evidence of an alternative explanation.
Remember, history isn't a science. Most of it is people looking at the evidence that's there and making a best guess. I'm not saying there definitely was a matriarchal society that the Amazons were based off of, I'm just saying based on how we do history, it's a good explanation, and stronger than the other leading theory of discounting it as mythology since it was beyond more documented areas of the time.'**
*And we get a lot of our history from ancient historians, especially in lack of better information from somewhere else. For example, everything we know about Cleopatra comes from the secondary sources, especially historians of antiquity who wrote about her.
**My issue with this is that myths don't just come out of thin air. They're inspired by something. And without a likely explanation of where else these legends could have originated from, just saying that there's not enough evidence, or that they existed in myths, I don't feel is a strong enough argument to discount the possibility that the Amazons were based off of a real, matriarchal civilization.