Terentia was born around 98 bc and reportedly died aged 103, in ad 5 or 6.1 From her name, she must have come from an old and respectable family called the Terentii; one branch, the Terentii Varrones, traced itself back to a consul of 216 bc.2 The identity of her mother and father are not known, though her mother must have married twice as Terentia had a half-sister, Fabia (whose father must have been a Fabius), who was a Vestal Virgin. Terentia is best known by her male connection – she was the wife of the lawyer, philosopher, and politician Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 bc) – it is impossible to write about her without also writing about him. The couple lived in the dangerous years of the twilight of the Roman Republic and were at the very heart of the conflicts and rivalries that tore it apart. This was the era when powerful Roman warlords were already emerging to challenge the status quo, of civil war, of Sulla, Pompey the Great, and the rise of Julius Caesar.

Once upon a time there was an Egyptian man, a priest, by the name of Wenamun.1 Wenamun was sent by his lord Herihor to fetch wood from Lebanon to build a sacred boat for the god Amon-Ra. Sailing north with his captain Mengebet, he landed at Dor and was entertained by Beder, its prince. His good fortune soon changed and after a series of misadventures, including being robbed by his own crew and attacking a ship belonging to the local Tjeker people of Dor to replace his lost wealth, he ended up at Byblos. Here prince Tjekerbaal felled the trees to provide Wenamun with the timber he wanted. Soon the Tjeker that Wenamun had robbed caught up with him. The prince of Byblos would not arrest Wenamun but instead asked him to depart so that the Tjeker could catch him at sea themselves. However, the wind blew him off course all the way to a coastal town on the island of Alashiya (Cyprus). The story continues thus, in Wenamun’s voice:

Eutychis’ name appears in a graffito on the entrance to the House of the Vettii at Pompeii, the ancient Roman town destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in August ad 79, along with a price; it reads: ‘Eutychis, a Greek lass with sweet ways, 2 asses’ (Figure 25).1 On the face of it, it looks like an advert for sex – a calling card for a female prostitute of Greek origin to attract, presumably, male punters.2 Over 11,000 inscriptions have been found at Pompeii and this one is not by any means the only one referencing sex and the sex industry.3 The sex trade was a normal part of the hustle and bustle of many ancient cities. More than 100 female prostitutes are known by name from Pompeii; ‘prostitutes were’, explains Robert Knapp, ‘quite literally, everywhere’.4

The Amazons are one of the best-known peoples of antiquity – though long thought to be mythical. They appear in book three of the Iliad, from the later eighth or seventh century bc, where they are given the epithet ‘a match for men’; the word ‘Amazon’ is still used to refer to fierce or powerful women. The Amazons were warrior women who legend had it would cut off a breast to enable them to better use their bows – the fifth-century bc Greek historian Hellanikos thought ‘Amazon’ could be read etymologically as ‘a’, ‘without’, ‘mazos’, ‘breasts’ (mastos in Greek).1 Others thought it could be read as without ‘barley’, ‘maza’, and referred to the fact that Amazons did not farm in the way that civilised settled people would. In Airs, Waters, Places, the physician Hippocrates recorded that Sarmatian women burnt the right breast of their baby girls to divert power into their right arms – making them stronger fighters. Such myths about these exotic women in a society where ‘proper’ gendered roles were reversed abounded amongst the Greeks and Romans, Amazon specialist Adrienne Mayor tells us. An alternative and possibly more likely origin for the name comes from old Iranian ‘ha-mazon’ – ‘warriors’. But it may be fruitless to search for meaning in the name – what would a future etymologist make of ‘American’?

Arranged marriages have been commonplace through history and, according to Kennon Rider and Ann Swallow, are still the norm for around half the population of the world.1 They can take several forms, for example, when parents and family select one or more potential marriage candidates, but the child can make a choice between them or refuse a particular individual. An arranged marriage can also be a forced marriage, in which one or both parties are given no choice in their marriage partner. In western culture, arranged marriages tend to be viewed negatively now because a cultural emphasis is placed on romantic love as the main factor in making a ‘proper’ or successful marriage; arranged marriages have, from a western perspective, been seen as primitive and inherently unhappy.2 However, ‘successful’ or at least enduring marriages are more common in arranged marriage cultures, although this may be due to the difficulty and stigma of divorce; love may also develop in arranged marriages and is not unimportant. Marriage in these terms can sometimes be thought of as a partnership and a joint project to be worked on. It can be a way of building and cementing alliances between individuals and families, controlling property and wealth, and of producing legitimate children.

Helen of Troy is remembered by posterity for her beauty and for causing strife amongst men – hers was the face that launched a thousand ships. But Helen was a figure of ancient Greek myth. Mariamne, the queen of Judaea, was equally known as a beauty and as both a cause and victim of conflict, but unlike Helen she was very real; her story too, though, ‘in the course of time … became a legend’, with Boccaccio, Voltaire, and Byron, amongst others, retelling it in much later times.1

One of the most exciting archaeological discoveries of modern times was made by a young Spanish girl called María Sanz du Sautuola in 1879 (Figure 1).1 Inspired by a meeting with French archaeologist Édouard Piette in Paris, who had found various pieces of portable Palaeolithic art, María’s father Marcelino had decided to carry out some excavations in the cave of Altamira, in the region of Cantabria in northern Spain. Whilst her father was working near the mouth of the cave, María went exploring further in. Soon, posterity records, she called out to her father: ‘Daddy, look, oxen.’ María had discovered the stunning cave art on the walls of Altamira – the first Palaeolithic cave art to be recognised in Europe. Sautuola published their findings in 1880 in his Brief Notes on Some Prehistoric Objects from the Province of Santander, which included his pencil drawings of the bison from the ceiling of the cave.

In this introduction, the scene is set for the ‘lives’ that form the body of this book. The first thing to consider is the presence – or absence of women. This absence takes several forms: absence from the world, absence from society or parts of it, absence from culture and absence from history. The discussion then moves to misogyny and patriarchy, which in a real sense lie behind the issue of missing women but which also must be considered in theoretical terms, and matriarchy, which forms part of the story of how women came back into history and one way in which parts of human ‘history’ has been conceived of. The chapter then gives a brief review of attempts to put women back into ancient history and archaeology. Finally, the methods and scope of the book are described, along with the questions it addresses.

More than a thousand years after Merneith ruled Egypt and a thousand years before Cleopatra, another Egyptian woman forged a place at the heart of Egyptian politics and succeeded in making herself pharaoh, ruling as a king rather than a queen, from around 1473 to 1458 bc. Her royal name was Maatkare, but she is better known to history as Hatshepsut (Figure 8).

In a brief article from the 1960s, Herbert Mentink wrote that ‘I have yet to come upon a writer who can refrain from such adjectives as amazing, fascinating, mysterious, baffling, enigmatic, puzzling, and ambiguous when he speaks of the Etruscans’.1 Usually this mystery extends both to their origins and language. Did they really come all the way from the eastern Mediterranean to Italy as legend had it or were they an indigenous culture that bound themselves into a wider culture? The Etruscan language, unrelated to any other European language, is represented by 11,000-odd surviving inscriptions but remains undeciphered.2 Their tendency to luxury and debauchery, their sensual habit of removing all body hair, and their unique way of doing things from boxing to bread-making and flogging to flute music were proverbial in ancient times and made the Etruscans oddities to the Greeks and Romans, from whose viewpoints we have come to know them.3 They were also known for their ‘religious expertise’, especially haruspicy, the bloody art of divination from animal innards.4 The Roman emperor Claudius was fascinated by them and even wrote a history of them, very sadly lost.5

In ad 272, the Roman emperor Aurelian defeated his eastern enemy, the empress Zenobia of Palmyra (Figure 28). As befitting a victorious Roman general, he celebrated an immense triumph in Rome, which is recorded in the Historia Augusta as a ‘most brilliant spectacle’.1 In the procession, there were three richly bejewelled chariots from the east, two from Palmyra, one a gift from the king of Persia, and Aurelian’s own chariot, drawn by four stags, which had once belonged to the king of the Goths. There were elephants, tigers, giraffes, elk, and two hundred other ‘tamed beasts … from Libya and Palestine’. There were 800 pairs of gladiators, bound prisoners from sixteen different peoples, northern, eastern, and southern, including some ‘Amazons’ – Gothic women who had fought against Rome. The various peoples held placards identifying their nations for the watching crowd. And of course, there were the political prisoners – Tetricus, a Roman who had set up his son, also present, as emperor in Gaul, wearing outlandish Gallic trousers. Then there were some of the great and good of Palmyra, ‘and there came Zenobia … decked with jewels and in golden chains, the weight of which was borne by others’. The people of Rome and the senators also took part in the procession and days of games and shows followed.

Late Bronze Age Greece was a partly literate place. The Minoans had used a hieroglyphic script and a type of writing we call Linear A, which remain undeciphered, but the Mycenaeans, or at least the authorities associated with some of the palaces, wrote on clay tablets in Greek using the Linear B script. These Linear B tablets, accidentally preserved in fires, were first translated by Michael Ventris in 1952 and then published as a corpus in co-operation with John Chadwick.1 Tablets continue to be found even now, extending our knowledge of Mycenaean Greece. None of them record history, literature or poetry, nor are there any lists of kings, but the information they do contain is nevertheless precious.

Atossa was in every sense a Persian royal woman. She was a daughter of Cyrus the Great, who ruled the Persian Empire from 559 to 530 bc, a wife of her brother Cambyses, king from 530–522 bc, one of the many wives of Darius I, king from 522 to 486 bc, and the mother of Xerxes I, 486–465 BC (Figure 15).1 But her lasting fame in the western tradition comes from her appearances in two of the most well-known texts from ancient Greece, Aeschylus’ Persians and Herodotus’ Histories. Both of these works, one a tragedy play the other combining history and anthropology, present the war between the Greeks and Persians in the early fifth century bc – the wars marked by the famous battles of Marathon, Thermopylae, Salamis, and Plataea. Atossa is portrayed as a powerful woman with great influence over the men in her life.