"There has never been a better time to be born a woman." "There are more female heads of government and more women leading organisations and running businesses than at any other time in history." "Yet in many parts of the world, women do not enjoy the same legal rights as men." "They are relegated to unequal spheres without access to education or employment." "And for many, the right to live free from physical and sexual violence is still a dream." "My name is Amanda Foreman, and as a historian and biographer," "I have spent my career studying women's lives." "The simple truth is that our story has never followed a straight line from darkness to light." "The real history of women is full of swings and reversions, with liberties gained and lost from one area and one society to the next." "I also think that you can judge a civilisation by the way it treats its women and the degree to which women have authority, agency and autonomy." "In this series, I want to retell the story of civilisation with men and women side by side for the first time." "And in so doing, I'll ask some difficult questions." "Why did history become almost exclusively male?" "Why has almost every civilisation set limits on women's sexuality, speech and freedom of movement?" "And what makes the status of women so vulnerable to the dictates of politics, economics, or religion?" "But it will also be a celebration of the women who have confronted these limits and created their own routes to power." "From Empress Wu, China's only ever female emperor, and Christine de Pizan, the first feminist, to the revolutionary women of France, Russia and beyond." "We'll look at the women who wrote their own history to change the world." "And to those who think that women haven't played an active role in history, or that ours is simply a mindless narrative of oppression," "I want to throw down the gauntlet." "Because I believe that any history of the world that excludes women, or simply pushes them to the margins, isn't just a distortion, but an untruth that must be challenged." "The hard truth is that in almost every civilisation, women have been deemed the secondary sex." "It's an idea that has become so engrained, it's been written into history as a biological truth." "But why did this happen?" "Have human societies always followed this pattern?" "And how far back do we have to go to find an alternative story?" "To begin to answer these questions," "I've come to Anatolia in central Turkey, wedged between the nomadic worlds of the Steppes to the north and the civilisations of Mesopotamia to the south." "These lands are the site of numerous archaeological discoveries, from prehistoric settlements to female figurines that reveal fundamentally different ideas about how early societies organised themselves." "This site," "Catalhoyuk, is one of the first known settlements in human history." "Inhabited from about 7500 BC, the tail end of the Stone Age, its early inhabitants, between 5,000 and 8,000 people, lived at the dawn of agriculture." "They had semi-domesticated animals and were learning to sow crops." "To maximise chances of survival, they grouped themselves into a hive of mud and brick houses stacked together in a giant commune." "What's special about this place is that after 20 years of excavations, archaeologists believe the Catalhoyuk didn't structure itself along rigid ideas of gender, where the biology of men and women determined their roles." "Instead, archaeologist Ian Hodder thinks it was an aggressively egalitarian world where all hierarchies were non-existent." "We've looked and looked and looked, and we just don't find any evidence of a big ceremonial centre or a chiefly house." "All there is at Catalhoyuk is just lots and lots of houses." "Much the same size as each other." "We see these houses that look like they could produce more and could become quite dominant, but there seems to be this cap that stops them doing it." "Catalhoyuk's inhabitants buried their dead under the sleeping platforms of their houses." "And from analysing their DNA, the wear and tear on their bones, and the soot from their lungs," "Ian's team have discovered that both men and women ate the same diet, and that there was little gender division of labour or domestic space." "Astonishingly, the burials also stress communal ties rather than blood ties or gender, suggesting that even the family didn't exist in the way we know it." "We assumed that the people buried beneath a house floor would be a nuclear family." "But it turned out, when we did some genetic studies, that they're not." "That the people buried beneath the house floor are no more closely related to each other than people in different houses." "So it seems that soon after birth, children were sent to foster or to live in other houses across the whole community, so, um, the whole community, in a way, was one great family," "tied together by many things, including biological links." "If something went slightly wrong, they could always depend on someone else in these very, very complex ritual and social ties that tied everybody together." "So Catalhoyuk is a society that's very unlike, you know, our society, and it's difficult to get your head around, in a way." "The most famous find from Catalhoyuk was a female figurine who many believe was the principal deity of the site's Neolithic inhabitants." "Found in a grain bin, she is thought to depict a corpulent fertility figure on a throne, flanked by leopards, with her feet resting on two human skulls." "Life and death in one image." "Ever since, she has become the pride of Anatolia, particularly among its local Muslim women." "TRANSLATION:" "The original figurine, now with a restored head, is held at the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations in Ankara." "To many, she is a site of pilgrimage, a promise, perhaps, that in early societies," "God was not a man, but a woman." "Although we'll never know what she meant to the people of Catalhoyuk, what she does reveal is that in a precarious pre-agricultural world where survival was closely tied to the vagaries of nature, a woman's ability to produce new life" "took on a special, perhaps even sacred, symbolism." "The Seated Woman of Catalhoyuk has this powerful beauty, and her posture very obviously projects this triple sense of woman, fertility and the power of nature." "And her imagery, especially the felines, and the fact that she is sitting on some kind of symbolic throne, these can be seen in various guises in many different civilisations." "What remains a constant is this theme that celebrates the power of woman to reproduce life, the sacred mysteries of the Earth, and life conquering death." "In the following millennia, as agriculture became increasingly controlled, society began to organise itself around more recognisable divisions, of gender." "Women's roles became tied to motherhood, and the home." "Their status became secondary to men, who took control over property and public space, ideas that in later religions would become "the natural order of life"." "To best understand why this started, we have to look at the first civilisations that emerged in Mesopotamia." "The first was Sumer, which developed around 4000 BC, between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in what is now war-torn Iraq." "Originally a collection of up to 20 city-states," "Sumer continued first under the Babylonian empire and then under the Assyrian, until the 6th century BC." "Over its course, it saw huge changes in the status and roles of women." "The Sumerians were a dynamic and intellectually curious people, and life in the Fertile Crescent where the first agricultural revolution took place created such abundance that they were able to channel their energies into great inventions, improvements and discoveries" "that literally changed the world." "The Sumerians harnessed the great power of the Tigris and Euphrates to create the first irrigation system." "They invented the wheel, the plough, mathematics." "They studied the stars and created the first calendar." "And most important of all, they invented writing, in 3300 BC." "And in this world, women thrived." "In the temples, the high priestesses had the same power and status as the high priests." "In the legal world, women had access to the law and could represent themselves." "In business, women had no restrictions." "And in family, when they entered into a marriage, women brought their own property, and they could get divorced." "And in education, women could study writing just as much as the men." "Open and outward-looking, early Sumer shows that there was no blueprint for gender inequality in early civilisation." "But that changed in 2300 BC, the time of the Pyramids and Egypt, when the Akkadian, Sargon the Great, conquered Sumer and made it a vassal state." "In this new world, women began to lose the freedoms that they had once enjoyed." "Their participation in the economy was restricted." "They were shut out from education and the professions." "But most important of all, women began to be excluded from positions of power and public space." "Ironically, it was the abundance of the Fertile Crescent that caused this change." "Alongside agricultural surplus came class, and the unequal distribution of wealth." "Out of that came armies and military rulers to claim power, and who wanted to pass that power down to their male heirs." "One of the best ways to see into the heart of any civilisation is to look at the art it leaves behind." "And this world is resolutely male." "There's the courtier, Ebih-il." "Gudea, the king of Lagash." "And the victory steles of Sargon the Great and his male heirs crushing their enemies and asserting their divine right to rule." "It's a male world, that mirrored the hierarchy of the gods." "The Seated Woman has evolved into goddesses of fertility and nature, but it's the male gods of justice and reason who are now the favoured gods of civilisation." "Among these monuments to conquest and power, Mesopotamian women have become increasingly invisible." "But one voice clamours to be heard." "It belongs to Enheduanna, the world's first named author, and the first of many individual women in this story who forged her own route to power in a male-dominated world." "To find out more about her, I've come to meet Dr Irving Finkel, a keeper of Mesopotamian culture at the British Museum." "Who was Enheduanna?" "Well, Enheduanna was the daughter of King Sargon I." "Who was the first king, in fact, to unite what we call Mesopotamia into a single empire." "And she was appointed by her own father to be the en priestess, as we call it" " E-N - the en priestess of the moon god in the city of Ur." "Which was the highest religious appointment in the culture at the time, it was the most..." "It was a pinion position, in order for the religious world to function, and she was in charge of it all." "Enheduanna created the world's first literary masterwork, a collection of 42 hymns written on clay tablets in praise of all the temples and gods in her father's empire and which played a vital role in legitimising his rule." "One could, I think, argue that this had some kind of uniting effect, because the antecedents of political life in Mesopotamia were independent city-states, each of whom had their important god and their important temple, and to some extent they were rivals." "And it would be a legitimate point to think that Sargon thought," ""If Enheduanna sits in this chair and produces this thing" ""it will be rather useful, because everybody will see" ""that all the temples and all the gods are one system" ""and it is a manifestation of the unity of the country" ""and the gods who are all part of the same environment."" "Like so many women, this made Enheduanna the cultural power behind her father's throne, and she knew it." "Because she signs her work, making it the first signed piece of literature in history, by a man or a woman." "But I think her most telling work is her poem the Exultation to Inana, a stunning hymn in which she allied to the goddess of fertility, nature and destruction." ""Mistress of heaven, my lady," ""you are the guardian of the great divine powers." ""In the van of battle, all is struck down before you." ""With your strength, my lady, teeth can crush flint." ""You charge forward like a charging storm."" "What makes the poem revolutionary is that she included within it elements of her own life, passionately repeating her name." ""I am Enheduanna," she writes," ""I am the brilliant high priestess of Nana."" "4,000 years ago, the use of the word "I" in poetry was simply unheard of." "Enheduanna wasn't just the first woman, she was the first writer to personally identify herself." "What makes this declaration "I, Enheduanna" so moving is that we have at the dawn of civilisation this beautiful and confident statement of the female "I am"." "Enheduanna's defiant declaration of autonomy, so singular, and so symbolic of the history of women, is all the more moving because she lived at a pivotal moment." "Before her, Sumerian women had equal status to men, yet after, as the laws of society became ever more fixed around the patriarchal family, women's rights became increasingly controlled and curtailed." "These are the world's earliest-known law codes, and within them, we have the first silencing of the female voice." "There's a phrase on one of these cones that says if a woman speaks out of turn, then her teeth will be smashed by a brick." "Dating from 1770 BC, the most complete of the Mesopotamian laws is the Code of Hammurabi, whose Babylonian empire had now taken over as the regional power." "Inscribed on a phallic piece of black obsidian, it shows Hammurabi receiving the laws from Shamash, the god of the sun, justice, and order, whose mission was to protect the weak from the strong." "And here, in its 282 intricately carved laws, is "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth"" "for the first time." "Considered by many to be one of the foundation stones of world civilisation, what's clear is that they are a mixed blessing for women." "On the positive side, the Code recognised a woman's basic right to own property." "This was vital, because it gave women legal protection when it came to control over their dowries and inheritances." "The law also forbade arbitrary ill-treatment or neglect." "Wives who were ill or barren couldn't simply be discarded, and in divorce, women could keep their dowries." "In widowhood, wives had the right to use their husband's estates for their lifetime." "Fundamentally, the women of Mesopotamia were recognised by law as being distinct persons." "Yet on the negative side, the Code was a blow to women's economic and sexual freedom." "Unlike Sumer, women were forbidden from doing any kind of commercial activity outside the household." "But far more damaging in my opinion was the power it gave to men over women's bodies." "The law legalised patriarchy." "Husbands and fathers now owned the sexual reproduction of their wives and daughters." "This meant that women could be put to death for adultery." "That virginity was now a condition for marriage." "And in the case of rape, it wasn't just an assault against a woman, it was an economic offence against a man." "For example, if his daughter was raped, he suffered the loss of her bride price." "She was, in a sense, damaged goods." "Now, it's important to recognise that we don't know how these laws worked at a local level." "They are an ideal." "But the driving force of these laws shines through." "Male authority and patriarchal notions of male honour are now sacrosanct." "If Hammurabi's Babylon marked a downward shift in the legal status of women, then the next imperial power in the region, the Assyrians, would reduce it even further." "As evidenced in their oversized art, all battles, prisoners and male gods, this was a world obsessed with male virility." "Evidence not of an outward-looking culture like early Sumer, but a militaristic one that expanded through pure conquest." "Central to the iconography of the Assyrian kings is the lion hunt, a symbol not of the harnessing of nature, but of its domination and control." "This is a world away from the Seated Woman of Catalhoyuk." "The 112 Assyrian laws dating from the 12th century BC are now housed in Berlin." "Over half deal with marriage and sex." "In them, many of the protective measures for women in the Hammurabi Code are taken away, and the price for noncompliance is ever more brutal." "What's so striking is how the laws so deeply enshrine the patriarchal double standard." "Men can do what they like to their wives." "They can ill-use them." "It says here explicitly that they can pull out their hair and twist their ears." "They can throw them out into the streets without their dowries." "They can pawn them without any protection." "In short, they can do anything they like except kill them without cause." "What's more, for women, they have no economic rights and many burdens." "If they have an abortion, they'll be executed." "If they commit adultery, they'll be executed." "And if their husbands commit a crime, then it is they who can be punished." "For example, the wife of a rapist will herself be raped in punishment." "In my opinion, this is a harsh society, with a law that's become a charter for male oppression." "In Assyrian culture, it was one article of clothing that symbolised the growing gulf between male and female status." "On this tablet, Law 40 is the first known veiling law, 2,000 years before Islam." "And it's astonishing how little-known this is, given the legacy it has left behind." "To explore it, I've come to meet a group of Middle Eastern women from the countries that were once ancient Assyria." "TRANSLATION:" "The laws divided women into five categories." "Wives and daughters of the upper class, concubines, temple prostitutes, harlots, and slave girls, dividing in their eyes the respectable from the unrespectable." "The punishments for transgression are pitiless." "Of all the legacies handed down to us from the ancient world, it's the veil that has been the most pervasive and the most symbolically weighted." "A mark of civilisation through Greece and Rome and Byzantium, it would become the nun's habit and the wimple of medieval Europe." "In Asia, it would spread to Confucian China and Korea." "And in Islam, it would become a mark of class before it became one of faith." "Nowadays in Kurdistan we don't have to wear a veil by law." "But I'm from a lower social class - when I go back to my city," "I have to be more covered and in specific spaces" "I have also to wear a hijab there." "What this reminds us is that there is a long history to the veil, whose complexities and contradictions were there from the start." "I don't think it's surprising that such a testosterone-filled society as Assyria would be among the first to pass a veiling law on women." "Still, it's important that we don't pre-judge the veil or what it meant in ancient times." "On one level, it is all about male ownership and male control." "But on another, ironic though it may seem to us, the veil was a way of giving women a liberty and freedom to go outside into the public space without compromising themselves or losing the protection of their husbands." "In some measure, what the veil took away, it also gave back." "It both limited women, but also protected and gave them freedom in what was essentially a man's world." "If the DNA of early civilisation was rooted in male codes of kingship, class and gender, another culture emerged in the grasslands to the north which in the long term would mount the greatest challenge to every subsequent civilisation." "Stretching from Ukraine in the west, across Kazakhstan and south Russia, to Mongolia in the east, the Eurasian Steppe was home to the nomads, most notably the Scythian, Sarmatian and Pazyryk tribes." "Dominated by warrior horsemen, this was just as male-led and martial a world." "The best pasturelands had to be vigorously defended and women were often captured in intertribal wars." "But recent archaeology has revealed evidence of gender relations within the tribes that proves that the control and submission of women was not an inevitable development in ancient culture." "Professor Leonid Yablonsky from the Moscow Institute of Archaeology has been excavating nomadic burial sites, called kurgans, across southern Russia for the past 25 years." "Over the course of his long career, he has discovered hundreds of burials that reveal the centrality of women to nomadic culture." "TRANSLATION:" "Did you find any evidence of women being buried with weapons?" "Er, yes." "Many of Professor Yablonsky's finds are now housed in the National Museum in Orenburg." "The female graves contain a remarkable variety of treasures." "There's gold jewellery such as torcs and feline coat clasps, sacred objects such as mirrors, seashells and portable altars, and a large cache of weapons, revealing women's roles as warriors within the tribe." "Yeah, your hand is too big." "It could only be for a woman." "It's a woman's implement." "Among the treasures, items from one individual burial stand out - those of a 14-year-old girl, who was buried with over 40 bronze arrowheads." "Much like Neolithic Catalhoyuk, these finds reveal a world in which the precariousness of survival negated ideas of segregation or divisions of labour." "Women's roles were not confined to their biological functions or to domestic space." "The nomads were, if you will, a kind of third way, different from the empires and city-states around them, and as for the urban codes that governed land, property, status, the family, none of these apply to them," "and what this meant for women was that their value extended far beyond being simply someone else's property or producing sons." "They were recognised because of their skills and because their contribution to society was absolutely necessary." "It just goes to show that biology isn't everything." "One of the most extraordinary finds in the Steppe was much further east, in the Altai Mountains on the Russian border with Mongolia." "These lands were home to the Pazyryk tribe whose territory straddled the trade routes of China, India and Persia." "In 1993, preserved in the ice of the Ukok plateau, the Russian archaeologist Natalia Polosmak found a tomb of a 25-year-old woman dating from 400 BC, whom she called the Ice Maiden." "Buried with her were six horses sacrificed for her journey into the afterlife, portable tables and altars containing coriander seeds and a last meal of mutton and a leather pouch containing a precious silver mirror revealing her status as a revered religious leader for her tribe." "Controversially flown to Moscow to be studied and preserved, she has since become a symbol of national pride to the peoples of the Altai, after years of Soviet rule." "She was also discovered in the most complete set of nomadic clothing ever found." "Felt riding boots, a long shift made from expensive Indian silk." "Around her neck was a beautifully crafted necklace of eight felines." "On her head was a horse-hair wig crowned with a hat nearly a metre high and covered with a coterie of symbolic animals that once again reveals the alliance of women with nature and ancient culture." "Now housed in the National Museum in Gorno-Altaisk, the mummy of the Ice Maiden has made an emotional return home after 19 years." "And what her body reveals is perhaps the most significant find of all, a set of animalistic tattoos which reveal her special status within the group." "She's covered in these mystical creatures that go all the way down both arms, down to her fingertips." "She had on her left shoulder this large tattoo of a deer whose antlers morphed into birds and griffins and then below that was a panther next to a ram, the predator and the prey combined together." "We do know that the deer represented the secret feminine." "It was the one animal that could pass from the earth to the spiritual world and back again and it also had regenerative powers." "Today the people of the Altai believe that her tattoos contain a coded message that will one day be revealed to them." "And if she was once a shaman to the Pazyryks and played a vital role in their community, today she's still playing that role for the people of the Altai." "The nomads are often written out of history as being illiterate and unimportant but I believe they left a legacy that has proved to be exceptionally powerful and long lasting." "The first was the marshalling of an economy between East and West that came to be known as the Silk Road." "But second, and equally important, was the active roles of women that made the nomads the great other in ancient culture and which culminated with the Mongol leader, Genghis Khan, putting his daughters in charge of the world's largest ever empire." "And of all the symbols that illustrate nomadic women's status, the hat is one of the most potent, remnants of which have been found in hundreds of nomadic graves." "Adorned with gold and precious stones, these hats are still used across the Steppe today as a portable bank account controlled by women and passed down from mother to daughter." "It's more than just a piece of fabric, it has immense power, like the veil that denoted a woman's wealth and status but in this case it wasn't about modesty or chastity, it was about a woman's power and agency." "In other words, it was about how a woman was perceived and how she perceived herself." "As is so often the case in this story, a reaction against nomadic life led to a radical redefinition of women's place in the world." "By the 6th century BC, the dominant forces in the Near East were Persia and the city-states of Ancient Greece, and if Persia incorporated both the Syrian and nomadic influences into its empire, the Greeks, in particular Athens," "would define their identity in opposition to their barbarian neighbours, with destructive consequences for women." "Standing at the centre of Athens, a symbol of everything it stood for, was its most famous building, the Parthenon." "Built by the military leader Pericles to celebrate their victory against the Persians, it was a reminder to the Athenians about who they were and why they were so special and each of its sides tells a founding myth of the city." "Behind me, on the east, are the 12 gods of Mount Olympus, fighting the giants and establishing once and for all their claim to power." "On the south side, the long side, that showed King Theseus fighting the centaurs, these were mythical half men half beast, and here the centaurs are a stand-in for the barbarians who lived to the north beyond the Black Sea." "To my mind, what's the most interesting and really the most revealing about the Athenians themselves is what's depicted on the other side, the west, the side that faces the setting sun." "Here you have the Greeks fighting these wild warrior women, the Amazons, and although the fighting is deadly and violent, it's clear that the Amazons are no match for the noble Greek male." "The Greek fascination with the Amazon myth, one informed by the nomadic women of the Steppes, reveals the deep paranoia of Athenian society." "Independent and free, the Amazons were the antithesis of Greek ideas of social order and citizenship." "Slain and subjugated, they are symbols of the triumph of civilisation, this time Greek civilisation over barbarian monstrosity." "Today the Parthenon itself represents democracy but Athenian democracy wasn't universal, it was only open to men." "Only they could be citizens of the polis, the state, and what was left to women was serving the oikos, the household." "They were barred from the law, from the economy, from politics, even from mingling in places where citizens conducted their business." "They couldn't be bought, couldn't be sold but they did spend their entire life under the legal guardianship of their nearest male relative." "When they were 14 this changed from being their fathers to their husbands and only he could represent them in public outside the home." "All of this begs the question, what did women themselves feel about their status?" "Were they happy, or were they angry?" "Were they held in contempt, or were they honoured as mothers and wives?" "The answer to all this, I think, simply lies in their silence." "The Athenians' obsessive, inward-looking culture, their fixation with male honour and racial purity meant that its women were so controlled that they are almost totally absent from the public record." "That absence highlights a striking paradox in Greek culture." "From the goddesses Athena to Aphrodite, there was no other civilisation in the ancient world that gave images of female power such a central role." "And yet, at the same time, so ruthlessly excluded real women from public life." "As evidenced by their tombstones, identikit images of female modesty, what was demanded from Athenian women was their obedience, chastity and, above all, sons to perpetuate the family line." "If it's really difficult to find the real flesh-and-blood women here, it's because, actually, we weren't meant to." "That wasn't the point of the tombstones, they were made to project certain ideals such as wealth, status, honour." "In other words, it was about citizenship and the family with a capital F." "CICADAS CHIRRUP" "Where Athenian women did have a collective voice was in the religious rituals of the city, from weddings and childbirth to funerals and festivals." "Arguably, the most important was the Thesmophoria, the festival to Demeter, the Greek goddess of fertility and agriculture, which took place every autumn at the time of the yearly sowing." "The location was deeply significant." "Much like carnival today, the world was turned upside down, for Athens handed over the meeting place of the democratic assembly, the seat of male power, to its women for three days." "The best way of describing the Thesmophoria is controlled madness." "On the first day, known as the "anaros," which means "setting up,"" "they climbed the steps from the Agora up here to Pynx Hill, where they pitched their tents throughout the stones and then they elected two women to be the leaders." "And this was a very shocking act, because they were recreating the polis for themselves." "Then on the second day, known as the "nisteia," that means "the fasting,"" "there were specially appointed women known as "bailers"" "and they went into the underground caverns where they collected piglets, well, dead piglets, because their bodies were said to symbolise female genitalia." "And then they collected cakes in the shape of phalluses and snakes." "And then in the afternoon, the women shouted obscenities and anything rude that came into their mind." "The third day, known as the "kalligeneia,"" "which means "beautiful birth,"" "the women prayed for children and crops." "What this all signified was twofold." "First of all, it was an ancient fertility rite going back thousands of years and it was linking female fertility with divine madness." "But second, and equally important, was the element of control, because here women's sexuality was being harnessed by the state in the service of the state." "And even though women were being unleashed and told to be free in themselves, actually, they were acting out the wishes of the male polls." "The most striking symbol of male control was once again a piece of fabric." "For what may come as a surprise is that Athens adopted the custom of veiling from ancient Assyria." "And it would be from here that it would later end up in Rome," "Byzantium and Christianity." "Formerly the rite of royal women, by the 5th century BC the wife of almost every citizen wore a veil." "Again, it was a way of making the status of women more discernible so as to better regulate them." "There is no equality between a man and a woman." "A woman is always down from a man." "Women are something like property for a man, so he has to have his wife only for himself and in the house." "He can go away and go across the street as he is, but a woman could not do that." "HORNS BLARE" "It's surprising that we are in the country that gave birth to the democracy, but modern women in Greece didn't have the opportunity to vote until 1952." "That was the first time that they had the right to vote." "The best evidence for how widespread veiling was in ancient Greece is a collection of votive statues called tanagras, now housed in the Louvre Museum in Paris." "Found in sacred shrines, they depict women in everyday costume and they reveal the wide variety of veils worn outside the home." "The most common was the himation shawl, which could be pulled over the head to cover their hair." "There are pharos veils, both covering the hair as well as the lower face." "But the most striking is the tegidion, a full-face veil with eyeholes, which literally meant "little roof,"" "a symbol of the male house under which married women and daughters were protected." "Like in ancient Assyria, the veil was a marker of class, but in Greece it embraced something much darker, a deep phobia of the female body and the idea that women's inferiority wasn't man-made but rooted in nature." "The women of Athens had probably the worst conditions of any woman in the ancient world." "And I would say that women's lot in ancient Athens was closer to a woman's lot in Afghanistan under the height of Taliban rule than anything else." "Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones is one of the world's leading scholars of ancient Greece." "He believes that its ideas about the nature of women were central to the myths that underpinned Greek identity." "So what we have here is a text by Hesiod, who was writing in about the 7th century BCE." "He writes two texts, one called the Theogony and another called the Works And Days, in which he deals with the same myth and this is the creation of the first woman." "The Greek equivalent of the biblical Eve, if you like." "And her name, of course, is Pandora and we know her because she's sent down as a punishment for mankind." "Now, if we look at the texts, there's some really interesting things that we can pick out from what Hesiod is trying to tell us here." "The first is what he calls Pandora when we're first introduced to her." "Hesiod is in fact calling her "genos gynaikon,"" "the first of the race or the species, the first of the species of women." "So, in other words, what we have here, fundamentally, in a 7th-century text, which is probably reflecting a much earlier idea, is that women are a separate species from men." "Now, in the myth, of course, in our English idea of it, she comes armed with this box." " But it's not a box, really." " No, you're absolutely right." "What she comes with is a pithos and pithos is the Greek word for a jar." "Now, the Greeks had a thought that a woman's womb was shaped like a pithos." "So really what Hesiod is talking about here is Pandora, being made the first woman, comes with the first womb." "And when, of course, inevitably that womb gets opened and the opening, of course, is through intercourse, what flows out is all the evils of the world." "And her sexuality, though, is very much bound up" " with openings and closings." " Oh, completely." "And leakage, the idea that women are miasmic through menstruation and so forth." "And therefore this...unbounded woman with her appetites, her sexuality, needs to be bound." "And that all becomes apparent in the use of the veil in the ancient Greek world." "If the veil was a way of drawing a curtain on what the Greeks found viscerally upsetting, then it was Aristotle who provided the most destructive rationale for it." "For alongside the foundations of Western philosophy, he developed deeply incorrect ideas about the female body that would be just as influential." "Now, he thought of women as being something different, he didn't see them as a different species..." "No, they were sub...sub-male." "That's right, exactly." "So, basically, they are...imperfect men." "They haven't quite reached perfection yet, because they haven't had semen to create what is the essence of man." "And that is really the most influential thought to be garnished in the Greek world which goes down into the classical Arabic traditions and consequently then into Christian and medieval traditions as well." "This link also seems to be a justification for the idea that women are incapable of reason." "Yes, absolutely." "So men in the Greek world are naturally "sophrosyne,"" "which means they have limits, they know their rationalities, they know their agenda." "Women have no such thing and, therefore, they have to be controlled by men all the time." "And it's a justification for domestic violence too." " They must be chastised, it's the only instruction they know." " Yes." "It all plays on the idea of the honour/shame nexus, it's so important for them." "The honour of a household is located within the body of the female." "And so any transgression on the part of that female, speaking out too loudly in public, laughing too much, obviously exposing the body in any way, is a transgression of that honour of the household." "And direct, therefore...is directed onto the men of that household." "If this is one of the least acknowledged legacies the Greeks have given the world, the segregation of women from civic life was not universally practised." "These glorious portraits date from Roman Egypt in the 1st century AD, a period of great cultural crossover between the two empires that were open and outward looking." "Brimming with personality, they are evidence of women's social and legal emancipation in Imperial Rome." "They're a world away from the veiled women of ancient Greece." "There's just such a flesh-and-blood feel." "She's unveiled, sensuous, confident." "What they tell us is that, even if early Rome absorbed Greek ideals of female virtue, the more it grew into an imperial power, the more it looked to other civilisations, like ancient Egypt, whose ideas of citizenship had always included women." "And in this world, which had emerged in parallel to the civilisations of Mesopotamia and their starkly gendered law codes, the legal status of women was almost identical to that of men." "As seen in its art, replete with couples lovingly holding hands, even wearing the same clothes, ancient Egypt embraced both the masculine and the feminine." "A shared life, rather than reproduction, was the purpose of marriage and women were allowed considerable autonomy over their own lives." "It meant that when all the planets aligned, women could, on occasion, rule." "The greatest of Egypt's six known ruling queens was Hatshepsut." "She came to power in the 15th century BC, as the regent for her stepson, Thutmose III, who was just a baby." "But it was how she ruled for over two decades that demonstrates her genius for government." "Hatshepsut appropriated for herself the religious symbols of kingship." "Famously, her statues depict her wearing the divine pharaonic beard, but just as important was how she concentrated on what Egypt did best - building and trade." "She organised the largest ever trade mission in her country's history, to the land of Punt." "Her legacy was peace and prosperity." "But even in Egypt there's a sting in the tail." "We don't know why, but after her death the next Pharaoh literally defaced Hatshepsut from the public record." "In a sense, she represents the fate of so many women, not just in the ancient world but throughout all of history." "The story of civilisation has largely been written as the triumph of humanity." "And it has given us extraordinary advances, codes of law and commerce, science and art." "But if the story of women is put back into history, the uncomfortable truth is that its benefits have been ambiguous." "For I believe that part of what it meant to be civilised also meant the regulation and control of women, which varied according to the worlds in which they lived." "Looking at the variety of women's experiences in the ancient world, from restrictive Assyria to tolerant Egypt, from the equality of the nomads to the nadir of ancient Greece, it's clear why the history of women" "has never been a simple story of darkness to light." "Civilisation and patriarchy went together hand in hand, but it wasn't a fixed relationship, there were powerful women in the ancient world who had a voice and an impact on their societies." "But it also bequeathed, particularly the Greeks, deeply pejorative notions about the nature of women, about their sexuality, their reason, and their capabilities that survive to this day." "One set of rules was established for men and another for women, denying them their autonomy over their bodies, their agency over their actions and their authority over their decisions." "And that same inequality would determine the shape of women's lives in the next, Asian, chapter of the history of women." "Interested in finding out more about world-changing women?" "The Open University has produced a collection of free postcards." "To order, call..." "Or go to the website below and follow the links to the Open University."