Just thinking back to the time I visited the Minoan Palace of Knossos on the island of Crete, followed by the archaeological museum.
The Minoans lived 2600-1450 BC. There’s quite a few archaeological sites that have been used to figure out what their culture was like. As their language hasn’t been deciphered until today, researchers are forced to make sense of what they found in terms of cultural items and buildings.
This is legit how my visit went, all info from guides, guide books and info signs explaining the archeological discoveries.
Researchers: So, it’s really weird. We found a shitton of paintings and figurines depicting lots and lots of people, but there isn’t a single one that depicts a king or something like that. So we unfortunately have no idea what their social system was like.
Researchers: Yeah, and it gets even weirder. The majority of paintings show women. There’s also a lot of jewelry that was discovered that is like super delicately made for the time, and hardly any weapons, which is weird, too. And when you look at the paintings, all the women are wearing really nice clothes and lots of jewelry and maybe even make-up. A lot of times the men are just in the background and they‘re wearing just loincloths. Really weird. Where are all the normal men?
Researchers: It gets even weirder than that. There are paintings and figurines that display several women, with one of them symbolically raised above the others, so we think that was was probably a goddess they worshipped at the time - normally, they’d deict kings that way. But the strange thing about the goddess is that is that the woman always changes, and a goddess would’ve stayed the same for generations. Just really odd. Clearly, it’s impossible to tell what their societal structure was like.
Researchers: Oh, also, the queen‘s chambers in the palace are literally at the heart of the structure, and the only way to get there is through what we think was the king‘s chambers. That’s also just so weird, cos usually it‘d be the other way around and the king as the most important and most valuable person would be the most difficult to get to.
Researchers: Did we mention that the palace has a really well-working latrine system at the bottom that is covered in paintings showing blood and women that we think are on their periods? Maybe there was some kind of fertility cult happening. There’s so many figurines that are pregnant, too. Maybe that’s why we have those paintings with the goddesses we mentioned earlier. Fertility goddesses?
Researchers: It really is such a shame that we can’t tell anything about the social structure because we have no paintings of the men. :-/ But look, the graves are also all full of depictions of women! :) :) :)
Just - really? I know we can’t say for sure, but - really? Is it so hard to follow the logical conclusion here? At least as a working thesis until it’s disproven?
