apes ingentes Hannibalis ad Romam ibant.

I keep reading, and I keep discovering random stuff there's no way I'll ever find again. Not when I want it, that is.

We've actually got the name of a pet cat from 3,000 years ago. It was Egyptian and named "Nedjem" (the hieroglyph nDm translates as "sweet, pleasing," so the cat's name was literally "Sweetie.") Mostly cats got called "miu" or "miut" which is an obvious onomatopoeia. And little Egyptian girls were often called "ta-miu" which I'm just gonna have to paraphrase as "kitten." It makes me think of the Japanese equivalent to "doggie," which is "wan-wan-chan"; two onomatopoetic barks and a diminutive.

But I can't let go of cats without mentioning Mike the Museum Cat, stand-offish guardian of the British Museum and so famed he got two write-ups in the Times and an official biography from E. A. Wallis Budge.




So back to Atlantis. I'm letting the Late Bronze Age novel simmer while I read Barbara Olsen's Women in Mycenaean Greece, a comprehensive work on the lives of Mycenaean women via exhaustive analysis of the Linear B texts.

I'm starting a Scrivener folder on this and I'm naming it "George Smith reads Plato." Although George is a little early for it; the period I want to set it in could be from 1860 to 1950 but for various reasons the first decade of the 20th century seems the best fit.

I want to write about the real people, and the real discoveries, but play them larger than life, and bring in more of the outsiders, the Gertrude Bells, the un-named Kurdish boy who scaled the Behistun Inscription for Sir Henry, etc. This is an Atlantis that could not have existed in our world, and as it comes into theirs the divergence becomes sharper, until people are moving well beyond their historical roles and accomplishments. The real Howard Carter once made a midnight rappel into a group of tomb robbers. This one should get at least a full gunfight.

And I want to follow the same patterns of historical discovery. That so much was gotten wrong, through the filters of cultural and religious preconceptions; Schliemann announcing proudly he has looked upon the face of Agamemnon, George Smith getting excited when he recognizes the Flood story in an earlier myth. And that for every Howard Carter digging out in the desert, there were a dozen men digging into papers at the British Museum, struggling to crack ancient languages and to find the world they expected to find in ancient texts.

I don't know what it is that Atlantis means or had or is, but it is important not just as a way of looking at the world and their place in it. A technology, perhaps. Even a threat. I could go a lot of different directions here, from something potentially useful to the war effort (something that gets Evans crawling back into the dig at Knossos in the middle of the war, say) Or go in more of a horror direction, with an ancient threat unleashed...or it is already rising and only the ancient knowledge can stop it.

I really don't know. But my final thought is that I'd like it to be funny. Not comedy, not even light-hearted, but to have some of the wonderful moments that happened in our world...like the moment George Smith started to strip in the reading room of the British Museum.