2/8: The Missing Thread: A Women's History of the Ancient World Hardcover - by Daisy Dunn (Author)
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 26 December 2024
⏱️ 8 minutes
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Summary
https://www.amazon.com/Missing-Thread-Womens-History-Ancient/dp/0593299663
Around four thousand years ago, the mysterious Minoans sculpted statues of topless women with snakes slithering on their arms. Over one thousand years later, Sappho wrote great poems of longing and desire. For classicist Daisy Dunn, these women—whether they were simply sitting at their looms at home or participating in the highest echelons of power—were up to something much more interesting than other histories would lead us to believe. Together, these women helped to make antiquity as we know it.
In this monumental work, Dunn reconceives our understanding of the ancient world by emphasizing women's roles within it. The Missing Thread never relegates women to the sidelines and is populated with well-known names such as Cleopatra and Agrippina, as well as the likes of Achaemenid consort Atossa and Olympias, a force in Macedon. Spanning three thousand years, the story moves from Minoan Crete to Mycenaean Greece, from Lesbos to Asia Minor, from the Persian Empire to the royal court of Macedonia, and concludes with Rome and its growing empire. The women of antiquity are undeniably woven throughout the fabric of history, and in The Missing Thread they finally take center stage.
1589 Engraving women of Rome mythology
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Did you know HGVs have four zones of limited vision around them? |
| 0:06.4 | If you're in one of these areas, you may not be seen by the driver. |
| 0:10.9 | These four limited vision zones are in front, behind and at both sides of the HGV. |
| 0:18.3 | So when you're driving around a HGV, don't linger around them. Because they may not notice you're there. |
| 0:26.6 | Know the HGV zones. National Highways. |
| 0:33.6 | I'm John Batchel with Daisy Dut, her new book, The Missing Thread, |
| 0:39.5 | A Women's History of the Ancient World. |
| 0:40.8 | Daisy is a classicist. |
| 0:43.0 | She has the Greek, she has Latin. |
| 0:49.0 | My understanding is she's going to conquer linear A, and she has linear B, all these languages. |
| 0:52.5 | We're going past the Minoans, although that's a wonderful chapter. |
| 0:56.2 | The Minowans favored cosmetics. |
| 1:02.2 | Others favored cosmetics, too. We're now going to a part of the story that is well known if I say it takes place on the island of Lesbos. It's also well known if I say it takes place |
| 1:07.8 | through the person of Sappho, the poetess. However, what it was not well |
| 1:14.4 | known to me is that of the, of the reputation of Lesbos, it was that it was women, beautiful |
| 1:20.3 | women everywhere, the beauties of Lesbos, except Sappho was said to be short and dark. Was she considered homely, Daisy? She is very unfair. I have to |
| 1:33.4 | say on poor Sappho, because we don't have any representations to be able to judge what she actually |
| 1:37.2 | looked like. Most of the people who have described her as being very unattractive and short and |
| 1:43.5 | dark, as you You say are people living |
| 1:45.6 | hundreds of years after she survived. So they could not possibly have seen her. But the thing with |
| 1:50.6 | Sapo is that because she comes from this island, which in the 7th century BC when she was living |
| 1:56.5 | had long been established as a place where beautiful women resided. |
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