DNA Reveals Sister Power In Ancient Greece

The University Of Manchester ^ | 6-2-2008 | The University Of Manchester

[gleeaikin]

I agree with all your examples of the era of classical Greece and Rome. However, the period I was speaking of especially, was around 1,000 years earlier. I don’t think we are so sure of the strength of the earth mother religions back in that era. Certainly by 400 BC to the time of Christ, the masculine dieties were much more powerful.

Regarding the tall headdresses. These were not dressed hair, but actual tall objects (crowns) placed on the head of the deceased. About 3 feet high if I recall the pictures I saw. Whole horses were also in these burials. Surely a sign of respect in a horse oriented steppe culture.

[buck jarret]

Certainly individual women in almost any culture can achieve elite status. But I don’t believe in the bizarre lesbian fantasy of the mother goddess culture, the pre-patriarchal Dianic world religion. They have to go back to the Neolithic, to the people who made the rounded female figurines, and basically re-write Jean Auel without the men, or imagine Aristasia in animal skins, which they find easy because there is little evidence to speak of.

A lot of goddesses around the Mediterranean in the second millennium were variants of Ishtar.

From the Trojan war epics (I know they don’t represent this exactly, but you have to extrapolate) and the murals that are mostly about hunting, I imagine that Mycenae was a warrior aristocracy that had both sexes in its pantheon, but in which men almost always exercised the major political power. Poseidon, as earthshaker, was a primary deity going back to Knossos. Actually Mycenae eventually had a lot of the same Olympian gods, though not all of them, because some arrived later from points east.