Three ships were drifting on the sea.

Not one man aboard was still alive. The living were all women, and they had just killed the men who were carrying them away.

But they did not know ships. How to work a rudder, how to set a sail, how to pull an oar: they knew none of it.

So the ships were left to the waves and the wind. Wherever the wind blew, the ships went.

The Greeks called these women Amazons.

I. Eight Kings in Council

Darius and his great army were coming. The Scythians knew they could not hold him off alone, and they sent messengers to the kings of their neighbors.

Those kings had already gathered to deliberate: the king of the Tauri, of the Agathyrsi, of the Neuri, of the Man-eaters, of the Black-cloaks, of the Geloni, of the Budini, and of the Sauromatae.

Before I tell you what they decided, I must explain these peoples one by one. I have dealt with the others already. The Sauromatae are left.

The Sauromatae live across the Tanais. Once you cross the Tanais, it is no longer Scythia. Their country begins at the innermost corner of the Maeetian lake and runs fifteen days' journey to the north, and it is bare, without a tree, wild or planted.

As to how the Sauromatae came to be, there is a story. I tell it to you as people tell it.

II. The Battle on the Thermodon

Once, the Greeks went to war with the Amazons.

The Amazons lived on the southern shore of the Black Sea, by the river Thermodon, where there is a city called Themiscyra. Sailing across from the Sindic country on the Scythian side takes three days and two nights; that is the widest part of the sea.

The Scythians knew the Amazons too, but by another name: Oiorpata. In Scythian, "oior" is a man and "pata" is to kill, so the name means "killers of men." In our Greek tongue, it means women who kill men.

The Athenians in later days liked to bring up the Amazons. I have heard them boast of it: the Amazons once came from the Thermodon and broke into Attica, and the Athenians drove them out, a great deed of their ancestors.

But this time the story is not of the Amazons invading Greece. It is of the Greeks defeating them on the Thermodon.

It is said that after their victory the Greeks took as many Amazons as they could capture alive, put them aboard three ships, and sailed for home.

III. Three Ships

Out at sea, the women struck. They fell on the men aboard and killed every one.

Only when it was done did they discover something: no one could sail.

They had never had anything to do with ships. They knew nothing of rudder, sail, or oar. With the men dead, there was no one left aboard who did.

So the three ships went where the waves and the wind took them, northward.

North of the Thermodon lies the whole breadth of the Black Sea. Farther north still, the sea joins a great lake, the Maeetian lake. It pours its water into the Black Sea and is not much smaller than the sea itself; people call it the mother of the Pontus.

The ships drifted at last into this lake, to a place called Cremni. In Greek, "Cremni" means "the Cliffs."

The place belonged to the free Scythians.

IV. Strangers on Horseback

The Amazons left the ships and set out toward the inhabited country.

On the way they came upon a great herd of horses. It was the first herd they met; they seized it, mounted, and began to raid the Scythian lands.

Ships they did not understand. Horses they did.

The Scythians could make nothing of it. They did not know these people's speech, had never seen their clothes, and could not tell what nation they were. They could only wonder where they had come from.

They took them for a band of men, all of about the same age.

And the Scythians fought them.

V. The Dead on the Field

When the fighting was over, the Scythians held the field, and the dead were in their hands.

Standing over the bodies, they learned for the first time that they had been fighting women.

The Scythians sat down to take counsel. They decided that they would by no means kill these women any longer.

They thought of something else. They chose their youngest men, as many as they guessed the women to be, and sent them out.

The young men were told: camp near them, and do whatever they do. If they chase you, do not fight; fall back. When they stop chasing, come back and camp near them again.

The Scythians had this plan because they wanted these women to bear them children.

That, at least, is how the story goes. I will not say more on the Scythians' behalf; the story makes plain enough what they wanted.

VI. Two Camps, Closer Each Day

The young men did as they were told.

The Amazons soon saw that these men had not come to harm them, and they let them be.

Each day the two camps moved a little closer.

The young men, like the Amazons, had nothing but their weapons and their horses. They lived as the women lived, by hunting and by plunder.

Their elders had told them to copy these women. They copied them well.

VII. Noon

The Amazons had a habit. At midday they scattered, one by one or two by two, going far apart from each other to ease themselves.

The young Scythians noticed it, and did the same.

One young man came up to an Amazon who was alone.

The woman did not push him away. She let him have his way.

She wanted to speak to him and could not; neither understood the other. So she spoke with her hand: come back tomorrow to this same place, and bring another man. She signed "two," and signed that she would bring another woman too.

The young man went back and told his comrades.

The next day he came to the place with a second young man, and there was the Amazon waiting, with another woman beside her.

When the rest of the young men heard of it, they went to the rest of the Amazons, and each found his own.

What spears had not settled was settled like that, in an open place at noon. Those are my words; no one told me so.

VIII. Who Learned Whose Tongue

Afterward the two camps became one, and they lived together. Each man took as his wife the woman he had first been with.

Then came the matter of speech.

The men could never learn the women's language. The women did learn the men's.

So when the two sides could at last understand each other, the words they spoke were Scythian.

The men said to the Amazons:

We have parents, and we have property. Let us not live like this any longer. Let us go back and live among our people. We will still have you as our wives, and no others.

IX. Two Kinds of Women

The Amazons answered:

We could not live with your women. Our customs and theirs are not the same. We shoot the bow, throw the javelin, and ride, and we have never learned women's work. Your women do none of the things we have named. They stay in their wagons and do women's work, and they go out neither to hunt nor anywhere else. We could never get along with them.

If you want to keep us as your wives and be thought just men, go to your parents and take the share of their property that is yours. Then come back, and let us go and live by ourselves.

The young men were persuaded, and did so.

Here were two kinds of women: one lived in wagons, the other on horseback. They now spoke the same language, but the Amazons already knew that the same language does not make the same life.

X. What They Feared

The young men received their share of the property and came back to the Amazons.

This time it was the Amazons who spoke first:

We are afraid and troubled at the thought of living in this land. We have taken you away from your fathers, and we have done great harm to your country.

Since you are willing to have us as wives, do this with us: let us leave this land, cross the Tanais, and live there.

Women who had killed the men on their ships said they were afraid. What they feared was not fighting, but living out their lives beside the very people they had plundered. That reading is mine, taken from their own words.

Again the young men agreed.

XI. Across the River

They crossed the Tanais and traveled three days toward the rising sun, and three days north from the Maeetian lake, toward the quarter of the north wind.

When they reached the country where the Sauromatae live today, they settled there.

Ever since, the women of the Sauromatae have kept to the old ways. They ride out to hunt, sometimes with the men, sometimes without them. They go to war, and they wear the same dress as the men.

That is how the Sauromatae are now. Whether their ancestors truly drifted here from the Thermodon, I can tell you only that this is how people tell it.

XII. Scythian, Spoken Wrong

The Sauromatae speak Scythian. But their Scythian has never been pure, not since the earliest days.

The reason is that the Amazons never learned the language properly.

They learned the men's tongue, but not correctly. That small wrongness was handed down, generation after generation, and the Sauromatae still carry it in their mouths today.

They also have a law of marriage. No maiden may marry until she has killed a man of the enemy. Some grow old and die unmarried, because they could not fulfill the law.

XIII. What the King of the Sauromatae Said

Now back to the eight kings.

The Scythian messengers laid Darius' doings before them: the Persian king had bridged the Bosporus, crossed over, subdued the Thracians, and was now bridging the Ister. Do not sit by and watch us destroyed, they said; the Persian has come against you no less than against us.

The kings were divided.

The kings of the Agathyrsi, the Neuri, the Man-eaters, the Black-cloaks, and the Tauri said: you wronged the Persians first, and this is not our war. If the Persian does not wrong us, we will not move.

The kings of the Geloni, the Budini, and the Sauromatae promised to stand with the Scythians.

The Scythians divided their forces, and one division was led by Scopasis. The Sauromatae were placed in that division.

The descendants of the women who once fought the Scythians on the battlefield would now ride beside the Scythians against the Persian king. How that war was fought, I will tell you next time.

XIV. Where the Wind Took the Ships

So the story of the Amazons has come down to us.

They could not sail, and the wind carried their ships to Scythia. They did not know Scythian, and in the end they learned it, but not well. They married Scythians, but would not live in Scythian wagons. They left the land they had plundered, and on the far side of the Tanais they became another people.

People say it all began with three ships that no one aboard could sail.

Wherever the wind blew, the ships went. The ships came to rest beneath the Cliffs, and a nation began there.

Sources, versions, and editorial boundaries

1. Core narrative: Herodotus, Histories 4.110-117. 4.110 ("about the Sauromatae, the story is as follows"; the Greeks fought the Amazons, whom the Scythians call Oiorpata, explained as "killers of men," from oior "man" and pata "kill"; after their victory on the Thermodon the Greeks carried off in three ships the Amazons they had taken alive, and at sea the Amazons killed the crews; not knowing ships, rudder, sail, or oar, they drifted with wave and wind to Cremni on the Maeetian lake, in the land of the free Scythians; they landed, went toward the inhabited country, seized the first herd of horses, and raided). 4.111 (the Scythians did not know their speech, dress, or nation, took them for young men of one age, and fought them; from the dead they learned they were women; they resolved not to kill them, but to send about as many of their youngest men, to camp near them and imitate them, to retreat if pursued and return when the pursuit stopped, wishing children to be born of them). 4.112 (the Amazons let them be; the camps drew closer daily; the young men, like the Amazons, had only weapons and horses and lived by hunting and plunder). 4.113 (at midday the Amazons scattered singly or in pairs; a young man approached one alone and she did not refuse; without a common language she signed for him to return next day with another, and she would bring another; this was done; the rest followed). 4.114 (they joined camps, each keeping the woman he first was with; the men could not learn the women's speech, the women learned the men's; the men proposed returning to their people; the Amazons refused, contrasting their own archery, javelin-throwing, and riding with Scythian women who stay in wagons at women's work, and told the men to claim their share of property and return). 4.115 (the Amazons, afraid after depriving the men of their fathers and harming their land, proposed leaving and settling across the Tanais). 4.116 (they crossed the Tanais, went three days east and three days north from the lake, and settled where the Sauromatae now live; since then Sauromatian women hunt on horseback with or without the men, go to war, and dress like the men). 4.117 (the Sauromatae speak Scythian but have spoken it incorrectly from of old, since the Amazons never learned it well; no maiden marries before killing a man of the enemy, and some die old and unmarried). Supplementary: 4.102 (the Scythian messengers and the eight kings); 4.21 and 4.57 (beyond the Tanais is not Scythia; the land of the Sauromatae begins at the recess of the Maeetian lake and runs fifteen days north, treeless); 4.86 (from the Sindic country to Themiscyra on the Thermodon is the widest part of the Pontus, three days and two nights; the Maeetian lake is called the mother of the Pontus); 4.20 (the Royal Scythians' land reaches the trading port called Cremni on the Maeetian lake); 9.27 (the Athenians, before Plataea, boast of repelling the Amazons who came from the Thermodon into Attica); 4.118-120 (the messengers' speech; the kings divided, the Geloni, Budini, and Sauromatae promising help and five refusing; the Sauromatae attached to the division of Scopasis); 4.128 (Scopasis' division, with the Sauromatae, sent to the Ionians at the Ister bridge). Read in A. D. Godley's public-domain 1920 translation (PerseusDL canonical-greekLit TEI, tlg0016.tlg001.perseus-eng2), with 4.110-117 checked throughout against the Greek of the same repository (tlg0016.tlg001.perseus-grc2); key phrases of 4.20, 4.86, 4.118, 4.123, 4.128, and 9.27 were also checked in Greek.

2. Levels of evidence: the drift of the Amazons, their union with the Scythian youths, and the founding of a new people are introduced by Herodotus with "ὧδε λέγεται" ("it is told as follows") and "λόγος" ("the story is"); he names no informant and does not say he believes it. The narrative therefore marks them as "how people tell it," and Section XI repeats this. The customs and speech of the Sauromatae in his own day (4.116 "ever since then," 4.117) he records as the present state of things, without claiming to have seen them, and the narrative does not claim eyewitness. The speeches between the Amazons and the youths are direct speech in Herodotus, rendered here from the Greek without additions. The Scythians' aim, that the women bear them children, is Herodotus' statement of the Scythian plan (4.111).

3. Key Greek phrases: the introduction, "Σαυροματέων δὲ πέρι ὧδε λέγεται" and "τότε λόγος τοὺς Ἕλληνας ... ἀποπλέειν" (4.110); ignorance of ships, "πλοῖα δὲ οὐ γινώσκειν αὐτὰς οὐδὲ πηδαλίοισι χρᾶσθαι οὐδὲ ἱστίοισι οὐδὲ εἰρεσίῃ" and "ἐφέροντο κατὰ κῦμα καὶ ἄνεμον" (4.110); language, "τὴν δὲ φωνὴν τὴν μὲν τῶν γυναικῶν οἱ ἄνδρες οὐκ ἐδυνέατο μαθεῖν, τὴν δὲ τῶν ἀνδρῶν αἱ γυναῖκες συνέλαβον" (4.114) and "φωνῇ δὲ οἱ Σαυρομάται νομίζουσι Σκυθικῇ, σολοικίζοντες αὐτῇ ἀπὸ τοῦ ἀρχαίου, ἐπεὶ οὐ χρηστῶς ἐξέμαθον αὐτὴν αἱ Ἀμαζόνες" (4.117); marriage, "οὐ γαμέεται παρθένος οὐδεμία πρὶν ἂν τῶν πολεμίων ἄνδρα ἀποκτείνῃ" (4.117).

4. Names and word choices: Amazons (Ἀμαζόνες), Sauromatae (Σαυρομάται, often linked with the later Sarmatians), Thermodon (Θερμώδων), Themiscyra (Θεμισκύρη), the Maeetian lake (λίμνη ἡ Μαιῆτις, the Sea of Azov), Cremni (Κρημνοί, "cliffs"), Tanais (Τάναϊς, the Don), the Sindic country (Σινδική), Scopasis (Σκώπασις). The breakdown of "Oiorpata" is Herodotus' own; modern scholars differ on it, and no judgment is made here. 4.110 "Σκυθέων τῶν ἐλευθέρων" is rendered "free Scythians"; 4.20 places Cremni at the eastern edge of the Royal Scythians' land, and the Royal Scythians regard other Scythians as their slaves, so the two passages can be reconciled, but Herodotus does not say they are the same group, and the narrative follows 4.110. In 4.113 "ἐς εὐμαρείην ἀποσκιδνάμεναι" (Godley: "for greater comfort") is usually understood in context as going apart to relieve themselves, rendered "to ease themselves." "ἐνεχρίμπτετο" and "περιεῖδε χρήσασθαι" are rendered simply ("came up to ... did not push him away; she let him have his way"). In 4.114 "δοκέειν εἶναι δίκαιοι" (Godley: "to have the name of fair men") is rendered "be thought just men"; "μένουσαι ἐν τῇσι ἁμάξῃσι" is "stay in their wagons." In 4.117 "σολοικίζοντες" means speaking with errors, rendered "spoken wrong / never pure." The rest is paraphrase and abridgment from the English and Greek, not word-for-word translation.

5. Later and archaeological material (not in the narrative): the Hippocratic Airs, Waters, Places 17 says that Sauromatian women, while unmarried, ride, shoot, throw javelins from horseback, and fight the enemy; they do not marry until they have killed three enemies and performed the customary rites; once married they stop riding unless there is a general expedition; and their right breast is cauterized in infancy. Its figure (three enemies) differs from Herodotus' (one). Read in W. H. S. Jones' 1923 translation and the Greek (PerseusDL canonical-greekLit, tlg0627.tlg002), notes only. For archaeology, the English Wikipedia article "Sauromatian culture" summarizes that the culture extended from east of the lower Don to the lower Volga and the southern Urals, is known almost only from burials, and that about a fifth of Sauromatian military burials with weapons belong to women; the article "Amazons" mentions a 2019 find near Voronezh, Russia, of a grave of Scythian women warriors with weapons and golden headdresses. These are secondary summaries; the excavation reports were not read, and they are not used to judge the truth of the legend.

6. Time: the Amazons' drift, their union with the youths, and the crossing of the Tanais are legend; the Histories give no date and none can be assigned, so they are listed as unresolved. The map uses one time entry, "5th century BCE," for the Sauromatae's homeland and customs as Herodotus records them "today" (4.116-117). The Sauromatian king's part in the council against Darius (4.102, 4.118-119) belongs to Darius' Scythian expedition, conventionally dated about 513 BCE (late 6th century BCE); it is not used as the map time.

7. Geography: English Wikipedia's "Taganrog" says the ancient settlement at Taganrog was "probably" Herodotus' trading port of Cremni; its coordinates (47.2167 N, 38.9167 E) mark only the conjectured landing place of the legend and are not linked to a time. The land of the Sauromatae lay east of the Tanais and northeast of the Maeetian lake (4.21, 4.116); the map point uses the mouth of the Don from English Wikipedia's "Don (river)" (47.0864 N, 39.2386 E), at region precision, for the start of their territory, linked to the 5th century BCE. The Thermodon is the Terme River in Samsun Province, Turkey; coordinates from English Wikipedia's "Terme River" (41.2000 N, 37.0333 E) mark only the legendary homeland of the Amazons and are not linked to a time. Themiscyra, the Sindic country, Attica, the Bosporus, and the Ister appear only in the narration and are not mapped.

8. Fact and literary boundaries: the five opening paragraphs retell 4.110; "Wherever the wind blew, the ships went" narrates "ἐφέροντο κατὰ κῦμα καὶ ἄνεμον." Section I opens with the council of eight kings, following Herodotus' own order (4.102 lists the eight peoples, 4.103-117 describe them, 4.118 returns to the council); "I have dealt with the others already" refers to 4.103-109. The Athenian boast in Section II comes from 9.27, a speech of the Athenians to the Tegeans before Plataea; "I have heard them boast of it" narrates a speech Herodotus records. In Section III, "northward" and "the whole breadth of the Black Sea" are inferred from the positions of the Thermodon and the lake; the text says only that they drifted to Cremni. In Section IV, "Ships they did not understand. Horses they did" is the narrator's contrast. In Section V, "I will not say more on the Scythians' behalf" is a narrative stance. In Section VI, "They copied them well" is the narrator's comment. The last lines of Section VII are marked in the text as "my words." In Section VIII, "the words they spoke were Scythian" is inferred from 4.114 (the women learned the men's speech); the men's "among our people" renders "ἐς τὸ πλῆθος." The closing line of Section IX is the narrator's comment. The reading at the end of Section X is marked in the text as the narrator's. In Section XII, "handed down, generation after generation" summarizes 4.117 "ἀπὸ τοῦ ἀρχαίου" ("from of old"). Section XIII abridges 4.118-120; the messengers' speech and the five kings' reply are compressed; "I will tell you next time" is a series preview. Section XIV is a literary close, not Herodotus' words.

9. Rights: the ancient text and Godley's 1920 translation are public domain; the Greek was checked in short passages against PerseusDL's open TEI; Airs, Waters, Places was checked in short passages against Jones' public-domain 1923 translation and the Greek in the same repository. The Chinese and English stories are original contemporary retellings by Clio Walker. Wikipedia pages were used only for coordinates and archaeological overviews.