Where Did Patriarchy Come From?

A new social system arose about 5k years ago. Here’s how and why.

It’s broadly believed that a new and more class-stratified, more violent social system arose with the advent of agriculture. Although that certainly played a part, it’s a bit reductive to say that it was the sole cause of the rise of patriarchy, as characterized by male domination and inequality more generally. Other things helped to change the fundamental social dynamics, including natural disasters as well as a series of invasions into Europe by the Kurgans, a Proto-Indo-European culture that originated in the area of the Caucasus and the Black Sea as well as similar invasions of what we now call Palestine by the ancient Hebrews.

I have perhaps leaned too heavily in the past on the advent of agriculture in my discussions of the rise of patriarchy because it’s a clearer delineation that is simpler to explain, but I think the time has arrived to dig a bit deeper into the real roots of this social system — one that is about so much more than just a power differential between men and women.

Agriculture existed for nearly 5k years before patriarchy truly took hold, and although things like greater personal property and a need to administer and guard stores of grain certainly contributed to new male-led dominance hierarchies, leaving the Kurgans and the Hebrews out of the equation is a disservice to anyone who truly wants to understand “How did we get here?”

At first it was like the proverbial biblical cloud “no bigger than a man’s hand” — the activities of seemingly insignificant nomadic bands roaming the less desirable fringe areas of our globe seeking grass for their herds. Over millennia they were apparently out there in the harsh, unwanted, colder, sparser territories on the edges of the earth, while the first great agricultural civilizations spread out along the lakes and rivers in the fertile heartlands. To these agricultural peoples, enjoying humanity’s early peak of evolution, peace, and prosperity must have seemed the blessed eternal state for humankind, the nomads no more than a peripheral novelty.

We have nothing to go by but speculation on how these nomadic bands grew in numbers and in ferocity and over what span of time.4 But by the fifth millennium B.C.E., or about seven thousand years ago, we begin to find evidence of what Mellaart calls a pattern of disruption of the old Neolithic cultures in the Near East.5 Archaeological remains indicate clear signs of stress by this time in many territories. There is evidence of invasions, natural catastrophes, and sometimes both, causing large-scale destruction and dislocation. In many areas the old painted pottery traditions disappear. Bit by devastating bit, a period of cultural regression and stagnation sets in. Finally, during this time of mounting chaos the development of civilization comes to a standstill. As Mellaart writes, it will be another two thousand years before the civilizations of Sumer and Egypt emerge.6 (emphasis mine)

Eisler, Riane. The Chalice and the Blade (p. 84). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

In contrast with the peoples of Old Europe as well as those of Mesopotamia, who worshipped a life-giving goddess that brought abundance, law, art, and beauty both the Kurgans and the ancient Hebrews worshipped a god of war and mountains, one who had no balancing female consort like that of the goddess. These invaders glorified in the death and destruction that they brought in the name of their god (Jehovah or Yahweh for the Hebrews), and in the case of the Kurgans, they actually paid devotion to their swords.

The one thing they all had in common was a dominator model of social organization: a social system in which male dominance, male violence, and a generally hierarchic and authoritarian social structure was the norm. Another commonality was that, in contrast to the societies that laid the foundations for Western civilization, the way they characteristically acquired material wealth was not by developing technologies of production, but through ever more effective technologies of destruction.

Eisler, Riane. The Chalice and the Blade (p. 86). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

This is what the term patriarchy actually refers to from a social science perspective — a male-dominated social hierarchy established and maintained through intimidation, coercion, violence, and fear. The war chieftains who are the most violent and most ruthless rise to power and prestige, and an ethos of Might Makes Right prevails. Culture becomes more authoritarian and much more hierarchical and stratified. Women and weaker men are at the mercy of the domination and violence of the stronger men. For the first time in human history, some people count and other people don’t.

We see the echos of this still today, where CEOs have a statistically higher level of psychopathy than the general population and where Donald Trump was elected for his ability to project an “I do what I want — our enemies will burn” sort of attitude. People constantly joust for social position by comparing themselves to those around them, and men, in particular, engage in a nearly non-stop scramble for pecking order — something that is detrimental to both society and their own mental and emotional health.

The American Psychological Association recently released new guidelines for working with men and boys. They took 13 years to craft and come out of 40 years of research. The findings are more nuanced than this statement indicates, taking into account multiple masculine experiences as influenced by things like race, and sexuality, but this phrase does still hit upon the gist of the problem, “The main thrust of the subsequent research is that traditional masculinity — marked by stoicism, competitiveness, dominance and aggression — is, on the whole, harmful.”

These norms came out of the social system of patriarchy. For the 97% of human history that came before it, human behavior was characterized by a blend of personal autonomy and cooperation with the larger group. Different cultures and different times may have had different ways of manifesting that, and differing levels of what was considered acceptable violence, but in general, even when there were kings and cities, most people did what they wanted to within acceptable social norms that took the wellbeing of the group into consideration. Read more about that here.

As the renowned primatologist, Frans de Waal points out in War, Peace, and Human Nature cooperation and fostering the wellbeing of the entire group is a strong evolutionary strategy — one that humans used for millions of years and still use in some cultures today. “Destabilization of the social resource network decreases group stability and efficiency and lowers the average fitness benefit derived from cooperation. When group stability is important for individual advantage, selection will favor active peacemaking and cooperation in our closest relatives and ourselves.”

Many anthropologists agree that suppression of our primate ancestor’s dominance hierarchies was a central adaptation of human behavior — one that allowed homo sapiens to survive in a harsh environment when many of our hominid cousins did not. This widespread social system that served us so well for 97% of human history only began to fall by the wayside about 6–9k years ago with the advent of patriarchal dominance-based hierarchies that were so violent and chaotic that they drove migration and their own inadvertent spread.

Gimbutas believed that the expansions of the Kurgan culture were a series of essentially-hostile military incursions in which a new warrior culture imposed itself on the peaceful, matrilinear, and matrifocal (but not matriarchal) cultures of “Old Europe” and replaced it with a patriarchal warrior society,[26] a process visible in the appearance of fortified settlements and hillforts and the graves of warrior-chieftains:

The process of Indo-Europeanization was a cultural, not a physical, transformation. It must be understood as a military victory in terms of successfully imposing a new administrative system, language, and religion upon the indigenous groups.[27]

In her later life, Gimbutas increasingly emphasized the authoritarian nature of this transition from the egalitarian society centered on the nature/earth mother goddess (Gaia) to a patriarchy worshipping the father/sun/weather god (Zeus, Dyaus).[28] (Kurgan Hypothesis)

Nobody is claiming that pre-patriarchy was Utopian, but there is no denying a distinct cultural difference between those who value autonomy, beauty, community, law, and the gift of life and those who venerate senseless violence and death and the idea that Might Makes Right. In Old Europe and in Crete, the art and the pottery depicted the goddess, beauty, animals in a garden and the like. Later art and pottery (shows slaves in chains, kings standing victorious over the bodies of their enemies, and other manifestations of domination and destruction.

As we have seen, technologies of destruction were not important social priorities for the farmers of the European Neolithic Age. But for the warlike hordes that came pouring down from the arid lands of the north, as well as up from the deserts of the south, they were. And it is at this critical juncture that metals played their lethal part in forging human history: not as a general technological advance, but as weapons to kill, plunder, and enslave.

Eisler, Riane. The Chalice and the Blade (p. 88). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

It has been suggested by some that war technologies drive innovation in a way that does not happen during peacetime, but how would we actually know that? The first archeological evidence of war is from 13,000 years ago, and the bulk of evidence of mass-scale violence is from 8k years ago or later. Although in some ways, there is less war today than in prior centuries, there’s still never been a time in recorded history when we have been free of it — so how would we be able to know what we might have accomplished without it?

Conversely, all the basic elements of “civilization” were already firmly in place before patriarchy ever came along — many of them invented or developed by women. I can’t help but wonder what we might have discovered or invented if women and non-dominant men had been allowed to continue exploring and devising rather than being precluded from that (although they did it anyhow) in favor of men higher up the dominance hierarchy spending so many of their efforts on trying to create a more efficient way to kill people.

With the appearance of these invaders on the prehistoric horizon — and not, as is sometimes said, with men’s gradual discovery that they too played a part in procreation — the Goddess, and women, were reduced to male consorts or concubines. Gradually male dominance, warfare, and the enslavement of women and of gentler, more “effeminate” men became the norm.

Eisler, Riane. The Chalice and the Blade (p. 90). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

This is what patriarchy means; this is what it stands for. Although it is a social system that is male-dominated, it’s not a synonym for men. In fact, as already noted above, this social system is well-documented to be harmful to men as well. It did not arise because it was somehow better. It did not come to bring order to chaos — in fact, it brought chaos to what had been quite orderly and settled.

Whole towns were wiped out, with all the men and children slaughtered, and only the women taken as prizes of war. This wasn’t considered necessary — it was considered glorious! And it underpins the social structures that we still have today — to our detriment.

Rather than defending patriarchy as somehow “my team” more men need to understand the realities of a social system that is steeped in blood, in authoritarian control, and in inequality — not just for women, but for anyone not able to keep themselves at the top of the hierarchy — either through accident of birth or through ruthlessness.

We can’t go back in time, but we can certainly strive to have more egalitarianism, less performative non-achievement-based competition, and less domination and control as a core manifestation of masculinity. It would go a lot better if more men got on board with that and stopped acting like criticizing this social system was a personal criticism of them. Maybe now that more of them know the true history of patriarchy they will.

© Copyright Elle Beau 2023