@Croquemitaine #199961
To the best of my knowledge, here’s how it ended up that way in the first place: Once agriculture took off, most cultures adopted some form of “separate-but-sorta-equal spheres” ideology where certain aspects of society were considered to be women’s purview and certain aspects were men’s, and that included some actual power for women to back it up. Inheritance was also matrilineal in most cases.
Then everything changed when the Fire Nation Black Mound Peoples attacked. Hailing from the Caucasus Mountains, they were the first to develop organized warfare (as opposed to small-scale raiding). They conquered peoples all over Europe, the Middle East, West Asia, and India, then settled down and absorbed most of cultural elements of those they conquered, albeit not entirely unchanged… only to be conquered themselves a few generations later by an even more advanced and vicious wave of the original Black Mound culture. This was a cycle repeated several times, though not every region was hit by every wave.
While they were illiterate and left no direct historical records, one of the key aspects of Black Mound culture seems to have been the need to breed up as many warriors as possible. How exactly that evolved over time is speculative, but it appears to have resulted in a punctuated erosion in women’s rights and power among the conquered cultures. And yet, even after the waves ended, and with a few isolated exceptions every culture within that region was patrilineal with a focus on breeding up sons, women still weren’t quite reduced to chattel and still had some degree of independence and rights.
But then came the Bronze Age Collapse, caused by a major climate shift, at which point most places’ male-run priesthood/government (at that point, same thing) tried to preserve themselves unchanged at all costs… including by continually increasing taxes on a rapidly declining-due-to-starvation population in order to fund/support themselves at the same level. The ones which managed to survive the commoner revolts did so by changing into a very strictly controlled and stratified society. Which, in the clan-based societies in parts of the Middle East, included reducing women to chattel… and the Abrahamic Religions came out of there…
