The term ‘amazon’ has been used throughout history with different meanings.

The amazon, whose name seems to derive from the Attic-Ionian dialect with the meaning ‘without udder’, is in the common imagination the woman on horseback, a bareback riding warrior, deprived of her right breast to improve her speed and accuracy in archery.

Some findings have offered other explanations for the name of these mythical fighters.

Archaeological excavations between Russia and Kazakhstan have brought to light the tombs (6th-2nd century BC) of the ‘enigmatic warrior women’, unmarried women buried with daggers and bows. An etymological compromise has therefore been proposed that makes the term ‘amazon’ derive from a Proto-Indo-European lemma, ‘the one without a husband’, as opposed to two other etymological solutions: from an Iranian tribe ha mazan, the ‘warrior women’, or from the Persian ha mashyai, ‘the people [of the steppes]’.

Whatever the correct etymology, the term was used to describe these women, warriors who were equal to men in the use of weapons and horses.

If initially the concept of the amazon was very much linked to that of independence from the male element at the end of the 19th century, the term ‘amazon’ came to be identified with a specific mode of horse-riding, translating into a model of dress, a ‘fashion’, ‘à l’amazon’.

The type of saddle then used by women, which was initially uncomfortable and unsafe, underwent a series of evolutions and modifications (knobs and horns) that gradually allowed for a more stable set-up.