matriarchy

matriarchy
has since J. J. Bachofen (Das Mutterrecht (1861)) been used to denote a quite hypothetical and now long discredited phase in the history of mankind when property was transmitted and descent traced through females, not males. (There has from the outset been a persistent tendency to confuse the specific phenomenon of matrilineal descent on the one hand—a system widely attested among contemporary peoples worldwide—with female supremacy in a more general and altogether less clearly defined sense on the other.) The system of descent is stated by Herodotus (1. 173) to have been operative as a going concern among the non-Greek people of Lycia (SW Asia Minor) in his own time, but this assertion is flatly contradicted by the conventional family structure reflected in their funeral inscriptions, including well over 150 in the Lycian language itself, many of which go back to the 4th cent. bc.

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