Whether astride galloping horses while aiming their Scythian bow and arrow with deadly accuracy against the enemy or mightily brandishing the lethal double-headed axe in hand-to-hand combat, the Amazon women were formidable foes.

Herodotus thrilled his readers with accounts of the Amazons who lived in the Black Sea region. The female warriors did not marry, he wrote, but mated with whomever they pleased. The spirit of the Amazons has lived through the centuries as women have taken up arms to defend their homes and families. Amazons live in the hearts of the women of the 2nd Peshmerga Battalion, an all-female battalion of Kurdish fighters who, in the fight for Kobani, greeted ISIS with AK47s and the promise to send them to hell. They were personified in Soviet women who played a major roll in WWII, with 800,000 serving as pilots, snipers, machine gunners, tank crews and partisans. Greek women who bravely fought the Ottomans, and Nazis; and in the 21st century, American women who serve in combat roles and as fighter pilots. Since the first Iraqi war more than 200,000 women from a total of almost 2.5 million U.S. active duty and reserve troops have served in war zones.