Adrienne Mayor of Stanford University, head of a research team examining ceramic vessels from 550-450 AD. BC, and the junior curator of the Getty Museum David Saunders translated the ancient Greek inscriptions on 12 Athenian vases into phonemes. The inscriptions were located next to the images of archery, hunting and fighting Amazons.
They then passed on the phonetic transcriptions of the inscriptions, without telling anything about their origin, to linguist John Colarusso of McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, a specialist in rare languages of the Caucasus. He made the translation, proceeding from the assumption that we are talking about names or nicknames: Princess, Persevere, Ognebok, etc.
The report, published in the magazine Hesperia, gives an idea of the languages spoken for over 2,500 years on the shores of the Black Sea, where nomad Scythians lived at that time, who fought and traded with the inhabitants of Hellas.
Authors of the study suggest that the Greeks tried to convey the sounds of Scythian names on vases with Amazons, recording them phonetically. Those who made inscriptions on vases managed to preserve and bring to our days the words of long-dead languages, to convey to the people of our era the idea of the sounds that once filled the air of the Black Sea steppes.
"I'm amazed, but I find the linguists' conclusions quite plausible," says archaeologist Ann Steiner, an expert on ancient Greek vases at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. This discovery confirmed the assumption of a number of historians that the Athenians, who were famous for their passion for long-distance travel, first learned about the Amazons and heard their names from foreigners.
The Amazons were considered fictional until archaeologists discovered the burial of Scythian women warriors, says Adrienne Mayor, author of The Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Women Across the Ancient World.
“The Greeks obviously respected and admired the Amazons. But the attitude of the Greeks towards them was not unambiguous, says Mayor. "Women in ancient Greece lived quite differently from men, and there was no question of equality in rights and responsibilities, so the idea that women could dress and fight like men was new and extravagant for the Greeks."
John Colarusso found on vases images of an Amazon with a bow named Battlecry, a horsewoman named Worthy Lat, and other female warriors, including Ogneboku, whose name may have erotic connotations. On one of the vases, the hunting scene of two Amazons with a dog is accompanied by a Greek transliteration of the Abkhaz expression meaning "to let the dog off the leash."
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Since other characters depicted on the vases, such as Hercules and Achilles, are signed with their own names, the researchers concluded that in the case of the inscriptions relating to the Amazons, we are talking about names, not descriptions.
However, these are not names in the modern sense, but rather nicknames or heroic nicknames. Even today, Colarusso explained, in the speech of native speakers of the languages of the Caucasus region, descriptive nicknames are often found instead of names and surnames.
Vases made in Athens were especially prized in the 6th and 5th centuries BC. They were traded throughout the Mediterranean, and wine was poured from them at symposia - feasts, in which only men could participate. In order to provoke debate among the feasting, scenes from myths were often painted on vases, while not all vessels have inscriptions.
Currently, more than one and a half thousand vases with “meaningless” inscriptions are known. Typically, they are combinations of letters from the Greek alphabet that do not form words in the Greek language. Some of the inscriptions accompany images of female warriors.
The first images of Amazons that excited the imagination of the Athenians date back to the period before 550 BC, says one of the study's authors, David Saunders. After the Scythian invasion of Thrace, bordering Greece, the Amazons were more often depicted in Scythian tunics, trousers and hats, riding a horse, with bows or axes in their hands.
Adrienne Mayor found that the clothing of the figures on the vases matches the clothing found in Scythian burials. “It all started with a premonition,” Mayor says. "What if these illiterate scribbles on ancient Greek vases with Amazons and Scythians actually mean something?"
To find out whether this is so, Mayor turned to Kolarusso, an expert in the Circassian, Abkhazian, Ossetian and Ubykh languages, with a request to translate the "nonsense." “When I realized that we had deciphered sounds recorded three thousand years ago, it took my breath away,” recalls Colarusso.
The first was a vase from the collection of the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art. The vessel, dated 400 BC, depicts, in particular, an orderly and a dead goose in a cage.
Quite intelligible Greek phrases correspond to the other characters on the vase, but the officer of the order says something illegible, meaningless in Greek. Colarusso did not see the image, but he reproduced this phrase in the Old Circassian language as follows: "This vile thief is stealing from that person over there." It is noteworthy that at that time in Athens it was customary to hire Scythians for police service.
Mayor also sent ancient Greek inscriptions to Colarusso for verification, and he was unable to translate them.
Colarusso translated inscriptions that have no meaning in Greek and into other ancient languages and dialects. For example, not seeing a vase with a Scythian archer and a dog, he translated the accompanying inscription as follows: "A dog is sitting next to him."
“It took them a lot of effort to convince me that they were right,” said Anthony Snodgrass, an ancient archeologist at the University of Cambridge, UK, who was not involved in the project.
According to him, a significant limitation is the small number of examined vases - only 12 out of 1500. “This raises many questions, one of the first - why would the Athenians write these phrases on their vases?” says Snodgrass. He also draws attention to the fact that many of these vases were delivered to the north of Italy (they are found in Etruscan burials), where Scythians could hardly be often found.
However, Snodgrass believes that Colarusso's translations are indicative of widespread intercultural and interethnic contacts in the ancient world.
"Now I will certainly be much more careful with what at first glance seems to be nonsense," adds the archaeologist.
Alexander Stolyarchuk
