“The moral and physical suffering, the shame, the desire to die, that chaos in my mind when I returned along the path to my house to collapse onto a bed like a dying animal. I am able to tell Nareem what I couldn’t possibly tell my mother or my sisters, because all I have ever learned since a tiny child, has been—silence.”

Guilty by Association

As long as there have been war, pestilence, natural disasters, or great building projects: temples, great walls, canals, or pyramids—women have lost their men. In some villages in which hundreds of men went to work and did not return, hundreds of widows remained. Theirs was a great loss, for in ancient times in China and in Greece women had no public face. Forbidden to leave the house without a guardian, the widow was unable to work—sell her produce, handiwork, or service to earn a living to feed her children. Without the freedom to work the field, negotiate sales in the market––selling the animals she tended or the food she raised––a widow could not make a living.

So, you survived the plague! Yes, if you had COVID-19, you recovered. And if you have not had it, your immunity is working. People in the ancient world had little hope of survival. Since time began, the world has suffered disasters causing chaos, disruption of daily life, pain, and death. In ancient times, earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic eruption were backyard occurrences. Plague wiped out large percentages of entire populations. No one was safe from the ravages of war or the terrifying invasions of marauding nomads. There were no pharmacies, only singular individuals who tried every herb and root––even dung––to cure the unfortunate victims of Nature. People prayed to the gods of Water, Wind, and Fire to give them succor, for it was humans who had obviously ignored the worship of the gods, seeking their own goals and  pursuing their selfish pleasures. Blaming themselves for foreign invasion, the Hebrews accepted personal consequences of the Assyrian invasions and displacement of their people to Babylon because they said they had ignored Yahweh’s Laws.

How long does traditional tribal thinking permeate the Middle East and other parts of the world? And why do Muslims cling to tribal tradition and claim that Allah commands the veil when the Quran only instructs women and men to dress modestly? Why has the instruction become so exacerbated as to demean women?

In the earliest times, circa 2000 BCE, the Assyrian kings gathered beautiful women from their conquests and sequestered them in harems. The Egyptians, Ottomans, Mughals, and Chinese also treasured their harems, private pleasure property of the monarch. The harem was the exclusive residence for the king’s pleasure. To assure that wishful observers did not taint the women, the inmates were covered so that “none could wish to know them.” They were indeed locked in a “gilded cage”––that wasn’t always effective––even trusted eunuchs found a way to inveigle neglected harem women.

With the successful takeover of Afghans by the Taliban, girls and women are forced to resume their lives under ancient tradition––removal of their very identity under cover of the burka.

Back to Burkas, Rape, and Child Brides 

In addition to ever-evolving plague, another world-wide tragedy has occurred in our lifetime. Because of poor planning, poor timing, American citizens and native interpreters have been left stranded in the wake of the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan. Desperate to get out, scores of people clung to departing aircraft, dropping to their deaths as the planes took off. Thousands more have been told to “shelter in place until …”––until what? There was no immediate plan in place to rescue them.

October 6. 2021

Much has happened since I began research on the Power Women series in 1993.  So many interesting books to read, so many histories to scour for hints and glimpses of women who lived, participated, and thrived in ancient times. Books I. Realities, and II, Expressions, along with Book III, Egypt, are complete and edited, waiting to find a publisher. Book IV, China, is still in progress, and Book V, Japan, is ready for editing.

Encapsulated below are contents of Books I––V.

Book I  REALITIES:  Women’s Lives in Antiquity: Survival, Status, and Success

Enheduanna was not the only Conqueror’s daughter to represent him in his absence. In the Third Intermediate Period, Libyans and Nubians who at last had their revenge for centuries of conflict ruled Egypt, 1065-525 BCE. Daughters, nieces, or sisters of conquerors held a secondary office for women in the Temple of Amun at Karnak in Egypt. The office was designed to assist the pharaoh’s rule in what might be the longest chain of cities in the world––Egypt. They ruled Thebes as their pharaoh brothers were busy at war. Care to guess why the rulers would choose their daughters instead of their sons to share rule?

In the 5 ^th millennium BCE, from Sumer, one of the world’s earliest, most creative civilizations, sprang spiritual and cultural achievements. Among their many “firsts,” they established the first cities, schools, bicameral Congress, tax reduction, irrigation and agricultural techniques. Sumer was cradle of the first writing; moral ideals, proverbs, sayings, hymns and elegies; the first historian; love song; sex symbolism; cosmology; a book of healing; and the first Farmer’s Almanac. When the Babylonians—followed by the vicious Assyrians—conquered, they overcame the lands and people and spread Sumer’s great achievements to the world.

Try as they might, misogynists have, since ancient times, tried to tame the dragon, the monstrous female serpent, forcing it into submission and euphemism. However, what they have really accomplished is to drive it underground to its cave, where it growls, and gnaws, and grinds its teeth in the heart and collective memory of every woman. When it has the least opportunity, it leaps like lightning, lashing its armored tail upon the solid ground of betrayal and abuse, and unleashes its fiery fury on all the minions of the collective Xerxes’s, Jasons, Agamemnons, and Philips of the world.

Imagine that you were born a woman two thousand, three thousand, or even five thousand years ago. Transport yourself through the haze of the millennia, and the experience of the ages, to a life very different from your expectations of the twenty-first century.

Let us pretend that as a girl of marriageable age—thirteen or fourteen—you were given away to a man of thirty or older; to live in his house under his rules with no rights, respect, or consideration from the husband or his family, whom you were expected to serve the rest of your life.