Prof. Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones: 'Locating the Women of Achaemenid Persia'

Women are notoriously difficult to find in the indigenous sources of Achaemenid Iran, but that is not to say that the iconography does not exist. Prof. Llewellyn-Jones highlights visual representations of women from across the Achaemenid empire and explores the diversity of female ‘types’ encountered in small-scale artworks like seal images, jewellery and textiles. He also considers how more recently Iranian artists, such as Hojat Shakiba, have projected an empowered image of Achaemenid women, which has contributed to a form of cultural myth-making about the freedom of women in the pre-Islamic past.