Man Holding Two Giraffes

That's Gardiner A39, a less common alternative to A38, an ideogram pronounced "kis" or "ksi" and meaning "town."

I've been messing around with basic Egyptian Hieroglyphs. As I mentioned earlier, the protagonist of the Crete book has a vision of a carving she can't read (part of the funerary inscriptions of Rameses III at Medinet Habu, in fact). It works well for my plotting if a couple of names stand out, names she is able to duplicate in the weaving/embroidery of a decorative hem and thus attract the attention of an Egyptian scholar.

Work by the plastic modeler Philotep

So. One of the Sea Peoples is the Sherden or Shardana, given in Egyptian as s3rdn or srdn (there's supposed to be a diacritical above that "s" but I can't figure out the coding for it). I found a picture from Champollion's notebook in which he's scribbled a set of characters beside the sketch of one of the heads from the splash page of the Medinet Habu "Sea Peoples" wall. The Sherden are pretty distinctive, with horned helmets surmounted by some sort of disc or crest.

After an afternoon squinting at Champollion's scratch-marks I have some possibilities. Note there are about a thousand hieroglyphic characters; not all occur in the various available dictionaries. And I'm not far enough in my E. Wallis Budge to understand how to combine them properly. So, just assuming straight phonetic values, this is what I'm getting:

M8 "Pool with lilies" phonetic value s3 (the "3" here is an aleph).
G1 "vulture" phonetic value 3
Then a possibly combined character which seems to be D21 "mouth" (phonetic value r) but with the stroke meaning "read this as a logogram," above a character I can't make out (looks a bit like an arm but there are a lot of arms in Gardiner).
The next is also a combined character that seems to combine two vultures (Champollion is so sketchy it could be any of five different birds) and what is absolutely and clearly the red crown of lower Egypt; S3, with a simple phonetic value of n.
And then there's more, including what is either an owl or a Ba (a human-headed bird), a pair of reeds; (M7, when doubled has the phonetic value of y,) and some more sketchy stuff.

I'm a little further ahead on Sinuhe, which I stumbled upon in a dictionary that says it is a personal name, and is spelled pintail duck, reed shelter, loaf of bread, tree ....except there is a wavy line above one or two of those making a combined character I'm not sure of. And the stacked phonetics of what I've given above is S3htim3 -- not terribly close to SA-nht.

So, yeah. Not too good. The best I can say is if "Sherden" is what my Cretan weaver is seeing in her vision, there is at least one bird in it.

Wikimedia Commons

Ah, but the Sherden. I liked them because they have a deep history with the Egyptians. They attacked in the past, moving against Rameses II and Merneptah. They are described as excellent sailors and had been raiding the coasts of Egypt and one of the above Pharaohs got tired enough of their shit he hired them. Which didn't stop them from teaming up with the rest of the coalition for the big raid of 1177/1175.

They have been linked with Sardinia, although like all of the Sea Peoples this is primarily a linguistic link and doesn't indicate order; they could have come from there, or they could have settled there after being defeated by Egypt. One of the other Sea Peoples is the Peleset, who are generally accepted on linguistic and archaeological (aka pottery) grounds as being the Philistines. Interestingly enough, there are Jewish sources claiming the Philistines in turn first came from...Crete!

Which is an interesting connection to a couple of bits in The Odyssey; that Odysseus led a fleet of ships to raid up and down the Egyptian coast and eventually ended up hired by them, and that he made up an elaborate lie (duh...Odysseus!) about being from Crete (and in fact a grandson of Minos himself.) But the arguments I've seen link him to Sherden, not Peleset.

(And, yes, for every writer exploring this theory there is another with equally strong reasons to argue against it, and origins that are pretty much across the map.)

In any case this brings up a very interesting option for me. Which is that despite the basically peaceful relationship of Egypt and the Mycenae, that ships either exiled from Crete, working in secret from areas of Crete that are only loosely under control of the formal government, or in fact based openly and getting tacit support from the formal government are out raiding. More-or-less as mercenaries in the employ of the Egyptians, but also taking what they can (even from peoples the Egyptians would prefer they did not).

This colors the current government rather differently. I've really been playing around with the idea of a transition of style/power between local and mainland rule, native and imposed, and especially a sea change between the hyper-bureaucracy of the Linear B inscriptions and the toxic masculinity of the warlords described by Homer. Which aren't necessarily antithetical; there's a lot of ways both could exist at the same time. Still, there's archaeology (well, at Pylos and Mycenae and perhaps Cypress) that suggests change over the recent past to more centralization and more emphasis on defense.

And I like every way in which the elites at Knossos are not monolithic. Plus any excuse to have a bunch of important people surrounded by exceptionally well-armed men show up and throw everything into turmoil (in the later parts of the book).

(The more I think about it, a conflict between an elite growing fat on both the extended trading routes and the, shall we say, extra income from the raiders and the rather more militaristic commanders of said raiders has good story potential).

Odysseus, detail from an Alan Lee cover of the Rosemary Suttcliff book

Not really connected to that, I've been following a long series of related articles on Racism and the Middle Ages (part of a new wave of public medievalism that is reacting at least in part to what they see as conscription of their field for Alt-Right talking points). In any case, combining a bit about the spread of blood libel and the recent pizzagate escapade with a lovely depiction in Pratchett of a rather sad little conspiracy and I'm thinking of an underground temple (I'd call it a Mystery Cult but that's kind of been co-opted) that has constructed their own peculiar and nationalistic little set of beliefs.

(Basically etocretan/pelasgian who are nurturing an ethnic identity of being natural Cretan and non-mycenaean, and who are preserving -- more like reconstructing -- Minoan religious practices).

A cult that is largely powerless, isn't hiding anywhere as near as well as they think they are, and is indeed not a little bit sad and ludicrous. Until they attract official attention (possibly just because someone is under pressure and needs to show how tough and effective they are) and finds themselves being accused of dark and terrible rituals and being hunted down ruthlessly by the authorities.

(One possible way of combining them is if the cult embraces the Black Fleet as being both cultural and genetic heir to what they imagine as a powerful Minoan Thalassocracy, but when the winds change to a heightened and more direct control by the military -- even, the rawaketa or "Military Leader" that appears in Linear B inscriptions along with the wanax or "king" -- said military turns out to be less fond of the lower-class based etocretan movement than the etocretans are of them).