The Third Cretan Lie

I stumbled across a reference to Eteocretan writings being in the collections unearthed at Ugarit. That makes it contemporary with the period of the novel.

Odysseus -- engaged in a lie about his true origins at the time -- describes Crete in the famous phrase "An island in the midst of the wine-dark sea." He specifically describes a confusion of tongues, and goes on to list; "Achaeans, hearty Eteocretans, Cydenonians, Dorians of waving plumes**, and goodly Pelasgians."

The question still remains how the elite of the period of the novel came to power, and how other Cretans look at them. The archaeological data is sparse. Cities were burned -- probably -- between the collapse of the Minoan culture and the Mycenaea-sizing of the island (changes in pottery styles, in urban design, in writing system). The great "palace" of Knossos wasn't destroyed, and doesn't seem to have been radically altered as it continued in use through the next couple centuries.

Basically, it's the same problem we have in Anatolia and the Levant; did the new Aegean cultural attributes come over with invaders, or with refugees who streamed in after the dust had settled? And was there really large-scale sacking and burning? There were earthquakes. There may have been revolt. And as one writer puts it, it may not be as easy as we think it is to tell one carbon layer from another -- maybe they were just having a lot of barbecues that year.

So I can spin it all the way from easily identified mainland invaders who speak a different language from the people my protagonist Kes grew up around, and who are still looked on with great resentment by the majority population. Or the other extreme, that this is just "Crete," a melting pot society, their continuing Mediterranean trade now aided by new technologies, immigrant bookkeepers, new faces around the market but as far as the people on the ground are concerned it is still the same kingdom.

The one thing I can be sure of is, no matter what the "real" story, there will be people and groups putting their own spin on it to advance their own purposes. It could be the softest transition of power that ever happened in the Bronze Age World (well...there's a low bar!) and there would still be young hungry demagogs talking about foreign rulers came to the throne in blood, the mailed fist in the mailed glove and all that.

And make no mistake; whatever may have happened in the past, part of my thesis (borrowed from various historians) is that the Bronze Age aristocracy has become dangerously and unsustainably despotic and decadent. So whether, in the confusing way Bronze Age cultures looked at ethnos, these are "foreign" or merely "aristocracy," they are certainly despots. And not in the friendly Greek City-State original meaning of the word, either.




So here's where I am with Troy now. I think Wilusa is the first domino to fall (well, not really the first domino. But to muddy metaphors a little, the first big one.) I'm thinking about Menelaus and his adventures in Egypt (depending on the source, as with anything involving the Trojan War), Odysseus' wandering and Agamemnon's less than happy homecoming: pretty much all the warlords who had been in the Troad returned to chaos at home (if they returned at all).

And before that you have Achilles raiding up and down the Anatolian coast, Odysseus also spent time in Egypt both raiding against them and working for them*, and even Herakles got his hand in taking a Troy of an earlier decade (presumably before Poseidon built those walls).

Basically, the Trojan War looks like the Bronze Age Collapse. This is disintegration of the social order, mass warfare and displacement, on an accelerating curve. And that's how I want to use it. With my Athenian character being at least close enough to those topless towers to have to fight his way down the coast to (dubious) safety afterwards.

One other thing I'm sure of. I don't want any names. Not even (as tempting as it might be) transliterations via Linear B to some weird early-Greek approximation. The only exceptions I can think of are Alexandros and Priam himself, because forms of those names show up in actual period inscriptions. That also goes for using any name that figures prominently in the Illiad. I just don't want the reader to be making too many connections that may not be supported by the text.



*A paper I'm reading now -- expanded into a recent book I've also got my eyes on despite the $80 price tag -- argues that the Wiley One's adventures in Egypt strongly parallel the Sherden experience there. Who were part of the first coalition of "Sea Peoples" who were turned back by Merneptah, and then later hired by him as mercenaries.

** A lot of people in the Bronze Age liked a horse-hair crest on their helmets, but something about this phrase really makes me think of those strange frond-hatted peoples depicted among the Sea Peoples on the Medinet Habu inscriptions.***

*** And just to make things totally confusing, the Dorians may be linked with the Sons of Herakles who swarm over the Greek Mainland in the 800 BCE's spin on the putative Dorian Invasions. And linguistic evidence says that the Dorians...or, rather, the Dorian dialect which is identifiable and distinct from Ionian Greek during the Classical period...had to arise among a Greek-speaking peoples isolated long enough for the language to diverge. On, say.......an island like Crete.****

****Except that the Greeks wrote of the Dorians as sweeping down from the North, with limited penetration into the Southern tip. And then there's Athens, with claims to being Autochthonous that even other Greeks looked askance at. But then, why are you tracing ethnical patterns from descriptions made four hundred years later? Which is about the span of time between the fall of the Minoans and the date of the novel, note....