Book Review: ‘The Missing Thread,’ by Daisy Dunn

When it comes to the important men of the ancient world, there are simply many more available sources, and much of what we do know about the lives of women was written by men. This leads to interesting ironies; most women of classical Athens were effectively imprisoned in their homes, while men wrote and acted in plays about sympathetic, competent and terrifying ladies. “It did not always occur to men,” Dunn dryly comments, “that real women might be up to something just as interesting.”

According to Dunn, they were up to just about everything. Much depends on the particularities of any given culture at any point in time; and much also depends on the interpretation of the evidence. The prevalence of women in Minoan art suggests that Crete was possibly matriarchal, or at least egalitarian. Among the Scythians, some women were buried with weapons and signs of battle wounds, suggesting that women warriors may have been relatively common and possibly even inspired the legend of the Amazons. Etruscan women had a shocking amount of sexual freedom (according to Greek observers, anyway); and multiple cultures, including Kush in northern Sudan, were often ruled by queens. But even in more repressive civilizations, women still worked: as bakers, weavers, poisoners and patronesses, as well as in the more traditional roles of wives, mothers and household administrators.

Dunn spends a lot of time on the archaeological and textual record of less-known women, without neglecting the famous individuals who have too often been regarded as exceptions. Sappho holds the prominence she does, Dunn reminds us, partly because the work of most of her contemporaries happens to be lost. She wasn’t necessarily a rare woman poet — just one we know about.

We also meet the Sumerian poet and princess Enheduanna — the earliest named author in the world — who wrote a poem calling on the goddess Inanna for revenge against her rapist. (She got it.) There’s also Pamphila of Epidaurus, who wrote 33 lost volumes of world history; Telesilla of Argos, the chronically ill poet whose heroic actions during a siege of her city were later honored in a yearly cross-dressing festival; and — my favorite — Tomyris, warrior queen of the Massagetae tribespeople, who defeated Cyrus of Persia in battle and reportedly carried his severed head around in a bag of blood.

Dunn stresses that, even if women didn’t cut off heads or write famous poems, they still had inner lives and agency: They didn’t just sit around waiting to be assaulted or married off for political gain or to die in childbirth (though many did meet these fates).