HIS 162 Sherman

Ranging from the earliest European hunters who created the first human images known to us almost 30,000 years ago to the lives of men and women from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who seldom appear in conventional histories, Ancient Bodies, Ancient Lives explores how men and women have represented sexual differences, and lived lives shaped in part by those differences.

The bone gatherers found in the annals and legends of the early Roman Catholic Church were women who collected the bodies of martyred saints to give them a proper burial. They have come down to us as deeply resonant symbols of grief: from the women who anointed Jesus's crucified body in the gospels to the Pieta, we are accustomed to thinking of women as natural mourners, caring for the body in all its fragility and expressing our deepest sorrow." "The Bone Gatherers introduces us to once powerful women who had, until recently, been lost to history - from the sorrowing mothers and ghastly brides of pagan Rome to the child martyrs and women sponsors who shaped early Christianity. It was often only in death that ancient women became visible - through the buildings, burial sites, and art constructed in their memory - and Denzey uses this archaeological evidence, along with ancient texts, to resurrect the lives of several fourth-century women.

This book presents examples of that art concerned with women's lives, accompanied by an eloquent, scholarly text that contradicts some of the fantasies spun about Egypt but leaves the ancient civilization no less compelling. In particular, Hawass indicates that, despite the presence of queens and goddesses, Egyptian women were not necessarily freer or more powerful than women today. The chapters explore daily life, the court, the arts, and more, while close-up photos detail the sculpture, bas-reliefs, papyrus paintings, and other artwork from the land of the Pharaohs. Patricia Monaghan

Jenifer Neils offers an engaging overview of the roles of women in the ancient societies of Greece, Rome, Egypt, and the Near East. Sifting through a range of evidence from written and material culture, and focusing in particular on visual imagery, she traces the parameters of women's real lives, as distinct from the stereotypical ways in which they were often portrayed.

A Companion to Women in the Ancient World is the first interdisciplinary, methodologically based collection of readings to address the study of women in the ancient world while weaving textual, visual, and archaeological evidence into its approach.

This extensive and engaging A-to-Z encyclopedia, illustrated with many rare and revealing images, tells the stories of the famous and the ordinary, treating subjects as diverse as Greek heroine cults, the daily life of the German warrior women and the intrigue, glory and power of ancient Romeʼs imperial women. Hundreds of well-researched entries, each with suggestions for further reading, give a rounded view of the lives of women in the ancient world.