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Three pieces of tech that have been protecting humans from other humans for 5000 years.

1. Hill forts.

https://www.thefield.co.uk/features/iron-age-hillforts-21556

The women live on fortified hills. They can see people coming from a distance and they watch. It is a costly endeavor to try to storm one of these hill forts because the women are good shots and they have a lot of arrows. And poison.

2. Dogs.

These semi-feral dogs live in the fields around the fort. The women encourage them and feed them, sometimes. The dogs keep out herbivores. They also keep out men.

3. Better the devil you know...

The men are no dopes. When it comes breeding time, they know what is up. A band of men will stake out territory in the countryside around a given hill fort. If some other band shows up to get in position, they will have to fight for it. The local band is a known quantities to the women, and these locals do not want to screw up the good thing they have going. They are going to respect the ladies and their system and in turn they get let inside the walls once a year. Random dudes in the hinterlands are out of luck.

If a serious band of marauders does show up and overpower the local band, surviving men will head for the hill fort. They have to get past the dogs, but if a couple of the regular guys show up with their tails between their legs, the women will know to light the fires and get ready.

Assuming that (1) we are speaking about humans and (2) by "ancient world" we are to understand the historical ancient world, that is, no pre-historical hunter-gatherers, then the way of life described in the question can be made stable over the long term, but probably not as the querent envisioned it.

The problem comes from the huge disparity between the population densities of a settled agricultural society and a dispersed hunter-gatherer society.

Since the question speaks about the ancient world we must assume that the matriarchal clans are settled in villages or towns and practice some sort of agriculture. This enables them to reach reasonably high densities and total numbers of inhabitants. But then the question says that boys are expelled at 12 or 14 years of age (when they "reach adulthood" according to ancient conventions) and go to live from hunting and gathering. This has the immediate consequence that most men die young, and thus in the world of the question there are many more women than men. And those males who don't die young must by necessity live in very small groups scattered far and wide, for the hunter-gatherer lifestyle cannot support dense populations.

Moreover, the hunting and gathering men cannot possibly be "seasoned warriors". Fierce brawlers, yes, quite possibly. Fearless fighters, acceptable. Seasoned warriors, nope. War as practiced by half-starved hunter-gatherer barbarians is simply not at the same level as war practiced by civilized settled societies.

So in the end the civilized women can easily fend off attacks by the barbarian men. Women have numbers on their side, they have actual military formations and tactics and discipline, and they have fortifications. How do I know that they have fortifications? Because everybody had fortifications in the antiquity. Even a ditch and an earthen rampart, what the Romans called a vallum, are force multipliers. (Fun note: the English word "wall" comes from Latin vallum, an earthen fortitication consisting of a ditch and rampart. A proper wall is murus in Latin.)

All right, so the barbarian men are too few, too dispersed and too barbarian to pose a significant threat to the civilized women. What can be done to make them more fearsome, while preserving as much as possible from the premiss of the question?

Simple. Ditch hunting and living of the land and make them nomadic pastoralists.

Nomadic pastoralism was indeed a well recognized way of life in the antiquity, and not only. Some cultures, for example the Lapps and the Mongolians, preserved it well into the modern age.

Make the sexual division of labor in this world more pervasive than in our real history: have the women labor the land and grow crops, while men roam the wide plains with their herds in search of pasture.

Such an approach would naturally lead to the conflict between tribes of nomadic pastoralists, reminiscent of the range wars known from American westerns; it would also naturally lead to conflict between free-roaming open-range pastoralists and the settled crop-growing women.

• But in this case, wouldn't women (smaller, physically weaker, etc. stereotypes) be certain to lose? No. The settled women would still have an advantage in numbers, albeit smaller than in the case of confronting scattered hunter-gatherers; they would still have an advantage in culture and discipline; they would still have fortifications.




• But didn't the nomadic pastoralists Mongols conquer the world? Well, they did indeed conquer a lot of land, which then they promptly lost. We will never know what would have happened in the end if the Mongols had persisted in their invasion of Europe; I for one think that they would have been beaten even if they had not decided on their own to abandon the attempt. Anyway, better to have those feminine settlements be somewhere not in the featureless boundless steppe.

Nitpicks:

• "Breeding season": humans do not have a breeding season. Better make the sexual congress take place in the autumn, after the crops are gathered and everybody feasts.




• "Some warlord may even decide to join forces and bring many bands together to dominate the weaker clans": and what's keeping the settled towns from banding together to defend their lands? That's the ancient and time tested response to external threats: form a confederacy, a kingdom, an empire. The plucky warlord will realize that what he has done is piss off the mighty Empress of the Fertile Valleys. The bards sing to this day the heroic feats of arms seen in the epic battles.

If we assume that we are speaking about humans or a sufficiently similar species, I can imagine one way that can be achieved comparatively easily.

Whether you want to implement it would depend on the degree of cynicism and brutality you want to have in your setting.

It's a primitive, but a pretty effective practice of population control that archaic societies actually often employed - castration. It's pretty horrific, but not much more then female circumcision that is still practiced in some regions.

The eunuchs would then stay in the female villages, and the proportion of villagers to rowing males would be quite far from natural 1:1. The precise proportion of men who are cut to those who are left whole can also be different, depending on the result you want. If you want the maximum genetic diversity with the minimal number of males, they would banish the firstborn son of every woman at puberty and cut all subsequent ones.

The cultural attitude to such practice and the attitude of eunuchs themselves can also be quite different. On one end of the spectrum, they can be treated as property and traded between clans (as women sometimes were, historically) - then you may have a pretty disgruntled portion of population. On the other end, especially if property and status are family matter and not individual, they can stay with their mothers and sisters, working to improve the position of the family and getting privileges from that themselves. In that case, eunuchs can actually count themselves more lucky then those 'whole' males that were banished to the wild lands in puberty. In that case, most of the people in this society won't even think there's anything obviously wrong in their arrangement.

The way you describe them sounds like this is a hard-wired, bred-in bioevolutionary situation. In other words, we're not dealing with human beings, but rather with a different race. Having had some experience with such races in my own world, I'll offer the following:

I would posit that the females of this race, living separated from the adult males, will do what females must. They will be their own warriors, their own hunters, their own watchmen, their own scouts. This works well if they're close in size and strength to males.

I would suspect that because of their biology and their social wiring, males have no interest in females except during the mating season. Once the girls' pheromones wear off and pregnancies are ensured, that's the last they'll see of their boyos until next time. It may be that, perhaps unknown to the females, their males kind of look after them from a distance. They may not live in one community, but these associations of males may wander from place to place in a broad territory that encompasses the smaller territories of their females.

Have you thought of a trading structure?

You're right that living off the land as a hunter / forager is going to make the male bands more dangerous; there's a reason why we as a species took up agriculture and it basically boils down to being able to support more people in smaller territories. Agriculture allows us to use all the arable land available to us to produce food, rather than relying on the randomness of what plants grow in a given area that are food-bearing as a percentage of the whole. The disadvantage of cropping for the most part is that it's a relatively long term investment during which the land has to be protected from the very marauders you describe in your roving bands of males.

So, on the one hand you have a female clan that probably has agriculture to support themselves in a smaller but fixed territory, and you have men who can defend those positions if needed and also hunt. So, my proposal is that the men trade with the women outside of mating season.

The women can provide vegetables, baked goods and the like that help sustain the men. The men can provide meat, and in dangerous times, can also provide defensive capabilities.

It is possible that this kind of arrangement may effectively tie specific male bands to specific female clans, but then that is likely to happen in any event as the roaming bands are still likely to want to stick to a given territory that they know well rather than roam in a random manner, risking not being close to essential resources like water when it's really needed. Nomads that live off the land as they move about seldom do wander randomly, especially in areas where resources are limited. Better to do without at known intervals than to risk losing everything by gathering resources out of unknown lands.

Pretty much by the same mechanism that tribes of males or males and females survive. By being effective and cooperative warriors. There is a saying -- Bows make men and women equal. Okay, it's not really a saying. But it ought to be. And, things like atlatl and the sling magnify human strength. Spears and stones don't care who through them if they hit their mark.

Plus, the chicks can bake cookies. And say, we have cookies!! And, the roving bands of marauding males are going to give it up. Cause ... who can say no to cookies?

Sorry, but I think I have to do frame challenge on the whole question, before speaking about organizing defenses, as it appears to me that some of your premises don't work together, unless you are willing to do some heavy handwaving or magic. Some of the issues were raised by @AlexP 's answer, but in addition:

1) Not only humans have no "breeding season", but it doesn't make much evolutionary sense that they should. Humans have the longest childhood of all known Earth animals. The only comparable animal is elephant. All the others reach maturity at least 5x times faster -- generally, a couple of years, max.

During this time children are vulnerable and weak. If there is a "breeding season", it means all children are born at approximately same time, and this incurs heavy penalty on the amount of women available to care for anything else. Of course, the same goes for the period of pregnancy.

Next, having all children of the same age around, heavily increases chances of a generation dying all together. For example, a heavy drought. Or a flood. Epidemy. Children of younger ages are much more susceptible to being killed by things that larger and older kids will survive.

2) Heavy work. Ancient world presumes most of work is hand-work. While females and males both can be assumed stronger physically than current day ones, in general, males of the human species can be expected to have about two times stronger upper body and up to about 1/3d stronger lower body. Whatever the settlement a clan lives in, what will they do, when they urgently need some wall repaired against predators, or a burst dam? Send for the nearest roving band, which might be a week away or more, when not "in breeding season"? Assigning twice as many females to the task, as the "surplus" men? Quite possible, but not very viable by survival economics -- in ancient times, and not only then -- there frequently was little enough food to go around. Add to it the "breeding season", and you really have a recipe for disaster: a lightning strike sets your settlement on fire, there have been hungry wolves spotted in vicinity, and half of your women are in the last months of pregnancy.

Due to (1) and (2) your premise of: "Boys exit their clans upon reaching adulthood. These males leave their families to join small bands of males who live as nomads. Roving bands of these men wander the countryside, hunting and living off the land" appears to place incredible burden on the women. Instead of having some division of work and the males at least regularly bringing back valuable sources of protein and fat, not to talk about doing the heavy lifting, you have males barely surviving in wilderness -- very much dependant on their luck, while women have to assign disproportionate amount of, well, women, doing the work that males could do faster/easier.

This separate living sounds like a recipe for extinction.

I am not even starting to consider that ancient communities were generally very wary and hostile of strangers, as compared to members of one's own clan. While you call your society "clans", what it amounts basically is men being expulsed from society, to form their own. What kind of loyalty could they be expected to have towards the women settlement then?

Because it would cause too much infighting between themselves.

With the males being nomadic hunters (and using the female camps as trading posts) it makes more sense for them to be small bands of a dozen or so - too many members, and you run into issues with either scaring the animals away, or not having enough food available to hunt. If a band get too large, then it will tend to split into two or more smaller bands.

On the other hand, the females are farming and never leave their clans. This means the clans will be larger. By only allowing males into the camp at certain times of year - and, presumably, by only allowing certain women to get pregnant (you don't want your entire workforce to be 9 months pregnant at the same time! Perhaps they take turns, or perhaps it's the most successful farmers?) they are more able to control the size of their population, but it is still likely to be much more than the roving bands of males.

This means that a female village will support multiple bands of males (certain industries are harder to maintain as nomads - for example, brewing beer, or working metal) which will often bee competing for the same resources out in the wilderness.

If any of these bands decide that they want to "take over", and claim the clan compounds and women, then the other bands will rally against them. A powerful or charismatic warlord trying to pull bands together into a larger force will run into logistical issues trying to keep them fed and happy, while also trying to keep his growing army from being noticed and put down before it can cut his rivals off from their annual conjugal visits.

On the other hand - as mentioned, metal working is one of the industries that is much, much easier when you have the ability to construct a static forge and mine. This means that the women in the village probably have easier access to superior weapons and armour (steel vs bronze?), and are more than capable of putting down the upstarts themselves.

I think the biggest problem with this scenario is that while your tribe of women might have religious reasons for expelling their young men, other tribes would not. Those other tribes would have all the advantages of a settled civilisation, plus they'd be able to raise a stronger army. Not only would their soldiers be (on average) larger and stronger, but losing soldiers in war would not reduce the tribe's ability to have children. Tribes that didn't expel half their workforce would, sooner or later, out-compete those who did.

So, you'd need a world where everyone had to live like this. The one that springs to mind is David Brin's Glory Season

Three thousand years before the story starts, Lysos founds a human
colony on the isolated planet of Stratos in an effort to radically
re-engineer human life into a happier, more pastoral form. She
developed a strain of human beings that conceives clones in winter
(always female), while those conceived in summer (variants or "vars")
obtain their genes through sexual reproduction just in case biological
adaptation becomes necessary.

Further, males and females have opposed
seasons of sexual receptivity: men in summer and women in winter. This
scheme is said to be stable over evolutionary time because women gain
an advantage from self-cloning, while men only reproduce in summer.
Finally, men have been made far less aggressive during the times that
they are less sexually receptive and are much less numerous.

The social result is that the vast majority of the population of Stratos
consists of groups of female clones, each in its own social or
economic niche. Over the centuries, these groups have come to dominate
society. Men are confined to relatively few professions (such as
sailing) and have a lower social status than clones, but higher than
vars. In each generation, a few women vars become successful enough to
found their own clan or "hive" of clones.

Use the Byzantium system - rely on superior fortifications for defense while playing the different bands against each other to prevent them from fielding a large army against you.

Fortifications can be womanmade or natural, depending on the tech level and resources. In a low resources environment, a narrow valley with a wall on the entrance can be as impregnable as any fortress.

On top of that, if the men are forced to live in very unforgiving, low resources conditions, their survival might at times require help from the women. For example, during winter some small bands might be given food, or even allowed inside (mating season right?) thus creating an intensive for them to be friendly with the women.

Of course if they disobey or grow too strong, another band can be selected to replace them...

The Women Are Amazing Warriors

Every female is trained from a young age to be a warrior. They are strong and have an organized military system, like Gengis Khan's:
There's a group of ten soldiers in which the leader was chosen by vote,
There's a group of ten groups of ten soldiers with 100 women in which the leader was chosen by vote,
There's a group of ten groups of ten groups of soldiers with 1000 women in which the leader was chosen by the leader of the clan.
Of course, as you said they are small clans, you can make the number of soldiers of each group lower, but this is up to you.