On the other side, the following facts are to be noticed :— (1) In many barbarous communities the family, in our sense of the word, does not exist. (2) The traditions of civilized races report a similar state of things in their early experience. (3) The domestic institutions of savages, and traces of the same manners among cultivated races, point to an age when the family was not constituted in the modern way. (4) The larger tribal associations of savages were clearly not developed out of the monogamous or patriarchal family. (5) The larger tribal associations of Greece, Rome, and India bear marks of having been evolved out of the tribal associations of savages. If these points can be proved, the family is not the earliest, but one of the latest conquests of civilization. We shall consider these points in order.
1. At whatever epoch civilized travellers have visited peoples of less cultivation, they have noted, with unconcealed surprise, not the family, but promiscuity and polyandry. They have found men and women living together in what seemed unregulated community, or they have found that the woman had several husbands, and often that these husbands were brothers. They have alleged that the woman, not the man, was really head of the household, that kinship was traced through the female line, on account of the certainty of that sort of genealogy, and consequently that a man’s children belonged, not to his own family, but to that of the wife, in whose affections he had only a limited or transitory share. It may be presumed, with some confidence, that these customs, observed in lands and ages widely apart, cannot have grown out of the monogamous or patriarchal family as we know it. The limitless area in which such practices have been usual may be gathered from a few examples. Thus Herodotus says of the Agathyrsi, a Scythian people (iv. 104): “They have their women in common, that they may all be brothers of each other.” The Nasamones (iv. 172) have similar customs; of the Massagetae (i. 216) it is said that each marries a wife, τaυτr ∣ σι δe ίπίκοινα χρόωνται. Aristotle alludes to similar promiscuity among the Libyans (Pol., ii. 3, 9); they have their women in common, and distribute the children by their likeness to the men. Diodorus Siculus reports the same manners among the Troglodytes and the Ichthyophagi on the coast of the Red Sea. The Auseis by the Libyan lake Tritonis, though they seem to have set store on the chastity of unmarried women, are said by Herodotus to have lived like cattle, with no permanent cohabitation (iv. 180). These are examples of reported promiscuity in ancient times. Though the observers may have overlooked, and probably did overlook, some regulations, yet it is plain that in the societies spoken of the monogamous or patriarchal family cannot have existed, and so cannot have been the germ of such wider tribal associations as were then established. Turning to modern savages, we find the custom of lending wives, as an act of friendliness and hospitality, very common. This may be no more than mere profligacy, in a society where male kin is recognized; but the marriage custom of Thibet, which assigns to a woman several brothers as joint husbands, cannot be thus explained. This amazing practice is the rule of life “among thirty millions of respectable people” (Wilson, Abode of Snow). As to the area over which some form of polyandry extends, the reader may consult Mr M 4 Lennan ’ s Primitive Marriage (Edinburgh, 1865, p. 178, 183), where it is traced “to points half round the globe.” Caesar describes something like it among the inhabitants of Britain (De Bello Gallico, lib. V. c. 14): “Ten or twelve men have wives in common, and chiefly brothers share with brothers, and father with children.” According to a fragment of Polybius, the same fraternal arrangement was not unknown among the Spartans.
Among the Nairs of Malabar, a woman has several husbands, but these are not brothers (Asiatic Researches, vol. V. p. 13; Hamilton’s Account of East Indies, vol. i. p. 308; Buchanan’s Journey, vol. ii. p. 411). Among the Nairs the woman lives with her mother or brothers, or in other cases has a house of her own, where she receives her husbands. “No Nair knows his father, and every man looks upon his sister’s children as his heirs” (Buchanan, ii. 412). Some other examples of very loose relations between the sexes will be found in Mr Herbert Spencer’s Princi]Jes of Sociology, vol. i. chap. 5, 6. But, to be brief, we strike on instances as soon as we look below the surface of civilization. Thus, in the Marquesas Islands, Mr Melville (Narrative of a Four Months' Residence, 1846, p. 212) describes polyandry, and asks, with some naïveté, “Where else could such a practice exist even for a single day?” He would have found the practice among the Tsonnotouan Iroquois. “La polygamie qui n’est pas permise aux hommes, l’est pourtant aux femmes” (Lafitau, Moeurs des Sauvages Américains, vol. i. p. 555, 1726). If we are to maintain, as it was usual to declare, that “it is difficult to say of what races of men it is not allowable to lay down that the society in which they are united was originally organized on the patriarchal model,” we must believe that some strange necessity, or some monstrous profligacy destroyed the patriarchal model among the people whose manners we have been studying.
2. If we can trust the traditions of Indo-European and other polite peoples, they too once lived in a stage which can hardly be discerned from promiscuity, and they too allotted many husbands to one wife. Beginning with Greece, we find the legend in Suidas (p. 3102), that the women of Attica abandoned themselves to unchecked vice, and that the male parentage of children could not be ascertained. According to the story of Varro (Augustine, De Civ. Dei, 1. xviii. c. 9), it was Cecrops, the serpent-king, who first instituted marriage, just as the Australian natives credit the lizard with the discovery. The Hindoos give it to Svetaketu, before whose date “women were unconfined, and roamed at their pleasure This ancient custom is even now the rule for creatures born as brutes and it is still practised among the northern Kurus” (Muir, Sanskrit Texts, part ii. p. 336). The Egyptians attributed the origin of marriage to the rule of Menes; the Chinese, to Fohi. As to polyandry, among Aryans of India, a famous passage in the Mahabharata tells how the five brothers Pandava “married the fair Draaupadi with eyes of lotus blue.” The whole legend of these princes is so marked with the stamp of polyandrous institutions that the very terminology of polyandry, the system of nomenclature called “classificatory,” is retained. Grand-uncles, in this episode of the Mahabharata, as among the Red Indians, are called grandfathers, and uncles fathers.
If, then, the Aryan race was not originally organized like the polyandrous Thibetans, the legends which declare these facts are at least singular examples of “undesigned coincidence.” Before coming to that conclusion, it is now necessary to examine certain symbolic customs, certain laws of inheritance and of prohibited degrees, and so to determine whether the looser relations of savages may not have been the material out of which the modern family was gradually fashioned. This can scarcely be called a new, though it has never been a popular opinion. Mr Millar, professor of law in the university of Glasgow, expressed it distinctly in his Origin of the Distinction of Panks, p. 47 (4th edition, Edinburgh, 1806).
3. If the practices which make kindred through males difficult or impossible to recognize were ever universally prevalent, they will have left vestiges of their existence in the custom of tracing descent through females. Again, where that custom is met with, though marriage has become fixed, and where women are mistresses of the household and headβ of the family, it is not easy to give any other explanation of these facts than this, that they are survivals from a time when the union of the sexes was vague and temporary. Where, then, do we meet with examples of kindred traced through the female line Ί Kindred through women is recognized in Australia (with exceptions among certain tribes), in the Marianne Islands, in Fiji, Touga, and some other isles of the Pacific, and in the Carolina Islands. Among the Kars of the Golden Chersonese, the tribes are divided iuto Sgans, who recognize male descent, and Pwos, who reckon by the mother’s side. The natives of the province of Keang-se “are celebrated among the natives of the other Chinese provinces for the mode or form used by them in address, which is Laon peaon,” paraphrastically translated (Morgan, Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family, p. 452), “Oh, you old fellow, brother mine by some of the ramifications of female relationship !” To select some more modern instances from Μ. Giraud Teulon’s collections {Origine de la Famille, Geneva, 1874, p. 15), the Singhalese, the Nairs of Malabar, the Kocchs, an Indian tribe, and the Zaporogue Cossacks, with the red men of North America as a rule, and the Indians of British Guinea, to whom we may add many African tribes (Bowditch, Mission to Ashantee, p. 185, London, 1873; M unzinger, OsM∕n‰mscAe Studien, 1864), count kindred by the mother’s side. Another collection of examples will be found in Mr M'Lennan’s Primitive Marriage. Strabo reports that among the Iberians women were heads of families (i. 214, 319; iii. 165), and Cordier {Anciennes coutumes de Barege) shows that among the Basques women inherited property to the exclusion of males as late as the eighteenth century. The legislation of the Revolution changed all this, but a popular song still testifies to the annoyance of les héritières. This ancient custom thus fulfils the proverb, “Tout finit par des chansons” (Giraud Teulon, La Mère chez certains peuples de U Antiquité, Paris, 1867, p. 42). Among ancient peoples there are very many more or less distinct vestiges of female kinship. Herodotus, it is true, says of the Lycians (i. 173), “This custom they have to themselves, and herein agree with no other men, in that they name themselves by the mother’s side and not by the father’s. And if one ask another who he is, he will recount his maternal descent, and reckon up his mother’s maternal ancestors.” Now, so far from this mode of deducing descent being peculiar to the Lycians, it was in vogue among the Locrians (Polybius, 12, v., and Excerpta Hist. Grcec. Frag., Rome, 1827, p. 384). In the bilingual Etruscan inscriptions, according to Μ. Giraud Teulon {Origine de la Famille, p. 21), to whom we owe many of these citations, “the Etruscan text contains only the name of the mother of the dead, while the Latin text gives that of the father.” Certain Egyptian mortuary inscriptions give the name of the mother, while the accompanying Greek text gives that of the father. A stele found in the ruins of the temple at Napata by Mariette Bey {Revue Archéologique, May 1873) shows us a monarch justifying his claim to the throne by enumerating the women of his maternal ancestry. Future historians will no doubt explain the apparent coexistence of two systems of kindred in Egypt. Meanwhile it is noteworthy that Herodotue (ii. 35) declares that daughters were compelled by law to maintain their parents, λvhile sons were free to do as they pleased. This report has been curiously confirmed by the legal documents of certain private Egyptian families, lately deciphered by M. Revillout. We see the woman mistress of the household, and owner of the property.
Many other ancient examples are published by the Baron d’Eckstein {Peνue Archéologique, 1858), but M. d’Eckstein’s speculations about race need not be accepted. Millar {op. cih, p. 48) quotes some survivals of the custom of tracing pedigree and deriving condition through women: “If any one be born of a Campanian father, and a mother Puteolan, he is a Campanian citizen, unless, by some particular custom {privilegio aliquo), his maternal descent is to be reckoned.” Among places where this local custom ruled, Delphi is mentioned. The great collections of the facts known about the ancient position of women as heads of the family is Bachofen’s Das Mutterrecht, in which somewhat crude speculations about religion are -introduced. The most classical example of a tradition of gynaecocracy is that often-quoted tale ofjVarro’s preserved by St Augustine {De Civitate Dei, lib. xviii. c. 9). In the time of Cecrops, the serpent-king, a dispute arose between Pallas and Poseidon, which was settled by the votes of the Athenians. In these days women possessed the franchise, and a woman’s vote turned the scale in favour of Pallas. To appease Poseidon, the Athenian men resolved that women should no more be admitted to the assemblies, nor should children take their names from the mother’s family. In this tradition survives a memory of the Red Indian and Australian practice, which makes the child belong to the mother’s clan, and also a memory of the political rights, so to speak, which women enjoyed among the ancient Britons, among the Iroquois of Lafitau’s time, and which take the shape of a considerable share in the despotism of African races. It may be said that if women bave ever enjoyed these privileges it is odd that among the least cultivated peoples, such as the Australians, they are treated as slaves. The reply is—if the Australians were a people of barbaric wealth, like many African nations, and if the certainty of succession to the “royal stool” and the royal treasures were a matter of the utmost moment to the state, it is not improbable that the ancient custom of female kinship would have given, among them too, dignity, importance, and power to women. Thus we know from several sources that
From the nobility of the mother
Should always be the right to the sovereignty among the Celts in Scotland (M i Lennan, Primitive Marriage, 1865, p. 86, quoting Nennius; the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Rolls series, p. 1). Even in the Mahalh harαta there is a vestige of this system. Vasouki, the Naga (serpent) king, wished to have an heir. Instead of marrying, he found a partner for his sister Djaratkarou. The sister’s son succeeded. Compare Bowditch’s Ashantee (p. 185), “Their extraordinary rule of succession excludes all children but those of a sister, and is founded on the argument that, if the wives of the brothers are faithless, the blood of the family is entirely lost in the offspring, but, should the daughters deceive their husbands, it is still preserved.” In leaving this part of the subject we may ask, from what considerations, except those indicated by Bowditch, could the rule of inheritance by the mother’s side have been derived?
4. It has been shown that the actual practices of many barbarous races make the existence of the patriarchal, and still more of the monogamous family impossible, and that the traditions of the races called Aryan, with many fragments of their customs, testify to a similar state of things in the past experiences of nations now organized on the basis of the family. We must now ask—(1) Of what nature are the wider tribal associations of savages? (2) How did they come into existence? (3) Are there any vestiges of similar and similarly formed associations among peoples which now possess strict marriage and kinship through males? We find that the Australian black fellows and the red men of North America are grouped in local tribes, which generally are named from the lands they occupy. Thus, the Onondaga are people of the hills, the Mohawks people of the flint, the Senecas people of the great hills, the Oneidas people of the granite, and so forth (Morgan, League of the Iroquois, 1851). In Australia the tribes take the names of districts, as Ballarat, Wandyalloch, and Moreton Bay. Within these local tribes there are smaller associations, variously called “clans,” “families,” “septs,” “tribes,” by travellers. They are, as a rule, governed on this principle in Australia :—“All the children take after the clan of their mother, and no man can marry a woman of the same clan, although the parties be born of parents in no way related, according to our ideas” (G. S. Lang, Aboriginals of Australia, Melbourne, 18G5, p. 10; Gray’s Journals, &c., ii. 227). These smaller associations which may not intermarry are named after some animal, vegetable, or other natural object. A member of the Kangaroo associations may not slay or eat the kangaroo, which he holds in honour, and a Paddymelon must abstain from paddymelon, The obvious result of this scheme of prohibited marriage is to make every local tribe contain much the same assortment of smaller communities. Looking at North America, we find the local tribe of Senecas to be composed of sets of persons called by the name of Wolf, Bear, Turtle, Beaver, Deer, Snipe, Heron, Hawk, and many of the same names prevail among Cayugas,...
