The Civilization of the Goddess: The World of Old Europe

by Marija Gimbutas, Joan Marler (Editor)

Preminent archaeoligist Marija Gimbutas's definitive volume — an authorative, fully illustrated masterwork that documents the existence of a triving, neolithic goddess-centered culture in prepatriarchal Europe.

Complete and panoramic, this convincing book presents a classic illumination of neolithic culture; this text provides a picture of a complex world, offering evidence of the matrilineal roots of civilization. 600 illustrations.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Anthropology, Goddess, Feminism, Religion, Archaeology

529 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 1991

About the author

Marija (Alseikaite) Gimbutas (Lithuanian: Marija Gimbutienė), was a Lithuanian-American archeologist known for her research into the Neolithic and Bronze Age cultures of "Old Europe", a term she introduced. Her works published between 1946 and 1971 introduced new views by combining traditional spadework with linguistics and mythological interpretation, but earned a mixed reception by other professionals.

Reviews

[Carole Stone · Rating 5 out of 5]

Left me longing for lost worlds where women were honored for their creative power, where men were artisans, where no weapons were found nor needed, and where fertile lands abounded and stewarded with care and reciprocity. Meticulously researched and documented. Impossible to absorb in one reading, but rewarding to return to over and again.

[Michael Cahill · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book, but if you are not even mildly interested in the first farming societies that moved into Europe via Greece from about 6500 BC, along with their package of Neolithic technologies, then this is not for you. If you are, then it should be a must read. This is essentially a technical academic summary of archaeological finds, overglossed with Gimbutas' interpretations about the mother-worshipping nature of the society involved, and its eventual demise at the hand of horse-riding nomadic Indo-European (IE) invaders who originated from the steppe.
On the whole I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I do have a different opinion on just who these people were though. Gimbutas, and much of established opinion after her, argue that the first farmers were non-Indo-European speakers because they were matriarchal mother worshippers, and because Indo-European comparative mythology paints a portrait of a male dominated (patriarchal) society for the society of people who spoke Proto-Indo-European (PIE). When you boil this argument down though, it has holes.
1) The language spoken by the first farmers is not attested linguistically, so we don't know whether they spoke Indo-European.
2) There are written texts, such as the Old European Dispillio Tablet from northern Greece, which shares certain characters with Early Minoan written texts: the undeciphered Linear A script. While the Minoans themselves did not speak Indo-European, their written records may well have been recorded in a more ancient Indo-European script, like church Latin. The evidence does not discriminate between the two positions.
3) Gimbutas (and most others) equate the Indo-Europeans with the Kurgan-building Indo-Iranian expansion from the steppe north of the Black Sea who invaded on horseback into Europe after about 4500 BC. These invaders established an elite ruling class that lived in fortified enclosures and dominated the local conquered farmer populations. They had a patriarchal society, and worshipped the sun rather than the mother goddess. Indeed the patriarchal pastoral society reconstructed by comparative Indo-European mythology fits well with those events, and the archaeology also matches. The question is, what language did the farmers speak?
Linguistic bootstrap analysis of Indo-European languages (Gray & Atkinson 2003) places the earliest divergence of PIE at about with 6500 BC (+/- a few hundred years). That is when the speakers of the now extinct (and scantily attested) Hittite language group diverged from the rest of the Indo-European speakers. The Hittite/Anatolian Indo-European group of IE languages was restricted to Anatolia: south of the Black Sea. Now this also corresponds to the time when Europe's earliest farmers moved from Anatolia to Europe (Greece). I contend that those first farmers and probably all of Europe's early farming cultures, spoke Indo-European.
One particular group of those Indo-European speakers, in my model, adopted a nomadic pastoralist lifestyle when they reached the steppe and merged with peoples living there. That is when the patriarchal and sun-worshipping culture developed (archaeologically as well as in my model).
Now, actually the argument that the comparative mythology, that Gimbutas and others use to conclude that these pastoralists were in fact the first Indo-Europeans, has several flaws including that the body of mythology does not include any myths inherited from the Hittites, the earliest IE offshoot branch. The written sources that survived do not include the myths about their pantheon of gods and heroes that allowed reconstruction of the body of common Indo-European mythology. Apparently, the vast majority of that mythology may have actually originated with the pastoralist Indo-Iranians on the steppe some time before 4500 BC, but long after Hittite was separated from PIE around 6500 BC. So it is the mythology inherited from teh concquering Kurgans, rather than from the first Indo-Europeans.
A perhaps more serious problem, although the above is methodologically serious enough, is that all of these farming communities were supposed to have spoken non-IE languages which have now been supposedly more or less lost without trace. Now there are for instance traces of non IE words in Greek, such as the –ossos words for instance. But the roots of such words were just as possibly introduced into an Indo-European vocabulary as the first Indo-European farmers moved into Greece, encountering and doubtless marrying a minority of hunter-gatherer endogenous peoples. This would mean that Proto-Greek-speaking chariot riders conquered an Indo-European-speaking farmer culture that was living in Greece and still using –ossos words that it had inherited long ago, but which were not inherited by the other early European farming peoples (who would have spoken their own regional dialects and inherited their own unique words from other languages after mixing with their own indigenous peoples).
But the same linguistic bootstrap analysis by Gray & Atkinson places the divergence of the major groups of western Indo-European languages at tantalisingly just the time that the Kurgan invasion of Europe by the horse riders would have segregated those societies. The evidence is in fact fully compatible with an Indo-European-speaking early European farming culture being infiltrated by the warrior hero Kurgan invaders. And in fact that is what the comparative mythology tells us happened. So I'm arguing that the early farmers who brought the Neolithic revolution with its farming from Anatolia spoke Indo-European, just like the Anatolian Indo-European-speaking Hittite languages who remained in Anatolia.
So for my money, and I don’t insist that I’m right, the first farmers were mother-worshipping IE speakers who entered Europe via greece and later segregated into the modern major clades of IE in Europe (Germanic, Celtic, Slavic, Latin, Greek) after the Kurgan invasion.
For more about the background to these arguments, and much more detail overall, see my book Paradise Rediscovered (http://www.goodreads.com/author/list/...)

Mike Cahill. March 1st, 2013.
__________
Reference:
Gray RD & Atkinson QD. 2003. Language-tree divergence times support the Anatolian theory of Indo-European origin. Nature. 426: 435-9. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14...

[Brian Griffith · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this classic of 20th-cetury archaeology Gimbutas uncovers the world of Old European civilization, which spread from the Ukraine to the Balkans thousands of years before the city states of Mesopotamia. She traces the main stream of Neolithic culture flowed up the Balkans to the Danube before 6000 BCE. In the lower Danube Valley, hundreds of villages emerged like a new flora in the woods. Some were tiny hamlets. and others could house 5,000 people. In northern Hungary near the Carpathan Mountains, a Bukk culture of the 5000s BCE seems to illustrate the merging of prehistoric cave dwellers with neolithic farmers. The graves show a mixture of light-boned Mediterranean people, and heavier-boned descendants of the Cro-Magnon population. The settlements were of one- or two-story houses, but caves were occupied as well. The villagers lived off gardens, hunting, and also the mineral resources of caves. The caves were used as sanctuaries for traditional religion, but also as mines for flint, quartz (for crystals and blades), and, by about 5500 BCE, copper. I wonder if such a mixture of cultures, races, and technologies, gave rise to a mythology of forest elves, mountain dwarves and “true people.”

Around 4800 BCE, farming cultures from the Balkans moved into the Ukraine, and found their most fertile fields. The Ukraine was a gardener’s paradise. The threat of raiders from the treeless steppes had not yet appeared. The arid steppes were only starting to form in the far-off Volga-Donets region. The gardening civilization met no environmental limits except to the north. By 3500 BCE, a 9,000 square-kilometer area of the Uman district held 253 villages of the Cucuteni culture. Some communities had thousands of houses. One site near Tallyanky covered five and a half square kilometers and could have housed 10,000 people. Since the land was vast and rich, there was probably no reason for conflict over any particular plot of ground. The methods of gardening and animal raising were a boon to all who learned them. The villages had no walls, and stood in open fields beside the rivers.

[Denise M · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gimbutas rules! If you're interested in Goddess cultural history and archaeology, this is a source text. Start here before you get into the melee of goddess books -- there was an tidal wave of them in the 1990's and many are garbage. However Gimbutas was THE scholar, so start with her and get a sound footing so you can judge the quality of the rest and find good, sound books, not crap. :)

[Judyta Szacillo · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’ve read about this book in My European Family: The First 54,000 Years by Karin Bojs. Marija Gimbutas got a very ambiguous description there – of a woman brave but stubborn, of a great mind but also too fixated on one particular idea: that the pre-Indo-European Europe was strictly matriarchal and, as a result, peaceful and balanced – as opposed to the later Indo-European societies ruled by men and driven by warfare. Having now read one of Gimbutas’s books, I can confirm that that description is accurate. The book offers a great wealth of knowledge which certainly substantiates some of Gimbutas’s claims to an extent, but certainly not all and not fully, and her bias is very clear. Every humanoid shape that predates the migration of the Indo-Europeans into Europe is, according to Gimbutas, a representation of the Goddess; every blade is a working tool in the Old Europe, but a weapon in the Europe invaded by the steppe warriors. The fixation is all too clear.

However, a number of Gimbutas’s claims – most importantly the theory of migration of peoples and technologies as opposed to the theory of local developments by the natives – have been proven beyond any doubt by the recent research on ancient DNA. Gimbutas’s fixation aside, I don’t think her works should be taken too lightly. From what I’ve read up to this point, there is a lot of truth in saying that the societies of the Old Europe were more egalitarian and probably more peaceful than the horse-riding, wealth-accumulating, socially stratified Indo-Europeans. I have learnt a lot from this book, and that makes it a worthy read to me.

[Madara Stade]

Gimbutas' research encouraged many works of historical fiction centred around a pre-Indo-European Mother Goddess; it was really nice to see the archeological examples and imagine what things were like before the arrival of other cultures, even if I found some speculations a bit idealistic.

[⭐️laura⭐️ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another life-changing read that changed the way I view modern society and makes me desperately wish we could bring some aspects of the old world back.

[Tao · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The Old Europeans had a strong belief in cyclic regeneration in which the main idea in grave architecture is 'tomb is womb.'"

[Rui Coelho · Rating 4 out of 5]

This feels like a neolithic "Caliban and the Witch". It tells the story of the ancient matrinear culture of Europe that was conquered by violent patriarcal invanders.

[Valerie]

I've read several of Gimbutas' books, and I'm pretty sure this was one.

'Perused' is the word I should use, probably, because you're always having to flip back and forth from picture to text to index...

This is NOT, however (I'm pretty sure), the book I was looking for. Somewhere, sometime, I had in my hand a book discussing historical, cultural, and trade links between the cultures of Malta and the Hebrides during the late Neolithic. The subject is discussed in this book, but the book I had was less pictorial and more wordy. I wish I could find it again.

This book is, however, quite useful as a reference. There is thorough discussion of motifs, common designs, household structures, etc. As with most of Gimbutas' work, it takes a somewhat less than Hellenic view of late prehistory, and deals with nonmartial, egalitarian, gynocentric cultures which were spread throughout most of western Asia, Europe, and North Africa in the late Neolithic. Of course, part of the problem is that such stories were often deliberately obscured and even partially obliterated by the later 'historical' societies of the Bronze Age and later, so it often requires actual digging to get back to the original materials--and sometimes the abandonment and/or alterlation of some of our own preconceptions, as well.

[Araminta Matthews · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gimbutas puts forth an argument for matrifocal societies based on several factors in archaeology, folklore and linguistics. Honestly, I was mesmerized. Gimbutas is the kind of person who reminds academics like me that specialization is only the commitment of a single lifetime (and how awe-inspiring that is). Think of it. We stand on the shoulders of giants, yes? Genuinely, you have... 40-70 years of specialization if you're lucky. That is not nearly enough to even scratch the surface of a very narrow subject...and then Gimbutas shows us that her years of specialization outrank us all. Incredible book.

[Christy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Masses of evidence for Old Europe's first agrarian civilization being one whose peace and egalitarianism and generalized well-being have never been equaled there since. Which is somehow inspiring, even if we've all taken a big long wrong-turn-at-Albuquerque in the intervening millennia.

[M S · Rating 5 out of 5]

Exhaustive in its detail. Perhaps the seminal reference test detailing the the goddess culture, pre-history.

[Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Extremely interesting, although not convincing on all points.

[Parhamow]

nothing