FredKurz wrote:Was there ever a communicative/emotional reason to have a masculine boat or female automobile (French) which 'in those ancient days' gave an added nuance to a noun by the listener knowing that the inanimate object had a so-called feminine or masculine quality? Was there a psychic purpose? Was there actual function in assigning and using gender?
There are two sets of questions here: those related to gender systems generally and those related to Western European gender systems specifically. Although M/F or M/F/N gender systems are relatively common, they're far from the only possibilities. Even within Europe you see "common/neuter" systems in the Netherlands and Scandinavia. Chapter 31 of the World Atlas of Language Structures
talks about some of the other systems out there and their distribution. As you can see from that, "animate" vs "non-animate" is a pretty common distinction.
In fact, it's commonly accepted in Indo-European studies that Proto-Indo-European
originally had an animate/inanimate system and that the future feminine gender developed out of the inanimate declension. But what purpose did this gender system serve? Well, there's some evidence that PIE had a complete different syntax from its descendent languages and underwent a major realignment of its verbal system. Having separate genders (and concord between and among noun phrases) is helpful for clarifying the relationship between elements of a phrase or clause. So the usual explanation is that the system was elaborated during a time of transition and then largely retained after that because there was no good reason to simply chuck it (although some Indo-European languages--notably Persian and, to a less extent, English and Afrikaans--have gone on to do that).
FredKurz wrote:If anyone knows, which ancient culture was the first? Or which ancient ruler? And why?
This is essentially unknowable. We don't know how far human language dates back or what features prehistorical languages did or didn't have.