Story is conflict, and the conflicts I've chosen to to focus on are those that most illuminate the cultures and history of the Late Bronze Age. This is why I'm delving into the economics and politics, but also into class, gender, and ethnicity in Late Bronze Age Crete.
Of course, like everything else in the period, information about how they perceived ethnicity is scarce and contradictory. Yes, humans have always had clans and kinships, signs and shibboleths: ways to define "us" and "other," back to when the "other" was leaving their bones in the Neander Valley. The forms in which they appear, however; the kinds of difference people focus on, the meanings they ascribe to them, and the very language used is constantly evolving.
Take the term ethnos. Appears in Homer and Herodotus, but means anything from what we might call a "race" to describing an army group. Even in the words of a single author (well, however many Homers there actually were) the scope and implications in one passage are contradicted in another.
What doesn't seem to appear is anything mapping to what we'd now call "white." Which is a subset of the idea of race, itself created largely in the 18th century and refined into a rather peculiar (and peculiarly fluid) form today.
(Here's an example of the fluidity of that barrier between "us" and "them"; when the Japanese whipped Russian butt at the Yalu River it shocked the world that a "yellow" race had triumphed in modern warfare over a "white" race -- except that the Russians were promoted to "white" for the purpose of that illustration and were otherwise seen as some kind of suspiciously swarthy people from rather too far to the East. The same goal post shifting goes on today, with parts of the Arab world enlisted when it is necessary to talk about the great accomplishments of "white" people, but otherwise barred from the borders of the "civilized" world. And I'm going to run out of scare quotes before I finish this post!)
Because of course there's an ongoing dialog. What the Mycenae thought of the Hatti, or indeed of different, err, ethnos within Mainland Greece is one thing, but where we paint lines today is visible and important and hotly debated -- and not just at the attacking edge of the Alt-Right.
It's not just shrieking idiots from Stormfront, and it isn't just another face (as it were) of the white cis male as the null condition (an attitude skewered years ago by Simone de Beauvoir, writing that when women act like people, they are accused of acting like men). Simply put, there's nary a comment when Achilles is played by Brad Pitt, but a shitstorm when he's played by David Gyasi. And that's a problem for nuanced and historical presentation.
Yeah...Hollywood does seem to whitewash roles right and left, and when they don't, they go colorblind; substituting one tone deafness for another, and still failing to realize the variety of the real world. The point I'm trying to make is that the Classical Hero, like the Roman Soldier or the Medieval Knight, seems to default to square-jawed and melanin deficient and when they diverge, audiences complain.
(Yes, yes -- there is always nuance, there is always possible rejoinder. People did comment on the whitewashing, even in earlier years. They laughed at Tony Curtis as the most Brooklyn knight in armor ever, "Yonder is da castle of my fodder," and they laughed harder when the Duke assayed the Great Khan. The counterexamples do not invalidate the trend.)
This ongoing dialog goes into some very odd places. Take the perception of age-bleached and now unpainted marble of classical statuary as being the aesthetic pinnacle intended by the classical world (or, at least, achieved.) A surprising number of people object, and yes, on aesthetic grounds I agree that the full gaudy colors seem crass to me, too. I'm comfortable with the idea of seeing Apollo in naked stone, just as I'm comfortable in reading the Illiad in English -- or for that matter getting it in colloquial modern language from a skilled story-teller. But at the same time, let's accept that there was a different intent of the original artists.
In quite another direction, there's the Dorians. Those Zeus-struck Dorians. Yeah, yeah. Classical writers described the Greeks as having several clearly distinct lines, Doric and Ionic among them (like the styles of architecture.) They seemed to know who was who, which city was Dorian and which was Ionian or...whatever the others were. Apparently most agreed the Spartans were Doric...and, yeah, that leads to problems later on as Sparta had many later admirers.
The Mycenaea, or the Hellenes as Homer would have it, get identified in Homer as Achaeans, Danaans and Argives, but he lists Dorians as among the various people of the multi-lingual Crete of Odysseus' time. But you know how the guy was with telling stories (even Homer cops to it with his "mostly lies" throwaway).
And yeah you get into the Sea People and there's a suspicious similarity between some of these names and some of the names recorded by the Pharaohs who fought them.
Anyhow, there are these distinct dialects documented in the Classical Age, as well as other cultural differences. And there's the evolution of Greek culture from the warlords of the Mycenae to the full flowering of Classical Greece. And there's origin myths as well, with the Dorians sometimes conflated with the Return of the Heracli..anyhow, the Sons of Herakles. Among the many origins of various peoples which show up in the myths, dragon's teeth and old guys escaping from Troy included. But anyhow!
Thing is, most of the early work done by historians was textual. Even post Schliemann the text ruled. So during all the empire building of the 18th century academics are looking at all this Dorian stuff and trying to figure out how you get from loose cannons like Herakles to the Athenian Democracy, and they decided there was a Dorian Invasion. That idea simmered for a while until the next crop decided -- with no evidence at all -- that this civilizing influx could only have come from those academic's own homeland; Germany.
Hit the 1930's and that was a very popular idea indeed. At least in certain circles. But it stayed, lingering. And I won't disagree that there isn't an attraction to various Dorian theories, much as the timing invariably fails to work out (most intriguing I've seen is that Dorian maps to soldiers and workers and Ionian maps to the aristocracy, and the documented spread and retreat of the various dialects within the early classical Peloponnese is a class conflict.)
plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose; the idea of civilization arising from Northern Europe echoes the ideas that wandered their way through Theosophy and the Pulp Magazines before showing up today on Ancient Aliens and similar shows; a mysterious source of all civilization, somewhere under the waves as Atlantis or Mu or otherwise hidden enough to permit mainstream historians to cover up the painful truth. Even when Atlantis leaves the picture and something resembling real history is still being sourced you have pundits claiming that no "non-white" race (from one of those shithole nations, one presumes) ever contributed to modern civilization. The ideas drift free like a miasma even when clipped free of their origins.
Andrew Jackson used the Mound Builder myth (aka, that Pre-Columbian white races had originally inhabited the Americas) as excuse for relocation. Not that he needed an excuse -- many didn't -- but what's notable is how few people disagreed.
And as of this year we're still seeing the ridiculous Solutrean Hypothesis rolling along, to the extreme delight of those who want to keep believing some variation of the Mound Builder myth. Why worry about tribal concerns about Bear's Ears if the people running the coal interests were here first. Even if these putative Solutrean ancestors were about as European as Temujin.
On the flip side, listen to the roaring when a reconstruction of Cheddar Man is done using genetic markers that map in modern populations to some of the variability in skin color. This is the other part of the problem; on certain subjects (say, gender representation in video games) the crazies hijack the conversation. They swarm comments and threads, they have endless energy, and their disgusting language drives other people to seek something less annoying to do.
Right, yeah, let's talk about gender. The problems I'm facing there mostly aren't stirring up external hornets. Mostly. The Mycenaean empire was a lousy place to be a woman. Out of the major empires of the Late Bronze Age they had the worst record on rights, public participation, etc., etc.
Actually, your life probably sucked who ever you were. The nobility had a cushy life but this was a warrior culture; you fought from the front. Of course death in battle was celebrated so they didn't really consider getting a spear in the gut a downside. I guess. Or you could be a rich merchant, but that is ever a precarious existence, particularly as the warfare, raids and general tumult ends the era.
And of course, don't attract the attention of any gods. That never ends well.
Oddly enough, there were pretty good legal response to rape. It's all about consent...the problem being, of course, who gets to consent. Unlike cultures where the woman suffered worst in accusations of adultery, the Mycenae apparently (from my limited reading so far) considered a wife was unable to give consent to another man. So whether secret lover or rapist he gets his head cut off. Unfortunately that same consent works for slaves; the only way to rape a slave (in the eyes of the law) is to do so without permission of his or her owner.
Slavery was a part of the Aegean cultures well through the Roman Empire. It doesn't seem to have been a major part of Bronze Age economies but it is there and, as in Classical times, there are few that speak against it. And then you have war. The llliad is full of slave-taking. The inciting incident, the whole reason Achilles is sulking in his tent, has to do with slaves. In brutal specificity, about two young women kidnapped into sexual slavery to the Hellene warlords. And, yeah, between that, the sack of Troy, and the sacrifice of Iphigenia I'd as soon drop the whole lot of these "heroes" in the Aegean.
Anyhow. I can bend things a little in polyglot, Minoan-leaning Crete, so daily life isn't quite so dismal for my heroine. Thing is, especially when things get a little more violent, the sexual threat is there. I don't have to focus on it, but it is so much a part of that world it sort of breaks the immersion not to acknowledge it.
I've also started reading on gender fluidity and cross-dressing in the Ancient world. Mostly because the obvious ruse to take when traveling with mercenaries and pirates is to go Sweet Polly Oliver. That might help the character, though, but it doesn't help the story.
It's a strange place to be. I've uploaded so much that Mycenae is what I'm ready to write about. If I were to switch gears and write about 19th-century archaeology (which I'd really love to!) I'd be back to Step One on research. But I don't know if I actually like the place.
Maybe I just have to rent a bunch of peplum movies and get into the spirit of bronze armor glinting in the Mediterranean sun. I'm hoping my planned trip to Crete -- that is, me, physically, going to the modern nation -- will inspire me.
I don't think it is The Sea Peoples any longer. I'm not sure what part they will play in the story (much less what they are). I get tempted by titles like Out of a Wine-Dark Sea but that promises more nautical activity than might actually be there. Plus Troy. And then there's A Conspiracy in Their Islands but that sounds pretentious as well as confusing and obscure (it's a quote from the Medinet Habu inscription). In the Path of Ares or The Wrath of Poseidon and even The Apple of Discord are difficult because while the characters certainly act as if the gods are real, they won't (probably) be making an appearance in the story.
At this point the titles I'm closest to wedded to are the three books; Weaver of Fates, Thief of Time, and Slayer of Gods.
Why am I so hung up on titles? Like an outline, they shape the overall conception. And you need that kind of overall grasp in order to work on the damned thing.
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