history and those changes are reflected in art and culture. There are controversies within the contemporary Christian church concerning women and their role in the church. Women, sex, and law in surrounding cultures Almost all Near Eastern societies of the Bronze Age (3000–1200 BCE) and Axial Age (800 to 300 BCE) were established as patriarchal societies by 3000 BCE. Eastern societies such as the Akkadians, Hittites, Assyrians and Persians relegated women to an inferior and subordinate position. There are very few exceptions, but one can be found in the third millennium B.C. with the Sumerians who accorded women a position which was almost equal to that of men. However, by the second millennium, the rights and status of women were reduced. In the West, the status of Egyptian women was high, and their legal rights approached equality with men throughout the last three millennia B.C. A few women even ruled as pharaohs. However, historian Sarah Pomeroy explains that even in those ancient patriarchal societies where a woman could occasionally become queen, her position did not empower her female subjects. Classics scholar Bonnie MacLachlan writes that Greece and Rome were patriarchal cultures. The roles women were expected to fill in all these ancient societies were predominantly domestic with a few exceptions such as Sparta, who fed women equally with men, and trained them to fight in the belief women would thereby produce stronger children. The predominant views of Ancient and Classical Greece were patriarchal; however, there is also a misogynistic strain present in Greek literature from its beginnings. A polarized view of women allowed some classics authors, such as Thales, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Aristophanes and Philo, and others, to write about women as "twice as bad as men", a "pernicious race", "never to be trusted on any account", and as an inherently inferior race of beings separate from the race of men. Rome was heavily influenced by Greek thought. Sarah Pomeroy says "never did Roman society encourage women to engage in the same activities as men of the same social class." In The World of Odysseus, classical scholar Moses Finley says: "There is no mistaking the fact that Homer fully reveals what remained true for the whole of antiquity: that women were held to be naturally inferior..." Pomeroy also states that women played a vital role in classical Greek and Roman religion, sometimes attaining a freedom in religious activities denied to