Reply #59: Minoans?

[RazzleDazzle]

The people named after King Minos?

Well, here's some info for you:

Feminist Joan Bamberger notes that the historical record contains no reliable evidence of any society in which women dominated (Bamberger 1974), though there are many known matrilineal societies.

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Peggy Reeves Sanday favors redefining and reintroducing the word matriarchy, especially in reference to modern, matrilineal societies like the Minangkabau. This group lives in West Sumatra and numbers about four million; it is considered the largest and most stable matrilineal society in the modern world. Sanday argues that this society is a modern matriarchy defined not in polar opposition to patriarchy, but on unique terms. A clear and consistent definition has been given by Heide Goettner-Abendroth, who did cross-cultural research on all of the still existing matriarchal societies of today (in her major work on matriarchy). Her viewpoint is close to that of Sanday. One of her examples are the Mosuo people of Southwestern China

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Whether matriarchal societies might have existed at some time in the distant past is controversial. The controversy began in reaction to the book by Johann Jakob Bachofen Mother Right: An Investigation of the Religious and Juridical Character of Matriarchy in the Ancient World in 1861. Several generations of ethnologists were inspired by his pseudo-evolutionary theory of archaic matriarchy. Following him and Jane Ellen Harrison, several generations of scholars, arguing usually from myths or oral traditions and neolithic female cult-figures, suggested that many ancient societies were matriarchal, or even that there existed a wide-ranging matriarchal society prior to the ancient cultures of which we are aware (see for example The White Goddess by Robert Graves).

More recent archaeologists like Marija Gimbutas have argued for a widespread matriarchal culture in pre-Indo-European Old Europe of the Neolithic.

But I'm pretty sure Gimbutas wasn't talking about the polar opposite of patriarchy.

Matriarchies in mythology
One area where written myths are available from an early period is the Aegean culture-zone, where the Minoan Great Goddess was worshipped in a society where women and men were apparently equals. Gender equality is a typical characteristic of matriarchy, according to the claims of modern Matriarchal Studies.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matriarchal