The Amazon Chronicle

In 1946, in the wake of the Nazi destruction, the Great Soviet Union set its energies on rebuilding its war-torn nation.

During this time a young engineer named Nicolai Stranskov was tasked with the reconstruction of Anapa, a small city with a deep history on the north-east coast of the Black Sea. While digging out a foundation under the location of a devastated Greek Orthodox Church, workers uncovered seven large clay pots weighing several kilograms each. The wide-mouthed jars were sealed with a tar-like substance that had become brittle with age. In the hope that they held treasures, the workmen had opened the jars before Stranskov's arrival only to find they contained 24 tightly wound scrolls of papyrus-like material.

Nicolai, recognising the importance of the discovery, chose to entrust this new-found historic treasure to The Party and surrendered them to the authorities based in Sevastopol. They were in turn handed over to the Moscow State University where they sat untouched for the next eleven years waiting to be translated and documented.

In 1957, Alexandar Orlov --the new university curator-- took control of the huge stockpile of artifacts yet to be archived. Having been the teacher of ancient Greek studies and language at the Irkutsk State Institute of Foreign Languages, he held a special interest in the pots and the scrolls that still remained inside them. He had recognised the jars to be of Greek design and thought them possibly from the ancient Greek colony of Gorgippia.

He quietly gathered as much information as he could from his friends and specialists in the academic fields on the handling and storage of ancient documentation. And with the great amount of spare time his new position provided he endeavoured to learn the mystery of the scrolls.

Undisturbed, he spent the next 33 years of his life translating the pages from ancient Greek while researching the local tribes, languages and histories of the Caucasus Mountains.

In the confusion following the dismantling of the Soviet Union in 1991, Alexandar, along with the help of an unknown friend, transported the scrolls back to his apartment on the outskirts of Moscow. Upon his death in 2005, his unfinished text books were found, along with a room full of linguistic charts, books of historic documentation of the tribes, settlements and lists of conquerors along the Caucasus. Using descriptions found in the scrolls, Orlov also left behind detailed maps of the locations and routes he estimated to be the paths taken by the story members.

His manuscript covers had the handwritten title of "Amajoi. Were they the Amazons of Greek Myth?" They recount the history of a tribe he pronounced as 'amajoi' or 'amazoi' over a span of five generations.

(The location of the original Greek Church and the whereabouts of the scrolls are presently unknown.)

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The Amazon Chronicle recalls the history of a tribe that was located in the western Caucasus Mountains -- among the borders of present day Georgia, Abkhazia and Russia -- around the mid 8th Century BC. (circa. 750BC)

The accumulation of the recorded accounts of the final survivors gives detailed insight into the lives of the five generations of these men and women who called themselves the Amazoi.

It tells of this nomadic group's change from a male dominated society to a female-governed tribe and continues with them from escaping almost being annihilated, to their rise to power as leaders of a small empire, until their final days on this earth as a people.