Nathan Parker Art

I love classical mythology. And I love to draw! Also, I love illustrated alphabets. So I’m going to put the three together and make some mythological drawings – one for each letter of the (Roman) alphabet. As it turns out, the number of letters in the alphabet is the same as the number of fortnights in the year, so I’ll post a mythabetical drawing every two weeks.

Without further ado, here is the first installment: A is for Amazon. She’s still pretty sketchy; I’ll try to update with a more finished version later.

My conceit is that the heroic legends recorded in the classical era reflect, if sometimes in a dim or distorted way, real events that occurred during the Bronze Age, several centuries earlier. More specifically, I am linking the high point of the Heroic Age – the time of Herakles, Atalanta, Theseus, and Oidipous, of the voyage of the Argo and the hunt for the Kalydonian Boar – with the beginning of the Late Helladic period (about the time of the Shaft Graves at Mykenai). I suppose at some point I should write up a justification for this chronology, but that will have to wait. The main effect on the illustrations is that the costumes, weapons, and tools borne by the characters will be based on artifacts of that period in history.

The Amazones, a famous nation of female warriors, are often mentioned by the mythographers, but there is little consistency about their habits, history, or even homeland. Different authors place them in various part of Turkey, in “Libya” (in ancient geography, this term encompasses not just modern Libya but all of Africa west of the Nile Valley), or on the Ukrainian steppes. Several stories involve them transplanting from one of these areas to another.

I conceive of the (eastern) Amazones as a highly mobile tribe of nomadic herders who dwell in the interstices between more sedentary agricultural societies throughout the Pontic region and carry on a trading (and sometimes raiding) relationship with those societies while maintaining their cultural integrity, something like the Kura-Araxes culture of the Near East in a slightly earlier period, or the later Bedouins. I have not yet decided what, if any, relation exists between the eastern and Libyan Amazones. Maybe they are separate peoples conflated by later writers.

Classical artists typically represented Amazones as bearing the garb of Phrygian, Persian, or Scythian warriors – whichever eastern barbarians were currently in vogue – and nearly always in tall peaked caps. I’ve outfitted my Amazon in an ageless steppe costume, similar to but simpler than those of the later peoples listed above – belted tunic, breeches, sheepskin cape, high boots – with a fur-lined version of the tall cap.

Her weapons are based on those of the Srubnaya, or Timber-Grave, culture of Ukraine. This is not to imply that the Srubnaya culture should be identified with the Amazones; rather, I figure the nomadic Amazones would have limited metal-working equipment (too heavy for swift travel) and would not make their own bronze blades. Srubnaya foundries in central Ukraine supplied metal tools, weapons, and ornaments to tribes across a broad region of the steppes, and the Amazones (at least in the northern parts of their range) would have been able to trade for these weapons or take them as spoils when raiding other tribes.

Classical writers and artists associated Amazones with the battle-ax, even crediting them with its invention, so my Amazon bears one at her waist. She also carries the distinctive Srubnaya pierced “spear”, which would have been used more like a halberd (focus on chopping or slashing rather than stabbing). Hers has some horsetail tassels – Amazones were also closely associated with horses, and credited with inventing cavalry. I didn’t want to draw a horse, so let’s assume hers is grazing just past the edge of the picture. I also gave her a crescent moon brooch, in allusion to the ties between the Amazones and the moon-goddess Artemis.