The Ascent of Woman

I just watched the first part of the documentary The Ascent of Woman by Dr. Amanda Foreman (whoever "Morgan" in the description is is not clear, it does not seem to be wholly related). A most interesting documentary, and I would even say an eye-opener in some ways. One must concede that women have been erased from history to an extent - I personally thought I was aware of this already, but I did not know, for instance, that the first named author in world history was Enheduanna, high priestess of Assyria, daughter of Sargon of Akkad.

I was also not aware that Genghis Khan's empire was ruled to a significant degree by his daughters and step-daughters. Apparently the main source of Genghis Khan's life, The Secret History of the Mongols, was edited after the great Khan's death to hide the embarrassing fact that he had appointed many women to chief positions. This book seeks to redress the problem.

Having watched The Ascent of Woman, part 1, two things strike me the most. Firstly, gender hierarchies and social stratification in general seem to go hand in hand. This is perhaps not surprising, but not obvious either. Foreman takes the ancient archeological site of Çatalhöyük as an example of this: a city that existed well before civilization as such, thousands of years before the dawn of Sumer and Egypt, where social equity would supposedly have been the norm.

But what really made me curious was the way she described the ancient Greek culture. While women became, in time, relatively suppressed in many Middle Eastern countries, they were more autonomous among the steppe nomads in Central Asia and north of the Black Sea - but nowhere were they more restricted than in Greece, or at least in democratic Athens. The Greeks had many goddesses in their Pantheon, but no women in public life. They also had mythical enemies to fight off: the centaurs, similar to the horsemen they knew from the east and, significantly, the Amazons (supposedly from the ancient Persian word hamazan, warrior) denoting Scythian or Sarmatian warrior women. It would seem that the Greek men were scandalized by the existence of such women, and that this played a significant role in the shaping of Greek identity. The Greeks would have none of this confusion of social roles: they instituted a gender regime comparable to that of the Taliban (as noted in the documentary by the author of this book) and, with women out of the way, went on to lay the foundation for "civilization" in the grand sense of the word. So once again we see the recurring pattern where men are connected with culture and women with nature - a distinction that Foreman actually promotes, if tacitly so. For civilization has indeed been the story of the grand ambitions of men, and now that we are beginning to doubt its very sustainability, it is perhaps only natural that women should have their revenge.