Bettany Hughes: The Aryans, Sappho, Socrates and Spartan Girls

Just finishing off a studio session because we're making a new documentary about the Aryan civilisation, trying to find out whether they existed or not, where their homeland was, what kind of language they spoke; and it has been one of the most exciting journeys I think I've ever made.

But why this is a particularly good time to be talking to you is this week I deliver my Socrates book which I've been working on for over 5 years. It has nearly killed me, I can tell you! He is an amazing man, with amazing ideas. He lived at the birth of all those great notions of democracy and liberty and freedom of speech. And yet he was poisoned by the Athenian state for speaking his mind freely. So he is a great character, but I have to say I'll be quite pleased to get the manuscript off my desk.

It's been a very, very busy few months. I've been in Siberia, in Kazakhstan. This is because we were trying to find, like I said, the roots of the Aryan culture. There are some incredible new excavations there – bronze age excavations. What's particularly fascinating about them is these pieces are covered with swastika imagery, so rather than just looking at them as an archaeologist, you have to think 'What is the Political implication of these places?' and certainly a lot of people – a lot of high up heads of states have gone to visit these digs, to try and see if they should associate themselves with these swastikas because this is probably where the Aryans, the original Aryans, lived and worked and worshipped and founded what is probably the basis of Western and Eastern civilisation.

I was there with chief archaeologist Professor Stanovich, and he drove me seven hours out into the step grasslands. I had no idea where we were going. And he took me to this amazing expanse of grass. You couldn't really tell there was anything special about it, and suddenly (He didn't speak any English but we communicated by sign language) he pointed at the ground and I realised I was walking across a buried city! Every now and again you suddenly notice these ghostly shapes in the grassland which were the shapes of fortresses and cattle sheds and homes and religious sites, and I would not have seen those had he not opened my eyes to what lay beneath my feet.

So it was very, very stimulating, intellectually very exciting. However, I'm vegetarian and the food was terrible! I was offered horsemeat sausages, I was offered pork for breakfast, I was offered bacon for lunch. There was really nothing, so the only thing I could eat was buckwheat, so I've lived for the last three weeks on a diet of pretty disgusting buckwheat soup, so that was a downside of this glorious search.

The Aryan programme will be coming out in September on BBC Radio 3, so check out all the websites and we'll give you the precise times there.

People always say to me 'Is there any particular time you would have liked to have lived?'. And I'm always torn, I have to say I'd be interested to spend one day as a Spartan girl, running all those amazing races that Spartan girls used to run. Oiling other Spartan girls with olive oil and doing exotic gymnastic contests, so that's one thing. Because if you know anything about Sparta, this was a place where women were really valued and a Spartan girl has an unusual degree of freedom, so they got the same rations as their brothers and boy cousins, they could drink wine, they could choose younger lovers if they wanted to, so it would be really interesting to just experience that for 24 hours.

The other place though, that I would love to visit would have been Lesbos at the time of poet Sappho. Even if you think you don't know Sappho's poetry, you probably do. She was one of the first people to describe love as 'bittersweet', although she actually called it 'sweet-bitter' which is probably more appropriate as it usually starts off good and ends up going rather bad. But she uses beautiful lines – she talks about her daughter as being like a golden flower. She describes the magic of the silvery moon, and she seems to have devoted her life to trying to articulate the incredible powerful, painful beautiful thing that is love. So to spend just an afternoon with Sappho would have been a real treat. Obviously I can't actually do that, so the second best thing is that I spent an afternoon in her company in a BBC radio studio, and made a program all about Sappho called “Sappho – The Great Life” which I think is going out on August 17th.

So one of the archaeologists I worked with was a Cossack and he told me that is was very, very important for Cossack men to be virile, to be muscular and it was very important that Cossack women should do nothing but produce children. So fascinated as I was by his world view, I think I'm never going to end up as a Cossack wife.