
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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Story
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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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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How to Make an Apple Pie from Scratch
- In Search of the Recipe for Our Universe, from the Origins of Atoms to the Big Bang
- By: Harry Cliff
- Narrated by: Harry Cliff
- Length: 11 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Harry Cliff - a University of Cambridge particle physicist and researcher on the Large Hadron Collider - sets out in pursuit of answers. He ventures to the largest underground research facility in the world, deep beneath Italy's Gran Sasso mountains, where scientists gaze into the heart of the Sun using the most elusive of particles, the ghostly neutrino. He visits CERN in Switzerland to explore the "Antimatter Factory," where the stuff of science fiction is manufactured daily (and we're close to knowing whether it falls up).
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Excellent
- By Adrian on 01-06-23
By: Harry Cliff
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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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Papyrus
- The Invention of Books in the Ancient World
- By: Irene Vallejo, Charlotte Whittle - translator
- Narrated by: Sophie Roberts
- Length: 17 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Long before books were mass-produced, hand-copied scrolls made from Nile River reeds were the treasures of the ancient world. Emperors and pharaohs, determined to possess them, dispatched emissaries to the edges of the known world to bring them back. Exploring the deep and fascinating history of the written word, from the oral tradition to scrolls to codices, internationally bestselling author Irene Vallejo shows that books have always been a precious and precarious vehicle for civilization.
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Great read
- By Hunter Pechin on 12-15-22
By: Irene Vallejo, and others
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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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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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Fascinating romp around the world
- By No1Treehugger on 05-15-25
By: Victoria Finlay
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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
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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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The World in Books
- 52 Works of Great Short Nonfiction
- By: Kenneth C. Davis
- Narrated by: Adenrele Ojo, Leon Nixon, Kenneth C. Davis
- Length: 15 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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From ancient times to the present day, The World in Books offers a wide-ranging historical education through pleasure reading—and a fantastic introduction to some of the most thought-provoking, profound, and interesting nonfiction works of all time. From Sun Tzu’s The Art of War to bell hooks’s All About Love, as well as such recent classics as Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s We Should All Be Feminists, Davis’s guide suggests a world of nonfiction books and explains just why they’re so historically meaningful and culturally relevant today.
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An enticing, concise overview.
- By Sean Faircloth on 11-10-24
By: Kenneth C. Davis
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Dancing Cockatoos and the Dead Man Test
- How Behavior Evolves and Why It Matters
- By: Marlene Zuk
- Narrated by: Jaime Lamchick
- Length: 9 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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For centuries, people have been returning to the same tired nature-versus-nurture debate, trying to determine what we learn and what we inherit. In Dancing Cockatoos and the Dead Man Test, biologist Marlene Zuk goes beyond the binary and instead focuses on interaction, or the way that genes and environment work together. Driving her investigation is a simple but essential question: How does behavior evolve?
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Good information, but reader distracts from it.
- By Jeremy Proctor on 02-13-23
By: Marlene Zuk
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Where We Meet the World
- The Story of the Senses
- By: Ashley Ward
- Narrated by: David Morley Hale
- Length: 12 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Our senses are what make life worth living. They allow us to appreciate a sip of an ice-cold drink, the sound of laughter, the touch of a lover. But only recently have incredible advances in sensory biology given us the ability to understand how and why our senses evolved as they have. In this book, biologist Ashley Ward takes listeners on a breathtaking tour of how our senses function. Ward looks at not only the five major senses—vision, hearing, taste, smell, and touch—but also a host of other senses, such as balance and interoception, the sense of the body’s internal state.
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You Can’t Taste Soy Sauce with Your Testicles!
- By Jefferson on 03-22-24
By: Ashley Ward
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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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Those Wild Wyndhams
- Three Sisters at the Heart of Power
- By: Claudia Renton
- Narrated by: Claudia Renton
- Length: 15 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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They were confidantes to British prime ministers, poets, writers, and artists, their lives entwined with the most celebrated and scandalous figures of the day, from Oscar Wilde to Henry James. They were the lovers of great men - or men of great prominence... They lived in a world of luxurious excess, a world of splendor at 44 Belgrave Square and later at the even more vast Clouds, the exquisite Wiltshire house on 4,000 acres, the "house of the age", designed in 1876 by the visionary architect Philip Webb - the model for Henry James' The Spoils of Poynton.
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SLOW START BUT STICK WITH THIS ONE
- By The Louligan on 01-22-19
By: Claudia Renton
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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