“….we saw in earlier chapters, tracing the place of women in societies without writing often means using clues left, quite literally, in the fabric of material culture, such as painted ceramics that mimic both textile designs and female bodies in their forms and elaborate decorative structures. To take just two examples, it’s hard to believe that the kind of complex mathematical knowledge displayed in early Mesopotamian cuneiform documents or in the layout of Peru’s Chavín temples sprang fully formed from the mind of a male scribe or sculptor, like Athena from the head of Zeus. Far more likely, these represent knowledge accumulated in earlier times through concrete practices such as the solid geometry and applied calculus of weaving or beadwork. What until now has passed for ‘civilization’ might in fact be nothing more than a gendered appropriation – by men, etching their claims in stone – of some earlier system of knowledge that had women at its centre.“
The above quote is from The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow. Their book is an attempt to upend the linear, inevitable human history as we have been taught and is currently de rigueur in popular books of overarching human history.
No earth shattering conclusions…I am just putting this out there as a nugget to meditate on. That ‘civilization‘ may not have been the product of men breaking the mold and having a sudden intellectual epiphanies on various subjects and endeavors, but the slow accumulation of knowledge by women that men appropriated. Although I am not sure appropriation is the proper word as many of these past societies were less gender stratified than became the norm later.
Now assume the lotus position…