Johann Jakob Bachofen, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death

Johann Jakob Bachofen

Swiss legal and classical scholar (1815-1887)

Date of Birth: 22-Dec-1815

Place of Birth: Basel, Basel-Stadt, Switzerland

Date of Death: 25-Nov-1887

Profession: judge, writer, historian, university teacher, gender studies, sociologist, classical scholar, jurisprudence, philosopher

Nationality: Switzerland

Zodiac Sign: Capricorn

Johann Jakob Bachofen (22 December 1815 – 25 November 1887) was a Swiss antiquarian, jurist, philologist, anthropologist, and professor for Roman law at the University of Basel from 1841 to 1845. Bachofen is most often connected with his theories surrounding prehistoric matriarchy, or Das Mutterrecht, the title of his seminal 1861 book Mother Right: an investigation of the religious and juridical character of matriarchy in the Ancient World.
Bachofen assembled documentation demonstrating that motherhood is the source of human society, religion, morality, and decorum.
He postulated an archaic "mother-right" within the context of a primeval Matriarchal religion or Urreligion. Bachofen became an important precursor of 20th-century theories of matriarchy, such as the Old European culture postulated by Marija Gimbutas from the 1950s, and the field of feminist theology and "matriarchal studies" in 1970s feminism.