The Amazons were a legendary tribe of female warriors whose homeland was at the edge of the known Greek world in northern Asia Minor. Ancient literature preserves many tales of battles fought much earlier between the Greeks and the Amazons, who sided with the Trojans in the Trojan War. Considered barbaric and uncivilized, the Amazons became typecast as enemies of the Greeks and were often substituted, particularly in art, for the Greeks' more immediate adversaries to the east, the Persians.

This ceramic horse and rider is similar in style to figures carved in relief on the roughly contemporary sculpted frieze encircling the Parthenon, sections of which featured Amazons battling Greeks. As was also common on stone sculpture, details, such as the eyes and garment of the Amazon, were added here in colored pigments; much of the original painted surface remains visible. The figures make up the body of a drinking vessel called a rhyton, a rare form inspired by Near Eastern vessels, usually in the shape of animal heads. Wine poured into the top would come out of a small hole at the front of the base. The vessel was probably made in Athens for export, eventually finding its way to the Nubian capital of Meroë in present-day Sudan, where it was deposited in the fourth century B.C. as a treasured heirloom in the tomb of a royal child and excavated by archaeologists in 1921.

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