| Originally, Egypt started out as a matrilineal society, likely up until the time of the Hyksos. Around 100 BC, Diodorus Siculus described Egyptians way of marital life: “It is for these reasons, in fact, that it was ordained that the queen should have greater power and honour than the king and that among private persons the wife should enjoy authority over the husband, husbands agreeing in the marriage contract that they will be obedient in all things to their wives.” John G. Jackson in Man, God and Civilization, quotes Robert Briffault: “Down to the time when a dynasty of Greek rulers sought to introduce foreign usages, the conservative society of the great African kingdom [Egypt], which has contributed so largely to the material and intellectual culture of the Western world, never lost the lineaments of a matriarchal social order... The functions of royalty in ancient Egypt were regarded as being transmitted in the female line... Those features of the constitution of Egyptian royalty are not singular. They are substantially identical with those obtaining in all other African kingdoms.” (98) Professor Cyrus Gordon writing on Egypt states: “In family life, women had a peculiarly important position for inheritance passed through the mother rather than through the father. This system may well hark back to prehistoric times when only the obvious relationship between the mother and the child was recognized, but not the less apparent relationship between father and child.” (99) Several centuries before Diodorus, Herodotus wrote of the women of Egypt: “Women go in the marketplace, transact affairs and occupy themselves with business, while the husbands stay home and weave.” According to Merlin Stone in her book, When God was a Woman, Egyptian women were the ones doing the pursuing: “Love poems in Egyptian tombs strongly hint that it was the Egyptian woman who did the courting, oftimes wooing the male by plying him with intoxicants to weaken his protestations.” (100) Taking these rights away from women may not have been in men’s best interest, after all. In Libya, the goddess Neith was worshiped prior to the Greek and Roman conquests and this was a matrilineal based society as well. Diodorus Siculus discussing the freedom of Libyan women is quoted as saying: “All authority was vested in the women, who discharged every kind of public duty. The men looked after domestic affairs just as the women do among ourselves and did as they were told by their wives. They were not allowed to undertake war service or to exercise any functions of government, or to fill any public office, such as might have given them more spirit to set themselves up against the women. The children were handed over immediately after birth to the men, who reared them on milk and other foods suitable to their age.” (101) |
The Cretan people, as well as the Maltese islanders and the people of the Indus Valley and Southern India, all of whom practiced worship of the maternal elements of the earth, were cultures that lasted almost 1000 years without war. War and the need to dominate other cultures was not an event that has plagued mankind since its inception as the patriarchal authorities would have us believe, but a more recent institution imposed on less violent cultures by more violent cultures. (102) Authors and researchers of many ranks hold the belief that patriarchy arose out of the loss of control over the development of metallurgy in the Bronze Age. Monica Sjoo writes: “Metallurgy, when it first appeared, was a highly ritualized and sacred art under guardianship of the Goddess, with strong taboos attached to it. Metals were light – gold, silver, tin, copper – and were mostly shaped into jewelry, ornaments, ceremonial vessels. Undoubtedly, the mystery-transformation of running hot metals into ornaments and tools, using fire, molds, and ovens, was first developed by women incidentally to their experimentation with pottery. Once developed into a distinct art, mining and smelting seem to have been the special tasks of men who lived apart, under religious restriction or taboo. The only male figures found on Cretan seals were tiny bodies of smiths, scratched beside the larger figure of the Goddess. Sacred metallurgy served the Neolithic Goddess and the people wisely, but in the Bronze Age the ritual controls were broken; metallurgy passed into the male sphere entirely, becoming a secular industry (or a religious industry in service to the God of War). This opened the earth up for the first time to violent exploitation, including struggles between male groups for control over the earth’s ores.” (103) However, this statement is contradicted by the fact that tribes encountered by the Romans and ruled by women, had both male and female soldiers, which would indicate that women may have made the weapons first, but the power slipped into the hands of men who ruled their respective tribes. At some point afterwards, it became a war between men and women as testified by the war between the Greeks and the Amazons. Julius Caesar writes of the Syrian Queen Semiramis in his memoirs and notes that Amazons once ruled most of Asia. (104) Neumann, in The Great Mother, cites Briffault, in documenting a story about aboriginals of Tierra del Fuego, whose men rebelled against the moon, under the leadership of the sun, slaying all the grown women and only permitting the ignorant and uninitiated girls to survive. (98) The Great Cosmic Mother, p.22; (Briffault, 19, p. 274-75) (99) When God was a Woman, Merlin Stone, Harvest Book, 1978 (1976), p. 36-7 (100) ibid, p. 35-7 (101) ibid, p.28 (102) The Great Cosmic Mother, p. 213 (103) ibid, p. 237 (104) ibid, p. 247 |