‘Penelope's Bones' Review: Queens of the Bronze Age

Wall Street Journal

13-06-2025

Novels that explore Greek mythology from the point of view of 'silenced' women now constitute their own popular genre: Madeline Miller's 'Circe' (2018), Natalie Haynes's 'A Thousand Ships' (2019) and Jennifer Saint's 'Atalanta' (2023), to name but a few. Emily Hauser, a lecturer in classics and ancient history at the University of Exeter, has also contributed to this trend, but her latest work, 'Penelope's Bones: A New History of Homer's World Through the Women Written Out of It' is something else altogether: a riveting narrative of the female figures of Homer's 'Iliad' and 'Odyssey' that draws on recent scholarship and archaeological discoveries.
The author explores the roles and personalities of Homer's characters—the Greek beauty Helen, the enslaved girl Briseis, the Trojan royal Hecuba, the witch Circe, Odysseus' patient wife, Penelope, and so on—by examining real women of the Bronze Age archaeological and historical record. The result is a close study of the epic poems, a meditation on the lives of women then and now, an engaging history of scholarship, and an overview of the archaeology of the Bronze Age Aegean and beyond. Written with a novelist's flare, 'Penelope's Bones,' with its linked chapters, makes for a surprising page-turner.
The bones of the title refer to the remains of a woman 'known to the researchers, somewhat unromantically, as I9033,' found in a royal burial site in the Peloponnese in Greece. Radiocarbon dating places the deceased at around the 14th century B.C., and she is buried with a queen's paraphernalia: 'gold leaf, beads of gold and semiprecious stones.' Ms. Hauser is not making the argument that this skeleton is actually the Penelope of the 'Odyssey' (her death, in any case, predates the traditional time of the Trojan War by a good century or two). The author is not, in other words, like the adventurer-cum-archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann (1822-90), who conducted excavations to prove the literal veracity of the epic poems. Rather, she is digging for the deeper truths in the poems, the real Bronze Age women affected by the violent deeds of men.
Many other Mycenaean palaces and burials of the Greek Bronze Age, as well as countless artifacts and skeletal remains, have come to light since Schliemann's time. Ms. Hauser has the benefit not only of archaeological hindsight but of advances in science such as DNA testing. During the 19th and 20th centuries, the assumptions of early (usually male) archaeologists skewed their readings of excavations.