Minoan Crete

Minoan Crete was a large, peaceful, and non-patriarchal Bronze Age Mediterranean society that flourished from about 3000 BCE to 1100 BCE. Due to the predominance of female goddesses and the scarcity of male gods, a number of scholars have argued that Minoan Crete had a "matriarchal" society.

Mainstream scholars have been cautious about such characterizations, noting a paucity of evidence. In a similar vein, Social Ecologist theorist Janet Biehl has sharply rejected the interpretation of Minoan Crete as a utopia or matriarchy:

Minoan Crete was a Bronze Age civilization, and it would defy archaeological credibility to assume that such a highly developed civilization could have been anything but hierarchical, exploitative, and oppressive.

More recently, David Graeber and David Wengrow have argued that Minoan Crete was most likely a matriarchal theocracy.

Culture

Matriarchy

Looking at Minoan artifacts, the early twentieth-century archaeologist Arthur Evans found that there were few if any male gods and that a female divinity named Rhea had the highest status in the religious pantheon. Crete's artwork most frequently portrayed women in positions of power.

The philosopher Heide Goettner-Abendroth considers Crete to be a matriarchal society, which she defines as having “true gender-egalitarian relations” but symbolically feminine power.

David Graeber and David Wengrow define matriarchy as a society that models governance on the mother's role in the household much as patriarchy bases governance on the father's domineering role.

Peter Gelderloos writes in Worshiping Power, “[The Cretans] were, if not matriarchal, non-patriarchal, with almost exclusively female deities and female or trans priestesses.”

Anthropologist David Graeber rejects the mainstream scholarly reticence to accept the existence of gender egalitarianism or matriarchy in Crete. Responding to complaints about an absence of ethnographic data, Graeber notes that scholars have been able to understand the Athenian polis without ethnographic materials. Scholars say female-oriented religion and art do not, by themselves, imply gender equality or matriarchy in actual social relations. However, Graeber points out, “[N]o one has ever managed to produce an example of a patriarchal society in which artistic representations focus nearly exclusively on images of powerful women, mystical or otherwise, either.”

Discussing the scholarship, Graeber concludes, “[I]t's hard to avoid the conclusion there's some kind of profound patriarchal bias here at play.” Similarly, Goettner-Abendroth contends:

However, precisely because archaeological findings provide evidence, this dis- cipline is held under strict patriarchal control, as can be seen in the way archaeol- ogists who break with patriarchal ideology are treated...In spite of the first-rate cultural-historical understanding possessed by Evans—in contrast to later archaeologists—his interpretation of Minoan culture has been sidelined. At first, the search began for an omnipotent king in Minoan culture, the “Big Man,” around whom the society must have revolved—but who is not to be found there.

Decisions

Although Crete had large buildings sometimes referred to in the scholarly literature as “palaces,” these buildings actually served, according to Peter Gelderloos, “as warehouses, redistribution centers, collective housing for priestesses and administrators, archives, and religious sites.” Gelderloos writes that the Cretans were “in all probability a stateless people.”

Crete had a written language, but the decoded documents in that language do not mention laws, rulers, or other elements of statecraft. In almost all states, one of the primary functions of written language was to document laws and to chronicle the lives and careers of elites. By contrast, the writings from Crete seem to focus mostly on trade and a little on religion.

Economy

Crete had a trade-based economy with a large network of people that traded overseas. They acquired food from “multicrop agriculture, apiculture, silvaculture, aquaculture, fishing and hunting.”

Some archaeological evidence suggests that craftsmen and priestesses enjoyed more luxury goods than farmers and herders did. Still, Gelderloos does not think that there was class stratification. He argues that the farmers and herders enjoyed too diverse a diet and too high a standard of health to have been a toiling, exploited class. He also notes that there is no evidence of police force that could impose work:

On the one hand, the Cretan diet was too rich, too diversified to suggest a hyper-exploited, enslaved lower class. Put simply, enslaved workers do not have the resources for a healthy diet, and they lack the time to dedicate to multiple forms of subsistence. Nor is there evidence of a Cretan army or other mechanisms capable of imposing the sort of work-or-starve, blackmail economy so common in other city-states. The very diversity of Cretan food production (spanning multicrop agriculture, apiculture, silvaculture, aquaculture, fishing, and hunting, a diversity that would be impossible for a weak state to surveil and control), paired with the lack of evidence of a police or military structure makes the proposal of a coerced or dependent peasant population ludicrous. In the worst case, merchant-priests controlling the palaces might have been able to impose an unfavorable exchange rate making it difficult or impossible for the peasants to acquire luxury goods, but the peasants would still have been more or less self-sufficient, autonomous, and healthy."

Crime

There is no evidence that Crete had police.

Neighboring Societies

Crete was “a peaceful society with a minimum of defensive infrastructure and no record of involvement in offensive warfare.”