3.3 Ancestor Cults

After the discovery of paternity put an end to the procreative function of the spirits, the role they played in the relationship between the living and the dead was reinvested with a new dimension, the cult of the forebears, sealing paternity into the social structure.

1.2 Demographic Growth and Integration

Demographic growth played a crucial role in strengthening the chief’s authority, since chiefdoms allowed the integration of strangers into the social fabric, forming this way a population of several thousand, and even tens of thousands of individuals. A…

3. The Masculine Paradigm

While the period that stretches from the chiefdoms to the late empires of Antiquity establishes the hierarchical domination of the masculine in all facets of society, women still enjoy prestige and privileges, and take an active part in the economy. They possess lands and slaves…

3.2 Sexual Offenses and Gender Roles

The codes of laws distinguish three sorts of sexual infractions: rape, fornication, which includes prostitution, and incest.

Rape

Rape is punished differently depending on whether it occurs in the city or in the…

2.3 Expansion and Slavery

Conquests blended these populations as never before. The ethnic and linguistic homogeneity of the lineages and clans, and the secured position of every individual within the community made way for a multi-ethnical society that defined itself in geographical terms, using territorial…

II. The Religious Society

With plant and animal domestication giving humans the idea that they were meant to control nature, most of the functions that were attributed to the spirits have now disappeared, and at the end of the Neolithic, their existence have become obsolete.

1.3 The New Procreative Credo

The Chalcolithic sees a complete reversal of the economic and social position of men and women: the primordial function and status that women possessed have passed in the hands of men who now dominate the new society, defining its norms and structures.

2.1 Urbanization and Power

The term of “Urban Revolution” by no means exaggerates the size and importance of the transformations that take place, first of all, with the introduction of a new concept, the one of monumental architecture. In the Neolithic, the construction of important buildings intended for…

1.1 From Natural to Divine Spirits

Freed from the manifestations of nature that defined the spirits, the divinities acquire a new independence that gives them the possibility to be conceptualized without the support of any representation and, as a consequence, to be in different places simultaneously.