Lifting the veil

Finally I realise why women are so pissed off. It all goes back to the first codified laws — circa 2,400 bc — when rules like this were invented by men: ‘If a woman speaks out of turn then her teeth will be smashed by a brick.’ Before that, apparently, women lived on a pretty equal footing with their future male oppressors. Indeed, in arguably the first civilisation — a hive-like collection of houses in central Anatolia called Çatalhöyük dating back to 7,500 bc, when mankind was just beginning to emerge from the Stone Age and living with semi-domesticated animals — not a single man was expected to put out the bins while the women dealt with the easy tasks like cooking, washing, child-rearing, ironing, cleaning and leafing through holiday brochures.

That’s because everything was shared equally. Everyone’s house was the same size and everything, including children, was common property. Once you’d given birth, your child would be handed over to the neighbours and they’d bring it up in their household. This bound everyone together in communal loyalty and affection and peace, over 9,000 years before John met Yoko and wrote ‘Imagine’.

And so the good times continued for another 5,000 years, peaking with the advent of Enheduanna, daughter of the Sumerian King Sargon of Akkad, who appointed her priestess of the moon god Nanna in the city-state of Ur. Besides being wise and semi-divine, she wrote the first works of signed literature in history. In her Sumerian Temple Hymns, she wrote: ‘My king, something has been created that no one has created before.’ Clever girl. (As you’re not supposed to say these days: patronising.)