Iranians and Greeks in South Russia - Robert Bedrosian's Armenian ...

34
THE PREHISTORIC CIVILIZATIONS
Supreme Goddess of the banks of the Dnieper, the mother of the
mythical Scythian chiefs. She appears, therefore, to have been a
Mother Goddess, goddess of the productive forces of Nature, hke
the Mother of the Gods and the Potnia Theron of Asia Minor.
As far as I know, almost all students of the Amazonian legend, led
astray by the semi-historic character of the story, have been induced
to explain it by an historical misconception. The beardless Hittites
that is the latest explanation—were taken for women and so gave rise
to the legend. Others consider that the Cimmerians were, so to speak,
the proto-Amazons. Nothing is less likely. Why not adopt a much
simpler explanation } The Amazons are localized wherever there
was an ancient cult of the Mother Goddess ;
—
wherever that cult was
connected, as it regularly was, with a social and political organization of
matriarchal type ; wherever women were not only mothers and nurses,
but warriors and chieftains as well. The matriarchal stratum and the
cult of the Mother Goddess are very ancient in Asia Minor. They are
the mark of the pre-Semitic and pre-Indo-European population—the
autochthonous population, if we care to use the word. Semites and Indo-
Europeans brought with them patriarchal society and the cult of the
supreme God. This cult imposed itself on that of the Mother Goddess,
but did not destroy it, least of all in Asia Minor. With the cult of the
goddess, the Amazons, her warrior priestesses, likewise survived.
Not only the cult of the Mother Goddess, but also the matriarchal
structure, persisted for a very long time in certain places, especially
on the shores of the Black Sea—in the immediate neighbourhood of
the Greeks—among the Sindians, the Maeotians, the Sauromatians,
and, in the Crimea, among the Taurians, who sacrificed travellers to
their Parthenos, their virgin goddess. It is quite natural that the
Greeks, who created the legend of the Amazons on their first contact
with the matriarchal tribes of Asia Minor, should have made the
Amazons of Asia Minor emigrate to South Russia and the Caucasus,
where matriarchy, the cult of the Mother Goddess, and the specific
ritual of that cult remained in full vigour.
This somewhat lengthy digression was necessary in order to show
that the Sauromatians, the Sindians, the Maeotians, and the Taurians
were really the oldest inhabitants of the Kuban, and that it was probably
they who created the civilization of the copper age, and who were
able to infuse it into their conquerors, the Cimmerians, and later the
Scythians. To show, also, that civilized life never ceased on the banks of
the Kuban, and that the Maeotian tribes were the element in the population
which developed that civilization, under the influence of their neighbours,
often their masters, the Cimmerians, the Scythians, the Greeks.