To browse Academia. This extended bibliography relative to the history of women in the ancient Mediterranean world includes more than books and articles in seven languages English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Greek. For any corrections or additions, be free to contact me. Additions Women in the Ancient World. An Extended Bibliography, A new fourth edition, Toulouse, Last digital edition, october , This last digital edition of my bibliography relative to the history of women in the ancient world includes more than Last digital edition, June , Just to introduce the book to the academia.
Women in Antiquity the present and on future reforms. The future, and what we can make of it, is rightly our major concern, but it should not obscure the lesson of the old truism, that you can't tell where you're going if you don't know where you've been. To know what we can achieve in the future we must come to grips with what we have been able to achieve in the past, and in our society, so strongly influenced by the Greeks and Romans, an understanding of woman's place amongst them takes on special significance.
One of the first questions the feminist must deal with is whether or not woman has always been subject to patriarchal authority. Certainly no matriarchy-or even a state of true equality-has ever existed in recorded history, but of the dim ages of prehistory no one can be certain.
Early civilizations preceded the classical Greeks and Romans: mysterious cultures of Minoans, Etruscans, and others, whose artifacts suggest a higher position for women than in later times.
The Lycians of Asia Minor, for example, traced their descent on their mother's side, as Herodotus reports, calling each other by their mother's name. Its feminism, strange as it may seem to us, is not so much a recent conquest as a distant survival threatened by Graeco-Roman pressures; it recalls in many respects the Crete of Ariadne and the paintings of Cnossos. Bachofen, Robert Briffault, and Jane Ellen Harrison have concluded from their extensive studies of archaeology and myth that these first civilizations were actually matriarchal but were overwhelmed and destroyed by a patriarchal revolution sometime before the dawn of history.
