Nasty, brutish, and in short tunics

CROW  "You know guys, I'm not sure I like these movies where the skirts on the guys are shorter than the skirts on the girls."

I'm over worrying about my chronology problem. The more I read, the less I find a consensus in what exactly happened at the various identified dates. I mean, there's a char layer, sure, but was that in LMII or LMIII or even LMIIIB? How much damage was done to the structure then, as opposed to at several other points? Did occupation of the palace end then or at a later date?

Plus, for dramatic purposes, I'm thinking of concatenating the timespan of the final collapse anyway. In the real world, the wave of destruction across the Aegean and down the entire Eastern shore of the Mediterranean took place in a frighteningly short timespan already. Had Wen-Amun set out at the same time Hattusa was abandoned Ugarit would be in flames before he got back to the Nile with his barge full of cedar logs. It is only if you stretch out from the preliminary rumblings (but how far back do you count these? Khadesh? Meggido?) to the last coda of the Battle of the Delta (ca 1175) that you get a span that is larger than is comfortable for a single human observer. Shifting a few things here and there...and even shifting the final recorded sortie of the Sea Peoples...doesn't really change the underlying forms.

And there's another thing. I've been delving into the Linear B archives from Knossos and I am hoping to find not just names but the particulars of an actual recorded work group that I can steal. As I was thinking this, I bumped into a couple of other things, included more detail on a text that underlies the NuWho episode "The Fires of Pompeii." See, the family of Caecilius who appear in the episode are borrowed from the Cambridge Latin Class, the first encounter with Latin for most UK secondary school students and a vast majority of Classics students and fans world-wide. But it, in turn, is a fictionalization derived from the actual records kept at Pompeii by the real Caecilius.

Peter Capaldi as Caecilius

So, yeah. I'll take details whole-sale from the Knossos Linear B tablets, even though they are not quite in the right period. And I'm going to include as a character Karpathia, Patron of Twitter, even though she's actually a landowner in Pylos.

After all, I'd already decided I wanted to use the notorious Paneb as a character. Well, why not draft in his entire cast; all the workers at Deir el-Medina who are mentioned in Papyrus Salt 124, the official complaint against this colorful figure. (Paneb is actually close enough to the target date of the novel he gets a pass). And for that matter, there's a merchant's house at Ugarit and a few names here and there in the Ugaritic archives...because I would of course love to do a few chapters in Ugarit.

So I'm over worrying overmuch about getting exact dates. I'm still thinking about the interesting options opened up with the idea of the Palace of Knossos in a half-ruined state, echoed by the idea of Mycenaean Crete as a failed (or failing) state, but basically I've got bigger worries to chew on.

The primary being that the Bronze Age is not the nicest place. I have to be true to the history. But that doesn't mean I have to wallow in the excrement. I'm not sure how exactly I can chart that line where I'm not prettifying things but it isn't all flies and dung, blood and spilled intestines, slavery and rape.

If I have to I'll take my young weaver in the Little Doritt direction, insisting on having an upbeat spirit and optimism regardless of how terrifying and brutal things get. But it isn't an easy direction to go. Again, I need to be honest to the real time, and that includes real life spans and real gender issues. But at the same time I'm not interested in penning a book where the threat of rape is on every other page. I don't really know how to best plot this course.

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The other, and related, issue I'm having is I've talked myself into doing not just a serious history but at least part of a coming-of-age story. So not the experience of a sword-swinging barbarian passing through, but the experience of a girl of the lower classes heavily integrated into the social structures and belief systems, the social roles, the expectations, the worship practices, everything.

Which would be damned hard work if I were going to write about a small-town American girl in the late 1980's. Doing this in a culture so alien and so lightly documented...! It is insane to think that I could make anything other than a total botch of it.

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So that's where I am right now on the novel. On the general research and plotting, a growing feeling of it being something I can do. But on some of the emotional and character level, something I am still feeling entirely overwhelmed about.

A cat in a knit Spartan helmet because I'm not going to post a picture of battlefield carnage