No, not that Hermione

Week is done. Did a full day at work and made it through the performance Friday and now I can sleep. More-or-less. Actually, I made a mistake on the Holocron kit I shipped earlier in the week and need to ship out a missing part. And I didn't get as far on the big project at work as I was hoping, meaning I may need to do overtime on it next week (assuming the materials arrive....!)

The show is "Conference of the Birds," a new adaptation for the stage of the epic poem written by Attar of Nishapur some time in the 12th century. Some of the stories within the story are familiar; stories of Joseph and Moses.

Because that's one of the fascinating things about the Bronze Age. The myths and stories which form the foundations of so many cultures were taking shape in the Bronze Age. Sure, they borrow from earlier tales, all the way back to the Sumerians, and the latter parts of, say, the Bible are largely informed by the Roman times in which they were codified. But the setting for so much of it is the Bronze Age.

Take the Greeks. I'm simultaneously following a podcast of the Trojan War and reading a fictionalized account of Helen's daughter -- which is to say, a story of the aftermath of that war. And, yes, Homer or the Homers built the stories we know in the forms we know around the needs of people coming out of the Greek Dark Ages, but they are set in and assume traditions of the late Bronze Age.

The Greeks lack a holy book. Pantheists anyhow, with every city having its own local deities. The stories and legends still fulfill those twin roles of origin story and moral guidance -- and none more so than the Iliad. So powerful was the influence of this text it continued on as one of the foundation texts of the Western World at the dawn of the 20th century.

Heck, even the Egyptians got in on the fun. For various reasons papyrus copies of the Book of the Dead start showing up during the New Kingdom, and perhaps in part due to having an easier script to work with, many of the stories and myths as we know them today were getting written down in the Greek era.

The foundational myths for so many cultures, coming from the other side of the lacunae of the Greek Dark Ages. Strange to think on.