Gendering the Human Mythic Memory, Archaeological Silence, and Feminine Worlds in Ruins

This article argues that the category of the “human” was not always implicitly masculine and that its masculinisation was neither natural nor inevitable, but the result of a long process of narrative, mythic, and historiographic reconfiguration. Drawing on archaeological evidence from Selinunte in Sicily alongside mythological and literary traditions from the ancient Mediterranean, South Asia, and East Asia, I examine how female-centred cosmologies and ritual worlds were foundational rather than marginal to early human self-understanding. My analysis approaches archaeology as a form of text and myth as a literary technology of memory. While monumental historiography privileges masculine civic order, the material record, particularly votive figurines, domestic ritual objects, and goddess cults, reveals a persistent feminine presence that resists political inscription. As the Homeric Hymn to Demeter reminds us, “the earth did not send up seed,” when the feminine was displaced from cosmological centrality. Comparable patterns emerge in Vedic hymns, Shakta traditions, and East Asian creation myths, where feminine generativity precedes later textual and bureaucratic masculinisation. Rather than attempting a recovery of women as historical subjects, I show how femininity was structurally repositioned from epistemic centre to symbolic residue. The paper advances the concept of the masculine as the unmarked human and the feminine as its marked deviation, arguing that this shift shaped not only ancient societies but also modern assumptions about universality, agency, and personhood. By reading archaeological silence and mythic absence as deliberate forms of forgetting, this article reframes the human as a contested literary construct rather than a stable biological or philosophical given.