Good afternoon everyone,

Sometimes I read things in magazines that are not at all about feminism and receive a beautiful, unexpected feminist gift, this happened to me this week so please enjoy finding out with me about the female warriors of the Uzbekhi and Kazakh steppes.

Here's how it started – with Saodat Ismailova's musical performace based on the legend of the Gulaim and the Forty Girls (Qyrq Qyz, a phrase I have typed many times now and never right first time):

Enduring for centuries in a male-dominated epic tradition, this powerful matriarchal narrative comes to full-throated life in the Aga Khan Music Initiative’s multi-disciplinary retelling, conceived and directed by internationally acclaimed Uzbek filmmaker and artist Saodat Ismailova. As the next generation of Turkic female bards sing Gulaim’s legend—accompanying themselves on dutar (two-stringed lute), kyl-kiyak (two-stringed bowl fiddle), and jaw harp—Ismailova’s mesmerising film, scored by acclaimed Tashkent-based composer Dmitri Yanov-Yanovsky, weaves an emotional tapestry of legendary female power.

https://www.akdn.org/akmi/performance/qyrq-qyz-forty-girls

Let me know if there is a performance of this near you and you get to see it, it looks brilliant. Great to be using the traditional instruments as well.

Turns out that as well as being an epic poem in an oral tradition (found absolutely nowhere in English, I am sorry guys, I have looked) it's also true or at least truth-adjacent:

Adrienne Mayor, a scholar at Stanford University and author of “Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Women Across the Ancient World,” [said that] the “Forty Girls” epic is rooted to a large extent in historical fact, with some scholars relating their exploits to accounts of female warriors that appear in ancient biographies of Alexander the Great. “Scholars believe that the events in the ‘Forty Girls’ epic are historically and culturally plausible,” she said.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/19/world/asia/uzbekistan-forty-girls-musical.html

And guess what, it's not just folklorists who say so! Here's an archaeological discovery of a steppes warrior woman:

In the burial found in the Central Asian republic, archeologists also found a huge sword and dagger, still clasped by the bony hands of the warrior woman. That the two weapons were found in the skeletal hands has led researchers to theorize that the woman was buried with military honors.

https://www.speroforum.com/a/LRISZUUVJW48/76290-Red-Sonja-ancient-female-warrior-found-in-Kazakhstan

Cool, have a nice weekend!

Alex.