retiring to inaccessible retreats, maintained their independence for a while. Time was when everywhere the women commanded and the men obeyed. It is not beyond imagination that, sometimes and in some places, with the memory of the matriarchate to inspire them, women have revolted against the cruel lot which was theirs in primitive society, and set up for themselves; for they were the daughters as well as the wives of the hard-headed men of the caves. This is perhaps as plausible as the conjecture that savage man merely concocted the story to dramatize the natural antipathy of the sexes, to account for the deep groove of division which this sentiment had run through primitive society and to justify the fact that society gave men so much the better of it. The roots of the Amazon tradition, however, lie deeper than what may be called the politics of sex. The truth underlying the several legends is to be found where, according to report, the fighting women had their commonwealth. The descendants of the Cappadocian Amazons who came to the aid of Troy are to be found in the Armenian highlands. The descendants of the West African Amazons, on whom, as Diodorus fables, the vengeance of Hercules fell, are to be found in Dahomey and near-by negro states. The secret of the Brazilian Amazons is to be sought, among other places, in Mexico. With a single word out of the Old Testament the door of legend opens. Of the Hittites the Hebrew writers seemed to know only that they occupied mountainous districts in the land flowing with milk and honey; that for a space the Jews dwelt with them and "served Baalim and the groves"; and that Solomon put a tribute upon them. From the rock carvings of Asia Minor and from Assyrian and Egyptian inscriptions the present age has learned more. The discovery by Sayce and other modern scholars of the important place once held by the Hittites has been called the romance of ancient history. That place may be likened to the place held by the Ottoman Empire in its strength. Like the Turks, the Hittites were a Turanian people who planted themselves across the great roads of Asia Minor and absorbed and crudely reproduced the culture of more civilized neighbor peoples. Their capitals were at Carchemish, where they commanded the fords of the Euphrates, and at Kadesh on the Orontes, whence they ruled Syria and the cities of the Ægean. They were mountaineers from the Taurus, with olive skins, mongoloid features, and the Chinese cue. Their double-headed eagle passed through the Turkomans and the Crusaders into the imperial arms of Russia, Austria, and Germany; the Phrygian cap of their successors has become the headgear of revolutionary woman, and the Turks still wear their peaked shoes. The Hittite Empire flourished in the Bronze Age, when it met Egypt, Babylon and afterward Assyria on equal terms. It began to loom in the sixteenth century B.C. and it was a power to be reckoned with until well into the first millennium before Christ. On its ruins arose Cappadocia, Phrygia, Lydia, and later Pontus. The rock carvings that proclaimed its sway, and that Herodotus described but misread, still look down on the Pass of Karabel along an old road of empire. The Amazons of Greek legend, according to the convincing scholarship of Sayce, were the armed priestesses of the Hittites. Their fabled capital of Themiscyra is the ruined city of Boghaz Keui in Asiatic Turkey not far from the Black Sea. The authentic likenesses of the warrior women are to be found, not in the temple friezes of Attica, but in the rock carvings on the hills that overlook this ancient ruin. Yet Greek art reflects correct observation or trustworthy report, for its warrior maidens wear the kilt of the mountain-dwelling Hittites and carry the same double-headed ax that is seen in their crude sculptures. In the service of the Asiatic goddess, known variously as Astarte, Derceto, Cybele, the Great Mother, and Diana of the Ephesians, was a multitude of armed priestesses so numerous that to the Greeks they seemed not a cult but a nation. Whole cities were in effect mere temple precincts populated by these women and by eunuch priests; the high priestess of the temple ruled the city and the surrounding country, and had some claim, therefore, to the title of Amazon queen. At Komana were six thousand of these armed maidens of the shrine. At Ephesus vast throngs of them served a high priestess who called herself the Queen Bee. These Hittite women worshiped the Asiatic goddess with orgiastic frenzies that simulated, or literally repeated, the primal processes of dissolution and reproduction. It was easy for the Greek mariners who saw them dancing to the goddess and flourishing their weapons on the shores of the Black Sea to infer that a woman's capital lay a short distance inland. It was natural, also, to attribute to them the actual feats of the Hittite armies, and fable that the cities founded or subjugated by that empire on the Ægean-Ephesus, Smyrna, Cyme, Myrina-were colonies of Amazonian origin. The Amazon legends of Africa and South America and the customs of the female palace troops of Africa and Asia are made clear if one goes behind the cult of the Asiatic goddess to the domain of primitive magic whence it arose. There one finds beliefs that belt the earth and are reflected not only in ancient tradition, but in modern practises associated with May day and Midsummer Eve, with sowing and harvest, with the summer and winter solstices. Frazer's examination of these in the Golden Bough is deeply illuminating. Following the laws of sympathetic magic, men believed that in order to make the grain flourish and the grass renew itself in the annual death and resurrection of nature, it was necessary by some drama of their own to repeat the phenomena of decay and of new life. There must be a noteworthy human death and a resurrection. Sometimes men killed a scapegoat, sometime a divine animal, sometimes a divine man-a god-king, as he was called-such an impersonation of divinity, for example, as the Grand Lama of Tibet. The killing of the god-king was preferred as a magic more constraining than any other upon the forces of nature. There were several means of simulating the phenomena of resurrection. This might be done by having two couples appear in the annual drama-two sets of divine and royal mates. Frazer suggests that the book of Esther, names and all, is based on a Babylonian religious festival of this kind-that the gentle Esther is none other than the lustful Astarte, that Mordecai is the god Merodach, that Haman is Hannum the Aramite god, and Vashti a goddess unidentified. The triumph of one set of characters and the humiliation and death of the other are supposed to represent the bourgeoning of spring after the long death of winter. The common means of symbolizing and constraining the reproduction of new life in nature was through a period of promiscuous sexual intercourse in which designated persons or whole populations took part. It was deemed necessary to set an example to the woods and fields, and in the woods and fields it was set. The saturnalia, the carnivals, the May Days and St. John's Eves of old time were not, in 'intent, excursions into debauchery; they were exercises in sympathetic magic. So it befell that in savage vision the withered leaf and the green shoot, winter and spring, death and resurrection, came to mean two things-periodic murder and lust. After a while the priest-kings sought escape from the custom that gave them only a year of life upon their throne of grace. They chose substitutes a son, a slave, a malefactor-who for a few days reigned in their stead, and as a sign of kingship were made free of their harems, as Absalom went in unto King David's concubines in the sight of Israel. The king, or the mock-king, devoted to death but attended by beautiful women, crowned with flowers and worshiped as a god-this spectacle, as profoundly ironical as life itself, was staged in Mexico when Cortez came; and when Huc visited Lhasa in 1846 he found the Tibetans electing a monarch of misrule to carouse and suffer in place of the pope of Buddhism, God's vicar for Asia. The bacchic procession of the doomed king and his women, this dance of death that went around the world, was the real Amazon march. It was the part of the warrior women to kill the man-god whose last days they had beguiled. It was their part, also, to co-operate with a multitude of men in a lustful drama, so that every acorn and grass root and grain of corn might heed the command to bring forth and multiply; back of the myth of annual Amazon matings with neighbor tribes was this reality of the saturnalia. In places the legend has suffered confusing changes, as in the Dahoman Customs, where the king kills instead of being killed. But the same meaning underlies the Phrygian worship of the Great Mother, the lethal privileges of the female palace guards in Hindostan, the self-slaughter of the warrior women when a king died at Abomey, the going of women into the hills of Brazil with one old man as companion, and the recurrent tragedy of the god-man of Mexico, who dis |