Kid Zeus

I think I'm there. I've enough idea of what is plausible in the politics and economy and so forth to get into the meat of the plotting. Which I want to have some good red blood in it; love, betrayal, sacrifice. Growing up, changing, making hard choices, having goals, changing goals, having failures, having victories. All the stuff that, basically, can (should?) be there whether the story takes place on Mycenaean Crete or on the Moon.

That's the stuff to work on now.

Not to say I'm not going to continue reading about politics and economy and material culture and religion and ethnicity and language and writing and....  And reading general, overview stuff, still. Later on is when I'll need to ask specific questions about the right ritual or the right cup.

I'm tempted to reverse myself again. Finding those little specific details is hard. Especially, finding the ones that are so particular and specific they give flavor and insight to a culture. But those details will only support your narrative if you keep the camera very close to street level. At any kind of story where your involvement is deeper than looking at the pretty scenery, you need to know how things work. And getting that sense may in fact be the more difficult task.

My sources on the Mycenaeans are still wonderfully contradictory. For every way of looking at the available evidence there's a cogent and well-argued paper against it. About the best I can say is that humans are complicated and so is history. What is likely true is that no simplification is quite right. The great hill complexes are palaces and administrative centers and temples. The feasts and other ceremonies are religious and secular.

And so forth. I was looking most recently at a paper drawing inferences from excavation of an impressive house outside the original city walls (aka the Lion Gate) of Mycenae itself. First off, it is very suggestive that massive building programs with a dramatically more organized pattern starts maybe a hundred years before the collapse. Which is close enough to both the first sightings of the Sea Peoples, the possible drought, and the earthquake storm that seems to have toppled walls across the Aegean.

There's suggestive changes in artistic styles and trade goods and grave goods that may point at a dramatically more centralized turn to things. Of course the overall pattern in many (but not even the majority!) of cities over this period is building of walls and the tucking of as much of the important population behind them. Followed by abandonment of city centers and retreat from the coasts. Depending on where you look, that is!

It all fits the fin de sicle...heck, the Weimar flavor I'm thinking of. The political elite ruling with an ever more stringent hand, organizing everything in a vain attempt to stem the tides as ecological stressors and outside raiders sweep towards them.

And...I don't know if I can use it, as I've pretty much fixed on a direct palatial workplace for my protagonist, but the suggestion of independent business people who come across more as traders and skilled craftsmen than as nobility who are earning a little side money, and who may be the inheritors of a full "House" system of previous eras...

But yeah the palace. The sources can't even decide on the economic basis. Or trade. I'm seeing it argued that a gift economy is the only functional long-distance trade. Or that such trade was small. There is a nice number; the amount of bronze recorded as being given (to workshops or as rewards...the records are not always clear which) from Pylos over an entire year is under a ton. You might look at the dozen-odd tons of ox-hide copper ingots on the Uluburun shipwreck as being bulk cargo, but do not mistake; these are luxury goods. Bronze is expensive. Only the heroes -- that is, kings and the sons of kings -- in Homer could afford bronze armor.

And more weirdness. The assortment of goods on the three Bronze Age wrecks we've recovered so far is rather too wide. Uluburun might make sense as a sort of Solar Queen (of the Andre Norton stories), trading one good for another as it wanders from port to port, but the smaller wrecks are too small for this to make sense. There had to be multiple hands, places where traders met other traders. And too many of the goods aren't really luxuries.

You can argue it is all kingly gifts, gifts in kind (as documented in various letters) but there's these weird little bits here and there, like a guy who brought Alum to Knossos and despite the records saying he was paid "wages" he walked off with fine cloth and even a little bronze. Well, yeah, there are records in the Hittite Empire of what are very much individual traders and craftsmen, pledging their own resources and pocketing their own profits. It can't be just elites trading gifts for political advantage.

And then there's the penetration. Pots from Greece make it to Anatolia but rarely into Egypt. What few clearly Aegean goods do show up in Egypt are grave goods of lesser nobility. Is it just Egyptian arrogance, that only local work was good enough for the Pharaohs? And where the heck is Punt, anyhow? (For every source that says Punt is now firmly located, another demurs). But are we looking in the wrong places if we just concentrate on luxury goods? I guess we have to, since tomb goods are what we can see now. If there was barley coming from Ugarit it got eaten long ago. We certainly know that cedar came in great abundance up the Nile....because you don't build massive boats with just reeds.

The seemingly sensible economic model is that the palace collected grain as tithe and used that as wages to pay skilled workers who created trade goods which could bring in luxuries (and political advantage) for the elite. But there are as many arguments against this scheme as there are supporting documents for it.

I've definitely rethought how I think of Mycenaean society. The Homeric model is a dark ages model; his prideful, martial kings come from the times the stories were being told, not from the time they are set in. Can you describe the LBA as a time dominated by warlords and conflict? Sure, but that's not the cities.

If for nothing else than the obsessive record-keeping in the Linear B tablets, I'd want to call the cities massive bureaucracies. But there's more. A stultifying sameness of cultural materials that can't be explained in terms of style or koine; the stacks of near-identical feasting ware produced at Petsas House by potters who could and did also make unique and artistic ware, by the large-scale re-arrangements of city walls and wells that could only happen with an imposed plan from above. And this isn't at all odd for post neolithic, early bronze age cultures; the mind immediately springs to examples in Mesoamerica, or closer to home, Hittite and Babylonian and, almost a crowning glory of the form, Egypt.

Not to say they didn't have kings. The Amarna letters (and Hittite and Ugaritic) capture correspondence written from one "Great King" to another (for many -- particularly for the Egyptian correspondents -- the Mycenae didn't make the grade). Treaties were written between kings, not between nations. But then, the idea of a nation was still developing. It is again possible to read too much into this; it could mean as little as scribes adding a king name the way I used to add the CO's signature block during my Radar O'Reilly days.

After all, for all that Ramesses II has carved that he personally raised a temple at Karnak, it is unlikely he got even as close to supervise a work gang. Or maybe not. Pharaohs did rule from the front during war. He probably didn't personally turn around the Battle of Kadesh by shooting a thousand chariots down with his own bow, but he most certainly was in the thick of the battle (even if it was the result of some really, really bad planning).

(One is tempted to throw religion into the mix, even more tempted to single the Pharaohs -- who as of the post Amarna period are finally using that name -- as explicitly divine. But no. Pharaoh was breathed the grace of Amun at conception but was at best a demi-god, divinity borrowed for his or her lifetime. Half the characters in Homer have a god on one side or the other of their family (even if the god was a giant swan at the time). And they, too, are given temporary mandates from the gods as well as various convoluted promises. And not a few prophesies, which even the gods feared.)

(So while there is evidence that something as simple as the weekly dinner put on for the hard workers at the palace -- this is a sheer estimate based on averages of grains collected and given as wages -- may have had religious trappings, it could defensibly be characterized as anything from a solemn religious ceremony in which miraculous food is made available from the very hands of the God-King to the way the bosses in Production will on random Fridays get pizzas for the whole floor.)

So what is happening in the LBA? Powerless kings at the heads of unwieldy bureaucracies beset by second sons and ambitious generals and angry peasants who have all started to go A Viking in the general collapse? Or are the kings a more intimate part of this, perhaps with more active, more martial ones swept in on a wave of blood? Or are we overstating the character of the mobilization, and this is more a drift of refugees than it is fleet of warships attacking the coasts?

Yeah, enough of the city. Let's go out to the mountains, like the closest and most famous Mountain Sanctuary (which may have been discontinued way back in Middle Minoan times and may or may not be distinct from Cave Sanctuaries) to Knossos. Which is also the birthplace of Zeus. Who may or may not be the same Zeus. And from the evidence, the people of the classical age may have been just as confused.

Gods merge and change anyhow. Athena is merely a local Potnia (which itself is more a title than a name) and there was no Aphrodite in the Mycenaean texts. So much for the Judgement of Paris. And there's at least one clearly Indo-European god still hanging on from his long journey out from...the Tigris and Euphrates, perhaps? And peoples. At the time Evans was painting his concrete columns a ponderous Victorian brown and refusing to lower himself to drinking locally-made wine there were recognizably ethnically distinct hill tribes on Crete. There's a dozen or so invasions to shake things up between the LBA and his time, though, so hardly seems worth it to investigate. Still, Homer does describe Crete as being a mix of languages...

Enough. It is time to sit my goat-girl down at a loom and start the plots moving around her.