Original subtitles

On this episode of "Expedition Files"...

In 1696...

Fire!

Captain Henry Avery is hailed King of the Pirates when

he pulls off an estimated 400-million-dollar heist

on the high seas.

But after the raid, Avery and his loot disappear.

Now, experts may have finally cracked the code,

revealing the fate of this legendary buccaneer

and his vast treasure.

Then, around 1153 BC, Egyptian pharaoh Ramses III

dies under mysterious circumstances.

Ancient records hint at a deadly palace conspiracy led

by his own queen.

More than 3,000 years later, modern scientific technology

could solve one of history's oldest cold cases.

And since the 8th century BC, mythological female warriors

known as Amazons have inspired everything from.

South American rivers

to the iconic superhero, Wonder Woman.

But did the Amazons really exist?

New evidence suggests these legendary fighters were real.

In the corridors of time...

are mysteries that defy explanation.

Now, I'm traveling through history itself...

on a search for the truth.

New evidence.

Shocking answers.

I'm Josh Gates.

And these...

are my "Expedition Files."

Have you ever met someone who's larger-than-life?

I'm talking about a person whose charisma could be

measured in megawatts, lighting up every room

they walk into.

Well, tonight, you'll need your sunglasses to investigate some

of the most powerfully captivating characters in

history, squinting to discover the real people

and real mysteries behind their luminous lives.

We begin in 1696 aboard a ship called The Fancy.

But don't let the sweet-sounding name fool you.

It's manned by a crew of killers.

The captain here is Henry Avery, the so-called.

King of the Pirates.

And right now, he's divvying up the score that earned him

that name, a massive treasure

snatched from the Mughal Empire of India.

It will go down as the largest pirate heist in history,

estimated to be worth a staggering

$400 million today.

But Captain Avery and all this loot will soon vanish,

never to be seen again.

So what happens to these incredible spoils?

The long-buried secrets of Henry Avery

are about to be revealed.

Henry Avery is born around 1659 near Plymouth, England,

the same rugged port where the Pilgrims

had departed from just a few decades earlier.

The ocean is in his blood from the start.

As a young man, Avery goes to sea,

earning his place as he learns

the ropes of life aboard a ship.

He begins his career the respectable way,

serving in the Royal Navy,

then he moves on to privateering.

That is, piracy with a government stamp of approval.

As long as you fly the right flag, the crown is happy to

let you rob its enemies blind.

For a while, Avery plays by those rules, but rules at sea

have a way of slipping.

By 1694, Avery is a hardened sailor and the chief mate

aboard the Charles II, a sleek, heavily-armed vessel

tasked with hunting French ships across the Atlantic.

But before long, the voyage stalls

due to bureaucracy.

The ship sails into a Spanish port to receive important

legal documents authorizing their mission.

And there it sits.

The documents fail to arrive, and the crew is all

but trapped, unpaid, restless, and forbidden

from going ashore.

The captain promises that money is coming, but tensions are

on the rise. Avery has had enough.

One night, he leads a mutiny, seizing the ship,

renaming her The Fancy,

and cutting all ties to the British crown.

From this moment on, Henry Avery is

no longer a privateer. He's a pirate.

The Fancy leaves port, setting course

for the richest waters on Earth.

Along the way, Avery and his crew raid and loot roughly

a dozen ships as they sweep down the West African coast,

round the Cape of Good Hope, and push into the Indian Ocean,

the vital trading artery of the mighty Mughal Empire.

The Mughals are a powerful Islamic dynasty that rules

across much of what is now India.

And their ruler at this time, Aurangzeb, is quite possibly

the richest man on Earth.

Naturally, that makes his trade route irresistible for

the eye patch and cutlass crowd.

But Mughal ships are famously well-armed

and fiercely protected.

And as a vital trading partner with Avery's former employers,

the British Crown, an attack on a Mughal ship would make Avery

the most wanted pirate on Earth.

September of 1695, as The Fancy sails toward

the Arabian Peninsula, Captain Avery launches

a high-seas heist so bold,

it would make the "Ocean's 11" crew seasick.

He convinces other nearby pirate captains to join forces

and attack not just one vessel, but a whole fleet,

25 Mughal ships.

But Avery and his crew set their sights on

one particular target... a massive,

heavily-armed treasure ship called the Ganj-i-Sawai.

It's a floating fortress with 62 guns and 400 guards aboard.

It's armed to the teeth for good reason.

The ship is owned by the Mughal emperor himself,

filled with his vast personal riches.

Fire!

After a volley of Avery's cannonballs takes out

the Indian ship's mast, the pirates storm the decks.

When the battle comes to an end, Avery's men claim

a treasure estimated to nearly half a billion dollars today.

As captain, Avery gets the lion's share, receiving not

just hundreds of thousands of gold and silver pieces,

but priceless artifacts too.

Suffice to say, Avery is now a very, very rich man.

With this victory, his reputation grows rapidly,

earning him the nicknames the Arch Pirate

and the King of the Pirates.

But before we break out the celebratory rum,

it should be mentioned that no treasure is valuable enough

to merit what Avery and his men do to claim it.

The pirates torture and butcher everyone aboard the ship,

allegedly including women and relatives of

the royal family.

The Ganj-i-Sawai becomes a bloodbath.

The fallout is swift and worldwide.

Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb is outraged and mistakenly blames

his trading partners in Great Britain for the attack.

He threatens to shut down all trade with

the British East India Company,

a move that would spell economic disaster for England.

The Brits promise to pay Aurangzeb what he's owed

and to bring the pirates to justice.

The search for Henry Avery is

the first global manhunt in history.

The navies of the British and Mughal empires

independently scour the seas for any sign of Avery's ship,

The Fancy, but the King of the Pirates

somehow escapes them.

Avery sets The Fancy on a course for the Bahamas,

at that time a sparsely populated,

loosely-governed British colony.

It's believed that Avery and about 100 crewmen arrive in.

New Providence in April of 1696.

There, Avery allegedly split shares of the treasure

between his men.

As for The Fancy, her fate is also unknown.

Some say Avery handed her over to the authorities in.

New Providence.

Others believe he may have scuttled her.

But either way, Avery and his crew scatter to the winds.

Some stay in the Caribbean,

some head for the American colonies.

Others head for home in hostile British waters.

Where Avery went, well, that's the mystery.

As many as 24 of The Fancy's crew are arrested

within the year.

Five are hanged at London's infamous Execution Dock.

Avery isn't one of them.

After 1696, the so-called Pirate King

appears to simply vanish, along with any trace of

his stolen fortune.

So what became of history's most successful pirate?

Over the last 300 years, there have been

numerous theories.

One of the oldest dates to 1709, when a printed pamphlet

circulates a rumor that Henry Avery took his riches

to Madagascar, married the daughter of

a local ruler, and established a pirate kingdom.

Another enduring theory, drawn from the 1724 book,

"A General History of the Pirates," says Avery

returned to England only to be cheated by merchants

who refused to pay fair value for his treasure.

Stripped of his riches, he allegedly dies a beggar.

But there's zero evidence to back up either of

these bold theories.

In the centuries since, the legend of Henry Avery

and his massive undiscovered treasure

has only continued to grow.

He's been the subject of books, stage plays,

even video games like "Uncharted."

And while his myth has heated up,

his trail has remained ice cold.

But now, an incredible string of discoveries

is quickly changing that.

In 1695, Henry Avery pulls off the greatest heist in

pirate history, when he steals $400 million worth of treasure.

For the next 300 years, the fate of the stolen riches

remains a mystery.

But then comes a remarkable find.

In 2014, a metal detectorist scanning an orchard in.

Middletown, Rhode Island,

discovers something extraordinary...

a silver coin engraved with Arabic script

and minted in Yemen in 1693.

Over the next few years, similar coins turn up across.

New England and as far south as North Carolina.

All of them are dated before 1695,

which means they could have been

on the Ganj-i-Sawai when Avery raided it.

In other words, this could be part of the lost loot.

The find was compelling, but it was far from

definitive proof that Avery and his treasure

made it to America.

And meanwhile, other leads elsewhere in the world emerged

as to where the Pirate King may have ended up.

In 2023, I joined an expedition to find the treasure,

not in the New World, but in the Old one.

I traveled to Cornwall, England to meet a team of

treasure hunters following cryptic clues from

an old letter that may reveal

some of Avery's long lost fortune.

"On his return from India, either landed or was

"shipwrecked near the Lizard, where he buried three chests

or boxes full of treasure in the sands of the seashore."

We're off to a good start.

We're literally talking about buried treasure here.

I also explored a sea cave straight out of "The Goonies."

And narrowly avoided a one-way trip to

Davy Jones' locker.

And I dived a shipwreck site rumored to have ties to

the Pirate King's lost fortune.

The results?

This is just amazing.

This is Arabic script here, yes?

This is, isn't it? Yeah.

This is definitely Mughal. There's no two ways about it.

- This is a Mughal coin? - That is a Mughal coin.

This is as good close to a smoking gun...

- That is. - As we've seen.

We may have found some of Avery's treasure, but if so,

it raises a question.

Could Henry really have returned to the country that

he'd made his enemy

and be allowed to live there happily ever after?

Well, a remarkable new theory developed by Dr. Sean Kingsley

may be able to explain how

the Pirate King managed to make peace.

In December 2020, I was doing some writing about pirates.

I hook up with an old friend, Rex Cowan.

He's a wreck hunter, an encyclopedia.

So he gets super excited and gives me this letter that

says, "Avery the Pirate, December, 1700."

And I go, "Hello!"

You know, this is very clearly four years since he was

last seen in November 1696.

And it's shocking.

You know, if this letter is real, the Pirate King is back

from the dead.

The letter is a copy of an older document and therefore

hard to authenticate, but Kingsley suspected

it might be the real deal,

calling it a once-in-a-lifetime

historical treasure and one that may totally rewrite

the final chapter of Henry Avery.

Henry Avery says he's just come back from a journey.

He's incredibly wary.

He's about to go off on another mission.

He's waiting to receive his instructions

and he'll report back imminently.

But all these lines are kind of inter cut with this sort of code

in numbers and letters, so it makes it impossible to

actually realize what the content is about.

In the late 17th century, codes like this were only used

by ambassadors, diplomats, and spies.

I think we can cut out the possibility that he became

an ambassador or a diplomat, which really only points

in one specific direction... Henry Avery,

on His Majesty's Secret Service, a spy.

Kingsley is arguing something remarkable.

He's saying that Henry Avery, the pirate who was England's

enemy number one, had an about-face and was now

part of a British spy ring that included, of all people,

the guy who wrote "Robinson Crusoe," Daniel Defoe,

and the Archbishop of Canterbury,

all to protect the country from a French Catholic invasion.

But if so, how had Avery managed to get back on

good terms with England?

Well, it turns out everybody's got a price.

I think that Henry Avery gave a large chunk

of his Mughal treasure to pay for his "freedom."

Avery's got all this cash,

but there's no way of spending it.

The authorities are gonna find him and eventually hang him

by his neck.

He's in his 30s, he's a young man,

and he's got this incredible resume of skills

which are transferable.

What's he gonna do?

I imagine that he fixed it with the King of England,

that he could come on His Majesty's Secret Service as

a spy in return for these incredible life skills

which he'd developed and for a king's ransom pile of cash.

There was a big problem, though.

He couldn't make heads or tails of the code.

Could it be the location of Avery's lost treasure?

The only way to find out would be to crack it.

Easier said than done.

I contacted academics, mathematician,

even an advisor to the FBI.

And they all told me one thing, that there are ciphers

and there are codes.

Ciphers, you can actually hope to read them,

because there's an internal logic

within the rhythm of a letter.

And if there is enough repetition of words and letters

and sequences, you can crack the cipher.

But this was not a cipher, it was a code.

And to be able to crack that, you had to have a code book.

And you'd have your book, and you'd go down it,

and you'd look at a number, and it would revert to a word.

For instance, 131 might mean the French king, 249 might mean.

Secret Service. Those are real examples.

So you've got to be really lucky to actually find one of

the original keys to the code.

The way these codes work is that the author would reference

a standalone code book to disguise sensitive messages

in the correspondence.

The recipient would have been issued an identical code book,

so the secret message could be deciphered.

That way, if the document fell into the wrong hands,

it would be impossible to understand.

The largest collections of these code books exist in

the British Library in London.

And I spent many days and weeks stuck in the archives going

through these volumes, hoping to discover

the Holy Grail, but without luck.

The hunt for the elusive code book continues.

Unless it turns up, the letters' strangest passages

will remain secret. My personal favorite?

Quote, "I'm not the least concerned for tank 29

of B26 being out of the T9211597."

Whatever the hell that means.

One thing we do know is that if the letter is authentic,

it rewrites Avery as less Jack Sparrow

and more James Bond.

Kingsley believes more clues could be buried in archives

across Europe, and he's still on the trail

of the world's most wanted pirate.

So watch this space, because who knows,

maybe the next treasure isn't sunk beneath the waves,

but locked away in a forgotten filing cabinet,

just waiting to be plundered.

It's around 1153 BC. The place?

Ancient Egypt.

And the pharaoh, Ramses III, has held his empire together

for three decades with an iron fist.

But tonight, this warrior king's grip is slipping.

Before the sun rises, Ramses will be dead.

How does he die?

And was it, as many will argue, murder?

Well, that will become the foundation of

history's oldest cold case.

But 3,000 years on, modern science will help

explain the death of the last great pharaoh.

Ramses III grows up during one of the most dangerous moments

in Egypt's history.

His father, Setnakhte, seizes the throne around 1186 BC,

at a moment when Egypt is coming apart.

Foreign rulers are chipping away

at its borders.

Vital trade routes are under attack.

The kingdom is in chaos.

While his father struggles to restore order,

the young Prince Ramses is sent to govern

the Sinai Peninsula,

Egypt's volatile frontier.

There, he learns how to command troops, protect trade routes,

and defend the fragile empire he may one day inherit.

It's a harsh training ground, but Ramses proves himself

a strong leader and fierce warrior.

His father saves the kingdom, but his reign is brief,

just three years.

And when he dies around 1184 BC,

Ramses III, as he'll come to be known,

assumes the throne.

He inherits a kingdom restored by force, but surrounded by

enemies on every side.

The young pharaoh now carries the responsibility

of holding Egypt together.

And almost immediately, he is tested.

Libyan tribes invade from the west.

Then an even greater threat arrives from the sea.

Mysterious maritime raiders known as the Sea Peoples,

whose attacks are helping to topple civilizations

across the ancient world.

Ramses fights back.

Against overwhelming odds, his armies defeat the invaders

in one of the most decisive battles of the age.

The victory is immortalized

on temple walls, showing the pharaoh as.

Egypt's defender, standing between his civilization

and destruction.

But decades of war takes its toll.

The treasury is drained. Workers go unpaid.

Nearly 30 years into his reign, laborers building

the royal tombs lay down their tools in protest.

It is the first recorded labor strike in history.

The empire Ramses fought so hard to defend

is beginning to weaken.

And inside the royal palace, an even more dangerous threat

begins to emerge.

The pharaoh has designated his eldest son,

Ramses IV, as his successor.

But that plan doesn't sit well with some of the royal family,

particularly with one of Ramses' three wives.

A betrayal is brewing.

Queen Tiye believes her own son, Prince Pentawer,

should take the throne instead.

But Tiye is only a secondary wife

with far less power at court.

She does not hold the prestigious title of.

Great Royal Wife,

the rank reserved for a pharaoh's

principal queens, whose sons typically

had the strongest claim to rule.

Born a commoner, Queen Tiye lacks royal blood,

and her lower status leaves her son far down

the line of succession.

But that doesn't stop her from trying to seize power.

According to surviving papyrus records, Tiye begins secretly

organizing a plot to assassinate Ramses III...

Kill the Pharaoh.

And place Prince Pentawer on the throne.

If she can gather enough support, she could overturn

the royal line of succession.

Tiye and Pentawer recruit several of Ramses' inner circle

to aid their plot,

including a chef, a butler,

and an overseer of his harem,

exploiting growing dissatisfaction with

the pharaoh from within his own household.

History will remember this as the Harem Conspiracy.

Some loyal officials may have tried to warn the king.

But if they did, the warning came too late.

Not long after, Ramses III, the warrior pharaoh who spent

his life defending Egypt is found dead.

Father!

Whispers of betrayal spread through the palace.

Had the king been murdered by his own family?

His body is embalmed and wrapped in layers of linen,

then buried in a tomb in the Valley of the Kings.

For more than 3,000 years, the truth about what happened

to Ramses III remains buried with him.

Thanks to modern science, we now have the answers.

All will be revealed.

Egyptian pharaoh Ramses III is dead, but was it murder?

And if so, was his plotting wife, Queen Tiye, responsible?

Well, there is a fascinating document that's key to

understanding the truth.

Writings known as the "Judicial Papyrus of Turin,"

which describe the trial of assassins of Ramses in

the so-called Harem Conspiracy.

But it is frustratingly vague on the details.

Here's what we do know.

The trial consists of 12 judges and is overseen by

21-year-old Ramses IV,

the late pharaoh's designated heir.

The fact that he presides and not Pentawer,

tells us that although Queen Tiye

may have succeeded in arranging Ramses' death,

her plot to install Pentawer as ruler failed.

The new pharaoh, Ramses IV,

shows little mercy in exacting revenge on those

who are seemingly implicated in his father's death.

The papyrus lists an astounding 28 people who were executed for

their roles in the conspiracy.

As for Tiye and Pentawer themselves, the papyrus states.

Pentawer is allowed to take his own life.

Though the method of execution isn't mentioned,

scholars believe he most likely hanged himself.

But the papyrus tells us nothing about what happened to.

Queen Tiye, the apparent instigator of

the Harem Conspiracy.

Many believe she was executed,

perhaps by burning, erased from royal memory.

The papyrus was discovered in the 1820s by Italian diplomat

and antiquities collector Bernardino Drovetti,

who shipped the documents and crates of Egyptian

treasures to the Turin Museum.

The papyrus sat there for decades

until Egyptologist, Adolf Erman finally translated it

around the turn of the century.

And while the details it revealed gave us

a revolutionary look into the Harem Conspiracy,

some key questions remain a mystery,

namely how Ramses III died and who killed him.

But then in 2012, a team of researchers

led by Dr. Zahi Hawass decides to take another look

at the pharaoh's remains

using modern forensic techniques.

When archaeologist Nicholas Brown

saw the results, he was stunned.

The findings that Dr. Zahi Hawass

and his team made broke open this whole mystery.

They actually used modern technologies like CT scanning

to virtually unwrap the mummy of Ramses III.

Underneath the bandages, the king's throat had actually

been slit with a knife.

This wasn't just a surface wound that

the king had experienced.

This cut had run deep and actually severed

his windpipe and several arteries.

Nearly 3,200 years after the brutal deed,

we finally know how the pharaoh died.

This new forensic evidence now proves the pharaoh was

assassinated, just as Queen Tiye had planned.

But one question remains.

Who could have gotten close enough to Egypt's most

protected man to slit his throat?

The ancient Egyptians' access to the king would have been

really limited and restricted, which means it must have been

somebody close to the king, either in his court

or even his harem, who was able to accomplish something like

an assassination plot.

Dr. Hawass's team believed they may have found

the murderer by examining another mummy discovered near.

Ramses in the pharaoh's tomb.

At first, this mummy appeared to be an anonymous young man

who had been mummified without the usual care and respect

afforded to royalty.

But then DNA analysis showed he was far from unknown.

The DNA analysis that Zahi performed on this unknown mummy

and the mummy of Ramses III found that the two

were very closely related.

It's possible that this mummy could, in fact, be Pentawer,

the son of Ramses III and Queen Tiye.

Some Egyptologists have suggested that the way this

mummy looks, right, with its mouth wide open

and it looks like he's screaming in pain, that perhaps this

indicates that he was killed by hanging.

38 people are accused as being involved with the assassination

attempt against Ramses III.

It's really unlikely that all 38 of those individuals

actually had direct access to Ramses and therefore

would have been the one to kill him.

Access to the king would have been really

limited and restricted.

It's more likely that as the son of Ramses III,

Pentawer would have had closer access to the king than most

other people in the court, and could have been the one

who actually assassinated him.

Modern forensics has unwrapped the millennia-old mystery of

the death of Ramses III.

We now know that his throat was slit.

There's even circumstantial evidence suggesting Ramses' own

son carried out the deed.

Not bad analysis for

a 3,000-plus-year-old crime scene.

Today, visitors to Ramses' temple can still see

the magnificent reliefs

showing him as a triumphant warrior king.

But it now seems this famed pharaoh's greatest battle

wasn't against foreign armies, but with his very own family,

who thirsted for the throne.

Welcome to the ancient world, and a place made famous

by the Greeks. We're not in Greece, though.

We're in a place beyond its borders,

a place where women rule.

This young fighter is training to join an all-female army in

a society said to be so powerful its name will echo

through time, inspiring everything from

the name of a mighty river to our most iconic superheroine,

Wonder Woman, because this warrior is an Amazon.

Now, in time, scholars will say these fearsome females are

simply the stuff of myth.

That is, until new evidence suggests something incredible,

that the Amazon might just be real.

The Amazons are first mentioned by name in "The Iliad,"

written in the 8th century BC.

In Homer's famous epic, King Priam of Troy mentions

that he, quote, "Once fought alongside the Amazons,

women the equal of men."

It's barely more than a name drop, but their mystique

is firmly established.

Over the next few centuries, Greek storytellers return to

the stories of the Amazons.

They write about a tribe of fierce warriors existing in

a female-only society beyond the borders of Greece in

the area of the Black Sea.

They procreate with men from neighboring communities,

then raise only the daughters,

sending male children back to their fathers.

According to legend, Amazon women are,

almost from birth, trained in hand-to-hand combat,

as well as horseback riding and archery.

They also expertly wield battle axes and spears.

Their strength is beyond compare, warriors so fierce

they blur the line between mortal and mythic.

Ultimately, the Amazons are said to go head-to-head

with the greatest heroes of Greek mythology.

And I promise you, this is a fight you don't want to miss.

Legends of female fighters known as Amazon warriors have

endured for thousands of years, stemming from stories left by

the ancient Greeks, known for their lethal skills as archers.

Some stories even describe them cutting off one of

their breasts to better steady their bows or hurl

deadly javelins. They're nearly unstoppable.

That is, unless they're squaring off against

mythical Greek heroes.

In tales recorded in the 8th century BC,

Queen Penthesilea of the Amazons

faces off alone against the Greeks

and the greatest warrior in Greek mythology, Achilles.

They engage in a savage battle.

And while she's a nearly even match for Achilles,

he ultimately slays her.

Afterward, he's struck by Penthesilea's valor and beauty,

ironically falling in love with the very foe he kills.

In another famous story, the queen of the Amazons,

Hippolyta, sister of the slain Queen Penthesilea,

is about to come face to face with the one man in

Greek mythology you don't want to pick a fight with,

because sailing into the harbor, is Hercules.

As the half-mortal, half-divine son of Zeus,

Herc is on a roll, tackling 12 lethal labors,

including the slaying of a giant lion,

a pesky Hydra, and the infamous Minotaur.

It's the ninth of these deadly missions which pits

him toe-to-toe, or sandal-to-sandal,

against the Amazons.

Hercules is tasked with claiming

the queen's golden war belt, the symbol of her power.

To his surprise, Hippolyta doesn't resist.

She meets him peacefully and even offers the belt as

a gift and a show of mutual respect between warrior equals.

Believing it too good to be true, Hercules turns on

the queen and strikes her down dead.

He escapes with the belt and his life.

Notice a pattern?

In myth after myth, an Amazon queen dies by

the hand of a Greek male hero.

It is no coincidence that the stories of Amazon warriors

being defeated by Greek heroes were written by Greek men,

men with a patriarchal worldview to defend.

So were the Amazons just a myth shaped by male imagination?

Or is there any truth to the stories of

these proud warrior women?

Well, there's at least one historical source which

suggests they may have actually existed.

In the 5th century, the historian Herodotus

documented an account of Amazon warriors captured by

the Greeks, who later escaped by seizing their captors' ships

and settling among the Scythians in what is now

Ukraine and Russia.

For millennia, Herodotus' account is

written off by scholars as imaginative storytelling,

not credible history.

But now there's extraordinary new evidence that the Amazons

may have been so much more than myth.

For centuries, historians have debated,

were the Amazon warriors of Greek legend

real or fantasy?

In the 5th century, Herodotus claimed they hailed

from the ancient region of Scythia, a vast swath of

territory stretching from Ukraine to Turkey around

the edge of the Black Sea.

Professor of anthropology Marin Pilloud

reveals that recent discoveries about the Scythians

may help solve the mystery of the Amazons.

So, some 30 years ago, some interesting discoveries

were found in the Caspian Pontic steppe region.

They found around 19 mounds that were large burial tombs.

And in 2019, in one mound, they found the remains of

four female skeletons.

And it's dated to around 2,500 years ago.

This date of about 2,500 years is important because it places

the culture in the area.

So, we know that around that time, the Scythians were in

this region, and we know the Scythians to be a group

that had women warriors that

predominantly traveled around via horseback.

Within this mound, with the skeletons of these

four women, were multiple iron arrowheads, spears,

artifacts associated with horse riding, and knives.

The oldest woman also had a golden headdress

around her head.

It was intricate and could have also suggested something about

her position in society.

Not only was she the oldest individual, but also had

the most elaborate grave goods with her,

with the golden headdress.

These were things that were placed there to honor

the dead amongst the living.

The women who were buried in these mounds would have held

an elevated place in society.

Just like the Amazons of legend, these women from

the late 4th century BC,

were apparently part of a family dynasty,

buried with the honor one would expect for revered warriors.

In fact, there is some skeletal analysis of other.

Scythian remains that suggests that there could be

battle wounds on women that's very similar to men.

Based on some of these recent archaeological findings,

we can see that it was quite normal for women to engage in

warfare activities amongst the Scythians.

As a nomadic tribe, they would need to, at times,

defend their areas.

Trained from youth in horseback riding

and mounted combat, much like the Amazons of legend,

Scythian women were adorned with animal tattoos

meant to imbue them with

magical protection and strength in battle.

These tattoos mimicked the striking gold and bronze

animal art also found in their graves.

This find adds to growing evidence that women had

strong roles in the past.

This is a notion that we have been at times reluctant to

embrace based on our own sort of conceptions of

gendered roles in the present.

And so, we infer those onto the past, but there's such

a growing body of evidence to suggest that women were in fact

engaged in all levels of society, including warfare.

And with discoveries like this one in 2019 of women buried

with grave goods indicative of being a warrior,

it seems highly probable that the Scythian warrior women were

the inspiration for the Amazon women

that the Greeks wrote about.

The archaeological findings are revealing that the Amazons

may be a legendary echo of historic female fighters.

The very name, Amazon, is now attributed to the old.

Persian word Hamazan, meaning "equal warrior."

After all, who needs Wonder Woman

when you've got the real-life action heroines

of the Scythians?

I'm Josh Gates, and I'll see you on the next expedition.