Art & Culture
‘A woman should cast off her shame together with her clothes’: What women in ancient times really thought about Relationships
A new book tells the history of the ancient world through women. Here author Daisy Dunn explores what they had to say about their own sexuality – flying in the face of misogynist male stereotypes.
According to Semonides of Amorgos, a male poet working in Greece in the 7th Century BC, there are 10 main kinds of women. There are women who are like pigs, because they prefer eating to cleaning; women who resemble foxes, as they are peculiarly observant; donkey-women, who are sexually promiscuous; dog-women, marked for their disobedience. There are stormy sea-women, greedy Earth-women, thieving weasel-women, lazy horse-women, unattractive ape-women, and – the one good kind – hard-working bee-women.
Of all the women described in this list, which pulsates with the misogyny of the time, those so-called sexually promiscuous “donkey-women” are perhaps the most mysterious.
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Historical accounts from the ancient world tend to reveal the cloistered nature of women’s lives. In Greece, women were usually veiled in public, and in Rome, they had “guardians” (ordinarily their father or husband) to supervise their movements and handling of property. Was the concept of the lusty woman pure male fantasy? Or were women of the ancient world more interested in sex than is generally believed?
As I learned while researching my new book The Missing Thread, the first history of the ancient world to be written through women, we have to look hard if we want to uncover what women really thought about sex.
So far were ancient women from flinching at the sight of erotica that some were even buried with it
The vast majority of the surviving sources were written by men who were prone to exaggerate women’s sexual habits in one direction or the other. Some went to such lengths to emphasise a woman’s virtue that they made her seem almost saintly and inhuman. Others purposely presented women as sexually voracious as a means of blackening their characters. If we took these descriptions at face value, we would come to the conclusion that women in the ancient world were either all chaste, or sex-mad. Fortunately, it is possible to peer into the hearts of some classical women, who provide a far deeper view of female sexuality.
Confessions of infatuation
Looking to the same period as the poet quoted above, we encounter Sappho, who composed lyric poetry on the Greek island of Lesbos in the 7th Century BC. Gazing at a woman sitting talking to a man, Sappho documented the intense physical sensations she experienced – fluttering heart, faltering speech, fire through the veins, temporary blindness, ringing ears, cold sweat, trembling, pallor – all of which are familiar to anyone who’s ever fallen in lust. In another poem, Sappho described garlanding a woman with flowers and reminisced wistfully about how, on a soft bed, she would “quench [her] desire”. These are the confessions of a woman who understands the irrepressibility of infatuation.
Sappho’s poems are so fragmentary today that it can be difficult to read them accurately, but scholars have detected in one of the papyri a reference to “dildos”, known in Greek as olisboi. These were employed in fertility rituals in Greece, as well as for pleasure, and feature as such on a number of vase paintings. Later in Rome, too, phallic objects had a talisman-like quality. It would not have made sense for women to shy away from symbols that were believed to bring good luck.
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So far were ancient women from flinching at the sight of erotica that some were even buried with it. In the period before Rome came to prominence, the highly skilled Etruscans dominated the Italian mainland and filled it with scenes of a romantic nature. Numerous works of art and pieces of tomb statuary depict men and women reclining together. An incense burner featuring men and women touching each other’s genitals was interred with an Etruscan woman in the 8th Century BC.
How prostitution was perceived
You only have to visit an ancient brothel, such as those of Pompeii, to see that sex was frequently on show. The walls of the dismal, cell-like rooms in which sex workers plied their trade are covered in graffiti, much of it written by male clients, who liked to comment on the performances of named women.
Historical accounts and speeches abound with descriptions of the hardships endured by such workers. Against Neaera, a prosecution speech delivered by Athenian politician Apollodorus in the 4th Century BC, provides particularly startling insight into the precariousness of these women’s lives. Just occasionally, however, we hear from a woman in touch with this world – and her words surprise.
In the 3rd Century BC, a female poet named Nossis living in the toe of Italy wrote in praise of an artwork and the fact that it was funded by a sex worker. A glorious statue of Aphrodite, goddess of sex and love, sung Nossis, had been erected in a temple using money raised by Polyarchis.
Polyarchis was not an anomaly. An earlier hetaera (courtesan or high-status sex worker) called Doricha used the money she had acquired similarly to purchase something for public view, in her case impressive spits for cooking oxen to be displayed at Delphi.
It was not sex these women embraced but rather the rare chance it afforded them to be remembered after they died. The vast majority of the women they knew were destined for anonymity.
Male writers’ insights
Male writers, for all their prejudices, can provide some of the most interesting insights into women and sex. In 411 BC, the comedian Aristophanes put on a play called Lysistrata, in which the women of Athens organise a sex strike in a bid to persuade their husbands to agree peace terms during the Peloponnesian War. This was a real conflict, waged between Athens and Sparta and their respective allies across three decades.
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Many of the women in the play are less than pleased at having to give up their pleasure. They are made to conform to the donkey-woman stereotype for comic effect. There is a moment, however, at which the play turns in a serious direction and Aristophanes offers a more convincing female viewpoint.
The title character Lysistrata, who organises the strike, describes what it is really like for women in wartime. Not only are they banned from the Assembly, in which the war is discussed, but they are repeatedly bereaved. And while such a protracted conflict is hell for married women, it is still worse for unmarried women, who are deprived of the chance to marry altogether.
It was quite usual among the upper classes for marriages to be arranged – and a woman’s first experience of sex could be disorientating
While the men, Lysistrata points out, may return home from war grey-haired and still marry, the same does not hold true for virgins, many of whom will be deemed too old to wed and procreate. These lines convey the difference between the male and the female experience of war so accurately that it is tempting to believe that they reflect what women of the day were really saying.
We may find real women’s fears surrounding sex expressed in Greek tragedy too. Sophocles, the playwright most famous for Oedipus Rex, had a female character in his lost play Tereus describe what it is like to go from being a virgin to a wife. “And this, as soon as one night has yoked us,” utters Procne, a mythical queen, “we must commend and deem to be quite lovely”.
It was quite usual among the upper classes for marriages to be arranged. A woman’s first experience of sex could be as disorientating as Procne described.
Ancient sex tips
Women sometimes committed such thoughts to papyrus. In a letter attributed to her, Theano, a Greek female philosopher in the circle of Pythagoras (some say she was his wife), offers her friend Eurydice some timeless advice. A woman, she writes, should cast off her shame together with her clothes when she enters her husband’s bed. She can put both back on together as soon as she has stood up again.
Theano’s letter has come under scrutiny and may not be authentic. Nevertheless, it closely echoes what many women have said to each other in more modern times, and its advice seems to have been followed by women in the ancient world as well.
British Museum
A certain Greek poet, Elephantis, was allegedly so keen to give women sex tips that she wrote her own short books on the topic. There is sadly no sign of her work today, but it is mentioned by both the Roman poet Martial and the Roman biographer and archivist Suetonius, who claimed that Emperor Tiberius (notorious for his sexual appetites) owned copies.
Where other women are quoted in other men’s writings, they tend to express themselves in terms of love as opposed to sex explicitly, which marks them out from some of their male contemporaries, including Martial and Catullus.
Lesbia, the pseudonymous lover of Catullus, tells him that “What a lady says to her lover in the moment / Ought to be written on the wind and running water”. The phrase “pillow talk” comes to mind.
Sulpicia, one of the few Roman poetesses whose verses survive, describes her misery at being in the countryside away from her lover Cerinthus on her birthday – and then her relief that she can be in Rome after all.
These women did not need to describe sex with their beloved in crude detail to reveal what they really thought of it. Men may dominate the sources but women, as Aphrodite well knew, could be every bit as passionate when the curtains were closed.
The Missing Thread: A New History of the Ancient World Through the Women Who Shaped It by Daisy Dunn has just been published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in the UK and will be published by Viking in the US on 30 July.
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Beautiful, surreal and eerily empty, Vienna’s Globe Museum the only public museum on Earth dedicated to globes, and it – quite literally – tells the story of our world.
It’s a chilly afternoon in Vienna, and the line for the Austrian National Library has already spilled out the door, curling like a ribbon around the grand Josefsplatz square. I’m not in the mood to wait – I’ve already struck out at several crowded nearby attractions where timed-entry tickets were sold out.
Rather than join the queue, I walk down the street and stumble onto a smaller, somewhat hidden site: The Globe Museum. Tucked inside Vienna’s 17th-Century Palais Mollard, it’s the only public museum on Earth dedicated entirely to globes, and one of Vienna’s greatest surprises.
Different worlds
I soon realise that I’ve wandered into another world – or more accurately, many of them.
Just steps from some of the city’s most celebrated, crowded attractions, Vienna’s Globe Museum displays more than 220 rare and antique spheres, most created before 1850, ranging from towering Coronelli globes to tiny, foldable pocket orbs.
Beautiful and surreal, the museum’s extensive collection goes beyond geography to reveal how humanity has mapped and imagined the Earth and heavens above. It’s a chronicle of human curiosity, and – quite literally – the story of our world.
“Globes show the change in our imagination of our planet,” says Nikolaus Schobesberger, the director of museum. “And this is the only place in the world where you can see so many of them at the same time.”
Visitors start by travelling through the Golden Cabinet, a lavish room with centuries-old frescoes depicting scenes from Greek mythology. It’s the backdrop for a stunning array of globe-related instruments, like telluriums, which illustrate the Earth’s orbit around the Sun, and armillary spheres, which use a framework of rings to visualise the movements of celestial bodies.
As I reach the museum’s four main galleries, I realise the whole place is pin-drop quiet. I shuffle slowly from one glass case to another, holding my breath to not disturb the stillness, even though I’m alone with centuries-old objects.
I find myself marvelling at two spherical worlds suspended in time. One is terrestrial, with oceans awash in vivid blues and squiggly brown coastlines. The other is celestial, where mythological creatures and constellations spill across a tea stain-coloured backdrop. Barely bigger than beach balls, these two time capsules were made by the same craftsman 10 years apart in the mid-1500s and preserve a world as it was still coming into focus.
In one, Europe, the Mediterranean and Africa’s coasts are filled with place names, while North America fades into the uncharted Arctic. Asia is distorted, a hypothetical southern continent stands in for Australia and Antarctica and the Pacific is populated by sea monsters instead of islands. In the other, Renaissance astrological observations exist alongside Pegasus taking flight and Perseus brandishing Medusa’s severed head.
“They’re some of the oldest globes we have in our collection,” says Schobesberger.
Moving from one globe to the next, I notice how these relics extend beyond geography and depict what people once believed. Many fill the space of unexplored oceans with dragons, while some confidently depict my home state of California as an island. Some pieces also preserve colonial-era prejudices with elaborately painted scenes depicting Indigenous people as cannibals. On one, African coastlines are dotted with Spanish and Portuguese flags, showing “ownership”.
“They’re a part of this colonial thinking. And so, they’re beautiful art, but you also have to think about the time they were created,” Schobesberger says, explaining that every globe is as much a record of what people knew as what they didn’t. That’s why he believes the museum resonates with all types of people, not just historians or cartography enthusiasts.
One of Schobesberger’s favourite objects is a lunar globe from 1961. The front portion of the Moon is meticulously mapped. The back, however, is a stark white strip, intentionally left blank because the far side of the Moon had not yet been seen. An updated lunar globe made two years later, also on display, contains the missing portion.
I can’t help but circle back to a showstopper in the front hall, a replica of the Behaim Globe – completed by Martin Behaim in 1492, the year Christopher Columbus sailed west – which shows a world without the Americas. There’s simply an expanse of ocean between Europe and Asia.
“A globe is such a great thing because it’s a small-scale model of our planet, so you can tell stories about the world on it,” he says. “Climate, geology, topography, trade routes, everything.”
From curios to cultural cornerstones
Walking through the museum, visitors can see the globe’s own journey unfold. The earliest examples were luxury objects reserved for aristocrats and wealthy merchants. Over time, globes lost their exclusivity, shrunk in size and became more affordable and popular. They entered schools, appeared in living rooms and even became playthings for children. Today, they are so commonplace that my son even won his desktop globe in a classroom raffle.
I entered the museum expecting to view globes as historic artefacts, but I’m surprised by how alive they still feel. Even with Google Earth at my fingertips, these tactile objects invite curiosity and imagination in a way that a screen doesn’t.
“It’s not just that the globe is a scientific instrument. It’s also an object which lets you dream of foreign countries,” says Schobesberger.
Globes in pop culture
Beginning 24 September 2026, the museum’s newest exhibition, Globes in Everyday Life, Art and Culture, will explore how globes evolved from a status symbol to a familiar fixture. It also showcases the globe’s enduring place in pop culture, from architecture to art and film, like Charlie Chaplin’s famous dance with an inflatable globe in The Great Dictator. “The main idea was to show that globes are almost everywhere as a part of everyday life,” Schobesberger says.
Schobesberger’s own fascination began as a young child, when he became captivated by the ships, sea monsters and mythical creatures that filled the blank spaces of historical maps and globes. He began to draw his own world maps when he was just six years old.
“You can think about what’s possible on the other side of the world, even when you’re sitting here in Europe,” he says. “Nothing else can capture the imagination quite like it.”
That sentiment resonates with author JF Penn, who stumbled onto the Globe Museum while researching her novel Spear of Destiny, based on a relic housed in Vienna’s Imperial Treasury. Like me, she ended up lingering far longer than planned.
“I particularly loved the oversized antique globes with the patina of age and use,” she says. “I considered how many fingertips have turned them over generations and wondered if they thought of travelling to these far-off places that I do.”
Even after visitors leave Palais Mollard, the search continues. Across Vienna, some 50 globes are perched on rooftops and facades, hidden in plain sight. The museum even charts them on a virtual map in its new exhibit, encouraging people to look upward as they wander the city.
When I finally step back outside, the sky is dark and the streets are even more crowded. Earlier in the day, I had been seeking a quieter corner of Vienna. Instead, I was given a whole new way of seeing the world – a place that’s constantly being redrawn and reimagined.
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This news is taken from BBC News
BISHKEK: The city of Lahore has been named the Tourism and Cultural Capital for 2026-27 by the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO).
The decision was announced at the 26th meeting of the SCO Council of Heads of State in the Kyrgyz capital, which was attended by PM Shehbaz Sharif.
The title of Tourism and Cultural Capital has been rotated annually among SCO member states since 2022, and the designation serves to highlight the prominence of a city that embodies the cultural heritage of the country that takes over the rotating presidency of the organisation.
This year, Pakistan assumed the SCO presidency, with PM Shehbaz defining the theme of the chairmanship as ‘Turning Vision into Action: Connectivity, Innovation and Shared Prosperity’.
Cities that have held the title in the past include Varanasi, India (2022-23), Almaty, Kazakhstan (2023-24), Qingdao, China (2024-25) and Cholpon-Ata, Kyrgyzstan (2025-26).
The decision to designate Lahore as the tourism and cultural capital was taken in April this year, when the heads of tourism administrations of SCO member states met in Bishkek.
The designation is designed to promote people-to-people contacts and tourism among the member states.
Published in Dawn, September 2nd, 2026
Art & Culture
Deputy High Commissioner Haseeb Bin Aziz Inaugurates “Masters of Canvas” Art Exhibition at Pakistan High Commission London
PRESS RELEASE
London, UK — Deputy High Commissioner of Pakistan, Mr. Haseeb Bin Aziz, inaugurated the prestigious art exhibition “Masters of Canvas” at the Pakistan High Commission in London, celebrating the exceptional talent, diversity and enduring legacy of Pakistan’s distinguished artists.
The exhibition brings together the works of renowned senior Pakistani artists and calligraphers Late Ahmed Khan, Late Mashkoor Raza, M.A. Bukhari, Chitra Pritam and Qamar Siddiqui, offering audiences in the United Kingdom a rare opportunity to experience original works of Pakistani art.
Speaking at the inauguration, Deputy High Commissioner Haseeb Bin Aziz paid tribute to the distinguished artists, appreciating their remarkable contributions to Pakistan’s artistic and cultural heritage. He also commended the efforts of Art Culture Pakistan and Crescent Art Gallery, Karachi, for bringing the work of these celebrated artists to the United Kingdom and providing an important platform for Pakistani art and culture to reach international audiences.
The exhibition is proudly presented by Art Culture Pakistan, an initiative founded by Mr. Akber Mehmood, in collaboration with Crescent Art Gallery, Karachi, founded by Mr. Nasir Javed, together with Mr. Sameer Nasir and curator Ms. Sidra Nasir. Through their continued commitment to the promotion of Pakistani art and culture, the organisations have worked to introduce outstanding Pakistani artists to audiences across Pakistan and internationally.
Addressing the gathering, Mr. Sameer Nasir of Crescent Art Gallery encouraged members of the audience to actively participate in and support cultural events of this nature. He emphasised that growing public interest in Pakistani art and culture can help create greater opportunities for cultural exchange and contribute to strengthening Pakistan’s soft image in the United Kingdom and beyond.
Mr. Asif Rangoonwala of the British Pakistan Foundation also congratulated the organisers for bringing such a prestigious selection of Pakistani artists to London. He described the exhibition as a rare cultural occasion, highlighting the significance of presenting original artworks from Pakistan to London audiences after a considerable period. He encouraged attendees to value and support such unique opportunities to engage directly with Pakistan’s rich artistic heritage.
The event also featured a special video presentation titled “Masters of Canvas,” presented by Mr. Akber Mehmood of Art Culture Pakistan. The presentation introduced the featured artists, showcasing their artworks and highlighting the distinctive genres and artistic approaches that have shaped their careers.
“To conclude the event, exquisite calligraphic masterpieces by the venerable maestro M.A. Bukhari were presented on behalf of Art Culture Pakistan to Deputy High Commissioner Haseeb bin Aziz, British Pakistani Foundation CEO Asif Rangoonwala, and Press Attaché Mr Ali Nawaz Malik.”
The museum charting how humans understand the world
Sexual crimes against women, kids: 80pc of offenders are people known to victims, says Punjab IGP
Shanghai Cooperation Organisation names Lahore as its ‘Tourism and Cultural capital’
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