The book several institutions would rather had not been written

Every institution that has owned the gate to the knowledge has a reason to wish these books had not been written.

The operation the trilogy traces is as old as time, it documents fifty centuries of records. Tiamat, Inanna and Marduk to touch on where the most recent split went: the young god slays the old mother of the waters, splits her, and builds the world from the halves — and the crown dates its legitimacy from the killing. Time-jump to (almost) present, and Jehanne, burned for her vision on pretence of putting men's clothes on. It works by not being named. Naming it is the undoing, and the records have to continue being set straight to account for delta of deviation and fog of smoke-and-mirrors.

Underneath it is an argument the reader will recognise: Greek and Roman hegemony is a colonial frame, and it erased the corridor's own knowledge. Every conqueror since has walked through a world already made and called it founding. This book argues that the imprint they left is what brought the civilisations down.

And it was never a war on women. It is a war on people who have it directly. Jehanne held a direct vision — and never surrendered. In the wilder steppes that never cower, Tomyris had Cyrus' head gulp the blood he was insatiable for, when he had come to marry the Queen, holding her offspring a hostage. Put a crown on the sieve and hand it the treasury of the world. Alexandria - Catherine and Hypatia. And a woman nineteen years into a research-funding body in the Sydney CBD, whose job is checking that the record is clean.

And Alexander the Great returns — as the man who has spent twenty years assembling the register of every woman who ever stood against a predator.

Christian, Muslim, Buddhist: the book does not spare whoever was holding the ledger. Challenges are welcome — the author puts her own tradition in the reckoning alongside everyone else's.