In April 2001, I visited Big Bone Lick State Park in Kentucky. The heaps of mastodon and other large skeletons that used to loom out of the brackish backwaters along the Ohio River here are long gone, though the occasional big bone sometimes comes to light. Adrienne Mayor Read Quote
The ‘Iliad’ covered only two months of the great ten-year war with Troy. At least six other epic poems preceded or continued the events in the ‘Iliad’, but they survive only as fragments. Adrienne Mayor Read Quote
Indeed, many ancient Greek writers do treat Amazons as a tribe of men and women. They credit the tribe with innovations such as ironworking and domestication of horses. Some early vase paintings show men fighting alongside Amazons. Adrienne Mayor Read Quote
The Greeks first identified the Amazons ethnographically, as a nation of men and women distinguished by something outstanding in their gender relations. Later, any ambivalence or anxiety that knowledge of this alternative gender-neutral culture evoked among Greeks was played out in their mythic narratives about martial women. Adrienne Mayor Read Quote
The Ephesians took great pride in their temple, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Amazons had worshipped here, and the fabulously rich King Croesus built the original temple. Adrienne Mayor Read Quote
The Romans had chosen Pergamon to be the capital of their new province. But by 88 B.C., most of western Asia was allied with King Mithradates, who had taken over the royal palace in Pergamon for his own headquarters. Adrienne Mayor Read Quote
The cultural center of Asia Minor, Pergamon boasted a vast library of 200,000 scrolls, a spectacular 10,000-seat theater, and a monumental Great Altar decorated with sculptures of the Olympian gods defeating the Giants. People came from all around the Mediterranean seeking cures at the famous Temple of Asclepius, god of medicine. Adrienne Mayor Read Quote
Pergamon, a prosperous city in western Anatolia, was fabled to have been founded by Hercules’ son. Like many Hellenistic cities populated by Greeks who intermarried with indigenous people, Pergamon after Alexander the Great’s death (323 B.C.) had evolved a hybrid of democracy and Persian-influenced monarchy. Adrienne Mayor Read Quote
In the seventeenth century, a French missionary in Canada reported a ‘strange legend’ circulating among the Hurons. They told of a monster with a ‘horn’ that could pierce anything, even rock. Adrienne Mayor Read Quote
Historical records show that Abenakis and other Natives encountered European explorers and traders in Canada looking for sources of ivory to compete with the Russian trade in Siberian fossil mammoth ivory – these traders routinely asked about ivory ‘horns’ and teeth. Adrienne Mayor Read Quote
