The Amazons were an all-female society of warriors and hunters who inhabited the Pontic steppe of northern Anatolia during the Bronze Age. With Themiscyra (Terme), on the banks of the Thermodon River, as their capital, the Amazons were said to have been descended from Otrera, a warrior queen produced by a romance between the god of war Ares and the nymph Harmonia. The Amazons may derive their name from the Iranian ethnonym hamazan ("warriors"), from a Greek phrase meaning "manless", or from a possibly mistranslated Greek phrase meaning "breastless" in reference to a myth that the Amazons cut off their right breast to facilitate drawing a bowstring. The Amazons secretly met with the all-male Gargareans of the North Caucasus during two months in spring in order to produce children, with all female babies being retained by the Amazons and all men being returned to the Gargareans. The female babies were raised to be fierce warriors on par with men, training in physical agility, strength, archery, riding skills, and the arts of combat. The Amazons were capable of undertaking regular military operations from Scythia to Thrace, Asia Minor, the Aegean, Arabia, and Egypt, and played major roles in the foundation of cities such as Ephesus, Cyme, Smyrna, Sinope, Myrina, Magnesia, and Pygela.
The Amazon queen Hippolyta battled the Greek hero Heracles when the latter was sent to obtain the queen's magic belt to fulfill one of his legendary labors, and he defeated Hippolyta and exchanged her kidnapped sister Melanippe for the belt. Theseus later abducted Hippolyta and took her to Athens, where she was forced to marry him, was raped, and was accidentally killed by her sister Penthesilea during a failed rescue attempt. Penthesilea led the Amazons into the Trojan War of 1193-1183 BC, during which she nearly routed the Greeks before being slain in battle with Achilles. The Amazons, who had expanded their realm into Lycia during the war, retreated into Pontus. A Greek fleet later defeated the Amazons, taking three shiploads of them captive and forcing them to abandon their capital of Themiscyra. The Amazon prisoners mutinied, killing the small crews of the prison ships and disembarking at the Scythian shore. The Amazons caught enough horses to assert themselves between the Caspian Sea and the Black Sea, eventually assimilating with the Scythians; multiple generations of female warriors were later discovered in graves in Russia's Voronezh Oblast, confirming the Amazons' existence. It was later theorized that the Sarmatians were descended from the Scythians and the Amazons.
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