84 Quotes by Bettany Hughes

Religion is an easy target for accusations of repression and misogyny, but achievement in the sacred and therefore socio-political sphere was often an option for women, thanks not to brawn, but to brain.

Even the picturesque prehistoric settlements at Akrotiri on the Greek island of Santorini were an exercise in problem-solving; white-washed homes and town halls built with an anti-earthquake technology still employed today, 3,500 years on.

Once universities, rather than religious orders, were established as the key repositories of learning, women would find it ever harder to prove the pen as mighty as the sword.

Ancient Egyptian women had rights under the law. They could own land. Many were literate.

Buttressed by an acceptance of female wisdom in the sacred sphere from the beginnings of organised religion 12,000 years ago to late antiquity and beyond, key women used wit and the power of the word to change the world around them.

When you look at Istanbul, from Byzantium to the present day, it's striking how it has always been a city of the people, with a political voice, right from its early classical history.

History was invented as a tool, an engineered road down which human society could advance.

Venus, ancient goddess of love and beauty, is an apparently irrelevant, invented deity of the long dead. But Venus merits scrutiny. Chart her life story across 5,000 years and you chart the evolution of our conflicted relationship with sex and with the female body.

Maybe it is not just social history - the belt buckles and soup ladles - that connects us to the past, but a grander idea, an idea that shared memory is essential to being human.