"Amazons" by Jonathan R. Brünner

I have always been kind of an ancient history person and when I was doing some casual reading about ancient religions I came upon the story of the Amazons, or more principally what interested me, their supposed take on masculinity and femininity. Basically, that which is soft is motherly, nurturing, but ultimately weak and that which is hard is bent on destruction. Since they were (in myth) supposedly warriors of some skill, they seared off one of their breasts with a red-hot disc, thereby destroying what was in them that was motherly and nurturing and hoping to sacrifice by its destruction also their weakness to become great warriors. This captivated my intellectual portion. Most people I have noticed to draw Amazons using other parts of their brain (or body) so the uni-boob thing, no thanks, but that is what makes them so cool to begin with and, in the legends, so terrifying.

Anyway, this illustration is a sort of amalgamation of a lot of ideas that honestly do not make all that much sense together. The helm on the one furthest left is somewhere between Corinthian and Scythian; the other two wear rather non-descript poor-person type helms appropriate to most of that region; and to round it all off they’re mounted on horses, which was not a feat really recorded at all (due to the lack of iron to make shoes) until Alexander took his Macedonians (different people again) traipsing about Greece, the middle east, Egypt, and onto India. Basically, this is not a period piece of people who probably never exist in the first place, though it does look vaguely historic.