The roles that women held and fulfilled in societies in the past were probably as diverse as they are in the present. However, in some aspects of life women’s roles have traditionally been treated as non-existent or have explicitly been ‘written out of the story’ or actively silenced. So how can we explore those types of areas, specifically those predominantly occupied by men. Warfare has long been seen as the domain of men, and only recent changes in technological warfare and medicine (namely contraception) have evened the path for more women participating in combat and warfare. Though men were usually the main combatants on the battlefield, and western history has typically been recorded through the military exploits of kings and generals, women have always been part of, and impacted by, the wars of men. Four examples of recent publications are reviewed here, as they search for these women across Europe and Southwest Asia.

The first book is a good introduction to the search for Women and warfare in the ancient world: myth, legend and reality and gathers the mainly textual evidence about the oldest war goddesses to medieval army-leading queens. The second book, Mythica: a new history of Homer’s world, through the women written out of it teases out the information on the roles of hidden women and connects it with archaeological discoveries. Amazons: the history behind the legend draws on ancient texts and iconography to show that the myths of the Amazons had real implications for Greek society. These three books come out of the ‘classicists’ corner’ combining ancient historical texts with a near-contemporaneous archaeological record. The fourth volume delivers a contrasting position and is a compilation concerned with Gender trouble and current archaeological debates. The wide field of gender archaeology is not only introduced, with various examples of where it has been recently applied, but it also shows where the gaps are and how gender should be incorporated in future studies.

Female warriors (even as goddesses and legends) have been part of the human story for at least as long as we have had written records, and probably well before that. Women usually did not participate as much as men in the fighting, but there are exceptions. Women, again rarely, have taken charge of territories and led armies. The trend of uncovering hidden women in the past seems from a prehistorian’s perspective more a problem for the ‘written world’ and shows a bias towards the assumed higher credibility of written records over the archaeological evidence in reconstructing the past. Working in a prehistoric setting where hardly anyone has a name (due to lack of literacy) means that the cultural remains of males and females are, at least in theory but not always in practice, more ‘levelled’ in their interpretations. But, of course, archaeologists have, especially during the emergence of the discipline, tried numerous times to find the real places of ancient myths and to connect them to the named individuals. This is, in no small part, due to the curation in oral and later written records over the millennia of many of these myths to the point that they are treated almost as historical facts. These myths are dominated by patriarchal societies, created and propagated by male writers. Their power has proven to be immense as it has impacted research to this day which remains attuned to this specific gendered lens. The last book is dedicated to how we can overcome this male focus and fully engender our research of the past.

Karlene Jones-Bley. 2024. Women and warfare in the ancient world: myth, legend and reality. Barnsley: Pen & Sword; 978-1-3990-6891-8 hardback £25.

This volume builds on years of research and study of the ancient world by Karlene Jones-Biley, especially in exploring women’s roles in the many wars of the past. The book looks back to the first mention of female goddesses, delving into myths and legends to historical and more- or less-well-documented figures. It then compares this to some of the archaeological evidence, highlighting that women have always been involved in warfare, in one way or another.

The Introduction guides the reader clearly into the world of legends and explains the thought process and methodology that tries to pry open the kernels of truth behind the nebulous myths and stories, handed down and recreated over centuries. The search here is not only for the sword-wielding warrior women but also to consider different roles women may have had during battles and wars. Women had to bear the results of war in often harsh ways, even without participating in the actual fighting. They could suffer greatly through loss of loved ones, the men who provided for and protected them, or could be taken as a prize or forced into slavery. The author seeks out women in the ancient sources who can be considered as ‘others’, who did not become passive victims but actively followed a different path, such as ‘virgins, viragos and Amazons’. Their actions were not always in combat—they were also leaders, planners or logistical support during wars. The opinion that women should not fight, and war is for men, is a very old one that only in very recent times has shifted.

Six chapters move from storytelling of mythical figures and goddesses of war to legendary women, such as the Amazons, through to investigating the archaeological evidence and finally the written sources from Roman times onwards. They conclude with the early medieval period of mainly noble women and their involvement in wars. The cultural and geographical framework stays mostly within the Indo-European world.

Chapter 1 investigates the oldest war goddesses who appear in texts and images in the Near East, such as Inanna. Her earliest mention is in Sumerian and dates to the late fourth millennium BC where she is described as a warrior. She is also connected to fertility and sexuality and has a complex nature, with changing attributes and different names across space and time. Further goddesses discussed are Ishtar, Anat, Astarte, Hathor and Sekhmet who all seem to be connected to, or developed from, Inanna. All are described as beautiful and are frequently referred to as virgins but also as fierce and brutal warriors causing bloodshed. The varying cultural meanings of virginity are highlighted to better understand their definitions in the different cultures. The lives of these many early war goddesses provide the backdrop for the following classical mythologies, which are well known today.

Chapter 2 moves on to the Indo-European goddesses connected with war, namely Šauška and Arinna for the Hittites, Arədvī Sūrā Anāhitā and the Fravši for the Iranians, for the Greeks the Erinyes, Enyo, Athena and Artemis, with the Roman counterparts of the Furies, Bellona and Minerva. These are followed by Celtic ones such as Andrasta, the Morrígan, the Germanic ones such as the Valkyries and Freyja, finishing with the Indic ones, such as Durgā and Kālī. All these goddesses had complex functions, and not one is solely occupied with war. The later Indo-European deities show a closer connection to warriors and are often depicted as training, favouring or supporting them, and their army, in battle where these goddesses held a strategist/endower role. Though male deities are more common as gods of war, the many female goddesses show that early communities were familiar with themes of women engaging in wars and committing acts as cruel and violent as men.

This leads on to Chapter 3, where women as ‘Legendary figures – mortal and supernatural’ are discussed. It begins with the most famous ones, the Amazons, whose looks and lives are detailed through the eyes of their Greek opponents, leaving scholars to determine the fragments of truths in their legendary status. This process of untangling the past realities from the mythologies is also undertaken in further examples of women from the Classical, Persian, Celtic and Nordic world and beyond. The myths of female warriors and war leaders, such as the Nordic shieldmaidens or the Celtic Queen Medb are all hints that sometimes certain women joined in the battles of the past.

Chapter 4 is dedicated to the archaeological evidence. An overview of the difficulties in determining the sex of a skeleton is given and what one might expect a warrior grave to look like. The past 20 years have seen the rapid development of ancient DNA (aDNA) analysis to enable biological sex to be identified. But this expensive method needs well preserved samples to work properly and has not yet been widely employed. Recent research reveals though that a small number of Scandinavian ‘warrior graves’ from the Viking Age can be determined as being women. In addition, evidence for female warriors is increasingly being detected in the Eurasian Steppe region where some warrior burials excavated in the past can, through new aDNA analyses, be assigned to biological females. However, evidence such as weapon trauma or muscle marks on female skeletons is still rare. Indeed, for the vast region and time span discussed there are, apart from the Steppe graves, only a small number identified as warrior women. This situation may change with new research objectives and (re-)analyses but it seems to underline the exceptional status that women warriors are known for in the myths and legends.

In the last two chapters, historical sources are collated on some relatively famous women from Roman times up to 1492. The vast majority of these are royal or noble women who defended their castles or lands instead of their absent husbands or their young sons or they were pursuing religious causes, where they led the armed men but most of them did not take up arms themselves.

A short Conclusion draws the main arguments together and makes the point that some women joined the men in the actual battle but, apart from the Steppe, this was the exception. Jones-Bley argues though that the many examples detailed in her book show that the definition of ‘fighting in a war’ should incorporate a wider circle and include the women who led, supported and sometimes caused a war. The book reads well and compiles a vast amount of information about the kaleidoscope of roles of women at war in the past. It is not always a cohesive narrative but will spark an interest for more stories and research in most readers.

Emily Hauser. 2025. Mythica: a new history of Homer’s world, through the women written out of it. London: Transworld; 978-1-5299-3248-5 hardback £25.

Emily Hauser has already successfully published novels detailing the lives of the women in Homer’s Illiad and Odyssey and this book delivers a wide-ranging and scientifically grounded synthesis, written for the interested public and fellow scholars alike. The study explores and re-evaluates the well-known epics from a new point of view and investigates the female protagonists, as these Late Bronze Age oral epics were subsequently and very influentially filtered through the male-centric perspectives of Classical Athens, followed by centuries of male-dominated scholarship on the topic. These writers, poets and thinkers—who made so many fundamental creative and intellectual contributions to later western societies—also hugely reduced the original complexity, agency and importance of women in the narratives. In both epics, women are invariably either overlooked in favour of male kings, princes and warriors such as Achilles, Hector or Odysseus and are frequently given one-dimensional roles that then lead to the downfall of many of the men (e.g. Helen, Circe, Cassandra) and are often actively ordered to be silent. At the core of this book is the desire to place the women of the Late Bronze Age centre-stage, starting with the descriptions of Homer’s women and giving a vivid image of their lives and roles, drawing on the broader Late Bronze Age scholarship of the East Mediterranean and Southwest Asia in archaeology as well as in bioarchaeology, history and linguistics. The inspiring Introduction highlights the main points of the following explorations and guides the reader clearly into the frequently ambiguous source that is the starting point—Homer’s world—and combines the texts with new archaeological research and scientific results.

The 16 chapters of the book each explore a different female character of the Illiad/Odyssey and open with a brief imagined sequence from the perspective of each woman. The individuals provide the foundation for exploring roles and themes in the lives of women in the Late Bronze Age. The narrative of each chapter begins by detailing an archaeological discovery and explaining its significance, beginning with ‘Helen: the face’ and Heinrich Schliemann’s discovery of ‘Priam’s treasure’ at his excavation in Hisarlik/Troy and the nineteenth-century search for Homer’s Troy and the real Helen. The Ulu Burun shipwreck and the Amarna letters highlight the active, international networks of elite women in the chapter on ‘Arete: host’ who generously hosts Odysseus and his crew. The chapter on ‘Penthesilea: warrior’, the Amazon queen who famously fought Achilles, sees the author review the rapidly growing evidence for previously marginalised or unrecognised female-warrior graves from the Black Sea regions to Mycenae. It also reveals that the widely held myth of the Amazon warriors being single-breasted arose from the flawed etymology of the historian Hellanicus of Lesbos in the mid fifth century BC and his determination to attribute all words to a Greek origin.

The book delivers a fuller image of Homer’s women, who are often mentioned only briefly, and can now only be understood within the broader context of epics, deities and politics in the wider Late Bronze Age world. It shows how the ill-fated ‘Cassandra: prophet’, who features prominently in Cypria, a now lost epic of the Trojan war, is paralleled by the female oracles in the Hittite world. It also highlights how the goddess Athena’s gender non-conformity in appearance (‘Athena: shapeshifter’) and very active role in war can be seen in much earlier deities such as Inanna in Mesopotamia, as discussed in the book reviewed above. The author uses this to demonstrate how the presence of what modern scholars have categorised as ‘male’ and ‘female’ grave goods in excavation of the Griffin warrior, a biologically male burial discovered near Pylos in 2015, is much more a reflection of our binary perspectives than past realities. More mundane female roles are provided as examples in the chapters of ‘Andromache: wife’, ‘Calypso: weaver’ and ‘Eurycleia: handmaid’.

In some sections, the often-overlooked female scholars who have transformed our understanding of the past are effectively highlighted. One of them is Alice Kober, whose premature death in 1950 at the age of 43 meant that her fundamental work towards the deciphering of the Linear B script did not share in the worldwide recognition accorded to Michael Ventris only two years later. The deciphering of the tablets opened up a further source, not one of epic poems, but of hundreds of lists of a bureaucratic administration detailing everything from production to livestock and resources, highlighted in the chapter on ‘Briseis: slave’.

The writing is elegant, precise and engaging and it creates vivid scenes and narratives, not only of the Bronze Age world but also of its re-discoveries and excavations. The reader is taken on wide-ranging journeys through the Late Bronze Age historical and archaeological worlds explored through ancient texts as well as modern investigations, always with a focus on the women of these times. Hauser deftly interweaves the various strands of past and recent research together with the myths and legends to create a tapestry of female lives. There are maps, a few drawings and photographs, a glossary and character list to help navigate the long journey. These are followed by lengthy endnotes, an impressive bibliography and extensive index for readers who want to dig deeper. It is a big book but easily enjoyed in digestible stages. I can fully recommend this read, for anyone with interest not only in living conditions of past women, the Bronze Age or Homer’s world but also to see how these ancient, epic stories still fascinate, intrigue and even touch us today, when we are brave enough to view them in a new light.

David Braund. 2025. Amazons: the history behind the legend. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 978-1-108-83449-0 hardback £29.99.

David Braund is another classicist author who is taking a new look at the Amazons, trying to explore the history behind the legend and in the Introduction he boldly promises a “fundamentally new vision of the Amazons” (p.1). The following 10 chapters collect and intertwine the different stories of Amazons to give a detailed picture of what is known about them. The aim is to highlight their characteristics, such as how warlike they were, their sexual allure, but also their capability to rule lands, build cities, practise astronomy, etc. Amazons can be found across the Archaic Greek world, since the beginning (c. 700 BC) in text but also widely in the iconography on buildings, from private to public monuments and on objects, such as decorated vessels and coins. This study is based predominantly on the textual sources, with supporting glimpses into the iconography.

The first chapter gives an overview of what the Archaic and Classical Greeks wrote about the Amazons and how they were perceived, revealing that later and modern interpretations are far from the ‘original’ Greek image. In contrast to the books reviewed above, Braund finds it implausible that Scythian female warrior graves are identified as Amazons. Firstly, he argues that the Amazons were never real and secondly, he postulates that the dating of the Scythians is later than the first appearance of Amazons. This is debatable because the earliest dates for the Scythian may reach as far back as the Late Bronze Age. I agree that we are beyond a Heinrich Schliemann tradition of ‘finding’ the places and peoples of ancient writers, but maybe not so far as to categorically deny any thought of real female warriors that sparked the idea for the Amazons.

The next two chapters discuss the Amazons’ narratives of their main traits in war and love. The following seven chapters each take a famous ‘scene’ as its central theme, which shaped the image of the Amazons, or rather were created to convey certain messages to the Greek society. These include the duel between Achilles and Penthesilea in Troy, Hercules battles with the Amazons, and the Amazons attack Athens. These episodes are then compared with themes in other legends of gods and heroes and are placed in the wider Greek world. Through these, the general and recurring tropes in the Greek storytelling emerge clearly. Chapter 7 explores the information on the origin and homelands of the Amazon, here understood as a people. They are perceived as Thracians who migrated east to Asia Minor (modern Türkiye) and founded cities such as Themiscyra. Chapter 9 highlights the closeness of the Amazons, in some regards, to the goddess Artemis on the one hand, weapon wearing and being independent from men and on the other hand to Aphrodite, using sex and seduction. ‘Alexander the great and the Amazon queen’ is the last chapter and looks at a later example of the story, which brought the Amazons back from extinction, and is used to legitimise Alexander as a Greek hero.

The Conclusion seeks to bring all strands of thought together and reveals the Amazons as skilled in battle and worthy opponents of men, but ultimately the story is that Greek men are superior and their heroes consistently win against the Amazons, as shown by Achilles, Hercules and Theseus. The Amazons are also thought to be beautiful and objects of love and desire, but they are so much more: intelligent; independent; organised; and though they are different from Greek women, they are not envisioned as barbarians and they share many virtues. The Amazons, therefore, can be understood as an embodiment of a complex cultural phenomenon that addresses gender roles and power in the Greek world. Created by Greek men for Greek society, they show the Amazons as an alternative society of a past era, dominated by capable women that had many qualities, but which is ultimately inferior to the Greek.

The writing style is accessible, though with some repetitions in the arguments. Footnotes are kept to a minimum, as is common for works for a wider audience, but allow the following-up of certain discussions. The flood of information sometimes makes it hard to follow the author’s arguments, and some episodes in myths are described as facts and others are rebutted as just imagined stories. There is hardly any source criticism; most ancient authors appear to be taken literally and their writing seems to be accepted word for word. The sources are referred to mostly as ‘the Greeks’. This is surprising as the texts were written from a specific perspective, always male and mostly in opposition to the other societies being discussed. In many cases, the texts were repeatedly revised and were originally formed from much older oral traditions. The later creation of the texts naturally incorporated the thoughts and societal aims and liberties of the ancient writers. The work is no doubt a treasure trove of knowledge on the Amazons, but exact sources are hard to discern. Braund portrays the Amazons as a purposefully created and curated myth with no historical reality, but the myth itself had a very real, significant and lasting impact on Greek society and culture.

Uroš Matić, Bisserka Gaydarska, Laura Coltofean & Marta Díaz-Guardamino (ed.). 2024. Gender trouble and current archaeological debates. Cham: Springer; 978-3-031-68156-1 hardback £129.99.

The previous three books explored the roles of women from the source of ancient texts, comparing them in part to the archaeological evidence. This last book takes a different angle to research gender roles in the past. The team of editors—inspired through discussions from a European Association of Archaeologists meeting and the need to address an apparent crisis in the field of gender archaeology—gathered a group of contributors from various research fields and backgrounds to shed light on Gender trouble and current archaeological debates. The Introduction by the editors establishes what gender archaeology is about and shows that this sub-field is not only concerned with the gender roles in the past but also how different gender issues in the academic world are affecting archaeological thought and research. Gender archaeology touches on a wide scope of topics and research avenues and is part of wider fluctuations and diversifying interests within archaeology, especially in bioarchaeology and theoretical archaeology. The editors address the recent stagnation in the development of gender archaeology and conclude the crisis is in part because a “… lack of a clear epistemological basis and coherent agenda has meant that we have not managed to offer a significant contribution to gender-sensitive grand narratives of the human past” (p.11). To restore some of the lost relevance the volume sets out “demonstrating that gender is an inseparable research component of current archaeological debates and research themes” (p.11).

The volume is divided into three parts: 1. New methods, theories and approaches; 2. Studying aspects of gender in the past; 3. Communication gender. In the first part, Katharina Rebay-Salisbury reflects on the implications of Third Science Revolution on gender archaeology. The advances in bioarchaeology are huge and allow the sex of human remains to be determined; aDNA analyses are more secure than any bone morphological analyses in terms of sex identification and assessing family relations. The rapid technological improvements have delivered a vast amount of new information but also turned research towards a ‘biologisation’ of social archaeology. The consequences are often: a disconnection to wider human relationships; the conflation of gender and sex or their use interchangeably; and the discussion of kinship models without integrating the archaeological background. A more integrated approach is needed to release fully the potential of both research strands. Two further chapters explore how gender studies have been impacted by posthumanism approaches and how digital archaeology, with jobs mainly dominated by men, has so far barely considered gender issues.

Part 2 moves to successful examples of how genders in the past are studied. Two chapters exemplify the importance of gender awareness when topics of intersectionality and social inequality are explored. The chapter by Uroš Matić and Bo Jensen on ‘Gender and violence in archaeology’ reveals how violence has been studied through a gendered lens, where male narratives strongly dominate, which goes hand in hand with what the other books reviewed here have shown. The written ancient sources and male dominance of previous centuries in scholarship clearly laid the path for the overpowering interest in warrior/warriorhood and heroic epics. This has neglected many other areas, such as violence against women and queer people as well as structural violence in societies or violence against different age groups; all of which are under studied. Violence in archaeology has a far greater complexity than often acknowledged and the authors advocate for resetting the framework to an objective view that includes a much wider range of concepts and interpretations and leaves simplistic gender binaries behind. Mobility has also been researched in the past through a gendered lens; Samantha Reiter and Karin Frei argue in their chapter that here as well we need to rethink past models and apply a multifaceted lens. They re-examine data from recent studies to assess a wider picture of gender and mobility, with case studies from western Neolithic/Bronze Age Europe. They confirm that mobility is gendered, women in general being more mobile and men being more stationary. Both had various motivations in their moving about or staying local. This result is not static though and patterns change across time and space so that each case must be individually considered. Oversimplistic explanations have often dominated and limited research, it is time to move on and embrace and welcome the complexity and variability in past human behaviour.

The third part discerns how gender is being communicated in the archaeological community and to the public. These matters are somewhat difficult to assess because the visibility is often obscured, but it is found that on an educational level in university courses ‘gender’ is acknowledged only to a very limited extent. The same is found for the representation of gender roles in museums, as these institutions are very often ‘trapped in time’, and sadly are resistant and/or take longer to adjust to reflect new research debates and results (which can be partly excused due to the often lack of archaeological staff and funding). Both chapters surmise that only targeted agendas can shift these inadequate situations.

The book concludes with a short reflection by Margaret Conkey, a pioneer and veteran in gender studies, that draws together some of the main points of the contributions. She ends with ideas for future actions to keep gender issues an ever-evolving and reflecting field of study and argues that through promoting feminist approaches, gender stays relevant for and keeps ‘engendering’ our research world and the grand human narratives of the past.

The huge range of research interests and topics presented in the chapters perhaps explains why it is so difficult for the ‘field of gender archaeology’ to have a declared and outlined agenda, as wished for by the editors in the Introduction. But the diversity and applicability (or rather necessity) of ‘gender’ in literally any area of archaeology is, in my opinion, its greatest asset and appeal. The volume shows undoubtedly how important it is to incorporate gender archaeology and to overcome long-held proxies of unchecked and often outdated models.