Anyone who asks about the name of Amasya sooner or later arrives at the Amazons. The warrior women imagined by Greek and Roman writers, who lived on horseback and fought with bow and spear, were placed on the map along the southern shore of the Black Sea, on the plain where the Yeşilırmak reaches the sea. Amasya's link to the legend is built on two separate planes. The first is geography: the Iris, today's Yeşilırmak, which feeds the plain of Themiskyra, the supposed homeland of the Amazons, flows right beneath the walls of the city on its way there. The second is the name: the ancient name of the city, Amaseia, is said by tradition to derive from an Amazon queen. The account below tries to separate what the ancient authors actually wrote from what later centuries added, and to say what archaeology does and does not show.

Who Were the Amazons?

In Greek mythology the Amazons are a people made up only of women, mounted and armed with the bow. In Homer's Iliad they are given an epithet meaning "women who match men in battle," and Priam is said to have fought against them in Phrygia in his youth. After these earliest memories the Amazons became one of the indispensable subjects of Greek art. The Amazonomachy, the battle of the Greeks against the Amazons, appears on vase paintings, temple reliefs and sculpture, and was read as the mythological counterpart of Athens' victories over the barbarians. A society of women that refused the command of men and made its own laws aroused both fear and admiration in Greek thought; it stood as a kind of inverted mirror of the Greeks' own order.

The origin of the name Amazon is also disputed. The ancient Greeks explained the word as "amazos," meaning "breastless." According to this account, Amazon girls burned or cut off the right breast so as to draw the bow more easily. The explanation does not go beyond folk etymology, because in ancient art the Amazons are shown with both breasts, usually with one exposed, and no breastless Amazon figure is known. Some linguists link the word to a root meaning "warriors" in Iranian languages, but no firm origin has been established. Researchers such as Adrienne Mayor think the breastless Amazon story arose later out of a false etymology. The same tradition makes the Amazons daughters of the war god Ares, and says they maimed or gave away their male children to neighbouring peoples while raising the girls in their own land.

The Greeks also report a name for the Amazons from the Scythian language. According to Herodotus the Scythians call them "Oiorpata"; in Scythian "oior" means man and "pata" means to kill, so the name means "killers of men."

Themiskyra on the Thermodon

The great majority of ancient authors place the homeland of the Amazons around the river known today as the Terme Çayı, the ancient Thermodon. This lies on the southern shore of the Black Sea, east of present-day Samsun. The plain is called Themiskyra and is identified with the Çarşamba Plain. For some writers Themiskyra is a city; for most it is the name of the plain watered by the Thermodon and the Iris. This geography in the ancient sources was not the invention of a single author. It was built up over centuries as a tradition in which each writer leaned on the last.

The first great narrator in that tradition is Herodotus (5th century BCE). According to the fourth book of the Histories, the Greeks defeated the Amazons on the banks of the Thermodon and sailed off with those they had captured alive, crowded into three ships. At sea the Amazons killed their crews, but, knowing nothing of sails, rudders or oars, they drifted with the wind to the Cliffs on the shore of Lake Maiotis. There they seized the first herd of horses they met and began to raid the Scythian lands, and in the end they joined with young Scythian men. From this union the Sauromatians were born. Herodotus writes that Sauromatian women kept a custom of riding, hunting and fighting in war, and that a girl who had not killed an enemy could not marry. In his text the battle takes place on the Thermodon; the name Themiskyra does not occur in this passage and was fixed by later writers. Strabo also quotes a line of Pindar describing the Amazons as women at the head of a "Syrian" army, and takes it as a clear sign that they lived in Themiskyra, since the people living in the territory of Amisos were called "White Syrians" by ancient writers.

In Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound the original homeland of the Amazons is said to lie farther north, around the Sea of Azov, and they are said to have settled in Themiskyra only later. This information is carried over from earlier writings; the text itself could not be verified here.

Apollonius of Rhodes (3rd century BCE) draws the most detailed picture in the Argonautica. The Argonauts leave the Halys and the Iris behind, round the "harbour-holding headland of the Amazons" and put in at the gulf at the mouth of the Thermodon. According to Apollonius the Thermodon rises in heights called the "Amazonian mountains," divides into ninety-four branches on the plain, and while some branches vanish into the sand, others reach the sea. The Amazons are not gathered in a single city; they live scattered across the land, divided into three tribes. Two other communities of warrior women, the Lykastai and the javelin-throwing Khadesiai, are mentioned among them.

The Latin writers sound calmer. Pomponius Mela (1st century CE) says, in the past tense, that beyond the Halys lies the plain of the Thermodon, where the town of Themiskyra and the forts of the Amazons once stood, and for that reason the place was called "Amazonion." The elder Pliny writes that the Thermodon rises near the fortress of Phanoroia and flows from the foot of "Mount Amazonius," and that five towns once stood here: Amazonion, Themiskyra, Sotira, Amaseia and Komana. Pliny takes no interest in the Amazons themselves; he simply records the geography. In his Periplus of the Black Sea Arrian (2nd century CE) counts 160 stadia from Amisos to the mouth of the Iris, 360 from there to the harbour of Herakleion and 40 from there to the Thermodon, and then calls it "the river where the Amazons are said to have lived." The word "said" shows that the Amazons have become a matter of hearsay rather than of eyewitness testimony.

The Confusion of Two Rivers

In the eyes of the ancient authors the Thermodon is far more famous than the Iris, although in reality it is a small stream. The Iris and its tributaries drain a basin of more than 36,000 square kilometres, whereas the Thermodon empties a small basin reaching only about fifty kilometres inland. Xenophon in the Anabasis gives both rivers a width of three plethra, so that to a traveller on the shore the difference between them would not be obvious. Ancient literature, however, names the Thermodon but not the Iris in Strabo's list of the most famous rivers of the Black Sea, and Mela leaves the Iris out altogether. The Thermodon owes its fame to its connection with the Amazons.

One characteristic of the Iris remained unfamiliar to most ancient writers. The Yeşilırmak is fed by melted snow from the high mountains and reaches its peak flow at the end of April. The pale silt it carries from the sedimentary rocks stays suspended in the water, so that the river looks opaque and pale green, which is where the modern name comes from. Ancient writers, by contrast, often call the river "white-eddying." The Periegesis, which Dionysius of Alexandria wrote in hexameters in the early 2nd century CE, is interesting in this respect. Dionysius says that for the Amazons the Thermodon sends down "white water," while the Iris flows "clear." Tønnes Bekker-Nielsen and Marit Jensen have shown that this description contradicts reality: the "white-eddying Iris" of Apollonius was transferred in Dionysius, or in his source, to the Thermodon, so that the two rivers had in effect changed places. The mistake went unnoticed by Latin translators such as Avienus (4th century CE) and Priscian (6th century CE) and by commentators such as Eustathius of Thessalonica (12th century), and Dionysius' inverted picture was accepted for about fifteen hundred years. The example shows that an important part of Amazon geography was built from library knowledge by authors who had never seen the Pontic coast.

Strabo's Testimony

The most reliable witness to the Amazon story in Amasya's own history is the city's native son Strabo (about 64 BCE - 24 CE). In the twelfth book of the Geography he describes the region as a local, at first hand, and treats Themiskyra within that account.

According to Strabo, Themiskyra is a plain, washed on one side by the sea and about sixty stadia from the city, that is, from Amisos, and on the other side lying at the foot of wooded mountains cut by streams. The Thermodon, fed by all these streams, flows through the plain. The Iris rises in Pontus, passes through the middle of Komana and the fertile plain of Dazimonitis, turns around Gaziura and back to the east, and flows "right beside the wall of Amaseia, my fatherland," a city of great natural strength, before reaching Phanaroia. There it joins the Lykos coming from Armenia, and from there it reaches the plain of Themiskyra and the sea. For this reason Strabo says the plain is always moist and grassy, feeds horses and cattle alike, allows millet and sorghum to be sown in almost unlimited quantity, and that plenty of water makes up for drought, so that famine never comes to the people there. In the mountains wild grapes, pears, apples and nuts are so abundant that anyone who goes into the forest at any season of the year finds fruit, either on the branch or under the heaps of fallen leaves, and game is plentiful too. The real subject of these sentences is the fertility of the plain rather than the Amazons.

One detail matters. Strabo counts Themiskyra as part of the territory of Amisos, today's Samsun, and not of Amaseia. The legendary capital of the Amazons must therefore be sought on the coast, and Amasya's link to them is made through the wide river system that includes Strabo's own homeland, and through the memory of a name.

Strabo is careful in dealing with legend. In the eleventh book he speaks of a special case in the Amazon accounts: for other peoples myth and history are kept apart, because what is ancient, false and monstrous is called myth, while history wants the truth, yet for the Amazons the same incredible stories are told now as in early times. Who could believe, he asks, that an army, or a city, or a tribe of women could be organised without men, and be said to overrun neighbouring peoples as far as Ionia, or even send an expedition across the sea against Attica? To Strabo this amounts to saying that the men of those days were women and the women men. Even so, he reports that the founding of cities such as Ephesus, Smyrna, Kyme and Myrina, and a number of tombs and monuments, is attributed to the Amazons, and that the plain of Themiskyra, the Thermodon and the mountains above it are counted by all writers as belonging to the Amazons, but that the Amazons are said to have been "driven out of those places."

There are two different views of where the Amazons lived afterwards. According to Metrodorus of Scepsis and Hypsicrates, they live north of the Caucasus mountains on the border of the Gargarians. In the two spring months of the year they meet the Gargarians on the mountain and bear children; the girls stay with the Amazons and the boys are given to the Gargarians. As for the story that Alexander met the Amazon queen Thalestria in Hyrcania, Strabo does not find it credible: the trustworthy historians do not mention it, those who tell it do not agree with one another, and he points out that Cleitarchus has Thalestria cover a road of more than six thousand stadia from the Caspian Gates and the Thermodon. That a geographer from Amasya could weigh even a legend that was the pride of his own region critically shows the seriousness of ancient geographical writing.

Strabo also has a long discussion of the allies of Troy. Taking up where the Halizones of Homer, the forces from Alybe, should be placed, he reports that Ephorus changed the text and placed the Amazons near Kyme, that Demetrius of Scepsis did not accept this view, and he calls Ephorus' change "a rashness against the evidence of the early manuscripts." Even in this debate the Amazons remain one of the unsolved questions of the ancient learned world.

As for Amaseia, Strabo's account is entirely geographical and defensive. The city lies in a large, deep valley on the course of the Iris, a place designed jointly by nature and human foresight, at once a city and a fortress. A narrow neck joins two hills, water channels are cut into the rock, and there are two bridges. Within the walls stand the palaces and monuments of the kings. Describing his own city, Strabo never mentions the Amazons; the most authoritative witness of the Amazon legend places the story not inside the walls of Amaseia but on the plain of Themiskyra.

The Amazons of the Heroes

The Amazons met the great heroes of Greek mythology again and again. The ninth labour of Herakles was to go to the banks of the Thermodon to take the belt of the Amazon queen Hippolyte. In one version neither side wants to fight, a misunderstanding turns into a quarrel, and Herakles kills the queen. In another the hero carries off the queen's sister Melanippe and exchanges her for the belt. Theseus of Athens abducts an Amazon queen, Hippolyte or Antiope depending on the source, to Athens; in revenge the Amazons march against Attica and besiege Athens. The Athenian accounts of the Amazonomachy rest largely on this episode.

In the Trojan War the Amazon queen Penthesileia comes to help the Trojans and dies at the hands of Achilles. When Achilles removes her helmet and sees the face of the dead woman, he mourns. The ancient world loved this scene because it gathers the double nature of the Amazons, feared and loved, into a single moment.

After Strabo the Amazons seep into history as well. According to Appian, Lucullus besieged Themiskyra in 71 BCE during the Third Mithridatic War; in the context of this siege the author describes the place and the Amazonia named after the Amazons. According to Suetonius, Caesar recalled in a speech that the Amazons had once ruled a large part of Asia. Even in Roman times the Amazons live on as a memory that is half legendary and half political. The Thermodon, for its part, appears on coins of the Roman Imperial period as a male river god carrying reeds, a branch and an amphora, and on the coins of Amaseia the Iris is shown as a personified figure seated beside a boat.

The Name Amaseia and the Amazon Queen

The ancient name of Amasya is Amaseia; on coins it appears as Amaseia, Amasia and Amassia. On the origin of the name one sentence is repeated in many places: "According to Strabo, the name of the city comes from the Amazon queen Amasis." When we went through the Themiskyra and Amaseia sections of Strabo, and the section of the eleventh book devoted to the Amazons, from beginning to end, we did not come across the name "Amasis." The origin of the tradition may lie in a later source or in another part of Strabo's text, so it is more accurate to present the link not as "Strabo definitely wrote this," but as "a tradition attributed to Strabo and settled in popular belief." The origin of the name Amaseia is treated under a separate heading, and a wider discussion of the name is found there.

Modern historians regard the tradition as folk etymology, that is, a story born of a similarity of sound. The Amazon tradition offers no archaeological or epigraphic evidence specific to Amaseia. Even so, the strength of the tradition lies in the way a city has adopted it. The people of Amasya like to hear in their city's name an echo of female strength, and over the centuries this has gathered a narrative around the name.

Is There Any Reality Behind the Legend?

Whether the Amazons really lived is a question carefully debated in modern research. The archaeological evidence comes not from the southern shore of the Black Sea but from its north and east. In the kurgan cemeteries of southern Russia and Ukraine, Scythian and Sarmatian women have been found buried with weapons. In the warrior graves of the Lower Don and Lower Volga region about twenty percent, and in Sarmatian military graves up to twenty-five percent, contain women buried as warriors. In 2019, near Voronezh, the grave of several generations of armed Scythian women warriors in golden headdresses was found. The Zemo Avchala grave near Tbilisi in Georgia is cited as one of the earliest Amazon women's graves from the Iron Age, and there are reports of women buried with weapons in Armenia and Nakhchivan as well.

The Russian archaeologist Vera Kovalevskaya argues that while Scythian men were away on campaign or hunting, the women had to be ready to defend the herds and pastures. These findings suggest that behind the Amazon legend there may have been nomadic mounted women warriors. But the graves are on the steppe, not on the Thermodon. In the southern Black Sea, in Themiskyra, no remains that could be linked to the Amazons have so far been found. Harun Oy's 2025 article notes that the plain described by the ancient sources still has similar features today, but that remains may lie buried beneath the soil; this is an interpretation and cannot count as evidence. The match between the way of life of the Sauromatian women Herodotus describes and these grave finds is nevertheless striking, and it feeds the main hypothesis about the source of the Amazon myth.

Another interesting comparison comes from the Turkish epic tradition. Ekici and Kınacı note that in the Dede Korkut stories, written down in the second half of the 15th century but held to have taken shape between the 6th and 11th centuries, one meets warrior women such as Selcen Hatun, the daughter of the Lord of Trabzon, Burla Hatun, and Banu Çiçek, and that around Tall Burla Hatun in particular there are forty girl warriors; they call the similarity remarkable. The authors present it not as a claim of kinship but as a sign that the image of the woman warrior lived on for a long time in the region.

The Amazons and Amasya Today

A festival is held in Terme every year in the name of the Amazons, and the district also has an Amazon statue. In this respect the local owner of the Amazon legend is Terme, in Samsun. Amasya, for its part, claims the legend through its name, its river and the women who stand out in the city's history. From the love of Ferhat and Şirin, who pierced the mountain, to the poems of Mihri Hatun, Amasya likes to be remembered as a place whose course was shaped by women and by love. This is less a historical claim than the city's own view of its memory, and it has played a part in the ease with which the legend found a place in Amasya.

Chronology

5th century BCE: Herodotus places the defeat of the Amazons on the banks of the Thermodon in the Histories and traces the origin of the Sauromatians to the union of the Amazons with young Scythian men.

3rd century BCE: Apollonius of Rhodes describes in the Argonautica the course of the Thermodon dividing into ninety-four branches and the three tribes of the Amazons.

71 BCE: Lucullus besieges Themiskyra during the Third Mithridatic War.

1st century BCE - early 1st century CE: Strabo of Amaseia writes the Geography, describing the Iris and the plain of Themiskyra as a witness who had seen them himself.

1st century CE: Mela and Pliny record the plain of the Thermodon and the Amazon forts in the past tense.

2nd century CE: Arrian calls the Thermodon "the river where the Amazons are said to have lived"; Dionysius of Alexandria confuses the two rivers.

Sources

Primary sources

  • Strabo, Geographika (Geography), Book XI, chapter 5, and Book XII, chapter 3 (translation by H. L. Jones, Perseus Digital Library).
  • "Strabon'a Göre Antikçağda Amaseia ve Çevresi," Karadeniz Araştırmaları, XV/58, 2018.

Academic studies

  • Kansu Ekici and Mesut Kınacı, "The Rivers of The Pontos Region in Ancient and Medieval Sources: The Halys, Iris and Thermodon," Tarih İncelemeleri Dergisi XXXIX-1 (2024), 145-162.
  • Harun Oy, "Amazonlar, Themiskyra ve Thermodon," Journal of History School, 2025.

Other sources

  • Herodotus, Histories, Book IV, 110-117 (translation by A. D. Godley, Perseus Digital Library).
  • Tønnes Bekker-Nielsen and Marit Jensen, "Two Pontic Rivers / İki Pontos Irmağı," Cedrus III (2015), 231-242.
  • Wikipedia: "Amazons," "Amazonlar," "Amasya," "Thermodon" (auxiliary source). en.wikipedia.org
  • "Terme, Temiskyra, Termedon ve Amazon," Ünye Kent Haber.

Online sources