There are many different accounts of the history of the Amazons. Here are a few of the ones Themiscrya draws its history from.

You can read Themiscryan History at our Scrolls.

From "101 Amazons"

members.tripod.com/~ancient_history/101amazons

(The site closed, so I removed the link. Sorry! Below is the history of Lysippe from that site).

Lysippe. Queen of the Amazons. Her reign predates the reign of the Queens of Themiskyra.

She ruled in an area north of the Black Sea, where flowed the Amazon River. She had a son, Tanais, whose virginity and worship of Artemis offended Aphrodite, who found him very attractive. In revenge for his spurning of all her attempts to have him lose his prized virginity, she cursed him to know lust, for no one else but his own mother. Lysippe apparently had no time to learn of the problem, since Tanais promptly drowned himself in the Amazon River.

She renamed the river Tanais, and consulted her oracles who told her to leave the area, lest the ghost of Tanais return to her as an evil spirit. Lysippe at once picked up and marched her people around the enormous Black Sea to its south-central coastal area, where they found a river called Thermodon and settled on its banks. There, the nation split into three tribes, and each formed a separate city; Lysippe's tribe formed Themiskyra, and conquered the land all the way back to the Tanais.

With the spoils of war she built temples to Ares and Artemis Tauropolis, whose bloody worship she may have founded (Artemis Tauropolis being the Greek version of the goddess Taurica Dea who was worshipped with particularly bloody and brutal rituals of human and animal sacrifice on the island of Tauris in the Black Sea. Iphigenia, who had been saved by Artemis when her father Agamemnon attempted to sacrifice her for a favorable wind with which to reach Troy and take back Helen, became a favorite of Artemis, who made her a high priestess of this Tauropolitan cult of human sacrifice. The cult spread to Sparta via Artemis Orthia, where young people were flogged mercilessly as a form of worship. The worship carried to Aricia in Italy, and apparently Hippolytus, son of Theseus and Antiope/Hippolyte, attempted to revive it for Athens).

The history of our tribe of Themiscyra is based on the above tale of Lysippe. Our founder, Queen Celosia, and her Regent, Medea, were the daughters of Lysippe. When the great Queen died, the pair moved south along the Thermodon to it's current site.

You can read more about it at the Ria Istoria site. If you seek more knowledge about Amazons and their role in history and legend, try our Links page.

Aeschylus calls them "The warring Amazons, men-haters." They were a nation of women, all warriors. They were supposed to live around the Caucasus and their chief city was Themiscryra (yet another spelling). Curiously enough, they inspired artists to make statues and pictures of them far more than poets to write about them. Familiar though they are to us there are few stories about them. They invaded Lycia and were repulsed by Belerophon. the invaded Phrygia when Priam was young, and Attica when Theseus was King. He had carried off their Queen, Penthesilea, according to a story not in the Iliad, told by Pausanias. He says that she was killed by Achilles, who mourned for her as she lay dead, so young and so beautiful.

Xena Warrior Princess is  © Studios USA, Universal City Studios, Inc. Webset design and content ©2010 Crescent Designs for Themiscyra Amazon Nation. Many thanks to Mike's Xena Page for most of the captures.