Pagan societies did not treat women very nicely...or men for that matter.
I’ll stand by my original comment above.
The fact that the ancient Crete worshiped goddesses doesn’t make them unusual; so did classical Athenians, whose city housed one of the most magnificent images of the goddess Athena ever created. But their women had about the same legal rights as their goats.
In classical Greece, girls got no education. When a man brought guests home for dinner, his wife was not allowed to eat with them. Adult women were considered little better than chattel thus the hetairae. Correspondingly, sodomy was rampant. In Aristophanes says women are “the vilest of creatures.” Female infanticide was routine.
The Romans: Emperor Tiberius surrounded himself with nude women to wait on him while he gorged. Female prostitutes entertained him with group sex. Caligula committed incest with all his sisters while Domitian was another who specialized in incest. In Roman law, adultery was a crime that only a woman could commit. Marital faithfulness in the Roman Empire was almost unknown.
Durant is one easily accessible source for all this. In pagan Rome, a husband could divorce his wife, kill her or sell her. He could even kill his married daughter.
Much of this didn’t change, in practice, because Christianity was introduced, although Christianity did empower certain women.
For instance, how many faithful husbands were there in medieval Europe? Maybe they could have fit into a phone booth ... or a confessional. Medieval Europe could be characterized as extremely misogynistic, and extremely Christian.
While the Roman elites were obviously decadent and immoral, it is not quite fair to use Caligula as an example of them, since he was regarded in his immediate posterity as the definition of “criminally insane.”
Maybe you would think that the Christian Byzantines ought to be much more moral than their wicked pagan Roman antecedents... if so, start with Procopius’ The Secret History.
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.