#histoire

Eilean Donan Castle in the Highlands region

History has a funny way of becoming decidedly less male-dominated the moment we stop assuming it always was.

The echoes — and the screams — of women occupying diverse, influential, and public roles, even within patriarchal societies like ancient Rome, were there. Yet only recently have we stopped treating them as background noise.

As long as humans have kept records, it turns out, there have been queens, empresses, pharaohs, priestesses, female warriors, keepers of knowledge, women who captained their own ships (the Red Sea matrons) and ran their own businesses (the ‘housekeepers’ who turned out to be winemakers), and other women who supported themselves, sometimes living free of society’s otherwise patriarchal bonds.

The surprising part isn’t really that women occupied all these various roles and positions, but that we continue treating them as exceptions to the rule, even as new archaeological methods challenge that idea over and over again.

Photo originale par Steph-Photo