3/8: 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
⏱️ 13 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.
1608 Women of Rome mythology
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is CBS, I on the World. |
| 0:06.1 | I'm John Baxter with Daisy Dunn. |
| 0:08.3 | The book is The Missing Thread, a Women's History of the Ancient World. |
| 0:11.7 | The Etruscans. |
| 0:13.4 | The Etruscans are a people of the Italian peninsula before Rome. |
| 0:20.5 | And the question is, always, where did Rome come from? |
| 0:23.5 | There's a version from the Aeneid, written by Virchal. |
| 0:26.3 | But there's also evidence that the Etruscans contributed to the building of Rome, |
| 0:32.0 | people leaving the Etruscan cities and coming to the Tiber. |
| 0:36.9 | However, where did the Etruscans come from? Daisy, you introduce us to |
| 0:41.3 | DNA and modern archaeology. What have they discovered about the Etruscan background? |
| 0:47.6 | It's quite controversial. People have been wanting to know where the Atruscans actually came from |
| 0:53.0 | for a very, very long time. |
| 0:54.8 | And there are stories in some of these early Greek sources, which some DNA analysis seems to support. |
| 1:00.8 | And one of those stories is that people came originally to central Italy from what is now Turkey at a time of great difficulty and plague. People came off in boats and |
| 1:13.8 | people looked at scientists, the analysis of people's DNA and also cow and cattle DNA as well. |
| 1:21.7 | And they found there are some similarities between people from Turkey and the Saturn area of Italy as well. Other people |
| 1:29.8 | dispute that and say that DNA analysis is quite difficult to sort of verify and they're more |
| 1:37.9 | inclined to see the Etruscans as being the native peoples of Italy. So we don't know exactly where they came from, but we know that they |
| 1:46.0 | were very, very prominent, they were very skilled, and they were the people who were dominating |
| 1:50.5 | Italy way before the Romans became prominent. The women were of great note. I believe they |
| 1:57.5 | wear cosmetics like the Minoans. I believe that they have, they have dentistry, false teeth, using gold, like the Minoans. |
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