However, there is both textual and archaeological evidence of women among the Scythians (albeit a minority) who enjoyed a fairly high status.The textual evidence consists of the famous Amazons, whose name is from the Greek a-mazos(without a breast), from their alleged custom of arresting the development of one breast to facilitate using the bow. Although the Amazons are featured in Greek myth, Herodotus, when he traveled in the Black Sea region, heard tales of actual women who had been warriors and war leaders.
A significant number of burials of warrior women have indeed been found, some with evidence of battle wounds. In the Scythian region west of the Don 40 such burials had been found by the late 1990s, some in conjunction with royal grave mounds, and in the region Herodotus called Sauromatia, east of the Don, some 20 percent of excavated warrior burials from the fifth and fourth centuries BCE were of women.
Herodotus connects the Amazons, whom the Scythians called Oiorpata, "man-slayers," with the Sauromatians, who he says were a mixture of Scythians and Amazons and spoke Scythian. Herodotus's Sauromatians seem to be distinct from the Sarmatians who later displaced the Scythians from the western steppe (and for whom there is no evidence of warrior women). Herodotus says that Sauromatian women had to kill three of their enemy before they were allowed to marry. The appearance of warrior women in Scythian society appears to be a late phenomenon, judging by the age of burials, and may have been a reaction of some sort to the great change in Scythian society brought about by contact with Greek civilization, or, on the other hand, by social changes set in motion among indigenous peoples in the Black Sea region by the arrival of the Scythians. Such a change would be unlikely for the "real" Scythians from the steppe, among whom male dominance was already great when they arrived in the Black Sea region. The Sauromatians, however, might have been indigenous people, among whom there was relative gender equality, which led some women to become warriors.