Launching History Sibyl

In this podcast series, we’ll talk about global women’s history from all kinds of angles, the known and the unknown, and illuminate the invisible. It will offer commentary on interpretation of archaeology and history, the politics of culture, and that includes the nature of our sources, the information available to us, and how we can see the world through new and old eyes. Here’s the first podcast, an introduction and overview of some of the subjects we’ll cover.

Today’s image illustrates the provisional nature of the information available to us, or to put it another way, the obscuration from our view of archaeological finds that are important for women’s history. This petroglyph from the Kom Ombo basin, north of the Aswan dam in Nubia, shows many women in invocatory postures. It is part of a larger predynastic picture, which depicts the invoking women in stone engravings, in painted pottery, and in ceramic figurines. More examples can be viewed in this  series of web pages. It includes an invoking figure of indeterminate gender in a riverboat, and this scene turns out to be the right side of the same panel shown here. This is how it goes: it can take years for more shoes to drop, for more images to come out from behind the veils of indifference and neglect, or sometimes active denial, so that we can look at them and get a more expansive view of ancient culture.