Cybersnark, on 05 March 2013 - 10:48 PM, said:
Consider, the whole reason we remember the Greeks is that they weren't primitives. Right off the bat, Themiscyra could've had access to advanced mathematics, skilled metalsmiths with a working knowledge of alloys, artists with a detailed eye for natural forms (who could likely figure out the basics of aerodynamics), farmers who knew about animal husbandry and agriculture (and thus had the means to understand and study genetics), a concept of alchemy (which could expand and subdivide into something resembling the "modern" sciences, including chemistry, germ theory, and medecine), and maybe even chemists and mechanics able to understand the concept of fuel and mechanical rocketry. Once they stopped having to fight for their lives, they couldn't have helped but to start studying the world around them --it's human nature.
Point of order -- the Amazons of myth were not Greeks. They were the mortal enemies of the Greeks. The whole point of the Amazon myth in Greek culture was as a symbol of gender values the exact opposite of Greece's own, a grotesque cautionary tale of what they believed women should not be.
Granted, the Amazons of the comics were not the Amazons of myth. But I believe that in the original version, they had in fact been enslaved by the Greeks and had escaped. And in the post-Crisis version, they consisted of a multicultural mix of female outcasts from a variety of cultures. Sure, they're guided by the same gods that the Greeks worshipped, but that doesn't make them actually Greek themselves.
BklnScott, on 05 March 2013 - 11:47 PM, said:
As far as the question of why wouldn't they develop advanced technology: I agree that they're smart, and that they should not be depicted as being primitives, but why would a small, isolated population living in utopian circumstances NEED to develop modern technology? They're doing better than fine already. Need is what drives innovation, no? And often - the existence of enemies, of which the Amazons, having been delivered from their enemies, had none.
Utopian circumstances don't necessarily last, though. An island has finite resources that can be exhausted -- look at Rapa Nui (Easter Island) and the collapse of the civilization that built the famous statues there. It takes innovation and careful management for a human civilization to live in balance with its environment; it doesn't just automatically happen by the generosity of nature. I just read a book I emphatically recommend,
1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann. One of the most fascinating things I learned from it was that it's now believed that the Amazon rainforest as it exists in modern times was largely or perhaps mostly the creation of the indigenous population that lived there -- that the reason so many Amazonian trees and plants are so useful to humans is because they were bred to be, that the Amazonian peoples practiced their own unique form of agriculture, or rather agro-forestry, cultivating trees and other rainforest plants that could provide food and resources since the rainy climate would've washed away the soil if they'd cleared the trees for normal agriculture. So what we've assumed to be the last untouched wilderness on Earth may actually be the end result of centuries of human environmental engineering -- an advanced technology in its own way even if it didn't involve stone and metal.
Of course the situation as depicted on Themyscira is different, but the point is that the idea of non-technological humans living in harmony with unaltered nature is a myth, that any large, organized human population is going to need to apply invention and technology of some sort to manage its environment if it expects to survive there for any length of time without exhausting its resources. So the idea that the Amazons of Themyscira could live in a perfect, unchanging, nontechnological utopia is a fantasy. Okay, granted,
Wonder Woman itself is a fantasy, but the point is that by the parameters of your particular argument here, they
would have a need to drive innovation.