To quote the article: “The most common explanation was that it was done so the breast wouldn’t get in the way of drawing the bow, but the presence of the right breast doesn’t seem to be an insuperable impediment to female archers today.”
This is true enough, if you are drawing a bow in the standard way - by fully extending the left arm and then drawing the nock back to the right ear. But suppose there was a different way of drawing a bow?
Years ago I ran across a source (forgotten, alas) which described this method: The nock is first placed against the right breast and then the bow is pushed forward, releasing the arrow in one quick movement. The source suggested that this may have been a common method in ancient times. It has the distinct advantage of speed. When the bow is extended, it is instantly ready to fire. Aiming is difficult, of course, but if you are snapping off shots at a massed enemy, good aim is not important. And if you are not concerned with aim, you can keep up a rapid rate of fire. So this method (if valid) would have appealed to warriors like the Parthians and Scythians, whose mounted archers were famous for their hit-and-run tactics.
Now the historical evidence suggests that perhaps 20% of the Scythian fighters were women. But the archery method in question carries a big disadvantage for a female archer. When she braces the nock against her chest, her right hand and wrist are clapped directly over her right breast each time she fires an arrow. If she engages in a battle lasting for several hours, her breast is going to be black-and-blue and very sore (This will reduce her effectiveness if she is flinching before every shot). If she fights in a months-long campaign, her breast is going to suffer serious cumulative trauma - bad enough that she may have to have the thing amputated. From there it would be a short step for an aspiring female archer to have her right breast amputated at the beginning of her career, simply to avoid the problem altogether.
All this is pure speculation, of course, but it does add an interesting wrinkle to the one-breast-two-breast debate.
Respectfully,
Hun, you are not slamming the hand and nock into your chest with any great force, it is more a take the arrow in your right hand and as you remove it from the quiver, bring the nock to the string which is an inch or so from your teat, and as the nock hits the string and latches into place you stretch your left arm out. Harsh abrupt movements are not a good way to aim, or even move with a weapon.
However, since the left arm is doing the heavy work, I can see the musculature under the left breasts tissues bulking up and looking much larger than the right, and if you ar as active as a lot of military were [walking or jogging to combat, or even riding a horse] you may have a low enough fat % that teh difference in size is very pronounced.
Of course, speculations about why the Amazons may have been asymmetrical in the chest department are pointless, since, as bibliophage points out in the Report, there’s no reason, from the earliest references, to suppose that they were.
Something about this whole subject that people seem to forget: what was the survival rate for a major amputation in those days? I think that women (and their commanders, after they’ve shown some aptitude for the bow) would have lived with a bruised boobie rather than risk dying from sepsis or blood loss.
I just want to note that, in all the ancient artwork I’ve seen (and I’ve looked for this), I’ve never seen any depiction of a one-breasted Amazon.
Besides the excellent report, I recommend Tyrell’s book on Amazons.
I admit that I don’t know much about ancient archery technique, but I’m not sure I have to in order to respond. There are several questions here: whether real ancient female archers did anything special with their breasts, whether real ancient female archers were the basis of the Amazon myth, and whether the name Amazon really means “breastless”.
The real female archers were steppe peoples among whom only a minority of unmarried females ever went to battle. Both ancient Greek historians and recent archaeological finds suggest that if they got married and started having children, they were expected to give up warfare. These young active nulliparous women may not have had particularly big breasts to start with. And if their breasts were big enough to get in the way, they probably had the option of staying home like most of their sisters. Cecil’s column on Why women athletes tend to be flat-chested may be of interest here. Even supposing their breasts were too big, binding (as Carrie Fisher did in the first Star Wars movie for different reasons) would seem a much less drastic step than amputation. The chest guard could also work, but I’m not sure they’d need anything special since the wore a lot of leather and fur which might have much the same effect. (This is one of the things the ancient Greeks found barbaric about the steppe peoples). Most of the female steppe warriors’ bodies discovered by archaeologists are skeletonized, so they’re not much help, but at least one was mummified. There was nothing special about her breasts that I ever read.
Now were the Amazons really based on the ancient steppe peoples among whom some women fought? It’s doubtful. The connection was made in ancient times, but not until centuries after Amazons were first depicted in art and mentioned in literature. Furthermore, it’s doubtful that the Greeks knew about the females fighters among the steppe peoples until the Greeks moved in any numbers into the Black Sea, and then naturally associated them with the existing Amazon myth. Before these Black Sea explorations, Amazons were always depicted in art dressing and fighting like civilized Greeks, not like the barbarians. That means that for the first few centuries, there were no Amazons archers in the Greek mind because civilized people like Greeks (and the original civilized conception of the Amazons) didn’t use the bow in battle. It was only after the Black Sea region was explored that the Amazons were depicted in art and literature as barbaric leather- and fur-wearing archers (often mounted).
Did the word Amazon derive from a+mazos (“without a breast”). It’s very doubtful. This derivation is not recorded until centuries after the Amazon myth was known, and Amazons ever always depicted in art as having two breasts. The “breastless” derivation has all the markings of folk etymology. Hellanicus, or whoever, sat down and tried to think of an explanation for the word, and hit upon the similarity to a+mazos. There is no particular reason to suppose the similarity is anything other than a coincidence, and no reason it should be any more or less meaningful than any of the dozens of other proposed derivations.
