The importance of images in ancient history

By Owain Williams

A few days ago, we posted an image of an Attic red-figure vase depicting a woman on a swing being pushed by another woman. This incredibly ordinary, relatable image of a woman from antiquity simply passing the time on a swing has really stuck in my mind. It reminds me that there is so much more to ancient history than we might think.

There has been a greater push to get a more well-rounded picture of ancient history, to turn our attention to less well-attested people, especially women and enslaved people. After all, our primary sources, especially the historical sources, tend to be concerned with politics and battles and the acts of powerful men (and a few powerful women). We, occasionally, get glimpses of the lives of marginalised groups in these sources, but not so often as to provide enough information for us to have any kind of significant understanding about them. Instead, we must turn to other sources.

Artefacts and inscriptions offer an alternative source of information about non-elite people. Yet to properly make sense of them, beyond what limited explicit information they contain, we still need literary sources to make sense of them. That said, since starting as editor of Ancient History, I have garnered a greater appreciation of such sources, as studying ancient history involves a lot of reading, and rarely the studying of objects, even if you read works on archaeology. Artefacts are just as important as literary sources.