Review of The Rise of Bronze Age Society by Kristian Kristiansen and Thomas B. Larsson. Edinburgh: Cambridge UP, 2005.

I really wanted to like this book because the authors seemed, initially, to be objective, but, as I read further, I realized that they know they have prejudices against women as leaders or inventors, but couldn’t help themselves from maintaining their programmed males-are-superior views.

While they are often careful to use gender neutral terms to describe people and activities, three times they create spurious arguments about women in ancient societies.
First, in Chapter Five, they examine the symbolism of lily and ivy ornaments “as female symbol[s] of high rank,” nicely tying the shape of some of the ornamentation to women’s breasts, a clear symbol of sustenance which they loosely tie to the drinking cups so often found in EuroAsia archaeology, demonstrating how ancient people viewed women as more than just sex symbols, but as symbols of fertility, sustenance, and the power of the earth (receiving the libations of mortal humans). Somehow, though, as the book moves on, these symbols are replaced by young men carrying staves.

Like most male-biased historians and archaeologists, they continually view horns found in burials as “bull” horns, despite the fact that both genders of ancient cows had horns—purposely ignoring goddesses with horns representing moon cycles, thus menstruation (a magical occurrence in which women bleed for three to five days without dying). And they completely miss the fact that moon-shaped axes were originally female symbols, although they admit that snakes were.

What mystifies me most of all is how they are “fascinated” by the dual nature of the various sun-goddesses because items like the Trundholm Sun-Chariot show such a divinity as having aspects of both light (daylight) and dark (night time). Within a couple of pages, however, this fascinating goddess transforms into a daylight Sun-God and a nighttime Sun-Goddess, so that the female aspect has to be viewed as dark, a slide away from something to fear or outright evil.

Nowhere do these authors discuss how women’s work, such as ceramics and metallurgy, were taken over by men during the Bronze Age. Women were further seen as magical for being able to turn soil, water, and fire into ceramics, a process through which women undoubtedly were the first to discover copper as it melted out of the pretty blue clay the women probably hoped would make pretty blue pots. While many scholars now believe there was a Copper Age, often called the Chalcolithic (Greek for Coper Stone) Age, few admit to women’s probable discovery of copper through the firing of ceramics. Without this widespread discovery of copper in the soil, retrievable by high temperatures, we would never have had the Bronze Age, since bronze is a mixture of copper and tin.

Also missing from this careful study of Bronze Age societies is how women were transformed from sacred and holy divine beings and human leaders into the “booty” so often associated with the new forms of warfare that arose with the uses of bronze armor and weapons.

The last disappointing aspect of this scholarship is the fact that they firmly believe the idea of sacred twin beings as being transmitted between cultures in the Eurasian and Mediterranean. Apparently, they are completely unaware that many cultures around the world, including the Lakota Indians of North America, believed in sacred twins. If these ideas are only communicated between cultures, and did not arise independently, how do they explain its widespread world-wide presence?

In short, the authors accredit much to transmission between cultures, but completely ignore the fact that kidnapping and enslaving women and children after sacking a city was probably the primary way such different ideas as ornamentation, food preparation (thus ceramic styles), and architecture were transferred from one culture to another. ( )