It’s also cuttingly symbolic of our hunt for Late Bronze Age women that the eponymous lions of the Lion Gate have been systematically misgendered as male – when they’re actually a fierce and gorgeous pair of female lions. (If you visit Mycenae, I encourage you to annoy as many people as you can by pointing out that this is, in fact, the ‘Lioness Gate’.) [loc. 5624]
An examination of the role of women in Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, and in the wider realm of Greek myth. In her introduction, Emily Hauser says she's exploring 'what new discoveries about the real women of history can do to help us understand Homer – not what Homer can tell us about the Late Bronze Age' [loc. 819]. And she points out that, although women are treated as secondary, as property, as lesser, they are essential to the stories. The Iliad begins with two men quarrelling over an enslaved woman (Briseis): the Odyssey ends with Odysseus going home (via Calypso, Circe and Nausicaa) to Penelope.
In chapters titled for the different women -- human and divine -- who power the stories, Hauser examines archaeological evidence, ancient DNA, linguistics (I am now mad keen to read about Linear-B!), the changing geography of the eastern Mediterranean, the ways in which the women of Greek myth have been reimagined in literature (I hadn't realised Briseis is the source for Chaucer and Shakespeare's Cressida), the histories of other civilisations in the Late Bronze Age, and the practicalities of women's lives in that period. She also presents a fascinating overview of gender roles, as typified in burials (traditionally graves with mirrors were assumed to be burials of women, and those with swords burials of men: this turns out to be overly simplistic) and in pronoun use in the Odyssey, where Athena, in disguise as Mentor, is referred to by the gender-neutral term 'min'.
There is so much fascinating detail here: the Hittite stories which may have been one of Homer's sources; Schliemann asking his Greek tutor to find him 'a black-haired Greek woman in the Homeric spirit' and choosing his wife Sophia, famously photographed wearing 'Priam's Treasure', from a selection of photographs; the length of time it takes to weave a sail for a ship (four years: possibly Calypso, instead of bewitching Odysseus for seven years, couldn't wait to see the back of him but had to provide a sail before he could leave); Γ58, the skeleton of a woman found with an immensely valuable electrum death-mask... Hauser is an excellent communicator (also a novelist: I shall look out for her fiction) and the occasional colloquialism (Cassandra as 'a Greta Thunberg of ancient times', for instance) doesn't distract or detract from the accessible, well-referenced account of women's roles in the centuries around the Late Bronze Age collapse.
I'm tempted to buy this book in paper form: I think it will be an invaluable reference, as well as an excellent read.
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