7 ms·

The first recorded writer probably was a male, indeed. That's because most ancient societies were blatantly misogynistic. It's unlikely women were afforded th

by erdevs 10y ago

The first recorded writer probably was a male, indeed. That's because most ancient societies were blatantly misogynistic. It's unlikely women were afforded the opportunity to be educated or trained in the scholastic, monastic, or financial professions which were most likely to leave some form of written record. So, yeah, the odds, based on historical predicates, are that the first recorded human's name was a male name. But not necessarily (or even likely) because of the author's claim that males seem to be more prone to be early adopters. Nor is it at all likely that many of the hostile commenters on this author's article have the right idea that women in ancient history were equal contributors to society's evolution. They probably were not. Not because of any intrinsic inferiority of women, but because of the male-oriented power dynamics that clearly dominated most ancient societies.

contingencies 10y ago
The first recorded writer probably was a male, indeed. That's because most ancient societies were blatantly misogynistic. Actually, my understanding is that the emerging reality is more interesting. Pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer societies were non-patriarchal and patriarchal societies only later became the norm with the rise of warlike/raiding and settled agricultural societies which co-evolved and co-depended on higher population densities. This is certainly the case here in Zomia where uninterrupted matriarchal societies have continued to exist until today, though they are now rapidly disappearing. However, writing did tend to evolve only after this shift, so your statement may tend toward observational truth despite being based upon fallacious assumption.
- 467568985476 10y ago
  What evidence is there of matriarchy, and how is that defined? I think you're right that today a popular theory among anthropologists is that agriculture led to many inequalities, but like all things ancient, there just isn't much data for anthropologists to draw conclusions from.
  - contingencies 10y ago
    Well, if you think about it from a reductionist perspective, in non-monogamous societies children were by definition primarily socially familiar with their mothers, because they were the only family actually known. Evidence of matriarchy includes living matriarchal societies (eg. the Mosuo people). I am no expert, though. If you look at Wikipedia's matriarchy page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matriarchy#Asia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matriarchy#Asia I actually live in Yunnan, which is smack bang in the middle of all of the Asian examples.
    - duaneb 10y ago
      What do you mean? what makes you think there is any distinction between family and community outside of incest taboos, which may not have even existed in prehistory? What does an identification of a mother as family have to do with matriarchies? You haven't even made an argument.
  - pastProlog 10y ago
    > what evidence Archaeological evidence Evidence from literate civilizations writing about their uncivilized neighbors, which goes back to the earliest known works Evidence from writers encountering such societies up to the modern day, although they're almost extinct outside of the deep Amazon and the like. Logical conclusions - without a food surplus, there is no class system and other results
    - vacri 10y ago
      > Logical conclusions - without a food surplus, there is no class system and other results Even hunter-gatherers have chiefs and elders.
      - pastProlog 10y ago
        > Even hunter-gatherers have chiefs and elders. Hunter-gatherer bands do not have chiefs. Looking at the Wikipedia article for "Tribal chief" it says "Historically, tribal societies represent an intermediate stage between the band society of the Paleolithic stage and civilization with centralized, super-regional government based in cities." I couldn't put it better. Even with regards to Indian chiefs, and it's not hard to see how there are misconceptions about them if they're still referred to as "Indians", modern anthropology acknowledges that European notions about Indian bands and tribes in the 15th and 16th century were often wrong. Europeans saw parallels of European society in the New World which weren't there (of course there were different kinds of societies in the Americas, from Montezuma's Aztec empire, to humter gatherer bands).
- erdevs 10y ago
  > Pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer societies were primarily matriarchal and patriarchal societies only later became the norm with the rise of warlike/raiding and settled agricultural societies which co-evolved and co-depended on higher population densities. Okay. Are hunter-gatherers or agricultural societies more likely to have left written records that survive until today?
  - fdej 10y ago
    You claimed that "most ancient societies were blatantly misogynistic". I don't think the current evidence suggests this, unless by "ancient societies" you meant something like "ancient civilizations". I would define the term "ancient societies" as inclusive of pre-agricultural (hunter-gatherer) societies, and then one has to make a distinction. The established view is indeed that ancient hunter-gatherer societies were much more egalitarian than ancient agricultural societies. Exactly which features of agriculture led to the development of (more?) patriarchy is surely still being debated, though.
    - erdevs 10y ago
      I agree it would've been even more clear if I used "civilization" instead of "society". Fair point, as more precise language is usually preferable. Are you saying the main point / logic of my post wasn't clear? It wasn't feasible to consider replacing this one word and evaluate the likely intent? This feels like you're being a bit nitpicky and pedantic. Still, your point stands. I hope you can concede my point here too...
      - fdej 10y ago
        Yes, I was of course nitpicking. The only reason I did so is that others in this thread already seemed to be commenting based on that interpretation of your post, and in the followup comments you all seemed to be talking past each other. I don't disagree with the content of your original post in general.
- duaneb 10y ago
  Social hierarchies are thought to be one of the innovations of civilization. There is not any evidence of an inherent matriarchy or patriarchy, and there were civilizations that went either way. In fact the strongest theory I've seen argues for a dichotomy of plough vs hoe civilizations: men are better equipped to plough, women are better equipped to hoe. This led to division of labor and social stratification along the lines of sex.
  - BurningFrog 10y ago
    AFAIK, probably all social mammals, including all primates have social hierarchies. There is an alpha male and an alpha female, and the ranking order under them is quite defined.
    - soundwave106 10y ago
      One interesting note on primates is that, of the two closest relatives to humans, the social hierarchy seems to falls on both sides of the spectrum. As in: chimpanzees are considered to be more "patriarchal" (read: the alpha male is at the top of the hierarchy), whereas bonobos are considered to be more "matriarchal" (read: mothers are at the top of the hierarchy, although bonobo society is more egalitarian overall than chimpanzee society). One cannot obviously conclude that much about human society by studying the great apes. However, just by this I honestly think it's safe to say that the author's statement was made in haste. Without evidence, it's hard to tell what the social structure was 30,000 years ago is without making some (in my opinion) shaky assumptions. (This does not justify the poison in the comment section of that article though.)
    - duaneb 10y ago
      I don't know if this applies to humans. Do you have a source for your claims, or for a similar claim about humanity?
      - BurningFrog 10y ago
        It seems obvious to me that we do a variant of this, but I don't have any scientific text to refer to.
- azakai 10y ago
  > Pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer societies were non-patriarchal We don't know that, and probably will never know. The problem is that those societies left little that we can use to learn about them. Our main source of information of our hunter-gatherer ancestors is often modern hunter-gatherers, but they are very likely to be different than the ancient ones. Two major differences are (1) the modern ones are in contact with modern societies, and (2) the land they live on is not random, it's land agriculturalists didn't decide to occupy, and has some specific characteristics (mainly that it is poor). It's also very possible that there isn't a single truth. Hunter-gatherers existed for a long time across a great many locations. They may have had a large variety of cultures. In support of that, we do have evidence of the opposite of your claim, too: hunter-gatherers that fight wars to capture women, for example.
  - flukus 10y ago
    > Our main source of information of our hunter-gatherer ancestors is often modern hunter-gatherers, but they are very likely to be different than the ancient ones. Two major differences are (1) the modern ones are in contact with modern societies, and (2) the land they live on is not random, it's land agriculturalists didn't decide to occupy, and has some specific characteristics (mainly that it is poor). There are also a whole bunch we've run into that were largely isolated until recently in Australia and the pacific. How many of them are matriarchal?
    - danieltillett 10y ago
      > There are also a whole bunch we've run into that were largely isolated until recently in Australia and the pacific. How many of them are matriarchal? Zero.
  - madaxe_again 10y ago
    Actually, the evidence is still here, and it's us. Genomic studies are increasingly suggesting an almighty y-bottleneck 20ka ago. One of the things this is consistent with would be a matriarchical society, as females would control reproduction. Couple this with "Venus" figurines scattered across Europe, evidence for societal upheaval ~15ka ago, and a possible and plausible explanation becomes that females were running the show for much of history, being the ones that can bear young (c.f. Animal hierarchies), and males took control recently, possibly in response to encountering other humans (neanderthalis). Anyway, it's all very patchy and speculative right now, but further genomic studies and archaeology probably can answer this one.
- will_brown 10y ago
  >Pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer societies were non-patriarchal and patriarchal societies only later became the norm with the rise of warlike/raiding and settled agricultural societies which co-evolved and co-depended on higher population densities. I think that is unlikely, especially if the support of the entire social dynamic changing is the introduction of warlike/raiding and higher population densities. For example, there are ~5,500 species of mammals, and only 3 species of mammals have female dominated social hierarchies, and the theory on those is evolutionary not social. Therefore, your statement would make humans only the 4th mammal having a female dominated society and the only species to change the power dynamic for social reasons. I can't refute there are and have been matriarchal societies as you mention, but like the mammal population that would be the exception not the rule.
  - contingencies 10y ago
    Non-patriarchal != matriarchal. (I had originally written matriarchal but changed the comment quickly as I realised had conflated multiple possible prior scenarios) In any event, humans are a known special case for lots of other stuff, as we have advanced cognitive function and predispositions to social reasoning and inter-generational cultural preservation, so to my mind your statistical argument is obtuse at best.
    - will_brown 10y ago
      >so to my mind your statistical argument is obtuse at best. Well I included statistics, but as I note gender domination is evolutionary in mammals. Evolutionary arguments != statistical arguments. >Non-patriarchal != matriarchal Correct me if I am wrong, because I did interpret non-patriarchal to mean matriarchal, so I am left assuming what you meant by non-patriarchal is no gender domination pre-agriculture, is that right? If not, what does that mean, I tried googling it and I get the wiki article for matriarchy. If you meant no gender domination, that would make humans the only mammal to evolve to not have a gender dominate hierarchy. Moreover, since other mammals all evolved to have gender dominated hierarchies and since they don't have the fancy cognitive functions we have, wouldn't it be safe to say like all other mammals, we evolved and developed a gender dominate social structure first and then higher brain functions? Moreover, if primates evolved to have gender dominated hierarchies and modern humans have gender dominate hierarchies (even with our superior brains), then why would we not have had a gender dominate hierarchy until the advent of agriculture?
- adekok 10y ago
  > Pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer societies were non-patriarchal and patriarchal societies ... i.e. unorganized societies are largely egalitarian, and small. Organized societies are not egalitarian, but are larger than unorganized ones. Organized societies tend to treat the leaders better than the masses (go figure). And the leaders are the ones who win the leadership competitions. There is no intrinsic "male" preference here. No "patriarchal" society promotes men simply for being men. Simple math shows this to be true. The leaders of a "patriarchal" society are perhaps 10%? Maybe 1% of the population. Yet 50% of the population is male. i.e. At least 80% of the male population had limited status, and limited power. We only call these societies "patriarchal" because we concentrate on the leaders. Everyone wants to be rich and powerful. No one wants to be a 16 year-old boy who's conscripted into an army, and then forced to die of starvation or illness in a foreign land, due to the whim of a king.
  - pluma 10y ago
    The problem you are addressing is part of an ideology called "intersectional feminism": the idea that all interactions between two individuals are also interactions between whatever buckets the two individuals fall into -- men and women, whites and blacks, heteros and homos, cis and trans, and so on. By that reasoning a man in Western culture is inherently privileged over a woman simply because men in general are typically privileged over women in general. This leads to redefining sexism as "sexism from a position of power" (because arguably sexism without power is "harmless") and "power" is then often treated as a synonym for "privilege". And this is how you end up with Hillary Clinton (a woman with significant wealth and political power) being less privileged than a male salaried worker simply by association. Note that this idea isn't inherently discriminatory against men (or whites or whatever) either -- if the balances were different it'd be equally unfair. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersectionality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersectionality * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYpELqKZ02Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYpELqKZ02Q
littletimmy 10y ago
That's actually not true. There's great evidence for the fact that hunter-gatherer societies had a fairly good distribution of gender power. It is only with the advent of "civilization", i.e. agriculture, that we find great power differentials, including the power of men over women. I add that your indignation seems rather misguided. If "male-oriented power dynamics" could so easily take charge, how on earth can be conclude that women were not "intrinsically inferior"?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- laretluval 10y ago
  > It is only with the advent of "civilization", i.e. agriculture, that we find great power differentials, including the power of men over women. And it is only with the advent of "civilization"/agriculture that we find writing. Note that the writing discussed in this article is about someone owing some barley to someone else.
- erdevs 10y ago
  > It is only with the advent of "civilization", i.e. agriculture, that we find great power differentials, including the power of men over women That is exactly what I'm saying. Do you somehow contend that hunter-gatherers societies are more likely to have left written records that have survived to today?
  - Retra 10y ago
    You're trying to make some kind of argument about what is likely to happen for a single data point defined only by the exceptional circumstances that surround it. More importantly, it doesn't matter what you think is more likely, because there's no way for you to use that information to make a meaningful decision.
    - erdevs 10y ago
      Not a single data point. First principles and logical analysis. Let me put it more simply: Did hunter-gatherer societies invent more artifacts that survived until today or did agricultural societies? This is an objectively quantifiable actuality we could check. Which societies that we know about today had developed writing surfaces that persist until today? This is something we can check. Be reasonable. Clearly, based on everything we know today, we're talking about agricultural societies here, not hunter-gatherer societies.
derefr 10y ago
> the scholastic, monastic, or financial professions Even in a patriarchy, could it not be that one or more of these professions would be seen in some early societies as "women's work"—i.e. work at first done by women because it was low-status (it was the work that was "left over") and then later because those women became skilled in said work and it became their comparative advantage? This is, after all, what happened with typing-cum-programming in the 1950s. Besides which, at least one of the above professions—teaching—is usually heavily connected with childrearing, and thereby usually ends up female-dominated-by-default until large-scale market forces come into play.
- erdevs 10y ago
  Yes, of course, these roles could be viewed as low-status in a patriarchy. And they might have been held by women even in a patriarchy regardless of whether they were considered low-class. But we should consider the logic and likelihoods here. Take the monastic/priest role or class. Does it seem more likely this role or class would be considered low-class and hold little power in most ancient civilizations, or that it would hold considerable power? Well, we can reason about this. Consider, based on what we know today, did religion seem to intermingle with government quite frequently in early civilizations? It seems so. Then the monastic/religious class likely held considerable power. Then by definition, in a patriarchy, it is more likely men held these roles more often than women. It sucks, but it stands to reason that it's likely that in most early civilizations, men more frequently held these power roles than women. Now, consider scholars. Ask: was the ability to write widespread in most early civs? If not, would knowing how to write be a form of power? In a patriarchy, which sex more often holds roles of power? We have an educated guess for scholars, scribes, etc now too. Follow similar logic for government officials. Would participating in government, and especially being responsible for written records in government likely confer power? It would seem so. Follow similar logic for finance roles. Were accounts and records important? Likely yes, else why were they meticulously kept in early civilization examples? If they were important, does being an official financial record keeper likely confer some form of power? In a patriarchy, which sex likely has those power roles? We obviously can't say for sure. But we can reason and apply what knowledge we do have.
will_brown 10y ago
I just don't understand all the guess work in the article. Based on the historical record to date, the first written records appeared in Mesopotamia, and it has long been understood writing developed out of economic need. Further, we have a vast records on the people and culture of ancient Mesopotamia. We know it was a patriarchal society. Their religious texts specifically define the stages of a women's life as: "I am daughter, I am bride, I am spouse, I am housekeeper". Therefore, I don't think it makes one sexist to look at this particular society through a sexist lens. That said, the historical record includes literary works written by women in ancient Mesopotamia, though to my knowledge none of these women were merchants or traders, but royalty and high priestesses. Further, there is no shortage of women authors from other ancient societies either, but we know they came later. Since looking beyond the historical record is all guess work anyway, because the record points to the first writings being for contracts/receipts/economic necessity, it could be that marriages may have likely been the first "transactions" to be recorded (this would include probably both the bride and grooms names, as well as the brides price and the bride-groom price). My thought is these transactions simply would have been considered the most important in that society and applied to the greatest number of people. Going full circle to the sexist thing, many of the marriage contracts we do have from Mesopotamia include clauses guaranteeing the bride was a virgin and we know if that was question the women had to appear before the courts (though these are later in time too, after Hammurabi's Law was written). And although humor is frowned upon here, since everyone is taking a jab at the historical inaccuracies of the cartoons, why has no one questioned why our good friend Kushim is looking at an iPhone in the last picture?
- LoSboccacc 10y ago
  well he had to pad it somehow right? he couldn't just write hey I googled first written name and it's 'Kushim' first place or 'Gal-Sal, En-pap X and Sukkalgir' if the first turns out to be a job.
ars 10y ago
> the opportunity to be educated or trained in the scholastic, monastic, or financial professions Isn't the better question who invented those things? I mean we are looking for the first one, which is likely to be the person who invented it. Males and Females have an equal opportunity here. > But not necessarily (or even likely) because of the author's claim that males seem to be more prone to be early adopters. Do Males invent things more often than Females or not? That's the question. > because of the male-oriented power dynamics Who created those dynamics? Why was it a male and not a female? You are arguing about a world where men already "won" and prevent females from doing things. But the question you should be addressing is an earlier one: Why did men "win" in the first place?
- erdevs 10y ago
  > Isn't the better question who invented those things? I mean we are looking for the first one, which is likely to be the person who invented it. So... you're assuming that the earliest example we can find will literally be the first creation. The instance where it was invented. I'm afraid you have an incredibly unrealistic view of the archaeological record. The odds are infinitesimally low that we will ever find the actual first example of human writing, or that it has even survived.
aaron695 10y ago
> But not necessarily (or even likely) because of the author's claim that males seem to be more prone to be early adopters. You are making up BS to make a SJW argument. He was obviously referring to the fact pre-societies were male dominated, which you repeat. So obviously they will adopt things first. Please don't twist his words to fit your world view. Normal people knew exactly what he meant. Please stop this trolling.
jkot 10y ago
> most ancient societies were blatantly misogynistic Ancient Egypt was more liberal than US in 1950. And do you have any concrete evidence that 'Kushim' is not a female name? I think it is sexist to assume it could not be a women.
- ajuc 10y ago
  > And do you have any concrete evidence that 'Kushim' is not a female name? Most Indoeuropean languages have a vovel (most often "a") at the end of female names, and a consonant at the end of male names. It's just a consequence of the gender system and postfixes. I'm not sure how old is this distinction, and I don't know if this writing system even preserved the vovels, if yes - it is indeed partial evidence that it was a male name. More: https://www.quora.com/Why-do-so-many-female-names-end-in-vowels-while-male-names-end-in-consonants https://www.quora.com/Why-do-so-many-female-names-end-in-vow... In my (Slavic) language all female names end with "a" and all male names end with consonants.
  - nandemo 10y ago
    But Sumerian was not Indo-european. It's considered a language isolate. And even if the name was from a different language that co-existed with Sumerian (like Akkadian), it was likely an Afro-Asiatic one.
- erdevs 10y ago
  > Ancient Egypt was more liberal than US in 1950. Right. With all of the slavery. And the emperor/pharaoh totalitarianism. And the state-sponsored religion. Very liberal. > And do you have any concrete evidence that 'Kushim' is not a female name? I did not say whether Kushim specifically was a male or female name, did I? Show me where. I suggest you read more carefully before jumping to conclusions and certainly before making inflammatory and insulting accusations to someone. > I think it is sexist to assume it could not be a women. Since I made no such assumption nor such comment, I have no idea why you wrote this. I didn't even weigh in on whether "Kushim" is likely to be a name at all. (It could be a title or a number of other possible monikers.)
mgalka 10y ago
Yes. Could have been phrased better, but it's true. For anyone who's read/heard any of his work, it's clear he's not sexist. Think the meaning he had in mind is different from how it comes off.
adekok 10y ago
> That's because most ancient societies were blatantly misogynistic. I have serious ethical concerns with such a claim. It gives a simplistic view of history, to the point of severe distortion. It implies that all women terribly oppressed, while all men had lives of unrelenting leisure. That's simply not true. What is true is that the Mesopotamian civilizations were violent, hierarchical, racist, genocidal, poor, etc. Many men were slaves, killed in wars, or beaten to death by the rich. Calling a society that treated women poorly "misogynistic" is like calling the USA a "technological" society. Well, it mostly is, but you could also call it an oligarchy, capitalistic, and sometimes democratic. No one sweeping term is accurate. The Biblical story of Esther shows that women were valued, and had significant "behind the scenes" power. I would even venture to say that there are no human societies, ever, where women were utterly powerless. Such a society would quickly collapse. > ... but because of the male-oriented power dynamics that clearly dominated most ancient societies. As opposed to our society, where most politicians and business leaders are male? As for why this happens, see: http://www.comparativecandidates.org/sites/default/files/Engeli%20Lutz%20When%20women%20campaign%20CCS%20Meeting%20Mannheim%2001%202012.pdf http://www.comparativecandidates.org/sites/default/files/Eng... Once we take into account incumbent advantage – where more men are incumbent - the ratio of elected women is about the ratio of the female candidates. When we model candidate success measured as the number of preference votes for individual candidates we do not find that women receive fewer votes than men on party ballots either. Maybe men just prioritize competitiveness more than women do. And for some strange reason, people who are competitive out-compete people who aren't competitive.
- mjmsmith 10y ago
  > It implies that all women terribly oppressed, while all men had lives of unrelenting leisure. No, it doesn't. It says nothing about "all men" other than their status relative to women. If I said "Alabama society in the 1950s was blatantly racist," why would you conclude that every white person in Alabama lived like a king?
  - adekok 10y ago
    True. However, as shown in another comment, the typical "everything is misogynistic" comment is due to intersectional feminism. Which in my experience, largely does claim that men have it very good just for being men, and women have it very bad, just for being women. A blatant statement of "the culture was misogynistic" is an overly simple classification. The culture was oppressive towards damned near everyone who wasn't of the highest class. I just don't believe that a rich woman like the Biblical Esther had it worse than a poor free man living in the city at the same time. So her experience with misogyny gave her a better life than 99% of the rest of the population.

by erdevs 10y ago

contingencies 10y ago

The first recorded writer probably was a male, indeed. That's because most ancient societies were blatantly misogynistic. Actually, my understanding is that the emerging reality is more interesting. Pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer societies were non-patriarchal and patriarchal societies only later became the norm with the rise of warlike/raiding and settled agricultural societies which co-evolved and co-depended on higher population densities. This is certainly the case here in Zomia where uninterrupted matriarchal societies have continued to exist until today, though they are now rapidly disappearing. However, writing did tend to evolve only after this shift, so your statement may tend toward observational truth despite being based upon fallacious assumption.

467568985476 10y ago
What evidence is there of matriarchy, and how is that defined? I think you're right that today a popular theory among anthropologists is that agriculture led to many inequalities, but like all things ancient, there just isn't much data for anthropologists to draw conclusions from.
- contingencies 10y ago
  Well, if you think about it from a reductionist perspective, in non-monogamous societies children were by definition primarily socially familiar with their mothers, because they were the only family actually known. Evidence of matriarchy includes living matriarchal societies (eg. the Mosuo people). I am no expert, though. If you look at Wikipedia's matriarchy page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matriarchy#Asia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matriarchy#Asia I actually live in Yunnan, which is smack bang in the middle of all of the Asian examples.
  - duaneb 10y ago
    What do you mean? what makes you think there is any distinction between family and community outside of incest taboos, which may not have even existed in prehistory? What does an identification of a mother as family have to do with matriarchies? You haven't even made an argument.
- pastProlog 10y ago
  > what evidence Archaeological evidence Evidence from literate civilizations writing about their uncivilized neighbors, which goes back to the earliest known works Evidence from writers encountering such societies up to the modern day, although they're almost extinct outside of the deep Amazon and the like. Logical conclusions - without a food surplus, there is no class system and other results
  - vacri 10y ago
    > Logical conclusions - without a food surplus, there is no class system and other results Even hunter-gatherers have chiefs and elders.
    - pastProlog 10y ago
      > Even hunter-gatherers have chiefs and elders. Hunter-gatherer bands do not have chiefs. Looking at the Wikipedia article for "Tribal chief" it says "Historically, tribal societies represent an intermediate stage between the band society of the Paleolithic stage and civilization with centralized, super-regional government based in cities." I couldn't put it better. Even with regards to Indian chiefs, and it's not hard to see how there are misconceptions about them if they're still referred to as "Indians", modern anthropology acknowledges that European notions about Indian bands and tribes in the 15th and 16th century were often wrong. Europeans saw parallels of European society in the New World which weren't there (of course there were different kinds of societies in the Americas, from Montezuma's Aztec empire, to humter gatherer bands).
erdevs 10y ago
> Pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer societies were primarily matriarchal and patriarchal societies only later became the norm with the rise of warlike/raiding and settled agricultural societies which co-evolved and co-depended on higher population densities. Okay. Are hunter-gatherers or agricultural societies more likely to have left written records that survive until today?
- fdej 10y ago
  You claimed that "most ancient societies were blatantly misogynistic". I don't think the current evidence suggests this, unless by "ancient societies" you meant something like "ancient civilizations". I would define the term "ancient societies" as inclusive of pre-agricultural (hunter-gatherer) societies, and then one has to make a distinction. The established view is indeed that ancient hunter-gatherer societies were much more egalitarian than ancient agricultural societies. Exactly which features of agriculture led to the development of (more?) patriarchy is surely still being debated, though.
  - erdevs 10y ago
    I agree it would've been even more clear if I used "civilization" instead of "society". Fair point, as more precise language is usually preferable. Are you saying the main point / logic of my post wasn't clear? It wasn't feasible to consider replacing this one word and evaluate the likely intent? This feels like you're being a bit nitpicky and pedantic. Still, your point stands. I hope you can concede my point here too...
    - fdej 10y ago
      Yes, I was of course nitpicking. The only reason I did so is that others in this thread already seemed to be commenting based on that interpretation of your post, and in the followup comments you all seemed to be talking past each other. I don't disagree with the content of your original post in general.
duaneb 10y ago
Social hierarchies are thought to be one of the innovations of civilization. There is not any evidence of an inherent matriarchy or patriarchy, and there were civilizations that went either way. In fact the strongest theory I've seen argues for a dichotomy of plough vs hoe civilizations: men are better equipped to plough, women are better equipped to hoe. This led to division of labor and social stratification along the lines of sex.
- BurningFrog 10y ago
  AFAIK, probably all social mammals, including all primates have social hierarchies. There is an alpha male and an alpha female, and the ranking order under them is quite defined.
  - soundwave106 10y ago
    One interesting note on primates is that, of the two closest relatives to humans, the social hierarchy seems to falls on both sides of the spectrum. As in: chimpanzees are considered to be more "patriarchal" (read: the alpha male is at the top of the hierarchy), whereas bonobos are considered to be more "matriarchal" (read: mothers are at the top of the hierarchy, although bonobo society is more egalitarian overall than chimpanzee society). One cannot obviously conclude that much about human society by studying the great apes. However, just by this I honestly think it's safe to say that the author's statement was made in haste. Without evidence, it's hard to tell what the social structure was 30,000 years ago is without making some (in my opinion) shaky assumptions. (This does not justify the poison in the comment section of that article though.)
  - duaneb 10y ago
    I don't know if this applies to humans. Do you have a source for your claims, or for a similar claim about humanity?
    - BurningFrog 10y ago
      It seems obvious to me that we do a variant of this, but I don't have any scientific text to refer to.
azakai 10y ago
> Pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer societies were non-patriarchal We don't know that, and probably will never know. The problem is that those societies left little that we can use to learn about them. Our main source of information of our hunter-gatherer ancestors is often modern hunter-gatherers, but they are very likely to be different than the ancient ones. Two major differences are (1) the modern ones are in contact with modern societies, and (2) the land they live on is not random, it's land agriculturalists didn't decide to occupy, and has some specific characteristics (mainly that it is poor). It's also very possible that there isn't a single truth. Hunter-gatherers existed for a long time across a great many locations. They may have had a large variety of cultures. In support of that, we do have evidence of the opposite of your claim, too: hunter-gatherers that fight wars to capture women, for example.
- flukus 10y ago
  > Our main source of information of our hunter-gatherer ancestors is often modern hunter-gatherers, but they are very likely to be different than the ancient ones. Two major differences are (1) the modern ones are in contact with modern societies, and (2) the land they live on is not random, it's land agriculturalists didn't decide to occupy, and has some specific characteristics (mainly that it is poor). There are also a whole bunch we've run into that were largely isolated until recently in Australia and the pacific. How many of them are matriarchal?
  - danieltillett 10y ago
    > There are also a whole bunch we've run into that were largely isolated until recently in Australia and the pacific. How many of them are matriarchal? Zero.
- madaxe_again 10y ago
  Actually, the evidence is still here, and it's us. Genomic studies are increasingly suggesting an almighty y-bottleneck 20ka ago. One of the things this is consistent with would be a matriarchical society, as females would control reproduction. Couple this with "Venus" figurines scattered across Europe, evidence for societal upheaval ~15ka ago, and a possible and plausible explanation becomes that females were running the show for much of history, being the ones that can bear young (c.f. Animal hierarchies), and males took control recently, possibly in response to encountering other humans (neanderthalis). Anyway, it's all very patchy and speculative right now, but further genomic studies and archaeology probably can answer this one.
will_brown 10y ago
>Pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer societies were non-patriarchal and patriarchal societies only later became the norm with the rise of warlike/raiding and settled agricultural societies which co-evolved and co-depended on higher population densities. I think that is unlikely, especially if the support of the entire social dynamic changing is the introduction of warlike/raiding and higher population densities. For example, there are ~5,500 species of mammals, and only 3 species of mammals have female dominated social hierarchies, and the theory on those is evolutionary not social. Therefore, your statement would make humans only the 4th mammal having a female dominated society and the only species to change the power dynamic for social reasons. I can't refute there are and have been matriarchal societies as you mention, but like the mammal population that would be the exception not the rule.
- contingencies 10y ago
  Non-patriarchal != matriarchal. (I had originally written matriarchal but changed the comment quickly as I realised had conflated multiple possible prior scenarios) In any event, humans are a known special case for lots of other stuff, as we have advanced cognitive function and predispositions to social reasoning and inter-generational cultural preservation, so to my mind your statistical argument is obtuse at best.
  - will_brown 10y ago
    >so to my mind your statistical argument is obtuse at best. Well I included statistics, but as I note gender domination is evolutionary in mammals. Evolutionary arguments != statistical arguments. >Non-patriarchal != matriarchal Correct me if I am wrong, because I did interpret non-patriarchal to mean matriarchal, so I am left assuming what you meant by non-patriarchal is no gender domination pre-agriculture, is that right? If not, what does that mean, I tried googling it and I get the wiki article for matriarchy. If you meant no gender domination, that would make humans the only mammal to evolve to not have a gender dominate hierarchy. Moreover, since other mammals all evolved to have gender dominated hierarchies and since they don't have the fancy cognitive functions we have, wouldn't it be safe to say like all other mammals, we evolved and developed a gender dominate social structure first and then higher brain functions? Moreover, if primates evolved to have gender dominated hierarchies and modern humans have gender dominate hierarchies (even with our superior brains), then why would we not have had a gender dominate hierarchy until the advent of agriculture?
adekok 10y ago
> Pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer societies were non-patriarchal and patriarchal societies ... i.e. unorganized societies are largely egalitarian, and small. Organized societies are not egalitarian, but are larger than unorganized ones. Organized societies tend to treat the leaders better than the masses (go figure). And the leaders are the ones who win the leadership competitions. There is no intrinsic "male" preference here. No "patriarchal" society promotes men simply for being men. Simple math shows this to be true. The leaders of a "patriarchal" society are perhaps 10%? Maybe 1% of the population. Yet 50% of the population is male. i.e. At least 80% of the male population had limited status, and limited power. We only call these societies "patriarchal" because we concentrate on the leaders. Everyone wants to be rich and powerful. No one wants to be a 16 year-old boy who's conscripted into an army, and then forced to die of starvation or illness in a foreign land, due to the whim of a king.
- pluma 10y ago
  The problem you are addressing is part of an ideology called "intersectional feminism": the idea that all interactions between two individuals are also interactions between whatever buckets the two individuals fall into -- men and women, whites and blacks, heteros and homos, cis and trans, and so on. By that reasoning a man in Western culture is inherently privileged over a woman simply because men in general are typically privileged over women in general. This leads to redefining sexism as "sexism from a position of power" (because arguably sexism without power is "harmless") and "power" is then often treated as a synonym for "privilege". And this is how you end up with Hillary Clinton (a woman with significant wealth and political power) being less privileged than a male salaried worker simply by association. Note that this idea isn't inherently discriminatory against men (or whites or whatever) either -- if the balances were different it'd be equally unfair. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersectionality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersectionality * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYpELqKZ02Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYpELqKZ02Q

littletimmy 10y ago

That's actually not true. There's great evidence for the fact that hunter-gatherer societies had a fairly good distribution of gender power. It is only with the advent of "civilization", i.e. agriculture, that we find great power differentials, including the power of men over women. I add that your indignation seems rather misguided. If "male-oriented power dynamics" could so easily take charge, how on earth can be conclude that women were not "intrinsically inferior"?

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
laretluval 10y ago
> It is only with the advent of "civilization", i.e. agriculture, that we find great power differentials, including the power of men over women. And it is only with the advent of "civilization"/agriculture that we find writing. Note that the writing discussed in this article is about someone owing some barley to someone else.
erdevs 10y ago
> It is only with the advent of "civilization", i.e. agriculture, that we find great power differentials, including the power of men over women That is exactly what I'm saying. Do you somehow contend that hunter-gatherers societies are more likely to have left written records that have survived to today?
- Retra 10y ago
  You're trying to make some kind of argument about what is likely to happen for a single data point defined only by the exceptional circumstances that surround it. More importantly, it doesn't matter what you think is more likely, because there's no way for you to use that information to make a meaningful decision.
  - erdevs 10y ago
    Not a single data point. First principles and logical analysis. Let me put it more simply: Did hunter-gatherer societies invent more artifacts that survived until today or did agricultural societies? This is an objectively quantifiable actuality we could check. Which societies that we know about today had developed writing surfaces that persist until today? This is something we can check. Be reasonable. Clearly, based on everything we know today, we're talking about agricultural societies here, not hunter-gatherer societies.

derefr 10y ago

> the scholastic, monastic, or financial professions Even in a patriarchy, could it not be that one or more of these professions would be seen in some early societies as "women's work"—i.e. work at first done by women because it was low-status (it was the work that was "left over") and then later because those women became skilled in said work and it became their comparative advantage? This is, after all, what happened with typing-cum-programming in the 1950s. Besides which, at least one of the above professions—teaching—is usually heavily connected with childrearing, and thereby usually ends up female-dominated-by-default until large-scale market forces come into play.

erdevs 10y ago
Yes, of course, these roles could be viewed as low-status in a patriarchy. And they might have been held by women even in a patriarchy regardless of whether they were considered low-class. But we should consider the logic and likelihoods here. Take the monastic/priest role or class. Does it seem more likely this role or class would be considered low-class and hold little power in most ancient civilizations, or that it would hold considerable power? Well, we can reason about this. Consider, based on what we know today, did religion seem to intermingle with government quite frequently in early civilizations? It seems so. Then the monastic/religious class likely held considerable power. Then by definition, in a patriarchy, it is more likely men held these roles more often than women. It sucks, but it stands to reason that it's likely that in most early civilizations, men more frequently held these power roles than women. Now, consider scholars. Ask: was the ability to write widespread in most early civs? If not, would knowing how to write be a form of power? In a patriarchy, which sex more often holds roles of power? We have an educated guess for scholars, scribes, etc now too. Follow similar logic for government officials. Would participating in government, and especially being responsible for written records in government likely confer power? It would seem so. Follow similar logic for finance roles. Were accounts and records important? Likely yes, else why were they meticulously kept in early civilization examples? If they were important, does being an official financial record keeper likely confer some form of power? In a patriarchy, which sex likely has those power roles? We obviously can't say for sure. But we can reason and apply what knowledge we do have.

will_brown 10y ago

I just don't understand all the guess work in the article. Based on the historical record to date, the first written records appeared in Mesopotamia, and it has long been understood writing developed out of economic need. Further, we have a vast records on the people and culture of ancient Mesopotamia. We know it was a patriarchal society. Their religious texts specifically define the stages of a women's life as: "I am daughter, I am bride, I am spouse, I am housekeeper". Therefore, I don't think it makes one sexist to look at this particular society through a sexist lens. That said, the historical record includes literary works written by women in ancient Mesopotamia, though to my knowledge none of these women were merchants or traders, but royalty and high priestesses. Further, there is no shortage of women authors from other ancient societies either, but we know they came later. Since looking beyond the historical record is all guess work anyway, because the record points to the first writings being for contracts/receipts/economic necessity, it could be that marriages may have likely been the first "transactions" to be recorded (this would include probably both the bride and grooms names, as well as the brides price and the bride-groom price). My thought is these transactions simply would have been considered the most important in that society and applied to the greatest number of people. Going full circle to the sexist thing, many of the marriage contracts we do have from Mesopotamia include clauses guaranteeing the bride was a virgin and we know if that was question the women had to appear before the courts (though these are later in time too, after Hammurabi's Law was written). And although humor is frowned upon here, since everyone is taking a jab at the historical inaccuracies of the cartoons, why has no one questioned why our good friend Kushim is looking at an iPhone in the last picture?

LoSboccacc 10y ago
well he had to pad it somehow right? he couldn't just write hey I googled first written name and it's 'Kushim' first place or 'Gal-Sal, En-pap X and Sukkalgir' if the first turns out to be a job.

ars 10y ago

> the opportunity to be educated or trained in the scholastic, monastic, or financial professions Isn't the better question who invented those things? I mean we are looking for the first one, which is likely to be the person who invented it. Males and Females have an equal opportunity here. > But not necessarily (or even likely) because of the author's claim that males seem to be more prone to be early adopters. Do Males invent things more often than Females or not? That's the question. > because of the male-oriented power dynamics Who created those dynamics? Why was it a male and not a female? You are arguing about a world where men already "won" and prevent females from doing things. But the question you should be addressing is an earlier one: Why did men "win" in the first place?

erdevs 10y ago
> Isn't the better question who invented those things? I mean we are looking for the first one, which is likely to be the person who invented it. So... you're assuming that the earliest example we can find will literally be the first creation. The instance where it was invented. I'm afraid you have an incredibly unrealistic view of the archaeological record. The odds are infinitesimally low that we will ever find the actual first example of human writing, or that it has even survived.

aaron695 10y ago

> But not necessarily (or even likely) because of the author's claim that males seem to be more prone to be early adopters. You are making up BS to make a SJW argument. He was obviously referring to the fact pre-societies were male dominated, which you repeat. So obviously they will adopt things first. Please don't twist his words to fit your world view. Normal people knew exactly what he meant. Please stop this trolling.

jkot 10y ago

> most ancient societies were blatantly misogynistic Ancient Egypt was more liberal than US in 1950. And do you have any concrete evidence that 'Kushim' is not a female name? I think it is sexist to assume it could not be a women.

ajuc 10y ago
> And do you have any concrete evidence that 'Kushim' is not a female name? Most Indoeuropean languages have a vovel (most often "a") at the end of female names, and a consonant at the end of male names. It's just a consequence of the gender system and postfixes. I'm not sure how old is this distinction, and I don't know if this writing system even preserved the vovels, if yes - it is indeed partial evidence that it was a male name. More: https://www.quora.com/Why-do-so-many-female-names-end-in-vowels-while-male-names-end-in-consonants https://www.quora.com/Why-do-so-many-female-names-end-in-vow... In my (Slavic) language all female names end with "a" and all male names end with consonants.
- nandemo 10y ago
  But Sumerian was not Indo-european. It's considered a language isolate. And even if the name was from a different language that co-existed with Sumerian (like Akkadian), it was likely an Afro-Asiatic one.
erdevs 10y ago
> Ancient Egypt was more liberal than US in 1950. Right. With all of the slavery. And the emperor/pharaoh totalitarianism. And the state-sponsored religion. Very liberal. > And do you have any concrete evidence that 'Kushim' is not a female name? I did not say whether Kushim specifically was a male or female name, did I? Show me where. I suggest you read more carefully before jumping to conclusions and certainly before making inflammatory and insulting accusations to someone. > I think it is sexist to assume it could not be a women. Since I made no such assumption nor such comment, I have no idea why you wrote this. I didn't even weigh in on whether "Kushim" is likely to be a name at all. (It could be a title or a number of other possible monikers.)

mgalka 10y ago

Yes. Could have been phrased better, but it's true. For anyone who's read/heard any of his work, it's clear he's not sexist. Think the meaning he had in mind is different from how it comes off.

adekok 10y ago

> That's because most ancient societies were blatantly misogynistic. I have serious ethical concerns with such a claim. It gives a simplistic view of history, to the point of severe distortion. It implies that all women terribly oppressed, while all men had lives of unrelenting leisure. That's simply not true. What is true is that the Mesopotamian civilizations were violent, hierarchical, racist, genocidal, poor, etc. Many men were slaves, killed in wars, or beaten to death by the rich. Calling a society that treated women poorly "misogynistic" is like calling the USA a "technological" society. Well, it mostly is, but you could also call it an oligarchy, capitalistic, and sometimes democratic. No one sweeping term is accurate. The Biblical story of Esther shows that women were valued, and had significant "behind the scenes" power. I would even venture to say that there are no human societies, ever, where women were utterly powerless. Such a society would quickly collapse. > ... but because of the male-oriented power dynamics that clearly dominated most ancient societies. As opposed to our society, where most politicians and business leaders are male? As for why this happens, see: http://www.comparativecandidates.org/sites/default/files/Engeli%20Lutz%20When%20women%20campaign%20CCS%20Meeting%20Mannheim%2001%202012.pdf http://www.comparativecandidates.org/sites/default/files/Eng... Once we take into account incumbent advantage – where more men are incumbent - the ratio of elected women is about the ratio of the female candidates. When we model candidate success measured as the number of preference votes for individual candidates we do not find that women receive fewer votes than men on party ballots either. Maybe men just prioritize competitiveness more than women do. And for some strange reason, people who are competitive out-compete people who aren't competitive.

mjmsmith 10y ago
> It implies that all women terribly oppressed, while all men had lives of unrelenting leisure. No, it doesn't. It says nothing about "all men" other than their status relative to women. If I said "Alabama society in the 1950s was blatantly racist," why would you conclude that every white person in Alabama lived like a king?
- adekok 10y ago
  True. However, as shown in another comment, the typical "everything is misogynistic" comment is due to intersectional feminism. Which in my experience, largely does claim that men have it very good just for being men, and women have it very bad, just for being women. A blatant statement of "the culture was misogynistic" is an overly simple classification. The culture was oppressive towards damned near everyone who wasn't of the highest class. I just don't believe that a rich woman like the Biblical Esther had it worse than a poor free man living in the city at the same time. So her experience with misogyny gave her a better life than 99% of the rest of the population.