Keep in mind that at the same time that the “shut-up-and-get-back-in-the-kitchen” society is occurring in Greece, a much more egalitarian society exists to the east and northeast.
Herosotus Writes extensively about his travels through the lands of the Scythians and makes detailed observations about their customs, spending a significant amount of time speaking of their egalitarian lifestyle. To him, this seems almost shocking by comparison to his own culture. There are many other first-hand accounts of this, as well as the archaeological evidence which backs this up quite extensively (I have a big stack of documents and books filled with this data LOL) Herodotus - Wikipedia
Example:
“Issedonians are reputed to be observers of justice: and it
is to be remarked that their women have equal authority
with the men.”
Selections from The Persian Wars (book IV) by Herodotus. From “The Greek Historians,” edited by Francis R. B. Godolphin. Copyright 1942 and renewed 1970 by Random House, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. p.133 Accessed online at https://www.metmuseum.org/pubs/bulletins/1/pdf/3269235.pdf.bannered.pdf
I tend to lean towards accepting rather than rejecting Herodotus as a historical source.
However you are open to comments that Herodotus’s claims of observation of gender equality in distant lands may be as accurate as his reports of winged snakes and gold digging ants. To a Hellenic reader from around the time it is difficult to tell which is more outlandish.
Many of his claims have been backed up by subsequent archaeology. While his discussions of mythology might be a bit suspect, his depiction of steppe culture lifestyle matches what archaeologists have found pretty dead on. I would be suspicious of secondhand stories that he tells about particular people, but not so much about the culture. Of course most of the knowledge that we have these people comes from archaeology.
Until just recently, bodies were categorized as male or female based upon their grave goods. In just the last 10 years alone, forensic archaeology has massively advanced. Science is now learning that a large percentage of the warrior graves found were of women, not men. While I can recommend many good books on the topic, Smithsonian TV will be airing a documentary on the various women warriors of ancient society and discussing the egalitarian nature of those societies.
One of the annoying problems I keep bumping into our that the archaeology books of 10 and 15 years ago have not kept up with modern advances.
For example, and archaeology book discussing steppe kurgan mounds from the early 2000s will speak of male warrior graves and women wives and servants. In 2004, Eileen M. Murphy’s Group, using modern archaeological forensics, catalogued a significant number of female graves of warriors. This research and several other important research projects have completely changed our view of this time and place, though they will not be reflected and a large percentage of the books that you would read on the topic and college.
This is the reason you constantly will find people who will argue the topic using these age-old miss beliefs. To a degree, it’s hard to blame them as a large percentage of the standard academic material still does not reflect these advancements though reading the most up-to-date research does.
A most interesting discussion! Thank you Lotus for your tireless devotion (and forbearance with some of the more “neolithic” members (runs for cover)) to it. From the perspective of a male gamer the apparent (back of the napkin maths of course) demographics of this thread are fascinating.
I’ve not been following AC’s development all that much but if 1/10th of the material in this discussion gets into the game I’ll be a happy gamer indeed. Frankly, it seems to me that the nomadic elements of the game will be some of the most interesting. I do hope it comes off.
I want to start by saying I’m not going to refute Your previous posts, only add my own thoughts. I don’t believe there were no female warriors, I only believe it is illogical to believe there were any significant amount of them.
archaeologists found that the Minoan civilization of Crete has a famous king who was known in Greek stories(king Minos) and that the civilization was highly advanced for Bronze Age Europe. We know of course for the same archaeology that the Minoan civilization was destroyed and its power transferred to mainland Greek kings and states. Only, recently archaeology discovered that it wasn’t only destroyed, it was rebuilt and continued to be a powerful trade and military power in the Mediterranean for much longer than was previously believed. The point I am getting at is, you cannot assume that because a female has wounds and is buried in armor, that she was a “warrior”. You can’t assume the same for men either. I would argue that most Viking men whose burial mounds we can see, whom were buried in full armor, were probably not great warriors; strategists at best. Armor, for warlike societies such as the Sythians and Norse could easily have been ceremonial upon any noble male or females death, as well as it could have been their personal battle regalia. A decent example of how misleading archaeology can be is the grave of Frankish king Clovis I. He was a Frankish warrior king, a barbarian from the coast of Belgium, yet he was burried in a roman grave yard, with a roman name, wearing full roman armor with all the honors of a roman general. The only thing that told us he wasn’t just some roman general was a ring or something that had his name on it or some other such identifier(I’m going off memory here). My point is that in archeology you can’t logocally assume that because someone is burried with something that it was their profession or even a hobby. You could just s easily assume that a woman burried in full armor with a bow and a sword hated fighting and war but her family insisted on her burial with such things because she would need them to increase her odds against some afterlife entity. Another great example of misleading archaeology is the graves of the defenders on the island of götland from the battle of Visby. In the 3-4 mass graves found you find perfectly preserved chain mail, breastplates, helms, swords and axes. The epitome of a warrior grave. However, we know from reports that these men were actually mostly farmers who doned the weapons of their Viking ancestors to attempt to defend their land from the Danes. So, although they fought in a battle and wore armor, they were not warriors in any way. Which, fighting in a battle is significantly removed from “being a warrior” in my opinion. It seems illogical as well to assume that, globally, society was entirely different two thousand years ago than it was a thousand years ago and today. Additionally, if there were societies with female warrior castes, like those described on occasion by Herodotus and Tacitus, they were nowhere to be found by the dawn of the middles ages(400s AD), so they must not have been very sustainable societies and we can assume they were short lived or isolated and later assimilated by more patriarchal tribes.
I recommend watching the video series below. I have many of the actual books from the archaeologists with the data which backs this up if you would like some more scientific info, if you like. Women have very much contributed to warfare, especially the steppe cultures. Let me know if you want book information for the more academic papers/books on the subject.
Epic Warrior Women - Season 1 Amazon Instant Video ~ Smithsonian Channel Amazon.com
True!
Also true! =)
That’s why we have Archaeological Osteology, which allows us to determine if wounds were inflicted running away, fighting or otherwise. I have a book which details over a hundred such inhumations and it explains how the status of the bodies were identified.
In the 21st century, we are no longer limited to the silly methods of old, where bodies were called man/woman based on grave goods and similar.
That is why we have modern techniques, developed in the last 5-10 years. A good example of this, and of what you mentioned, can be seen in the Siberian Ice Maiden. She was incorrectly identified as a man, based upon her grave goods. She was in fact, a warrior.
Well, to be fare, many societies (such as those Herodotus and Tacitus also belonged to) had also been destroyed or changed by the middle ages, so I am not sure that works as a logical argument. The Romans were quite sustainable for a long time… but they started after those Scythian societies and ended before the middle ages, as well.
The problem is that using this antecedent would allow us to conclude that the Romans were short lived and assimilated by more patriarchal tribes, and we know that is not correct. =/
I would be more than happy to watch the series. Ill check it out this weekend. I have concerns about the recent state of archaeology and anthropology though. I’m highly skeptical of most recent finds that have anything to do with “redefining” gender. The field of Anthropology is notoriously full of Neo-liberal women, which is fine, however mixing those politics with all these recent discoveries of exactly what they set out for seems a little too reminiscent of Piltdown man, if you catch my drift.The female viking warrior’s discoverers were mostly women and were later found to have sort of jumped, broadly, to the assumption that this woman was a warrior.
As far as wounds; the argument could be made that wether or not the wounds were in defense or in flight are irrelevant, especially with nordic women who would have been taught to be stronger willed. They could just have easily died in attempt to fight off an attacker on the farm as they could have on a battlefield. Likewise the methods of old in several ways screwed us over. Although a lot of the greatest discoveries were made in the late 19th and early 20th century, they just threw all the bones wherever, so opening these sorts of cold cases becomes “at the viewers discretion” if you will. That in particular can become problematic with what I discussed previously. I’d also like to point out that I am only a truth seeker, I don’t honestly care if women were warriors in mass, I just know a bias when I see one and when to be skeptical.
What I meant when I said that their societies, if they existed, were inferior, I didn’t mean to specific peoples, only to the patriarchal method which has obviously been dominant for some time. They were obviously slain by stronger tribes lead by males. One tribe I am aware of Tacitus speaking of was located in or around modern Denmark and they definitely weren’t there at the time of the Saxons departure from the same lands. Comparing a one off tribe of female warriors with no written or oral traditions to be found, to the Roman Empire and Greek states is a little bit silly. However, Rome did fall after a couple hundred years of Queen Mother’s and child rulers and were subsequently waylaid by the various highly patriarchal tribes. Not far off.
It’s correctly identifying the sex, not the gender (these are two different things).
Neoliberal is an actual term, and I think you do a massive disservice to women in archaeology by broadly painting them in that brush. Women finally getting the attention and recognition they deserve isn’t neoliberalism, it’s humanity finally doing the right thing. Our species is 50% women.
This argument, when reversed, is why men misidentified inhumations for years. =/
Wow… just… wow… I do not agree that being more masculine is more advantageous.
I don’t think we are going to agree if you start with that mindset. So, I doubt this is a conversation which I will continue with. =/ I find myself less and less willing to engage with that sort of mindset these days.
I think you misunderstand. As I said, I don’t care what political beliefs or what the male to female ratio in these fields are, however, modern universities arts programs are, as I also mentioned, notoriously filled with neoliberal who jump on every chance to reorganize what is traditional history, regardless of wether or not it adds up under scrutiny, which I mentioned the recent female viking warrior that was never actually proven to be such, yet was plastered on every major historical and even some main stream media sites as an unarguable fact. It is far too coincidental to me that only now that the field is predominantly comprised of women that we are discovering this massive amount of female warriors that contradict basically every historical text, previous archeology, and the evolution of society itself. You can believe whatever you want, but masculinity obviously triumphed over femininity and is therefore, at least in scientific terms, more advantageous. Actually, the societies which we have been referring to were described as being highly masculine even with female combatants. Just looking at genetics, the strongest male will, nine times out of ten, beat the strongest female.
The reason that we are now learning about women warriors is because our society’s misogyny has finally dropped low enough that women can present evidence without being laughed out of the room by people who assert that they are wrong merely because they are women, or call them words like neoliberal just because they have a different view point.
Only in the early 2000’s did technology finally reached the point where we could discern woman from man without the need of only relying on observing the morphology of bones and grave goods. It’s obvious that we wouldn’t learn the truth until we had the technology to the learn truth. That doesn’t point to some conspiracy or political leaning, it’s simply a matter of technology that we didn’t have. Isn’t it odd that we all of a sudden have high resolution pictures of Pluto? No, it’s because we only just finally got to probe there.
The view point that you’re espousing is one that dominates much of archaeology and holds women back. Luckily, it is a fading viewpoint that is being wiped away as older archaeologists retire and younger ones start working with their female coworkers, less biased by decades of living in a systemically massagist environment. Unfortunately, others fields of science have the same problem, but they too are getting better. I hear similar kinds of problems from my scientist friends and other disciplines. Women constantly being told that their Viewpoint is influenced by their sex or gender, and not by the facts that they present. It’s rather demeaning and misogynist, but that’s what you get from a society it has been misogynist for a very long time.
The reason that I’m pushing back on you so hard is because you’re asserting that the views of women archaeologist are potentially wrong because they are women. These women, and by the way a lot of men are involved with this as well, have significant evidence.
The fact that you don’t know about the existence of any of these things or think that there are a new liberal woman conspiracy is unfortunate, but flies in the face of fact and evidence. You are in disagreement with the archaeology community.
I’m not under the impression that our society is or ever has been misogynistic. Since the definition of the word is a hatred for women and I don’t believe that disagreeing with women or in the past believing them to be mentally inferior is synonymous with hatred, I would have to disregard your assumption that the field or indeed any society has ever been “misogynistic”. Your emotions on this issue seem to prevent you from seeing my argument. Before we continue; I don’t hate women, I don’t care if women make up the entirety of the historical and anthropological arts, and I do not believe that their is a conspiracy. I merely understand that the current political climate in modern universities, mixed with the high number of females which further mixes with the high number of politically left leaning students, is a breeding ground for historical revision that is fabricated.
I don’t want to hold any women back, I just don’t want them to pull out a bag of old bones from a shelf, discover its a woman, and then assume that they are the only bones in the world properly categorized from the bygone era of archeology of the 19th and 20th centuries, and then say, “women were vikings too, heres a bunch of half truths to prove it”. You can call myself and my peers misogynist all you would like, but in an equal world I absolutely will not accept “facts” from a female archeologist on the basis that she is a female and I shouldn’t hold her back. Even other females are skeptical. An article from The Bulletin states, “But a respected scholar of the Vikings says that conclusion is premature. She says the researchers who conducted the tests were so determined to show that women were Viking warriors that they overlooked other possible explanations for why a woman’s body might have been in the tomb, which dates to the first half of the 10th century.”. When you are desperate to find proof of something you can easily get sloppy(plenty of men have done this in the past as well). Admittedly, my degree does not deal with archeology. I am a scientist with an ancient history minor, so I am no expert. I do know enough of history to tell you that there are a plethora of reasons our forebears would have strapped a women in armor or buried her with a weapon that don’t prove a woman was anything remotely close to being a warrior. DNA evidence proving a body is a female doesn’t do much. Only understanding why the ancients would do certain things does and looking at weapons and armor in the modern sense doesn’t do any good. Swords to the vikings in particular were magical symbols of power. For all we know a woman could have been the only child of some noble and was the only person eligible to be buried with the families ancestral arms and armor. There are plenty of explanations that would be culturally and historically accurate that don’t break the mold. Those should be considered first in every case and the fact that they were overlooked makes one skeptical.
Just a side note, not regarding the content of this discussion - the term ‘neoliberal’ is a term denoting a political/economic philosophy or policy favouring economic liberalization and deregulation, etc. So it doesn’t really have a place here. Again, besides the point, but this wrong terminology used as a label bothered me.
To be unaware of misogyny within the world today is truly baffling. How could you be so unaware?
Oh, so now my emotions are the problem. Will I be hysterical next? lol. Wow. Imagine if every time men made an argument, women said that their argument was invalid because they were being overly aggressive. “Your anger is preventing you from seeing my argument” That would get annoying, wouldn’t it? And yes, I understand that the prefix Mis does not mean against, but rather hatred, yet I’m speaking of colloquial usage. It ipso facto means against within common vernacular.
The shows of fundamental lack of understanding of archaeology. They don’t just look in bags of bones, discover their women and then decide what they are. This comment ignores the entirety of archaeology and all the techniques used within it to come to scientifically-based conclusions.
New Policy of mine: no more replying to misogynists or those displaying misogyny.
(This means I won’t be replying to anything else you say. So replies you will, and I’ll let everyone who reads come to their own conclusions)
Your entire response emboldens my claim that your emotions are getting in the way here. I have displayed no hatred or contempt towards women yet you continue to base your arguments on me being a misogynist, which I am not. This is the same as if every response I simply said the misandry of the archeological community is holding back traditional male archeologists. I assumed you were actually a man until now. I didn’t mean to say your emotions are in the way here because you are a woman. Rather I mean that every argument I make is simply given some ad hominem argument about me being a misogynist, which I am not. You are so consumed with believing that women are being attacked that you see anything that isn’t pro-woman as being anti-woman.
I obviously don’t believe that is all archeologists do. I just happen to know that the bones these people are looking at were labeled by dig and generally bones were just arbitrarily thrown into bags and labeled later. Archeologists of the past were more concerned with grave goods than grave occupants unfortunately. Archeologists today tend to not consult historians or anyone really when they make new discoveries. Another good recent example would be the “Muslim viking” who archeologists announced was buried with inscriptions reasons “Allah”. They didn’t consult any specialist in Old Norse and this turned out to be false but we didn’t find that out until after it had been released to the media and made its rounds through the minds of the human population.
From the perspective of a male gamer the apparent (back of the napkin maths of course) demographics of this thread are fascinating.