
The Missing Thread
A Women's History of the Ancient World
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Narrated by:
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Daisy Dunn
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Jenny Funnell
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By:
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Daisy Dunn
About this listen
A dazzlingly ambitious history of the ancient world that places women at the center—from Cleopatra to Boudica, Sappho to Fulvia, and countless other artists, writers, leaders, and creators of history
Around four thousand years ago, the mysterious Minoans sculpted statues of topless women with snakes slithering on their arms. Over one thousand years later, Sappho wrote great poems of longing and desire. For classicist Daisy Dunn, these women—whether they were simply sitting at their looms at home or participating in the highest echelons of power—were up to something much more interesting than other histories would lead us to believe. Together, these women helped to make antiquity as we know it.
In this monumental work, Dunn reconceives our understanding of the ancient world by emphasizing women's roles within it. The Missing Thread never relegates women to the sidelines and is populated with well-known names such as Cleopatra and Agrippina, as well as the likes of Achaemenid consort Atossa and Olympias, a force in Macedon. Spanning three thousand years, the story moves from Minoan Crete to Mycenaean Greece, from Lesbos to Asia Minor, from the Persian Empire to the royal court of Macedonia, and concludes with Rome and its growing empire. The women of antiquity are undeniably woven throughout the fabric of history, and in The Missing Thread they finally take center stage.
* This audiobook edition includes a downloadable PDF that includes maps, charts, and photos of artifacts from the printed book.
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
©2024 Daisy Dunn (P)2024 Penguin AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
"A sweeping history thrumming with energy…. Dunn’s deft sleuthing uncovers long-overlooked realities…. Wars, rivalries, and invasions made women central to political alliances, and Dunn details their adept machinations as they moved boldly or plotted secretly. Besides familiar names, such as Cleopatra, Fulvia, and Lucretia, [Dunn] introduces scores more of prodigious prowess and influence…. Her erudition is impressive, and her narrative is consistently animated.”–Kirkus Reviews *starred review*
“Revelatory… an epic act of noticing… [in The Missing Thread] narratives of political and military ambition–the bloody internecine battles of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, for example–become more clearly explorations of intense familial and inter-personal dynamics, laced with division and rancour, rage and loathing–but also grief and longing, loyalty and love. It is all so utterly and desperately human. Ultimately, the book asks the question: what does it mean to participate in history?”–The Spectator (UK)
“Fresh, detailed… an engaging and well-researched history that brings ancient women to life.”–Booklist
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From the moment Teddy Roosevelt's outrageous and charming teenage daughter strode into the White House—carrying a snake and dangling a cigarette—the outspoken Alice began to put her imprint on the whole of the twentieth-century political scene. Her barbed tongue was as infamous as her scandalous personal life, but whenever she talked, powerful people listened, and she reigned for eight decades as the social doyenne in a town where socializing was state business.
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Interesting but sometimes infuriating
- By Info Seeker on 05-16-23
By: Stacy A. Cordery
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Unwell Women
- Misdiagnosis and Myth in a Man-Made World
- By: Elinor Cleghorn
- Narrated by: Hanako Footman
- Length: 14 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Elinor Cleghorn became an unwell woman 10 years ago. She was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease after a long period of being told her symptoms were anything from psychosomatic to a possible pregnancy. As Elinor learned to live with her unpredictable disease, she turned to history for answers, and found an enraging legacy of suffering, mystification, and misdiagnosis. In Unwell Women, Elinor Cleghorn traces the almost unbelievable history of how medicine has failed women by treating their bodies as alien and other, often to perilous effect.
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I have a fatal autoimmune disease too
- By The Iconoclast on 04-10-22
By: Elinor Cleghorn
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The Deep History of Ourselves
- The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains
- By: Joseph LeDoux
- Narrated by: Fred Sanders
- Length: 11 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Renowned neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux digs into the natural history of life on earth to provide a new perspective on the similarities between us and our ancestors in deep time. This pause-resisting survey of the whole of terrestrial evolution sheds new light on how nervous systems evolved in animals, how the brain developed, and what it means to be human. In The Deep History of Ourselves, LeDoux argues that the key to understanding human behavior lies in viewing evolution through the prism of the first living organisms.
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Oversold
- By Michael on 03-04-20
By: Joseph LeDoux
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The Reopening of the Western Mind
- The Resurgence of Intellectual Life from the End of Antiquity to the Dawn of the Enlightenment
- By: Charles Freeman
- Narrated by: Mark Bramhall
- Length: 27 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Charles Freeman, lauded historical scholar and author of The Closing of the Western Mind (“A triumph”—The Times), explores the rebirth of Western thought in the centuries that followed the demise of the classical era. As the dominance of Christian teachings gradually subsided over time, a new open-mindedness made way for the ideas of morality and theology, and fueled and formed the backbone of the Western mind of the late Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and beyond.
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Fascinating survey of 1,000+ years of thought
- By Roger on 11-07-23
By: Charles Freeman
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Every Living Thing
- The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life
- By: Jason Roberts
- Narrated by: David de Vries
- Length: 14 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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In the eighteenth century, two men—exact contemporaries and polar opposites—dedicated their lives to the same daunting task: identifying and describing all life on Earth. Carl Linnaeus, a pious Swedish doctor with a huckster’s flair, believed that life belonged in tidy, static categories. Georges-Louis de Buffon, an aristocratic polymath and keeper of France’s royal garden, viewed life as a dynamic swirl of complexities. Each began his task believing it to be difficult but not impossible: How could the planet possibly hold more than a few thousand species—or as many could fit on Noah’s Ark?
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Fascinating history of scientific thought
- By Candy Dan on 06-10-24
By: Jason Roberts
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Storm in a Teacup
- The Physics of Everyday Life
- By: Helen Czerski
- Narrated by: Chloe Massey
- Length: 10 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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In Storm in a Teacup, Helen Czerski provides the tools to alter the way we see everything around us by linking ordinary objects and occurrences, like popcorn popping, coffee stains, and fridge magnets, to big ideas like climate change, the energy crisis, and innovative medical testing.
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Everyday Physics Thoroughly Explained
- By Amazon Customer on 01-19-17
By: Helen Czerski
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Our Tribal Future
- How to Channel Our Foundational Human Instincts into a Force for Good
- By: David R. Samson
- Narrated by: Fajer Al-Kaisi
- Length: 14 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Tribalism is one of the most complex and ancient evolutionary forces; it gave us the capacity for cooperation and competition, and allowed us to navigate increasingly complex social landscapes. It is so powerful that it can predict our behavior even better than race, class, gender, or religion. But in our vast modern world, has this blessing become a curse? Our Tribal Future explores a central paradox of our species: how altruism, community, kindness, and genocide are all driven by the same core adaptation.
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Best Game Plan Yet for Unfucking the World
- By Rob R. on 07-26-23
By: David R. Samson
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She Has Her Mother's Laugh
- The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity
- By: Carl Zimmer
- Narrated by: Joe Ochman
- Length: 20 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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She Has Her Mother's Laugh presents a profoundly original perspective on what we pass along from generation to generation. Charles Darwin played a crucial part in turning heredity into a scientific question, and yet he failed spectacularly to answer it. The birth of genetics in the early 1900s seemed to do precisely that. Gradually, people translated their old notions about heredity into a language of genes. We need a new definition of what heredity is and, through Carl Zimmer's lucid exposition and storytelling, this resounding tour de force delivers it.
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Changed this strict genetic determinist's mind
- By Anonymous User on 06-11-18
By: Carl Zimmer
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Jewels
- A Secret History
- By: Victoria Finlay
- Narrated by: Victoria Finlay
- Length: 14 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Throughout history, precious stones have inspired passions and poetry, quests and curses, sacred writings and unsacred actions. In this scintillating book, journalist Victoria Finlay embarks on her own globe-circling search for the real stories behind some of the gems we prize most. Blending adventure travel, geology, exciting new research, and her own irresistible charm, Finlay has fashioned a treasure hunt for some of the most valuable, glamorous, and mysterious substances on earth.
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Great historical stories
- By John from NorCAL on 05-25-25
By: Victoria Finlay
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In the Shadow of Liberty
- The Invisible History of Immigrant Detention in the United States
- By: Ana Raquel Minian
- Narrated by: Cynthia Farrell, David Shih, Marie-Françoise Theodore, and others
- Length: 9 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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A probing work of narrative history that reveals the hidden story of immigrant detention in the United States, deepening urgent national conversations around migration.
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Important information
- By W. R. on 10-03-24
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Madame Restell
- The Life, Death, and Resurrection of Old New York's Most Fabulous, Fearless, and Infamous Abortionist
- By: Jennifer Wright
- Narrated by: Mara Wilson
- Length: 14 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Madame Restell is a sharp, witty Gilded Age medical history which introduces us to an iconic, yet tragically overlooked, feminist heroine: a glamorous women’s healthcare provider in Manhattan, known to the world as Madame Restell. A celebrity in her day with a flair for high fashion and public, petty beefs, Restell was a self-made woman and single mother who used her wit, her compassion, and her knowledge of family medicine to become one of the most in-demand medical workers in New York.
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Every woman should listen to this book!
- By Ruth Aston on 06-18-23
By: Jennifer Wright
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The Wizard and the Prophet
- Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World
- By: Charles C. Mann
- Narrated by: Bronson Pinchot
- Length: 18 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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In 40 years, Earth's population will reach 10 billion. Can our world support that? What kind of world will it be? Those answering these questions generally fall into two deeply divided groups - Wizards and Prophets, as Charles Mann calls them in this balanced, authoritative, nonpolemical new book. The Prophets, he explains, follow William Vogt, a founding environmentalist who believed that in using more than our planet has to give, our prosperity will lead us to ruin.
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Fantastic
- By BKATX on 01-26-18
By: Charles C. Mann
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The Art of More
- How Mathematics Created Civilization
- By: Michael Brooks
- Narrated by: Nick Afka Thomas
- Length: 9 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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In this captivating, sweeping history, Michael Brooks makes clear that mathematics was one of the foundational innovations that catapulted humanity from a nomadic existence to civilization, and that it has been instrumental in every subsequent great leap of humankind: from charting the movements of celestial bodies to navigating the globe to tracking the dissemination of viruses.
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Wow!
- By Cinski446 on 07-12-22
By: Michael Brooks
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The Buried
- An Archaeology of the Egyptian Revolution
- By: Peter Hessler
- Narrated by: Peter Hessler
- Length: 16 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Drawn by a fascination with Egypt's rich history and culture, Peter Hessler moved with his wife and twin daughters to Cairo in 2011. He wanted to learn Arabic, explore Cairo's neighborhoods, and visit the legendary archaeological digs of Upper Egypt. After his years of covering China for The New Yorker, friends warned him Egypt would be a much quieter place. But not long before he arrived, the Egyptian Arab Spring had begun, and now the country was in chaos.
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A Fascinating, Funny, and Moving Account of Egypt
- By Jefferson on 07-23-19
By: Peter Hessler
So comprehensive!
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How little is actually known about women of antiquity and how much is surmised, guessed really.
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d by the details. Worth the read. Highly recommend to anyone interested in women’s voices that have been excluded from history.
Great read!
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Learning the names
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Not quite what I expected
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