90 chapter two
(“maiden’s mountain”).^17 It was al-Masʻûdî who, in the tenth century,
mentions that among the Volga Bulgars women, together with their
children, had an important role in the military organization.^18
All these examples, from different authors and for different peoples,
but referring to societies on a similar phase of development are indeed
enough so as to claim that such a ‘woman behavior’ had been quite a
typical phenomenon during the age of the so-called early state as well
as in earlier time, in the chiefdoms’ era. This can be seen in 811 A.D.,
in Danube Bulgaria, when Bulgarian women took part in the repelling
of the army led by the Byzantine basileus Nicephorus I (802–811).
Since we do not have another evidence from Bulgaria till the coun-
try’s Christian conversion in 864 A.D. that mentions women’s activity
during wars or in the political sphere, one should agree with S. Geor-
gieva’s claim that in Danube Bulgaria this “women’s role” had been
sporadic and incidental.^19
In the nomadic and semi-nomadic societies women were really
capable in holding the sabre, or sword, or bow, or horse’s bridles.^20
Women warriors in the steppe were not a forgery but a reality and
this reality can be noticed not only in folklore (in the typical plot of
before-wedding or during-the-wedding combat between the bride and
the groom)^21 but also in artifacts found during archeological excava-
tions. The Bulgaro-Alan necropolis in Dmitrievskii, which belongs
(^17) Davletshin 1990, 95. Cf. Badalanova-Pokrovska 1995, 156–161, for the mytholo-
gem ‘town–woman’, which in the folklore of Danubian Bulgaria can be found in two
nuances: 1) marked by the meaning “Bulgarian maiden”/“maiden’s town”, from the
original ‘devingrad’; 2) marked by the scandalous “whore-town” mentioned by the
Hungarian writer Felix Kanicz in 1870s. Of course, we may also suppose that in ‘dev-
ingrad’ one can see an old mythologem linked to the common Indoeuropean heritage,
namely ‘daeva’, that is “deity”. As regards the cultural heritage in Volga Bulgaria,
now Tatarstan in Russia, such naming could have in its roots that same mythologic
origin.
(^18) Garkavi 1870, 126; Georgieva 1996, 109.
(^19) Georgieva 1996, 110. Probably the same was also true for early Byzantium if one
takes into consideration data from the Arabic sources where there is information that
sometimes even the Byzantine women took in their hands weapons—see El-Cheik
1996, 132. 20
Golden 1992, 161 f., does not miss to point out that around 835 A.D. the Uighur
mission to the T’ang court in China presented to the emperor “seven women archers
who were able to shoot well even while riding”. Barfield 1989, 25, also claims that
women in steppe Eurasia had been more autonomous and had more prestige com-
pared to that in the sedentary societies. For evidence from archaeological excavations
in that same direction, in general, see in, Davis-Kimball 2002. 21
See Pletneva 1998, 530–532. It was believed that after the wedding, woman usu-
ally lost her warrior power because she moved to totally ‘female’ status, i.e. to abso-