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The John Batchelor Show

3/8: The Missing Thread: A Women's History of the Ancient World Hardcover – July 30, 2024 by Daisy Dunn (Author)

The John Batchelor Show

John Batchelor

Books, News, Society & Culture, Arts

4.52.8K Ratings

🗓️ 18 October 2024

⏱️ 14 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

3/8: The Missing Thread: A Women's History of the Ancient World Hardcover – July 30, 2024 
by  Daisy Dunn  (Author)

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 womenwhether they were simply sitting at their looms at home or participating in the highest echelons of powerwere 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.

1806 SAPPHO

Transcript

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0:00.0

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That's Better Help H-E-L-P.com. This is CBS Isle of the World. I'm John Baxter with Daisy Dot. The book is The

0:39.2

Missing Threat of Women's History of the Ancient World, The Etruscan world. The Etruscan's are a people of the

0:47.3

Italian peninsula before Rome and the question is always where did Rome come from there's a version from the Aniad written by Virgil

0:56.1

But there's also evidence that the Etruscan's contributed to the building of Rome people people leaving the Atruscan cities, and coming to the

1:06.1

Tyber.

1:07.1

However, where did the Atrusans come from?

1:10.2

Daisy, who introduces to DNA and modern archaeology. What have they discovered about the Etruscan background?

1:17.0

It's quite controversial. People have been wanting to know where the Etruscan's actually came from for a very, very long time and there are stories in some of these early Greek sources which some DNA analysis seems to support and one of those stories is that people came originally to Central Italy from

1:36.8

what is now Turkey at a time of great difficulty and plague. People came off in boats and people have looked at the

1:46.8

analysis of people's DNA and also cow and cattle DNA as well and they found there are some similarities between people from Turkey

1:56.1

and the certain area of Italy as well. Other people dispute that and say that DNA analysis is quite difficult to sort of verify and they're more inclined to see the

2:08.8

Etrusans as being the native peoples of Italy.

2:13.0

So we don't know exactly where they came from,

2:15.4

but we know that they were very, very prominent.

2:17.5

They were very skilled, and they were the people

...

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