Paleolithic female figurines

Yes, but the Scythians are far closer us in time than they were to PREHISTORIC cultures.

Scythians, Greeks, Romans, Etruscans these are all from HISTORY, not PREHISTORY. They are also all PATRIARCHIES.

The Scythians did not have equality for women, it was not an equal society.
Yes, it had noblewomen, but rulership (kings) were almost exclusively male. Yes 20% of the warriors were female, but this doesn’t equate to sex equality. In burials of noblemen, you always find a sacrificed (murdered) female companion or two buried with him. You don’t find that in the burials of noblewomen….

I think perhaps you are confusing Herodotus story of Amazons with the Scythians, many historical fictions do speculate in such a fashion. But let’s not forget other tribes described by Herodotus including tribes of men with the heads of dogs, tribes of cyclops, tribes of men with the feet of goats, tribes that slept for six months of the year straight through…

I will finish with that I do know about PREHISTORY and I am trying to gently make you aware that all your examples from HISTORY are not examples of PREHISTORIC cultures.

No society is an Eden but patriarchy is not inevitable.

I didn’t say that a patriarchy was inevitable, I said it is highly unlikely that the majority of PREHISTORIC cultures were matriarchies in response to the paper referenced in the OP: “Women in modern and Paleolithic foraging societies. Matriarchy, patriarchy, or equality. Mother goddesses or Venus figurines?”

As a reminder, the Paleolithic prehistoric era covers from 2.5 million years ago to 12,000 years ago (10,000 BC)

Scythians were from 600 BC to 300 BC. They literally came 9,400 yrs AFTERWARDS. Yet you have been wittering on about them as if they were prehistoric.

This is worse than confusing the Romans in Britain in 66AD with the Normans in Britain of 1066AD as those two very different societies are only 1,000yrs apart.

So, please stop saying I don’t know about prehistory and that I am ignorant.

I am not the one that thinks they are posting about PREHISTORIC cultures but are listing HISTORIC cultures that came along over 9,000 years later. 🤦🏽‍♀️

This is a great thread, thankyou Arabella. Bookmarking to follow up later

Amazing thread thanks OP! Planning to return to explore the links when I have more time.

I’m far from an expert in this area (and maybe this is an existing theory) but I don’t find these ancient depictions of women mysterious or necessarily indicating female agency, in that making images of women (especially sexually attractive or exaggerated ones) is huge in our own society. Women consume images of women, men consume images of women. Women pay to have their sexually attractive body parts exaggerated. And we know in some societies sexy = voluptuous and that would make sense in a prehistoric society where food might be scarce. So maybe it’s less deep than we’d like to think IYSWIM. I feel bad being cynical about the lovely Venus figures but maybe men made them so they’d have them to look at - that would explain why they don’t need hands and feet!

What a fascinating thread! I'll have to go back over (and over!) to get the most from it. Thank you all. On an emotional level, when I stood in front of the Venus of Willendorf in the Natural History Museum in Vienna I was deeply moved. She made me feel very tearful. Something about the age of her, her voluptuousness, and her vulnerability really got to me.

😂

(I keep misreading “Scythians” as “Slytherins”. It’s very disconcerting. 😶)

IdaPrentice

I've heard that theory too and I think Graves subscribes to it in The White Goddess. I'm not sure.

On the one hand, maybe in the very early days of human existence, especially if women and men lived semi-separate lives (like elephants), but then they would also know about small animals where the timeline of copulation and the appearance of young/eggs would be so much shorter. And on a very basic level, they would know - male lions know, etc.
I think it was more the case that the qualities that humans had which were valuable were less dependent on brute strength and speed etc. It takes cleverness or experience to set traps, to identify which of two virtually identical plants is poisonous, intelligence and a good memory to know where to find water in a drought, that sort of thing. And if there was a famine, the men and the children died before the women. So perhaps it was more of a case of men's physical superiority not being that relevant a lot of the time?

Who remembers The Women's History of the World, by Rosalind Miles? - a very popular / populist book from the 90s IIRC. I remember a theory in it that prehistoric people didn't know that it was sex that led to a pregnancy and a child being born, so to them, a mother was an incredibly powerful creator of life (hence all the 'fertility' type statues). Later when they worked out the role of men and penises, women lost this mystique and this was part of the reason women became less revered and powerful, and then to the rise of the patriarchy.

I have no idea if it's true, btw! But interesting.

Treaclewell

Obviously the Goddess isn't real (I'm an atheist!) but Graves invented a sort of cipher to decode stories which have been handed down for generations but which don't seem to make sense. That's a really interesting aspect of it for me.

The peoples of greater Scythia and their customs are very well evidenced - grave goods and skeletons, DNA, Greek vase paintings and the reports of Greek, Chinese and various other European writers spanning millennia.

Patriarchy existed in Ancient Greece alongside the equal societies of the Scythians. The Etruscans had a much greater degree of sex equality than the Romans who they lived alongside. No society is an Eden but patriarchy is not inevitable. The nomadic lifestyle of the Scythians and the fact that they lived their lives on horses were the crucial factors in creating a more equal society. Everybody had to contribute and it was inefficient to strictly divide roles by gender.

I would recommend you read Mayor's book - it's extremely well researched. I think you are bringing your prejudices to this argument about a subject you don't know much about. I don't blame you for your ignorance, because much of this information is new.

I lost patience with Graves many years ago. In, I believe, the preface to the White Goddess, he described the difficulty he had getting it published. One publisher,after turning it down, was found in his wardrobe, hanging, after some auto erotic activity which had gone badly wrong. Graves attributed this to the activity of the goddess, as a punishment. I wasn't prepared to go along with any of his hypotheses about her after that. "Go on then, do your worst" I said to the imaginary character, and unless she is responsible for my being single into my 70s, she has proved to be non-existent.

Sorry I meant to delete quote before posting.

There isn’t really any evidence as to what prehistoric people thought because all we have are the material remains, no writing.

”If you mean the Scythian tribes, we have the reports about them from people who did write,”

No I don’t mean the Scythians as they are not prehistoric, but ancient. Prehistory is defined as the time before writing was invented. So you see we only know how the Scythian society was seen by other cultures from the writings of ancient historians, which have their own problems btw and cannot always be taken as unbiased & objective. In many cases the Ancients would literally write propaganda about other neighbouring peoples to justify going to war with them.

The same with your Thracian general- we are in history then not prehistory.

I am not saying we can only infer from cave paintings, I am saying that most of what we infer is by necessity speculative.

We do have long running cultural issues with presuming our noble prehistoric ancestors lived in an Eden of sorts where the ills of more recent times did not exist- such as patriarchy.

Thanks, MTCoffeepot.
The missing heads thing is quite intriguing, isn't it? I'm inclined to see it as part of the symbolic nature of the figurines. Shaped like an exaggerated version of a woman - most of them - and representing fertility? So any woman (or man) could put her own personal carved head on it and thus access its power?

Post menopausal females again?

I don't remember anything about them when we had our Maltese megaliths lecture in second year on college. Unforgettable because of the description of the geological structure of Malta as 'like a giant cheese sandwich'. Our professor had several idiosyncratic practices, one of which was that in second year the main curriculum should be divided up into areas that we would present ourselves, with supervision and advice from the lecturers. The woman who did the Malta talk was a mature student whose day job was domestic science teacher. We all laughed, but we never forgot the substance of that lecture - teaching experience tells!

Snowy - I'd say that the vast majority of them are female but one or two of them I saw could be a bit sumo-wrestler sort of shape where only the bottom half was there. I thought it was interesting that there were only holes where the head should be sometimes and that possibly there were interchangeable heads.

Interesting article. The author is keen not to infer that the plethora of female figurines is necessarily evidence of a matriarchy, because the figurines on their own don't justify that inference. I agree. But it seems almost perverse to say that those figurines could be male or female. I think it's pretty obvious that they are meant to be women - possibly older women who had nursed several children. But I'm not an expert.

Just thought that I'd add that there are lots of 'fat lady' statues from the neolithic period on display in the National Museum of Archaeology in Valletta, Malta (I was in Malta earlier this year). This paper mentions the 'sleeping lady' figure which is particularly interesting because of her natural-looking snoozing position on a couch and she has a pleated skirt and an unusual hair style. https://fenici.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Sharon-The-female-figure-in-Neolithic-Malta.pdf

https://archive.org/details/bloodbreadrosesh0000grah
I haven't read this in years, I think I'll have to get it off the shelf again.

Completely out of my period/not my thing, but I do so love MN threads like this with everyone merrily geeking out. It’s like sitting in a virtual Buttery. With better food, including when I’m not eating…

Place marking in thread as I never go back to saved threads

Thank you for this, so interesting.

Another very good non fiction book is 'when God was a woman' by Merlin Stone.

I could spend the next month looking at all the material here.