Welcome to Interesting If True, the podcast that’s proud to fight like a girl!

I'm your host this week, Big Papa, and with me is Shea:

I'm Shea, and this week I learned that bologna is just hotdogs for people who like pancakes.

I'm Aaron, and this week I learned that the powerful Amazon warrior is called Amazon Prime.

Amazons Will Get You

This week began with International Women's Day and because I'm a dick-having hoser I forgot to post anything on the socials.

So instead, I'm going to pander a bit—but don't worry, not nearly as much as that scene in End Game. Yeah, you know what I'm talking about... that was... oof.

Today I'm going to talk about actual Amazons! The warrior women, not the company. As brutal as the Amazons could be, they still let you take a piss-break.

The more I read about the Amazons the more clear it becomes that this will need to be a muli-part show. So I'll do a little intro and then talk about one specific tribe of female warriors, the Mino, or Minon depending on who you talk to.

These warriors were called the Dahomey Amazons by the European writers from whom most of this information will come. I did find some records of Fon oral histories but they're scarce. The French didn't leave much when they were done with the area...

So these won't be your typical Amazons, at least, not in the Wonder Woman sense. At some point we will talk about Themiscyra, the city-state not the magic island, and the Amazons of Asia's Steppes, but for now I'll only go into that stuff far enough to explain how these African warrior women came to be called Amazons... and basically, it's fake news.

From Adrienne Mayor's The Amazons,

"one thing everyone seems to think they know about Amazons: that the name has something to do with only having one breast so they could easily fire an arrow or hurl a spear."

Which I think we've all heard. Unfortunately, it's nonsense. Anyone whose seen Hunger Games or done any non-sausage fest archery knows that the ladies can tuck that jazz enough not to boob up the works. For the archeology record, there are thousands of Greek artworks depicting warrior women with both boobs. The translation of "Amazon" as "without breast" was the invention of Greek historian Hellanikos in the fifth century BCE.

Basically, he shoehorned the meaning of Greek words, "a" meaning "lack", and "mazon" being close to the Greek word for breast, from which we get the modern world mammary. Put them together and you've got a terminology that even Hellanikos's contemporaries called BS, never mind modern archeologists.

Seh-Dong-Hong-Beh, a leader of the amazons

Still, the Greeks were obsessed with the idea of the legendary warrior women. So much so that any Grecian hero worth his salt would need to face them, from Hercules to Achilles. They often gave the location of the Amazons as the eastern Mediterranean on the steppes of Eurasia. And indeed warrior graves have been found there and, once we invented DNA testing and accurate bioarchaeological analysis, we stopped calling them all dudes. In total, about 1/3 of those buried with spears, knives, and visible war-wounds were women. Today we attribute the graves to the Scythian nomads whose women fought alongside their men well into the modern era... well, ok, Andromache did anyway, less so for the rest of them.

So, back to modern-day Benin. Benin, formally Dahomey (/de`hoomi/), was annexed into the french empire in 1904 until its independence in 1975. It's a small country in West Africa tucked between Togo and Nigeria. Its small coastal area is part of what was then (and by "then" I mean way, way too recently) called the Slave Coast.

A sketch of a warrior and her equipment