Tomyris

Tomyris was the queen of the Massagetae, a nomadic people of Central Asia, and is known chiefly from the account of the Greek historian Herodotus. In his narrative she ruled after the death of her husband and rejected a marriage proposal from the Persian king Cyrus the Great.

Herodotus says Cyrus invaded Massagetae territory and was defeated and killed in battle after Tomyris vowed revenge for the death of her son. The story became a famous classical example of a warrior queen defeating a great conqueror, although its precise historical details cannot be independently verified.

John Man’s Amazons uses Tomyris, the Massagetae queen said by Herodotus to have defeated and killed Cyrus the Great, as one of the most famous ancient examples of a woman commanding steppe warriors. Her story is considered alongside Greek myth and archaeological evidence for armed women in Scythian and Sarmatian societies, allowing Man to distinguish a powerful literary tradition from what can be recovered about real Eurasian warrior cultures.