Women Forgotten by History

      



                Women Forgotten by History

       Rediscovering the Person Behind the Figure

     A personal reflection on memory, history, and theatre




1. Why These Women?


I am not a historian. I am an amateur with a deep love of history, and also a man whom certain traces of the past will not let sleep peacefully.

Sometimes I come across a name, a few lines impressed into clay, a letter, or a story handed down by ancient writers. And I find myself wondering what lay behind those traces: a face, a voice, a fear, a love, a moment of despair or courage.

History gives us facts, fragments of lives, and sometimes immense silences. Yet these fragments can touch us with a force that goes far beyond their apparent simplicity. They remind us that behind those names were human beings, with all their contradictions, hopes, and suffering.

This is where my work begins.

I am not attempting to write a historical treatise. I want to express history through the language of drama, to give theatrical form to what the traces of the past awaken in me.

I know that my perspective is personal. I do not claim to possess the truth about these women, nor to reconstruct their lives in their entirety. I try to look at them through my own sensibility, to ask myself what a human being might have felt under the circumstances that the surviving evidence allows us to glimpse.

I do not ask history to dictate a play to me. I ask it to give me a starting point from which I can search for the person.

In this spirit, I began working on a collection of short plays under a common title: Women Forgotten by History.

The cycle remains open. It does not claim to be a definitive catalogue of women erased, neglected, or caricatured by collective memory. It grew out of my encounters with particular figures from the past, and out of my desire to bring them into a space where they might speak again, act, and challenge us.



2. Enheduanna: From Clay to the Word


The World of Enheduanna is the cornerstone of this cycle, and by far its most developed part.

Enheduanna lived in Mesopotamia more than four thousand years ago. A high priestess and the author associated with hymns preserved under her name, she represents for me an extraordinary meeting between history and literature.

What moved me was not simply the antiquity of her writings. It was the act itself: a woman writes, addresses her words to the gods, and leaves her name attached to her work.

From that act, I began to imagine a consciousness.

I do not claim to have recovered Enheduanna’s historical personality in all its complexity. The Enheduanna I have created is my dramatic interpretation of what her act of writing allows me to glimpse. I have given her an inner life, conflicts, choices, and a vision of the world. I have shaped my character as a sculptor shapes a figure from material that existed before the sculptor’s hands touched it.

That freedom lies at the heart of the project.

In my world, Enheduanna becomes the starting point for a reflection on power and the Word, violence and creation, the fragility of life and the possibility of transmitting something beyond one’s own existence.

Her story led me to write the historical novella The Last Breath of Clay, followed by the two-act play Enheduanna — The Seal of Eternity, its condensed theatrical form Exile into Eternity, and seven further dramatic scenes exploring other aspects of the human, political, and spiritual conflicts within this world.

Yet the World of Enheduanna is not merely a work about a woman from antiquity. It has become the starting point for a much larger undertaking, in which the Word, memory, and transmission travel across the ages.

Enheduanna was my first encounter with a question that continues to haunt me: what remains of a human being when the centuries have erased almost everything except a few traces of their passage?



3. Taram-Kubi: When the Archives Find a Voice



With Taram-Kubi, we enter a different world, but the underlying question remains the same.

The archives of ancient Assyria, particularly those of K;ltepe-Kanesh, have preserved correspondence that offers glimpses into the lives of women involved in the family and commercial networks of the early second millennium BCE.

Taram-Kubi belongs to this documentary world. The surviving letters give us access to practical concerns, exchanges, and relationships, though only part of her world has come down to us.

I see in this another dramatic possibility: bringing onto the stage a woman whose life emerges through written documents, but whose inner world remains beyond our full knowledge.

I am currently working on a play devoted to her. I do not consider it finished. Before settling certain aspects of her portrayal, I want to deepen my understanding of the historical sources.

But some questions already accompany me. What does it mean to write to someone when distance, obligations, and time separate people? What can a letter contain beyond the words it explicitly states? What becomes of a voice when those who might once have understood it are no longer there?

I know that my answers will not be those of a historian. They will be those of a dramatist searching, through the surviving documents, for situations in which a human being might reveal herself.



4. Ku’;: What the Clay Cannot Tell Us



Ku’; brings us to one of the most painful areas of this cycle.

Documents from Emar, a city in the middle Euphrates valley at the end of the Bronze Age, record transactions that reach into the very heart of family life. Two documents concern Ku’;.

In one, she states that she gave up her daughter Ba’ala-bia to another woman so that she could feed her other young children during a year of famine.

Another document concerns Ku’; and her husband, Zadamma, who sell their four children for sixty shekels of silver. Among the children is a little girl, Ba’ala-ummi, who is still nursing. The contract refers to the children’s footprints being pressed into clay by their parents.

These documents are terrible precisely because they are so concrete. They tell us of a transaction, a sum of money, children, and a family driven into an extreme situation.

But what do we know about what Ku’; felt? What happened within her before the decision, at the moment of the transaction, and afterward?

I do not know.

Nor do I know whether she spoke to a scribe like the one I might bring into a play, or what words she might have used. If I give her a voice, imagine a meeting, a dialogue, or the moment when she finds herself alone in the street, all of that belongs to my imagination.

I do not present these scenes as historical facts. I begin with what the documents tell us and try to imagine what they do not allow us to know directly.

I ask myself what I might have felt in her place. How does a human being continue to live after such a decision? What does she see when she steps out into the street? How does she look at other people, at children, at houses, at a world that carries on as usual while her own world has just been shattered?

I cannot answer for Ku’;. But I can try to approach her anguish through theatre.

The footprints preserved in the clay acquire a particular force in my eyes. They do not reveal this mother’s thoughts. They do not tell us everything she experienced. Yet they make it almost impossible to regard the children as mere objects in a contract.

I do not seek to make the tablets speak in my place. I try to imagine what a human being might have experienced where the tablets fall silent.

Perhaps this is where I feel the need for my work most keenly. Not because I can restore Ku’;’s true voice — I cannot — but because I cannot remain indifferent to what her story allows us to glimpse.



5. Athens: The Women Behind the Stories


Leaving Mesopotamia, the cycle approaches ancient Athens. The setting changes, the sources change, and the difficulties of interpretation take on different forms.

Xanthippe is known chiefly through a tradition that often portrays her as a shrewish wife, at odds with the philosopher Socrates. But the ancient testimony concerning their private life is limited and reaches us through accounts whose literary purposes and perspectives must be taken into consideration.

I have written Socrates and Xanthippe, a short play in which I try to look differently at a woman too easily reduced to a single character trait. I am interested in what might unfold between two people when one has become, in the eyes of the world, a symbol of philosophy, while the other remains trapped within a reputation.

I do not claim to reconstruct their actual conversations. I want to explore a human relationship that the surviving accounts do not allow us to know in its entirety.

Aspasia draws me for a different reason. Associated with Pericles and present in the literary memory of Athens, she appears in sources that combine testimony, polemic, and representation. It is difficult to separate the historical woman entirely from the images constructed around her.

This is precisely the space in which I would like to work: not to replace the sources with my own certainties, but to imagine a woman whose intelligence and presence provoked discussion, even though we have no complete access to her personal experience.

Aspasia is a project still to be developed. I do not want to present an intention as a finished work, or turn hypotheses into established facts.

Agnodice presents yet another challenge. Her story, transmitted in particular by Hyginus, tells of a woman who is said to have practised medicine while disguised as a man and to have received the support of other women when she was accused. The historicity of this account remains uncertain.

What interests me in the tradition is the dramatic conflict it contains: access to knowledge, the right to practise a profession, the trust granted to a person, and the limits imposed by social conventions.

I do not claim to settle the historical question of whether she existed. I see in the story a theatrical possibility, provided that the power of a narrative is not confused with certainty about every event it recounts.

Diotima of Mantinea occupies a different position. We encounter her in Plato’s Symposium, where Socrates attributes to her a teaching about Eros. We cannot simply treat this literary portrait as a documented biography. Yet the place Plato gives her in a philosophical discussion raises a question that matters deeply to me: what part might women have played in the formation of thought, and what can we truly know about those whose presence has been transmitted to us through another person’s words?

I do not yet know what form this question will take within the cycle. I would rather leave the possibility open than force a play into existence before I have found its true dramatic centre.



6. Seven Plays, an Open Cycle


I envisage this cycle as a collection of seven short plays.

Seven plays do not necessarily mean seven women, one per work. Theatre is not built according to an administrative headcount. If a play calls for two women, if their destinies illuminate one another, or if their encounter reveals the conflict more clearly than I could otherwise convey it, I will be glad to give both of them a place.

What connects the plays, then, is not the number of characters but a shared purpose: to try to rediscover the person behind the figure handed down to us by the centuries.

The women in this cycle do not form a uniform category. A Mesopotamian priestess and author, a woman whose life emerges from commercial archives, a mother confronted with the sale of her children, a philosopher’s wife, a woman associated with the intellectual life of Athens, or a figure transmitted through a medical legend do not raise the same questions.

Their circumstances, their eras, and the sources through which we encounter them are different. That is precisely what interests me.

I do not want to impose a single answer upon them. I want each play to discover its own necessity, its own conflict, and its own way of making a voice heard.

The cycle will remain open to other figures, new discoveries, and different interpretations. It may evolve as my reading and writing continue. I do not pretend to know today what its final form will be.



7. Theatre: Where History Meets Imagination


I like the idea of these plays standing independently while also belonging to a larger whole.

I often think of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition: separate works, each with its own world, connected by a musical promenade that leads us from one to the next. This image helps me imagine a theatrical form in which each play could be performed on its own, yet acquire a different resonance when placed beside the others.

Music is not a model to be reproduced literally here. It is an analogy of structure: a sequence of encounters, contrasts, and echoes.

Theatre offers something distinctive. It allows a person from the past to stand before us, speak, fall silent, look at another human being, and make a decision in our presence.

We know that the words have been written by a contemporary author. We know that the gestures, encounters, and many of the situations are imagined. Yet if a scene is emotionally true, it can bring us closer to a question the centuries have left unresolved.

I do not confuse that emotion with historical evidence. I do not believe that a successful scene automatically tells us what really happened. But I believe it can help us grasp the human weight of an event, ask what we might have felt, what we might have done, and what we are capable of understanding about a life different from our own.

This is the encounter I am seeking.



8. My Freedom and My Responsibility


I know that my perspective is that of an amateur historian and a writer working with the means available to me. I have neither the training nor the pretension of a specialist. I also know that my interpretation can be discussed, challenged, and corrected.

I would even welcome such criticism when it helps improve the work.

If a reader wishes to verify a fact, explore a question in greater depth, or consult the work of historians, I can only encourage them to do so. Historical research is indispensable in establishing what the documents tell us, what remains uncertain, and what we simply do not know.

But I also want to preserve the dramatist’s right to imagine.

I do not ask my readers to accept my scenes as authentic testimony. I offer them an interpretation. The words I give Ku’;, the thoughts I imagine for Xanthippe, and the inner conflicts I create for my Enheduanna are not quotations recovered from the archives. They belong to my works.

I am not trying to rewrite the documents. I am trying to write human stories from them.

I do not believe artistic freedom means ignoring the facts. But neither do I believe theatre must stop every time a document falls silent.

Where the source ends, the dramatist may begin to imagine. The dramatist simply has to know that this is what they are doing.




9. Why Continue?


I have often asked myself why these stories affect me so deeply.

I think it is not only the injustice done to certain women by the stories passed down through time that troubles me. It is also the disproportion between a human life and what survives of it.

An entire life may have been lived, loved, feared, and fought through. And all that remains may be a name, a letter, a contract, or a few lines written in a language almost no one speaks any longer.

I cannot repair that loss. I cannot know what each of these women would have wanted to tell us. Nor can I claim to speak for them as though I had received a mission from them.

I can only try.

I would gladly have wished for someone better prepared, more experienced, or more talented to take on this work and give it a more accomplished form than I am capable of offering. But I would not want the silence surrounding these women to continue simply because I do not feel equal to the task.

So I write. I read, I search, I imagine, I begin again. And I leave the door open to those who may wish to contribute their knowledge, their perspective, their objections, or their own talent.

I do not own these women. I am not their only possible interpreter. I am a man deeply moved by certain traces of the past, trying to give them dramatic form.

If someone finds in this cycle a reason to discover ancient texts, read the work of scholars, reflect on a forgotten woman, or look differently at a figure they thought they knew, then perhaps the work will have achieved something beyond my own plays.

I do not know whether I will succeed in building everything I imagine. An architectural plan is not yet a building. The cycle is still taking shape, and some of its plays remain to be written.

But I would like it to remain a place where history, imagination, and human consciousness can meet.





                Conclusion




I keep returning to the same question: what do we do with what has come down to us from the past?

We can preserve documents, translate them, classify them, and study them. We must do so. But we can also allow ourselves to be touched by what they reveal, try to imagine the people behind their words, and give those people a place in our inner world.

This is what I am trying to do with Women Forgotten by History.

I do not ask anyone to confuse my characters with the historical people who inspired them. I do not ask anyone to mistake my imagination for evidence. I ask only that we accept the possibility that a dramatic work can bring us closer, in human terms, to an ancient story.

For I cannot give back to the centuries what they have erased. I can only try to ensure that what remains does not leave us indifferent.

When the centuries have spoken in a person’s place, can we still take the time to listen?



     Thomas DJERAK