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اهم وثائقي عن الحجاب يعرض نصوص قوانين تفرض الحجاب وغطاء الوجه والشعر والعباية على النساء قبل اكثر من 2000 سنة من الاسلام
مع عرض للتماثيل والرسومات الاثرية للنساء المحجبات بجميع ثقافات العالم
وفيها جميعها منع الحجاب عن الجواري وقصره على الحرائر - الحرات
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00:00There has never been a better time to be born a woman.
00:16There are more female heads of government and more women leading organisations and running
00:21businesses than at any other time in history.
00:24Yet, in many parts of the world, women do not enjoy the same legal rights as men.
00:31They are relegated to unequal spheres, without access to education or employment.
00:37And for many, the right to live free from physical and sexual violence is still a dream.
00:45My name is Amanda Foreman, and as a historian and biographer, I have spent my career studying
00:50women's lives.
00:52The simple truth is that our story has never followed a straight line from darkness to
00:57light.
00:59The real history of women is full of swings and reversions, with liberties gained and
01:03lost from one era and one society to the next.
01:07I also think that you can judge a civilisation by the way it treats its women, and the degree
01:12to which women have authority, agency and autonomy.
01:18In this series, I want to retell the story of civilisation with men and women side by side
01:23for the first time.
01:25And in so doing, I'll ask some difficult questions.
01:30Why did history become almost exclusively male?
01:33Why has almost every civilisation set limits on women's sexuality, speech and freedom of movement?
01:40And what makes the status of women so vulnerable to the dictates of politics, economics or religion?
01:52But it will also be a celebration of the women who have confronted these limits and created
01:57their own routes to power, from Empress Wu, China's only ever female emperor, and Christine
02:07de Pizan, the first feminist, to the revolutionary women of France, Russia and beyond.
02:14And to those who think that women haven't played an active role in history, or that ours is
02:27simply a mindless narrative of oppression, I want to throw down the gauntlet.
02:33Because I believe that any history of the world that excludes women, or simply pushes them
02:37to the margins, isn't just a distortion, but an untruth that must be challenged.
03:07The hard truth is that in almost every civilisation, women have been deemed the secondary sex.
03:23It's an idea that has become so ingrained, it's been written into history as a biological
03:29truth.
03:30But why did this happen?
03:32Have human societies always followed this pattern?
03:36And how far back do we have to go to find an alternative story?
03:42To begin to answer these questions, I've come to Anatolia in central Turkey, wedged between
03:48the nomadic worlds of the steppes to the north and the civilisations of Mesopotamia to the
03:53south.
03:56These lands are the site of numerous archaeological discoveries, from prehistoric settlements to
04:02female figurines that reveal fundamentally different ideas about how early societies organised themselves.
04:09This site, Czatlhuyk, is one of the first known settlements in human history.
04:23Czatlhuyk, inhabited from around 7,500 BC, the tail end of the Stone Age, its early inhabitants,
04:29between 5,000 and 8,000 people, lived at the dawn of agriculture.
04:35They had semi-domesticated animals and were learning to sow crops.
04:43To maximise chances of survival, they grouped themselves into a hive of mud and brick houses,
04:49stacked together in a giant commune.
04:53What's special about this place is that after 20 years of excavations, archaeologists believe that
04:59Czatlhuyk didn't structure itself along rigid ideas of gender, where the biology of men and women
05:05determined their roles.
05:07Instead, archaeologist Ian Hodder thinks it was an aggressively egalitarian world where all
05:14hierarchies were non-existent.
05:16We've looked and looked and looked and we just don't find any evidence of a big ceremonial centre or a chiefly house.
05:24All there is at Czatlhuyk is just lots and lots of houses, much the same size as each other.
05:30We see these houses that look like they could produce more and could become quite dominant,
05:36but there seems to be this cap that stops them doing it.
05:40Czatlhuyk's inhabitants buried their dead under the sleeping platforms of their houses.
05:52And from analysing their DNA, the wear and tear on their bones and the soot from their lungs,
05:59Ian's team have discovered that both men and women ate the same diet
06:03and that there was little gender division of labour or domestic space.
06:07Astonishingly, the burials also stressed communal ties rather than blood ties or gender,
06:14suggesting that even the family didn't exist in the way we know it.
06:18We assumed that the people buried beneath a house floor would be a nuclear family,
06:24but it turned out when we did some genetic studies that they're not,
06:28that the people buried beneath the house floor are no more closely related to each other
06:33than people in different houses.
06:35So it seems that soon after birth, children were sent to foster or to live in other houses across the whole community.
06:43So the whole community in a way was one great family tied together by many things, including biological links.
06:51If something went slightly wrong, they could always depend on someone else in these very, very complex ritual and social ties that tied everybody together.
07:02So Çatalhöyük is a society that's very unlike our society and it's difficult to get your head around in a way.
07:09The most famous find from Çatalhöyük was a female figurine who many believe was the principal deity of the site's Neolithic inhabitants.
07:21Found in a grain bin, she is thought to depict a corpulent fertility figure on a throne flanked by leopards,
07:29with her feet resting on two human skulls, life and death in one image.
07:35Ever since, she has become the pride of Anatolia, particularly among its local Muslim women.
07:41The original figurine, now with a restored head, is held at the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations in Ankara.
07:59To many, she is a site of pilgrimage, a promise perhaps, that in early societies, God was not a man, but a woman.
08:18Although we'll never know what she meant to the people of Çatalhöyük, what she does reveal is that in a precarious pre-agricultural world,
08:27where 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.
08:37The seated woman of Çatalhöyük has this powerful beauty, and her posture very obviously projects this triple sense of woman, fertility, and the power of nature.
08:50And her imagery, especially the felines, and the fact that she is sitting on some kind of symbolic throne.
08:57These can be seen in various guises in many different civilizations.
09:01What remains a constant is this theme that celebrates the power of woman to reproduce life,
09:07the sacred mysteries of the earth, and life conquering death.
09:17In the following millennia, as agriculture became increasingly controlled,
09:22society began to organise itself around more recognisable divisions of gender.
09:27Women's roles became tied to motherhood and the home.
09:34Their status became secondary to men who took control over property and public space,
09:40ideas that in later religions would become the natural order of life.
09:46To best understand why this started, we have to look at the first civilizations that emerged in Mesopotamia.
09:57The first was Sumer, which developed around 4000 BC, between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in what is now war-torn Iraq.
10:08Originally a collection of up to 20 city-states, Sumer continued, first under the Babylonian Empire,
10:14and then under the Assyrian, until the 6th century BC.
10:19Over its course, it saw huge changes in the status and roles of women.
10:30The Sumerians were a dynamic and intellectually curious people,
10:34and life in the Fertile Crescent, where the first agricultural revolution took place,
10:38created such abundance that they were able to channel their energies into great inventions, improvements,
10:44and discoveries that literally changed the world.
10:47The Sumerians harnessed the great power of the Tigris and the Euphrates to create the first irrigation system.
10:53They invented the wheel, the plough, mathematics.
10:57They studied the stars and created the first calendar.
11:00And most important of all, they invented writing in 3300 BC.
11:05And in this world, women thrived.
11:09In the temples, the high priestesses had the same power and status as the high priests.
11:14In the legal world, women had access to the law and could represent themselves.
11:18In business, women had no restrictions.
11:20And in family, when they entered into a marriage, women brought their own property and they could get divorced.
11:26And in education, women could study writing just as much as the men.
11:30Open and outward looking, early Sumer shows that there was no blueprint for gender inequality in early civilization.
11:43But that changed in 2300 BC, the time of the pyramids in Egypt, when the Akkadian, Sargon the Great, conquered Sumer and made it a vassal state.
11:55In this new world, women began to lose the freedoms that they had once enjoyed.
11:59Their participation in the economy was restricted.
12:02They were shut out from education and their professions.
12:05But most important of all, women began to be excluded from positions of power and public space.
12:12Ironically, it was the abundance of the Fertile Crescent that caused this change.
12:19Alongside agricultural surplus came class and the unequal distribution of wealth.
12:25Out of that came armies and military rulers to claim power.
12:30And who wanted to pass that power down to their male heirs.
12:34One of the best ways to see into the heart of any civilization is to look at the art it leaves behind.
12:46And this world is resolutely male.
12:49There's the courtier, Ebi-il.
12:54Judea, the king of Lagash.
12:58And the victory steles of Sargon the Great and his male heirs, crushing their enemies and asserting their divine right to rule.
13:06It's a male world that mirrored the hierarchy of the gods.
13:13The seated woman has evolved into goddesses of fertility in nature.
13:19But it's the male gods of justice and reason who are now the favored gods of civilization.
13:24Among these monuments to conquest and power, Mesopotamian women have become increasingly invisible.
13:37But one voice clamours to be heard.
13:40It 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.
13:55To find out more about her, I've come to meet Dr Irving Finkel, a keeper of Mesopotamian culture at the British Museum.
14:03Who was Enheduanna?
14:05Well, 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.
14:15And she was appointed by her own father to be the end priestess, as we call it, E.N., the end priestess of the moon god in the city of Ur,
14:26which was the highest religious appointment in the culture at the time.
14:31It was the most, it was the opinion position in order for the religious world to function, and she was in charge of it all.
14:39Enheduanna created the world's first literary masterwork, a collection of 42 hymns written on clay tablets,
14:48in praise of all the temples and gods in her father's empire, and which played a vital role in legitimising his rule.
14:55One could, I think, argue that this had some kind of uniting effect, because the antecedents of political life in Mesopotamia were independent city-states,
15:09each of whom had their important god and their important temple, and to some extent they were rivals.
15:15And it would be a legitimate point to think that Sargon thought if Enheduanna sits in this chair and produces this thing,
15:22it would be rather useful because everybody will see that all the temples and all the gods are one system,
15:29and it is a manifestation of the unity of the country and the gods who were all part of the same environment.
15:37Like so many women, this made Enheduanna the cultural power behind her father's throne, and she knew it, because she signs her work,
15:49making it the first signed piece of literature in history by a man or a woman.
15:53But I think her most telling work is her poem, The Exaltation to Enheduanna, a stunning hymn in which she allied herself to the goddess of fertility, nature and destruction.
16:05Mistress 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.
16:21What makes the poem revolutionary is that she included within it elements of her own life, passionately repeating her name.
16:29I am Enheduanna, she writes. I am the brilliant High Priestess of Nanna.
16:374,000 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.
16:50What makes this declaration, I, Enheduanna, so moving is that we have, at the dawn of civilization,
16:58this beautiful and confident statement of the female, I am.
17:10Enheduanna'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.
17:21Before 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.
17:35These are the world's earliest known law codes, and within them, we have the first silencing of the female voice.
17:49There'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.
17:56Dating 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.
18:13Inscribed 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.
18:30And here, in its 282 intricately carved laws, is an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, for the first time.
18:39Considered by many to be one of the foundation stones of world civilisation, what's clear is that they are a mixed blessing for women.
18:50On the positive side, the code recognised a woman's basic right to own property.
18:56This was vital because it gave women legal protection when it came to control over their dowries and inheritances.
19:02The law also forbade arbitrary ill-treatment or neglect.
19:05Wives who were ill or barren couldn't simply be discarded.
19:09And in divorce, women could keep their dowries.
19:12In widowhood, wives had the right to use their husbands' estates for their lifetime.
19:17Fundamentally, the women of Mesopotamia were recognised by law as being distinct persons.
19:24Yet, on the negative side, the code was a blow to women's economic and sexual freedom.
19:29Unlike Sumer, women were forbidden from doing any kind of commercial activity outside the household.
19:36But far more damaging, in my opinion, was the power it gave to men over women's bodies.
19:42The law legalised patriarchy.
19:45Husbands and fathers now owned the sexual reproduction of their wives and daughters.
19:49This meant that women could be put to death for adultery.
19:53That virginity was now a condition for marriage.
19:56And in the case of rape, it wasn't just an assault against a woman.
20:00It was an economic offence against a man.
20:03For example, if his daughter was raped, he suffered the loss of her bride price.
20:08She was, in a sense, damaged goods.
20:09Now, it's important to recognise here that we don't know how these laws worked at a local level.
20:16They are an ideal.
20:18But the driving force of these laws shines through.
20:22Male authority and patriarchal notions of male honour are now sacrosanct.
20:28If Hammurabi's Babylon marked a downward shift in the legal status of women,
20:38then the next imperial power in the region, the Assyrians, would reduce it even further.
20:44As evidenced in their oversized art, all battles, prisoners and male gods,
20:50this was a world obsessed with male virility.
20:54Evidence not of an outward-looking culture like early Sumer,
20:58but a militaristic one that expanded through pure conquest.
21:05Central to the iconography of the Assyrian kings is the lion hunt,
21:09a symbol not of the harnessing of nature, but of its domination and control.
21:17This is a world away from the seated woman of Chatelhoog.
21:23The 112 Assyrian laws dating from the 12th century BC are now housed in Berlin.
21:39Over half deal with marriage and sex.
21:44In them, many of the protective measures for women in the Hammurabi Code are taken away
21:48and the price for non-compliance is ever more brutal.
21:54What's so striking is how the laws so deeply enshrine the patriarchal double standard.
22:00Men can do what they like to their wives.
22:03They can ill-use them.
22:05It says here explicitly that they can pull out their hair and twist their ears.
22:09They can throw them out into the streets without their dowries.
22:11They can pawn them without any protection.
22:15In short, they can do anything they like except kill them without cause.
22:19What's more, for women, they have no economic rights and many burdens.
22:25If they have an abortion, they'll be executed.
22:28If they commit adultery, they'll be executed.
22:31And if their husbands commit a crime, then it is they who can be punished.
22:35So, for example, the wife of a rapist will herself be raped in punishment.
22:41In my opinion, this is a harsh society where the law has become a charter for male oppression.
22:52In Assyrian culture, it was one article of clothing that symbolised the growing gulf between male and female status.
22:59On this tablet, Law 40 is the first known veiling law 2000 years before Islam.
23:08And it's astonishing how little known this is given the legacy it has left behind.
23:16To explore it, I've come to meet a group of Middle Eastern women from the countries that were once ancient Assyria.
23:22There must be no no longer fit the women, orvis orcas, or Monopoly, and intravenous women, and women.
23:29There must be nice women to beilated for the leaders.
23:31And they must protect the women from the dead.
23:34We must protect the women from the dark side.
23:37We must protect the women from the dark side or the ravine.
23:43And the people from the dark side and the citizens of the burning side are the most painful.
23:48The girls in the dark side have to protect the women to protect their bodies.
23:50The laws divided women into five categories, wives and daughters of the upper class, concubines,
23:58temple prostitutes, harlots, and slave girls, dividing in their eyes the respectable from
24:05the unrespectable. The punishments for transgression are pitiless.
24:20This is the law of the men. The law of the men is a servant.
24:34The law of the men is a burden of the men.
24:40The women are also a burden of the men.
24:44In the past, I was able to carry out the Muslims and the Christ.
24:57I was able to carry out a lot of the Muslims.
25:03I was able to carry out a lot of the Muslims and the prisoners.
25:13The first thing about the people's lives, the first thing about the women's lives,
25:23the situation of the women's lives in the real world.
25:27There is a change in the lives of women who are working with them in a way
25:32and in a way of dealing with the government or the government.
25:38In fact, I think that the result of the death of the beginning was a part of it,
25:44that this text can be used in reality,
25:48and that it is supposed to be human rights,
25:52but that is what is changing the language.
25:57Of all the legacies handed down to us from the ancient world,
26:01it's the veil that has been the most pervasive
26:04and the most symbolically weighted.
26:07A mark of civilisation through Greece, Rome and Byzantium,
26:11it would become the nun's habit and the wimple of medieval Europe.
26:16In Asia, it would spread to Confucian China and Korea.
26:20And in Islam, it would become a mark of class before it became one of faith.
26:26Nowadays in Kurdistan, we don't have to wear a veil by law,
26:31but I'm from a lower social class.
26:34When I go back to my city, I have to be more covered and in specific spaces,
26:43I have also to wear a hijab there.
26:48What this reminds us is that there is a long history to the veil,
26:52whose complexities and contradictions were there from the start.
26:56I 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.
27:05Still, it's important that we don't prejudge the veil or what it meant in ancient times.
27:11On one level, it is all about male ownership and male control.
27:15But on another, ironic though it may seem to us,
27:19the veil was a way of giving women a liberty and freedom to go outside into the public space
27:25without compromising themselves or losing the protection of their husbands.
27:30In some measure, what the veil took away, it also gave back.
27:34It both limited women, but also protected and gave them freedom in what was essentially a man's world.
27:42If the DNA of early civilisation was rooted in male codes of kingship, class and gender,
27:57another culture emerged in the grasslands to the north,
28:01which, in the long term, would mount the greatest challenge to every subsequent civilisation.
28:06Stretching from Ukraine in the west, across Kazakhstan and South Russia to Mongolia in the east,
28:17the Eurasian steppe was home to the nomads,
28:20most notably the Scythian, Sarmatian and Pazarik tribes.
28:28Dominated by warrior horsemen, this was just as male-led and martial a world.
28:33The best pasture lands had to be rigorously defended
28:37and women were often captured in inter-tribal wars.
28:42But recent archaeology has revealed evidence of gender relations within the tribes
28:47that proves that the control and submission of women
28:50was not an inevitable development in ancient culture.
28:58Professor Leonid Yablonsky from the Moscow Institute of Archaeology
29:02has been excavating nomadic burial sites called Kurgans
29:06across southern Russia for the past 25 years.
29:17Over the course of his long career, he has discovered hundreds of burials
29:21that reveal the centrality of women to nomadic culture.
29:25But, for many women, housework,
29:29are available in Mass wurde
29:32些 changes were created for delusions.
29:33Over the course of the future,
29:34and other type of beautiful objects,
29:36and other types of materials,
29:38and other types of clothes,
29:40and other types of materials,
29:41and other types of materials,
29:43and other animals,
29:45and some types of materials.
29:47In addition, women отвечed for the whole spiritual life in this society, spiritual life, they were responsible.
29:59And so, social functions of women were much higher than social functions of men.
30:09Although, with the soldiers of the military, there were only men.
30:14Did you find any evidence of women being buried with weapons?
30:19Yes.
30:21Archaeologists thought that if a skeleton is found with weapons, it's not necessarily a man.
30:28And if a skeleton is found with buses, it's not necessarily a woman.
30:33But then, when they learned to determine the floor of the skeleton, it turned out that it was not the same.
30:41And the anthropologists, the physical anthropologists, showed us that we were wrong.
30:48Many of Professor Yablonski's finds are now housed in the National Museum in Orenburg.
30:54The female graves contain a remarkable variety of treasures.
30:58There's gold jewellery, such as torques and feline coat clasps.
31:03Sacred objects, such as mirrors, seashells, unportable altars, and a large cache of weapons, revealing women's roles as warriors within the tribe.
31:13Look, it's a very small hand.
31:20Your hand is too big. It could only be for a woman. It's a woman's implement.
31:26It's possible.
31:27Among the treasures, items from one individual burial stand out.
31:31Those of a 14-year-old girl who was buried with over 40 bronze arrowheads.
31:36Lug is a weapon of a distance battle.
31:43It's not necessary to have a large physical strength to be able to shoot well from the lugs.
31:52As today, during the Second World War and during the Kavkaz War,
31:59the role of snipers were performed by women.
32:03Because the sniper rifle is a weapon of a distance battle.
32:10Therefore, it's not possible that during the ancient Sarmatian war,
32:16women could also use the lugs,
32:20while standing at a distance from the enemy.
32:24It's not possible.
32:26Much like Neolithic Chattahuyuk,
32:29these finds reveal a world in which the precariousness of survival
32:33negated ideas of segregation or divisions of labour.
32:36Women's roles were not confined to their biological functions
32:40or to domestic space.
32:43The nomads were, if you will, a kind of third way,
32:47different from the empires and city-states around them.
32:50And as for the urban codes that governed land, property, status, the family,
32:56none of these applied to them.
32:58And what this meant for women was that their value extended
33:01far beyond being simply someone else's property or producing sons.
33:06They were recognised because of their skills
33:08and because their contribution to society was absolutely necessary.
33:12It just goes to show that biology isn't everything.
33:21One of the most extraordinary finds in the steppe was much further east,
33:25in the Altai Mountains on the Russian border with Mongolia.
33:29One of the most extraordinary finds in the United States.
33:34These lands were home to the Pazarik tribe,
33:38whose territories straddled the trade routes of China, India and Persia.
33:43One of the most extraordinary finds in the United States.
33:47In 1993, preserved in the ice of the Ukok plateau,
33:52the Russian archaeologist Natalia Polasmak found a tomb
33:55of a 25-year-old woman dating from 400 BC, whom she called the Ice Maiden.
34:02two-year-old woman dating from 18 Haha and Suman.
34:07One of the most extraordinary Joes likeども.
34:09Many children are known as the
34:17There were six horses sacrificed for her journey into the afterlife,
34:21portable tables and altars containing coriander seeds
34:25and a last meal of mutton,
34:27and a leather pouch containing a precious silver mirror,
34:31revealing her status as a revered religious leader for her tribe.
34:38Controversially flown to Moscow to be studied and preserved,
34:42she has since become a symbol of national pride to the peoples of the Altai
34:46after years of Soviet rule.
34:56My name is Aydar Aydaran.
34:58I have been with my son of Altai,
35:01and I have been with my wife.
35:05I have been with my wife.
35:08I have been with my wife.
35:11I have been with my wife.
35:13I have been with my wife.
35:15She was also discovered in the most complete set of nomadic clothing ever found.
35:28Felt riding boots.
35:30A long shift made from expensive Indian silk.
35:34Around her neck was a beautifully crafted necklace of eight felines.
35:39On her head was a horse hair wig crowned with a hat nearly a metre high,
35:45and covered with a coterie of symbolic animals that once again reveals the alliance of women
35:52with nature in ancient culture.
35:54we are in the mostете of a colony which is a world under the sky.
35:58We are now in the middle of H kaldigaya trava.
35:59We take it to the people who are in the sky.
36:01It is the one who is called the solar ship.
36:03The sky is another symbol of the power of the nation.
36:04We are in the middle of Haldana.
36:06I will then show you how to the world under the high and low.
36:08between the top and the top.
36:10I used to have a lot of them.
36:12And this is the land,
36:16which is the land,
36:18which is the symbol of the land.
36:22The land of the land is the land,
36:24and this is the land of the land.
36:26And this is the land of the land.
36:38Now housed in the National Museum in Gorno-Altesk,
36:42the mummy of the ice maiden has made an emotional return home after 19 years.
36:50And what her body reveals is perhaps the most significant find of all,
36:55a set of animalistic tattoos which reveal her special status within the group.
37:03She's covered in these mystical creatures that go all the way down both arms,
37:07down to her fingertips.
37:09She had on her left shoulder this large tattoo of a deer,
37:14whose antlers morphed into birds and griffins,
37:17and then below that was a panther next to a ram.
37:20The predator and the prey combined together.
37:23We do know that the deer represented the sacred feminine.
37:26It was the one animal that could pass from the earth to the spiritual world and back again,
37:30and it also had regenerative powers.
37:33Today the people of the Altai believe that her tattoos contain a coded message that will one day be revealed to them.
37:40And if she was once a shaman to the Pazariks and played a vital role in their community,
37:45today she's still playing that role for the people of the Altai.
37:49The nomads are often written out of history as being illiterate and unimportant.
37:59But I believe they left a legacy that has proved to be exceptionally powerful and long-lasting.
38:05The first was the marshalling of an economy between East and West that came to be known as the Silk Road.
38:12But second, and equally important, was the active roles of women that made the nomads the Great Other in ancient culture,
38:24and which culminated with the Mongol leader Genghis Khan putting his daughters in charge of the world's largest ever empire.
38:31And of all the symbols that illustrate nomadic women's status, the hat is one of the most potent,
38:43remnants of which have been found in hundreds of nomadic graves.
38:48Adorned with gold and precious stones, these hats are still used across the steppe today as a portable bank account,
39:00controlled by women and passed down from mother to daughter.
39:08It's more than just a piece of fabric. It has immense power.
39:11Like the veil, it denoted a woman's wealth and status.
39:14But in this case, it wasn't about modesty or chastity.
39:17It was about a woman's power and agency.
39:20In other words, it was about how a woman was perceived and how she perceived herself.
39:28As 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.
39:39By the 6th century BC, the dominant forces in the Near East were Persia and the city-states of ancient Greece.
39:46And if Persia incorporated both Assyrian and nomadic influences into its empire, the Greeks, in particular Athens, would define their identity in opposition to their barbarian neighbours,
39:59with destructive consequences for women.
40:05Standing at the centre of Athens, a symbol of everything it stood for was its most famous building, the Parthenon.
40:12Built 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.
40:25And each of its sides tells a founding myth of the city.
40:28Behind me, on the east, were the twelve gods of Mount Olympus fighting the giants and establishing once and for all their claim to power.
40:38But on the south side, the long side, that showed King Theseus fighting the centaurs.
40:43These are the mythical half-men, half-beasts.
40:46And here, the centaurs are a stand-in for the barbarians who live to the north beyond the Black Sea.
40:51But, 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.
41:03Because here you have the Greeks fighting these wild warrior women, Amazons.
41:08And although the fighting is deadly and violent, it's clear that the Amazons are no match for the noble Greek male.
41:18The Greek fascination with the Amazon myth, one informed by the nomadic women of the steppe, reveals the deep paranoia of Athenian society.
41:31Independent and free, the Amazons were the antithesis of Greek ideas of social order and citizenship.
41:41Slain and subjugated, they are symbols of the triumph of civilisation, this time, Greek civilisation, over barbarian monstrosity.
41:50Today, Parthenon itself represents democracy. But Athenian democracy wasn't universal. It was only open to men.
42:05Only they could be citizens of the polis, the state. And what was left to women was serving the oikos, the household.
42:12They were barred from the law, from the economy, from politics, even from mingling in places where citizens conducted their business.
42:20They couldn't be bought, couldn't be sold. But they did spend their entire life under the legal guardianship of their nearest male relative.
42:28When they were 14, this changed from being their fathers to their husbands, and only he could represent them in public outside the home.
42:35All 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?
42:48The answer to all this, I think, simply lies in their silence.
42:53The 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.
43:10And that absence highlights a striking paradox in Greek culture.
43:14From the goddesses Athena to Aphrodite, there was no other civilisation in the ancient world that gave images of female power such a central role.
43:25And yet, at the same time, so ruthlessly excluded real women from public life.
43:35As evidenced by their tombstones, identicate images of female modesty, what was demanded from Athenian women was their obedience.
43:44And, above all, sons to perpetuate the family line.
43:50If it's really difficult to find the real flesh-and-blood women here, it's because, actually, we weren't meant to.
43:56That wasn't the point of the tombstones.
43:58They were made to project certain ideals, such as wealth, status, honour.
44:04In other words, it was about citizenship and the family with a capital F.
44:14In other words, it was about to work.
44:18Where Athenian women did have a collective voice was in the religious rituals of the city, from weddings and childbirth to funerals and festivals.
44:28Arguably, the most important was the Thesmaphoria, the festival to Demeter, the Greek goddess of fertility and agriculture, which took place every autumn at the time of the yearly sowing.
44:42The location was deeply significant.
44:49Much 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.
45:02The best way of describing the Thesmaphoria is controlled madness.
45:10On the first day, known as the Anodos, which means setting up, they climbed the steps from the Agora up here to Penix Hill, where they pitched their tents throughout the stones.
45:19And then, they elected two women to be the leaders.
45:24And this was a very shocking act, because they were recreating the polis for themselves.
45:29Then, on the second day, known as the Nastia, that means the fasting, there were specially appointed women, known as balers.
45:36And they went into the underground caverns, where they collected piglets, well, dead piglets, because their bodies were said to symbolize female genitalia.
45:46And then, they collected cakes in the shape of phalluses and snakes.
45:50And then, in the afternoon, the women shouted obscenities and anything rude that came into their mind.
45:56The third day, known as the Kelegania, which means beautiful birth, the women prayed for children and crops.
46:02What this all signified was twofold.
46:06First of all, it was an ancient fertility rite, going back thousands of years, and it was linking female fertility with divine madness.
46:14But second, and equally important, was the element of control.
46:19Because here, women's sexuality was being harnessed by the state, in the service of the state.
46:25And even though women were being unleashed and told to be free in themselves,
46:29actually, they were acting out the wishes of the male polis.
46:38The most striking symbol of male control was once again a piece of fabric.
46:44For what may come as a surprise is that Athens adopted the custom of veiling from ancient Assyria,
46:49and it would be from here that it would later end up in Rome, Byzantium and Christianity.
46:58Formerly the rite of royal women, by the 5th century BC, the wife of almost every citizen wore a veil.
47:05Again, it was a way of making the status of women more discernible, so as to better regulate them.
47:10There's no equality between a man and a woman. A woman is always down from a man.
47:17Women are something like property for a man.
47:21So he has to have his wife only for himself and in the house.
47:26He can go away and go across the street, as he is, but a woman could not do that.
47:33It'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.
47:50That was the first time that they had the right to vote.
47:54The best evidence for how widespread veiling was in ancient Greece is a collection of votive statues called Tanagras,
48:12now housed in the Louvre Museum in Paris.
48:15Found in sacred shrines, they depict women in everyday costume,
48:20and they reveal the wide variety of veils worn outside the home.
48:27The most common was the hymation shawl, which could be pulled over the head to cover the hair.
48:36There are pharos veils, both covering the hair as well as the lower face.
48:41But the most striking is the tegidion, a full face veil with eye holes, which literally meant little roof,
48:51a symbol of the male house under which married women and daughters were protected.
48:58Like in ancient Assyria, the veil was a marker of class, but in Greece it embraced something much darker,
49:04a deep phobia of the female body, and the idea that women's inferiority wasn't man-made, but rooted in nature.
49:16The women of Athens had probably the worst conditions of any woman in the ancient world.
49:23And 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.
49:38Lloyd Llewellyn Jones is one of the world's leading scholars of ancient Greece.
49:43He believes that its ideas about the nature of women were central to the myths that underpinned Greek identity.
49:49So what we have here is a text by Hesiod, who is writing in about the 7th century BCE.
49:59He writes two texts, one called The Theogony and another called The Works and Days, in which he deals with the same myth.
50:04And this is the creation of the first woman, the Greek equivalent of the Biblical Eve, if you like.
50:09And her name, of course, is Pandora.
50:11And we know her because she's sent down as a punishment for mankind.
50:14Now, if we look at the text, there's some really interesting things that we can pick out from what Hesiod is trying to tell us here.
50:21The first is what he calls Pandora when we're first introduced to her.
50:25Hesiod is, in fact, calling her Genos Gunaikon, the first of the race or the species, the first of the species of women.
50:33So, 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.
50:44Now, in the myth, of course, in our English idea of it, she comes armed with this box.
50:48But it's not a box, really.
50:50No, no, you're absolutely right. What she comes with is a pithos.
50:53And a pithos is the Greek word for a jar.
50:56Now, the Greeks had a thought that a woman's womb was shaped like a pithos.
51:03So, really what Hesiod is talking about here is Pandora, being made the first woman, comes with the first womb.
51:09And 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.
51:20And their sexuality, though, is very much bound up with openings and closings.
51:25Oh, completely. And leakage, the idea that women are miasmic through menstruation and so forth.
51:30And therefore, this unbounded woman, with her appetites, her sexuality, needs to be bound.
51:40And that all becomes apparent in the use of the veil in the ancient Greek world.
51:47If the veil was a way of drawing a curtain on what the Greeks found viscerally upsetting,
51:52then it was Aristotle who provided the most destructive rationale for it.
51:56For, alongside the foundations of Western philosophy, he developed deeply incorrect ideas about the female body,
52:04that would be just as influential.
52:09Now, he thought of women as being something different. He didn't see them as a different species.
52:13No, they're a sub-male. That's right, exactly.
52:16So, basically, they are imperfect men.
52:19They haven't quite reached perfection yet, because they haven't had semen to create what is the essence of man.
52:27And that is really the most influential thought to be garnished in the Greek world,
52:34which goes down into the classical Arabic traditions, and consequently then into Christian and medieval traditions as well.
52:41But this link also seems to be a justification for the idea that women are incapable of reason.
52:47Yes, absolutely. So, men, in the Greek world, are naturally sophroson,
52:51which means they have limits, they know their rationalities, they know their agenda.
52:56Women have no such thing, and therefore they have to be controlled by men all the time.
53:00And it's a justification for domestic violence, too. They must be chastised. It's the only instruction they know.
53:04Yes. It all plays on the idea of the honour-shame nexus is so important for them.
53:11The honour of a household is located within the body of the female.
53:16And so, any transgression on the part of that female, speaking out too loudly in public, laughing too much,
53:22obviously exposing the body in any way, is a transgression of that honour of the household,
53:29and therefore is directed onto the men of that household.
53:32If this is one of the least acknowledged legacies the Greeks have given the world,
53:42the segregation of women from civic life was not universally practised.
53:47These glorious portraits date from Roman Egypt in the 1st century AD,
53:53a period of great cultural crossover between the two empires that were open and outward-looking.
53:59Brimming with personality, they are evidence of women's social and legal emancipation in imperial Rome.
54:11They are a world away from the veiled women of ancient Greece.
54:15This has such a flesh-and-blood feel. She is unveiled, sensuous, confident.
54:24What they tell us is that even if early Rome absorbed Greek ideals of female virtue,
54:30the more it grew into an imperial power, the more it looked to other civilisations like ancient Egypt,
54:38whose ideas of citizenship had always included women.
54:41And in this world, which had emerged in parallel to the civilisations of Mesopotamia and their starkly gendered law codes,
54:52the legal status of women was almost identical to that of men.
54:56As seen in its art, replete with couples lovingly holding hands, even wearing the same clothes,
55:06ancient Egypt embraced both the masculine and the feminine.
55:10A shared life, rather than reproduction, was the purpose of marriage.
55:15And women were allowed considerable autonomy over their own lives.
55:18It meant that when all the planets aligned, women could, on occasion, rule.
55:29The greatest of Egypt's six known ruling queens was Hapshetzot.
55:34She came to power in the 15th century BC as the regent for her stepson, Thutmus III, who was just a baby.
55:41But it was how she ruled for over two decades that demonstrates her genius for government.
55:46Hapshetzot appropriated for herself the religious symbols of kingship.
55:52Famously, her statues depict her wearing the divine pharaonic beard.
55:57But just as important was how she concentrated on what Egypt did best, building and trade.
56:03She organised the largest ever trade mission in her country's history to the land of Punt.
56:09Her legacy was peace and prosperity.
56:12But even in Egypt, there's a sting in the tail.
56:17We don't know why, but after her death, the next pharaoh literally defaced Hapshetzot from the public record.
56:25In a sense, she represents the fate of so many women, not just in the ancient world, but throughout all of history.
56:32The story of civilisation has largely been written as the triumph of humanity.
56:41And it has given us extraordinary advances, codes of law and commerce, science and art.
56:47But if the story of women is put back into history, the uncomfortable truth is that its benefits have been ambiguous.
56:58For I believe that part of what it meant to be civilised also meant the regulation and control of women,
57:05which varied according to the worlds in which they lived.
57:09Looking at the variety of women's experiences in the ancient world, from restrictive Assyria to tolerant Egypt,
57:16from the equality of the nomads to the nadir of ancient Greece,
57:20it's clear why the history of women has never been a simple story of darkness to light.
57:25Civilisation and patriarchy went together hand in hand, but it wasn't a fixed relationship.
57:32There were powerful women in the ancient world who had a voice and an impact on their societies.
57:38But it also bequeathed, particularly the Greeks, deeply pejorative notions about the nature of women,
57:44about their sexuality, their reason and their capabilities that survive to this day.
57:49One set of rules was established for men and another for women,
57:53denying them their autonomy over their bodies, their agency over their actions and their authority over their decisions.
58:01And that same inequality would determine the shape of women's lives in the next Asian chapter of the history of women.
58:23A face of the history of women and theoka and theandrage.
58:24A world of black and women, the psychology of yoga,
58:26And that same power and women were determined to the size of women's lives in the next year in the past.
58:30And that same change, they were too vague and uncomfortable to the battlefield as a woman.
58:33So I went home and I was going home and I was gone.
58:35And I was looking for a few to come.
58:38It's gone.
58:40The world of black and white and white,
58:44All right, it's gone.
58:46The world of black and white,
58:47There are more and white.
58:49I had a lot of black and white.
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