“There was a woman like a mounted hero”: A survey of the historical roots of female warriors in the Shahnamah

This article explores the cultural context and social set-up that have led to the emergence of female warriors and demonstrates that the female fighter is an historical phenomenon the origin of which must be assumed as somewhere around the Euro-Asian Steppe.  This historical phenomenon had found its way from earliest times into the culture, art and literature of the Greeks, playing, in subsequent centuries, a role in fictional and mythical narrations of Greek writers and historians.By examining the archeological studies and the stories of the Scythians in Greek sources, the present article attempts to elucidate that the accounts of the female warriors in the Shahnamah are all rooted in the ancient Scythian heroines, where in most cases one can observe motifs and elements of Greek way of narrating.