Why Prehistoric Matriarchy Wasn’t a Thing (A Brief Explanation)

If you are interested in religion and gender in the ancient world like I am, there is a fairly strong likelihood that, at some point, you’ve encountered some version of the claim that, at one point in human prehistory (variously conceived as sometime in the Upper Paleolithic, Neolithic, Bronze Age, or all three), either all human societies worldwide or at least the majority of human societies in Europe belonged to a matriarchal social order, in which women were supreme over men, and that this system preceded the imposition of the current patriarchal order.

The kinds of arguments and evidence that various proponents of the hypothesis of “prehistoric matriarchy” have tried to invoke over the years are so wildly disparate that it is impossible to address all the supposed evidence comprehensively in a single post. At the end of the day, the common denominator of all the arguments is that all the “evidence” they try to cite is weak, irrelevant, and/or open to many other interpretations. In this post, I will very briefly address the arguments that the man who originally formulated the hypothesis used and explain why those arguments do not hold up to scrutiny.

Problems with arguments for prehistoric matriarchy based on archaeological evidence

Today, most proponents of the hypothesis that human societies went through a phase of widespread matriarchy in the prehistoric past primarily try to support their claims by appealing to archaeological evidence, such as so-called “Venus” figurines—a whole array of small carved images of nude, corpulent women with prominent breasts and vulvae that archaeologists have found in Europe and that mostly date to the Gravettian culture (lasted 33,000 – 21,000 years ago).

As I discuss in this post I wrote back in April 2022 about the earliest evidence for human veneration of deities, archaeologists for a long time assumed that these “Venus” figurines represented some kind of great fertility goddess, but this assumption is not necessarily correct. The fact of the matter is that many other interpretations could explain the figurines just as well as the goddess interpretation. Given the plethora of possible explanations, it is impossible to say for certain what these figurines were for or what they represent.

Moreover, even if we assume that the “Venus” figurines do represent goddesses, they still do not provide adequate evidentiary support for the notion that European cultures during the Upper Paleolithic were matriarchal. Throughout human history, many deeply patriarchal societies have worshipped powerful goddesses without this veneration having particularly much impact on the status of human women in those societies.

Perhaps most famously, the Classical Greeks worshipped goddesses and ascribed religious authority to certain female religious figures, such as oracles and priestesses. Despite this, Classical Greek society was still deeply patriarchal in every fundamental way. (For a more detailed discussion of the tension between the authority of female figures in Classical Greek religion and the marginalization of women in most other areas of Greek society, see this blog post I wrote in July 2021.)

I’ve discussed the example of the “Venus” figurines not only because they are a well-known and prominent example of the type of evidence that proponents of prehistoric matriarchy generally appeal to, but also because they exemplify the problems that plague all attempts to use archaeological evidence to argue for a matriarchal prehistory in the sense that they are open to many different interpretations and, even if we interpret them how proponents of prehistoric matriarchy want us to, they still don’t necessarily support their claims.

Thus, the archaeological case for widespread prehistoric matriarchy is not compelling. This makes sense, considering the fact that the man who first proposed the hypothesis did not base his claims on any prehistoric archaeological evidence at all.

ABOVE: Two different photographs from Wikimedia Commons showing the so-called “Venus of Hohle Fels,” the oldest surviving undisputed depiction of a fully anthropomorphic being and the oldest surviving “Venus” figurine, from the side (left) and from the front (right)

Where the idea of prehistoric matriarchy originates from

Most people today who are familiar with the idea of prehistoric matriarchy associate it with the Lithuanian anthropologist Marija Gimbutas, but she isn’t actually the one who came up with the idea in the first place. She merely adapted a hypothesis that was already proposed a hundred years before her time.

The person who originally proposed the idea was actually the Swiss scholar of Roman law Johann Jakob Bachofen in his book Das Mutterrecht: eine Untersuchung über die Gynaikokratie der alten Welt nach ihrer religiösen und rechtlichen Natur (The Motherlaw: An Inquiry Concerning the Gynocracy of the Ancient World with Respect to her Religious and Legal Nature), which was originally published in German in 1861.

At the time when Bachofen was writing his book, the field of archaeology was still in its infancy and there was almost no published archaeological evidence from the Upper Paleolithic or Neolithic that he could have cited as evidence. The earliest “Venus” figurine to be discovered—the so-called Vénus impudique—wasn’t even found until three years after his book was published. Moreover, “Venus” figurines didn’t become generally well known even among scholars until around half a century later.

ABOVE: Portrait of the Swiss legal scholar Johann Jakob Bachofen, who promulgated the hypothesis that humans in the earliest stage of civilization were matriarchal in his 1861 book Das Mutterrecht

What Bachofen argued

Bachofen, like many other scholars of his time, inspired in part by Charles Darwin’s monograph On the Origin of Species, which had been recently published in 1859, saw human social history as an evolutionary development from primitive savagery to sophisticated, European-style, patriarchal civilization.

Relying almost entirely on his own speculative interpretations of ancient Greek and Roman literary and legal texts, Bachofen argued that the social order of the earliest primitive humans was “hetaerism,” in which humans lived as hunter-gatherers, mainly worshipped a proto-version of the goddess Aphrodite, and basically had sex with whomever they wanted with no norms or prohibitions surrounding sex or the production of offspring.

Once humans first developed agriculture, he held that they began worshipping a proto-version of Demeter and developed matriarchy, which he regarded as the earliest and most primitive stage in the process of becoming civilized. Then, he held that humans entered into a more sophisticated phase, in which they began to worship a proto-version of the god Dionysos and began to develop towards patriarchy, which he regarded as positive development over matriarchy. Finally, he held that humans became fully patriarchal and thereby became fully civilized. He regarded the god Apollon as representing this final stage of patriarchal development.

Bachofen saw matriarchy as an archaic, primitive, and ultimately unworkable system and patriarchy as its modern, civilized, working replacement. He also regarded many non-European cultures as still belonging to the older, less advanced stages of human development.

ABOVE: The four classical deities whom Bachofen considered to represent the supposed four supposed stages of human social development from primitive “hetaerism” (represented by Aphrodite) to matriarchy (represented by Demeter) to an intermediate stage between matriarchy and patriarchy (represented by Dionysos) and finally full, civilized patriarchy (represented by Apollon)

A brief look at Bachofen’s methods and arguments

Bachofen’s primary method for arguing all this was basically picking out features of classical Mediterranean cultures and legal systems that he regarded as “primitive” and declaring that they were actually holdovers of earlier stages of human development on the basis of absolutely no evidence other than the fact that he subjectively thought those elements seemed less civilized.

In support of his hypothesis, Bachofen also appealed to claims by classical authors that we now know are factually incorrect. For instance, Bachofen begins the first chapter of his book by discussing the ancient Greek historian Herodotos’s claim in his Histories 1.173 that the Lykians, a people who inhabited southwestern Asia Minor, called themselves after their mothers rather than their fathers (Bachofen 1861, 1). Bachofen found this absolutely baffling and sought to explain it as the holdover of the prehistoric matriarchal system.

In reality, though, ancient historians now know from epigraphic evidence that Herodotos was not entirely correct. Surviving inscriptions in the Lykian language attest that the Lykians usually identified themselves by patronymics just like the Greeks.

Although some surviving Lykian inscriptions do identify men by their mothers or their mother’s brother, these can be explained as idiosyncratic individual cases in which the person described may have been illegitimate, of unknown paternity, or a foster child, rather than evidence of an entirely different system of reckoning lineage (Pembroke 1965).

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a Roman marble bust of the Greek historian Herodotos, based on an earlier Greek original

The matriarchy hypothesis after Bachofen

Bachofen’s hypothesis of prehistoric matriarchy became popular among archaeologists and anthropologists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in part because it rested on and affirmed their white male supremacist assumptions and biases.

British scholars of this period such as William Mitchell Ramsay, Sir Arthur J. Evans, and Jane Ellen Harrison, who were already convinced by Bachofen’s hypothesis, interpreted archaeological and historical evidence in light of it, thereby making it seem as though the archaeological evidence supported the hypothesis when, in reality, the same evidence could be interpreted in very different ways.

Then, in the 1960s and ’70s, second-wave feminist authors, especially Marija Gimbutas, embraced the idea of prehistoric matriarchy and reframed what was originally a deeply misogynistic hypothesis as a feminist one. They also dispensed with most of Bachofen’s original arguments based on ancient Greek and Roman literary and legal sources and appealed mostly to archaeological evidence, such as the Venus figurines I discussed at the beginning of this post. Thus, a hypothesis that was originally motivated by sexism and colonialism became championed by feminists.

This is all I will say about this subject here because I am busy working on my master’s thesis right now and don’t have time to give this topic the justice it really deserves. I will most likely revisit this topic in greater depth in a future post at some point.

Works cited

• Bachofen, Johann Jakob. 1861. Das Mutterrecht: eine Untersuchung über die Gynaikokratie der alten Welt nach ihrer religiösen und rechtlichen Natur. Stuttgart: Verlag von Krais und Hoffmann.
• Pembroke, Simon. 1965. “Last of the Matriarchs: A Study in the Inscriptions of Lycia.” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 8, no. 3: 217–47. https://doi.org/10.2307/3596379.