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.

This chapter analyses how the ecumenical synods contributed to the organisation of the festival network. It first discusses their involvement in the organisation of individual agones. The sources indicate that there was a broad spectrum of synod involvement: the old, well-established agones probably did not require a lot of organisational assistance, whereas the organisation of some newly founded agones was entirely outsourced to one of the synods. Between these two extremes, synod involvement varied according to specific circumstances. Second, this chapter investigates how the synods helped maintain the festival network as a whole. Due to the combined experiences of their travelling members, they had a unique overview of the agonistic circuits and as such could provide valuable input when the festival calendar was reformed. Communication went the other way around as well: for instance, they communicated changes in schedules and imperial decisions to their members. In sum, the synods were the lubricant that kept the agonistic machine running. The synods were thus not simply a by-product of the ‘agonistic explosion’ of the Principate but rather a key factor that made it possible.

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.

When we think of ancient medicine, we might think first of the Greek tradition beginning with Hippocrates and probably then of Galen in Roman times. Hippocrates stands at the beginning of the western medical tradition and we have a collection of texts attributed to him known as the Hippocratic Corpus.1 The Hippocratic Oath, a statement of professionalism, was still regularly taken by newly qualified doctors until fairly recently, albeit in a modified form. Galen achieved fame in Roman times as an extraordinarily learned and intellectual doctor, a collector and editor of medical texts, a public performer of medicine and sometimes gruesome experiments, and doctor to the rich and famous.2 His influence was felt deep into medieval times. Yet these are only two men in a very long tradition, and the world of health and medicine was a world in which women too played a vital, if not always so visible, role.

Ancient Egypt has fascinated the modern west since Napoleon’s campaigns took soldiers and scholars to the land of the Nile in 1798; the French and British came to blows there and many French discoveries were delivered into British possession – perhaps most notably the bilingual Rosetta Stone, which was key to the decipherment of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. This rather small black stone tablet can still be seen in the British Museum. The story of the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb by Howard Carter in the early twentieth century remains a television and publishing favourite, and there have been various tours of authentic objects, including to London’s Saatchi Gallery in 2019–2020; pyramids and mummies are more than ever objects of fascination and fantasy – and everyone knows the name Cleopatra.1 But the line of pharaohs stretched back far longer than Cleopatra and King Tut – it is sobering to recall that we are closer in time to Cleopatra than she was to the first pharaohs – and there have been many other intriguing and much more ancient discoveries in Egypt.

In ad 203, a young mother was killed by animals in the amphitheatre of Carthage in North Africa on the orders of the local Roman authorities.1 She died alongside other members of her small religious group, men and women, apparently confident in the knowledge that she was about to enter heaven. This woman was called Vibia Perpetua and she was a Christian; she left us part of her story in a text called The Passions of Perpetua and Felicity (Figure 27). The text gives us a fascinating insight into the mind of a young Roman woman caught up in the power of her beliefs. It also reveals much about the workings of Roman society, especially those times in which people came up against the system. Here we will explore who Perpetua was and how she ended up dying in this terrible way.