Palette of King Narmer
c. 3200 BCE
Slate, 25 inches high
(Egyptian Museum, Cairo)

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       History begins with the development of writing. With writing also begins the steady atrophy of memory.

       Julius Caesar (100-44 BCE) explained that the reason the ancient Celtic Druids forbade their teachings to be put down in writing was in order to prevent their pupils from relying on the written word and neglecting to train their memories; "for it is usually found that when people have the help of texts, they are less diligent in learning by heart and let their memories rust" (De Bello Gallico, VI, 14).

       Memory of your own past, and of your family and its past, is a primary, perhaps fundamental, constituent of personal consciousness and identity. The rusting of memory is accompanied by the deterioration of the knowledge or consciousness of the individual self, and by the gradual loss of what might be called "deep" identity which resides in a profound knowledge of personal and family history.

       In the early historical period, as personal identity weakened, the socio-political structure of the emerging state, with declining opposition, was able to abrogate unto itself an individual's prerogatives. Memory, and history, became politicised. Personal or family memory was replaced by a larger collective memory, and the individual was urged to identify with the state.

       Urban memory served the state when conceived in terms of a city; or it could be royal memory, in which history would be embodied in a king or in the ruling family and maintained through dynastic succession.

       The primary purpose of much of the painting, sculpture, and architecture produced in the historical period has been to fix and sustain a particular memory and a particular history. Besides art, a state, city, or king also created memory-institutions, such as libraries, archives, and museums.

       With state formation came "civilization". This was, and is, in the west, a particular type of civilization, the nature, form, and thrust of which has been predominantly male. Some believe that this patriarchal civilization replaced matriarchal societies which existed throughout the prehistoric period [see Women in Prehistory].

       Gerda Lerner has shown that matriarchal structures, if this is what they indeed were, had begun to collapse even within the earliest historical states formed in Mesopotamia, with men gaining control over those areas where women had formerly exercised power.

       It is true, as Camille Paglia states in her book Sexual Personae [see BIBLIOGRAPHY], that we would not be living as we do today if civilization had been left in female hands. It is unfair, however, to say that had matters been left up to women we would still be living in grass huts. Rather, we would be living in a different civilization, perhaps better, perhaps worse, than that created by men. We would be no doubt living in another civilization again if men and women had worked together as equals.

       But these latter scenarios were not to be. Western civilization, both the form and the illusion of it, is essentially a male construction devised to promote the interests and values of a small elite that very early in the historical period came to be identified almost entirely in male terms.

       Whatever the prehistoric status of women, the historical period, beginning around 5,500 years ago, marks the beginning of the rise of patriarchy. It arose gradually, however, and for a while women appear to have maintained, mostly by default of tradition and custom, especially in conservative societies like that in Ancient Egypt, a position of importance that was not only different from but also, and this is the crucial point, independent of that of men.

       In other words, for a while in Ancient Egypt (and also in Minoan Crete [see Women in the Aegean] and Ancient Greece [see Women in Greece]), women were recognized as embodying an identity and power which derived from, and was based upon, the female, of which the Mother Goddess, and ultimately all female goddesses, was its manifestation. It was a power acknowledged and respected by men which resided in the female and could be claimed by all women; it was not, as it subsequently became in the later Egyptian, Greek, and Minoan periods and has remained so ever since, a power defined and delimited by men.

MATRIARCHY