Provenance, Provenience, Parthenon

Here’s the first image: troups of well-dressed Europeans climbing the maze of stairs, teetering on the artistically fragmented walls, admiring the Victorian brown collonades and the fashion-magazine stylish repainted frescoes.

Here’s the second image. A Turkish powder magazine explodes, delivering the final indignity to the creaking, discolored ruins of Athen’s heart.

Two different cities, two different monuments, two different sets of problems in archaeological restoration and the often complex relationship between a modern nation and their cultural heritage.

Knossos is terribly underfunded. It seems strange at first glance. Athens is scarred by their economic woes; abandoned buildings with gaping windows like rotting teeth in faces covered with graffiti, pavements scored with broken walks and open drains and drifts of garbage. By contrast Heraklion, (from the harbor at least), is clean and modern and wears proudly the remodeling for the 2004 Summer Olympics. Even the tourists look wealthier.

(The contrast is even stronger at Chania. This is basically a sea-side resort town. The history underfoot is barely remarked upon; in a long dockside strip of eateries and bars and trinket shops no signage showed and only a handful of people seemed to know there was a full replica Minoan sailing vessel on display nearby -- among the other archaeological and historical treasures.)

Work has all but stopped at the site of the Palace of Knossos. Down at the Heraklion Museum they speak proudly of the restoration efforts on their collection (which as with so many begins with removing the efforts of the previous generation). But at Knossos itself, the best description of the present efforts is stabilization. Keeping it from disintegrating further before the money for actual work flows in again.

The site is under-documented by the standards of the new Acropolis Museum. But there is some justification in calling that a special case. Knossos is layered, an archaeological palimpsest and a restoration bricolage, and that is part of the problem.

Cleverly, the Knossos signage cleaves to an essentially Sir Arthur Evans narrative. Although this is couched with qualifiers like, “Evans called this...” or even, “Evans mistakenly believed...” the singular narrative through-line is Knossos as Evans and his generation experienced it and understood it.

It could be argued that this is the best approach for most visitors. It is one step more honest than simply saying, “This is a Lustral Basin” but it doesn’t drag the visitor into the full depths of complexity and confusion.

In the States, the age at which a building can apply for protected landmark status is the ripe old age of fifty. Archaeology can be done — archaeology has been done — where some of the original participants are still alive.

So what is the best way to approach a palimpsest like, say, the Koules guarding the Heraklion harbor? Restore it to the Venetian fort that stood so long, or the Ottoman modifications when they finally took it and, too, produced a grim history in and around it? Restore whatever mute evidence the Second Wold War may have left, or restore it to the Byzantine walls? And do you keep the moule, or do you re-float the Venetian ships that made its foundation and make them your exhibit?

In short, one could almost defend presenting Knossos as the historical efforts of Sir Arthur Evans. But let’s contrast.

There was a Mycenaean complex (probably a fort) on the Acropolis and Cyclopian walls about the heights of The Rock. There were several generations of earlier temples. And there were later, largely civil uses of the centerpiece structure. But against all of this the Periclean Parthenon is both the architectural and artistic height of all the constructions that site has seen, and the symbolic centerpiece of the Athenian democracy and the Greek Classical world.

So it makes sense to restore towards this Ur-Acropolis. But unlike Knossos, where the multiple levels of occupation and (sometimes questionable!) “restoration” are ill-documented at the site, the Parthenon and particularly the new Acropolis Museum carefully and clearly indicate the layers of provenance involved.

(The Provenience of the parts of the Parthenon are, unlike in almost every other archaeological context, quite simple. At least, for the sculpted facade. In modern parlance, the provenience of an artifact is the exact find location. In this case, the sculptures started life on the building. And not in the British Museum, as the exhibits at the Acropolis Museum take pains to point out!)

At the site itself, every tiny fragment of column has been carefully measured and 3D modeled and the correct location determined in the world’s largest picture puzzle. Where the originals are unavailable (lost to time or to Lord Elgin’s luggage) replacements are provided in plaster cast and fresh white marble.

This allows for both appreciation of the total aesthetic — the building as it would have been — and understanding of what parts are historical and what parts (the shining white parts) are not. It is something that Knossos could have benefitted from, except there the story is far more complicated. How does one mark a Dolphin Fresco that Evans had on a wall and modern papers believe was more likely on the floor, and in any case is in the relative safety of a museum with only a replica on site?

The thing is, though, Evans was right. Not in his guesses, but science marches on. Not in his reconstruction efforts — which like earlier efforts at the Acropolis eventually damaged the stone — but, again, the science of restoration marches on. He was right in doing what he did at the time he did it. The site would be gone now, farmland or a condo, if he hadn’t made it something those Victorians could admire and paint and have their photographs taken on as they lined up in the long coats and top hats along some crumbling wall.

There is something to be said for the aesthetics of a ruin. But you get more public attention, more tourist dollars, more help in preservation, if you have something that looks more like a building. I am tempted to say Knossos doesn’t go far enough. There is a virtual replication in the cloud and a place in town where you can rent a tablet and a VR headset and walk around a fully-restored building, bull-leapers and all.

Imagine if something like that was available on site! I’ve seen this. In Berlin (at the grand Museum für Naturkunde) there is a paleontological exhibit where by standing behind a viewing class the dry bones can be clothed in muscle and skin and feathers and placed in their natural habitat. There is an effort somewhere that has a huge collection of those now stark white marble statues that with another press of a button clothes them with light, bringing back the colours of history.

(The new Acropolis Museum makes crafty compromise by displaying in air-conditioned safety the actual Kouros and Kore from the Parthenon but placing beside them small samples of contemporary reconstruction of the original paint job.)

Above all, however, both these places are symbols. Knossos is merely one photogenic touchstone (when taken from exactly the right angle and cropped ever so carefully; the Evans restorations are, when all is said and gone, pitifully small bits of wall and sequences of column). It stands along side of reproductions of the Dolphin Frescoes and Bull Leaper and Bull Rhyton and so on (which also are rather more Victorian restoration than original artifact).

(It is also informative that the “Mask of Agamemnon,” that in many circles is the emblematic and much-reproduced artifact of that peculiar juncture where the Classic and Homeric tradition meet the historical reality, is presented in Athens at the National Museum of Archaeology as just another shaft-grave death mask. But then, much as Knossos is a monument to Sir Arthur, the largest collection in Athens is assembled and presented as, "Here's what Schliemann dug up.")

The Minoans are today a way that Crete reinvents itself as something other than a backwater island in a nation with a broken economy. And of course a way to draw in the tourist dollar. Their imagery is everywhere (I say imagery because the actual artifacts are thin on the ground but reproductions are everywhere, from made-in-China caliber Phaistos Disk reproductions available at every other souvenir stand, to nicer hand-painted miniatures of the Prince of the Lilies, and — moving from not-so-sublime to worthy-of-ridicule — the Court Ladies fresco incorporated into the plastic banner on the Coke stands.)

But there’s no depth in it. No wearing of the mantle of the true progenitor of the Greek Miracle, or at least the past glory of a Minoan Thallasocracy. Now all there is, is the Minoan Bus-Ocracy (Minoan Lines, the most visible of the huge Bus Tour operations that plow through the place like Achilles and his ships on a “foraging” expedition against the defenseless villages of the Anatolian Coast. The tour buses are everywhere, the most visible part of a massive efficient machine that delivers door-to-door from airport to air-conditioned hotel to guided tour, and everything and everyone else must bend to accommodate them.)

It is simply presented as, “This is historical; look at it and be impressed.” The same can be said, alas, for the Cretan’s attempts to share their more recent cultural heritage with the world. “It is traditional,” they say, as if that is enough; no explanation, no context. I can stand on one foot and hum “Barnacle Bill” and call that traditional and it would be, if only for me. If they truly want people to engage with the historic folkcrafts or the nautical tradition or the terrible and inspiring stories of the Cretan Resistance, they need to provide more.

(At Arolithos Traditional Cretan Village they laud their open museum of “living history” displays. They even offer their vision of engagement; for ten Euros your kid can learn a Camp Runnamucka version of the mosaic work the Byzantines brought to such a high peak. But it stops there. One simplistic, one-way presentation. Don’t ask questions.)

What I’m saying is the curation is abysmal. There are few placards and those are uninformative, and to a man or woman the docents are both uniformed about the museum and its subjects and monumentally uninterested in either them or in the act of conversation itself. (Unfortunately this isn’t a peculiarity of museum staff. Shopkeepers also make you work for the privilege to give them your money.)

I do have to say that even the best of the Athenian museums also fall down a bit by world standards. There wasn’t a catalog number in sight. It was hard sometimes to even nail down era or collection. I’d be tempted to say this stems from the embarrassment of riches; the collections are so vast they can only present them in patterns, like “Pots that include an octopus in their decoration.” But that’s another discussion!

What really separates Athens in this sketch here is that the Parthenon is Athens. As Athena herself remains Athena Potnia, the patron saint and protector of the city. The Parthenon is not a place disconnected from current life, like the Palace of Knossos or even the Sinking of the “Elli”; it is effectively the Cathedral of the majority religion. (Not that is functional in any current rituals, or even connected to the professed and officially recognized faiths.)

And I have to stop here and say these aren’t unique issues.

Besides the radically different standards of different museums and monuments worldwide — no nation, no city is without fault — there are basic questions about preservation and accessibility that are not dissimilar to the problems a writer of history (or historical fiction) faces.

There are always market forces. What was important to Athens in the early twentieth century led to what the Parthenon is today. What was inspiring to the Victorians is — as had been the case many times in the past, from Napoleon back through to fifth Dynasty Egyptians — what led to the preservation of what we have today and the interest that raised generations of scholars who would go on to advance our current knowledge.

Monuments and museums have to chase the buck. They have to work within those blurry lines of dramatization and simplification. They have to speak to the viewer whether it is aesthetics or spiritual connection or lessons for the present or (the illusion of?) learning and/or self-actualisation. To do less is to lose the museum, the collection, the monument itself. Athens at least has state support for their grand symbol of the state, but even there money has to come in or the monument doesn't survive.

But beyond serving the needs of the archaeological and historical community, professional and amateur, the museum or monument should, I think, also serve the real needs of the public.

I would like to think the need of most of that public is the sense of transcendence of one’s own mortal lifespan; of being able to walk where the Poets had walked. Of having for a moment a grasp of the boundless. I’d prefer an interest in understanding a different people and different ways, if for no other reason because that helps us to lift our own blinders and for that moment see our own predictions and presumptions as if with alien eyes. But in any case it beats an interest in boasting rights (the selfie-taker infesting modern monuments would be utterly familiar in needs and process and rationale to the Victorians who went to Athens and Rome and, eventually, Crete.)

To speak to that majority audience you need to streamline. You may need to reconstruct or fill in (depending on the circumstance). You need in short to lie, to commit sins both of omission and confabulation.

But that still doesn’t keep me from wanting that other layer to be available. From wanting those access points, from catalog numbers to educated docents, that allow one to drill down beyond the repainted facade to something deeper. Instead my experience across Greece was one of active resistance.

There’s a whole other sideline here about folkloric crafts. There are thriving communities interested in, keeping alive, being inspired by, and otherwise practicing crafts from history or reconstructed from archaeology. It upset me that the points of access were almost nonexistent on Crete despite the several clever and fascinating folkways museums.

Take spinning and weaving. However. There was a small exhibit sponsored by some government agency trying to grow the market for Cretan silk that tried to produce a kit to let you try pulling silken threads from a cocoon yourself. Alas it was badly explained, poorly presented, and none of the exhibiters had any idea how it actually worked.

The one access I got is through something that is recognized as a living craft within a slightly different circle. Even though in large parts of Crete the part of the Cretan Lyre has been taken over by the more flexible and easier-to-obtain violin, there are people who sell and play and build and teach the lyre who are completely open and supportive to the idea of someone new learning the instrument.  I suspect (although I haven't the direct experience to prove) that cooking could, within limits, also benefit from coming from a different context that bypasses the blind uncomprehending, "But we have postcards for sale! What else do you want?"

And, yes, as someone fascinated by the practicalities of daily life artifacts, it is disheartening to find at even a good museum — one that recognizes and labels loom weights and spindle whorls — the distinctive and informative linen-spinner’s bowl is left unremarked among a class of general household pottery. Or that a set of actual surviving clay tuyeres is simply labeled “tuyeres,” losing that brazen opportunity to talk about the ingenious period smelting practices.

But this should be no surprise. When the sleek mechanism is designed to ferry the tourist as smoothly and quickly as possible through the monument and into the gift shop, the very concept of dialog is anathema. Only a passive audience can be processed with efficiency. And the shame is that the audience seems largely satisfied. Whatever experience they were seeking, they seem to have gained it somewhere between the massive bus that made sure Cretan soil never touched their pristine footwear, and the hotel amenities that made it as much as possible like any other large hotel anywhere in the world.

The visitor who wants, needs, and can accept more (I saw one visitor at the National in Athens who was getting an expert lecture from his friend, another visitor -- a man I am almost certain was Eric Cline himself!) is the outlier. They have to fend for themselves. The visitor who has moved even further from the mainstream, like the growing groups of historical and folkloric re-creationists, is even more left with no easy access to what they were hoping to find.

And there is no simple answer to this. It is not a fault, per se. Certainly not one of any agency. It is merely a function of how things work, how they -- apparently -- must work, but certainly how they have currently evolved.

And for all of that said....yes, the material is still there, and I got something worthwhile from it.

Sutton Hoo

Sometime in the 7th century an Anglian King was buried in his ship on the banks of a river in Suffolk, England. Most people will remember the Sutton Hoo helmet (which is on display at the British Museum.)

There were also sufficient fragments to reconstruct a lyre. Unlike the Greek Kithara with the separate crossbar this is a compact rectangular instrument that gives the appearance of being made from a single plank.

The historical playing style, as reconstructed by Master Dofinn-Hallr Morrisson, is that it is strummed with the right hand (plectrum or backstroke with the nails) whilst the support hand mutes selected strings autoharp style. It can also be plucked from the right hand, and a modern master has demonstrated drone plucking with the left thumb as well as pinch harmonics.

Acoustically, it is a cigar-box guitar without a fretboard. Which I expect would make it relatively robust to changes in dimension and shape. Most people who have made a Sutton Hoo-style lyre have modified them in various ways for ease of play and ease of construction. I borrowed several elements from other lyre builders for this my first build, relying largely on instructions made freely available by David Friedman/Cariadoc.

And, yes, I dream about grain-matched sapele and torrefied sitka spruce but I decided to make this a budget build; fast and cheap.



MATERIALS:

White Pine: a short plank of 1 x 12. The most common (and cheapest) lumber at any store.
Basswood (linden): an eighth-inch thick hobby board (8" x 24") from Orchard Supply Store.
Red Cedar: another OSH hobby board, quarter inch thick and 2" wide.
Brass rod: one eight inch, also from OSH's hobby supplies.
A pack of cheap acoustic guitar strings from Starving Musician.

Total materials about fifteen bucks. (Staining and finishing adds a bit, but the instrument plays fine without all that).


BODY:

First step was drawing out. I scaled Cariadoc's outer dimensions (8" x 30") to the wood I had, then after drawing it checked to make sure I could still get a hand inside. In case you are wondering, I went for 6" x 17", with 3/4" side rails (cut back to 1/2" inside the soundbox). That gives it roughly the scale length of a ukulele.

There's two basic ways to make the soundbox on this; either cut out a hole and cover front and back with solid pieces of wood (quarter inch for the back...and I'll discuss the soundboard soon enough). Or you can carve out the cavity. I chose to do it the quick and dirty way. The two long boards in the picture here are guides to keep the router from flying through the side walls should I slip.

(Later in the rout I added a top board and adjusted the plunge; otherwise the unsupported router can tip into the gap you are carving and ruin the piece.)

Three passes with the router, and a tiny bit of clean-up with a wood rasp, and the soundbox is made.

Next was cutting out the hand hole. Typical jigsaw work. (I'm spoiled; I also have bandsaw and scrollsaw available.)

After all the holes were done I used table saw and chopsaw to take the original plank down to dimension, bandsaw to rough out the ends, then bench sander to round things off properly. The interior cut, alas, had to be approached with hand rasp.

White pine is strong enough in these dimensions, especially for "gut" (nylon) stringing. The go-to wood is ash, although spruce, maple, cedar, yew and others are all nice alternatives. Plywood will work as well; again, this structure is under small enough stresses that regular plywood will handle it. It won't sound as good, of course, but it can sound good enough.


SOUNDBOARD:

Rough-cut the soundboard to slightly over the dimensions of the body, and pre-cut a sound hole. The Sutton Hoo lyres did not use a sound hole but several modern versions do.

I made mine an arbitrary size and position -- I went for roughly a third, as the third has magical properties in musical instruments (directly center you risk amplifying the primary resonance node of the body. And, yes, you can calculate the resonance frequency of the cavity. There's a simple formulae many luthiers use for sound hole size but it is based on an ideal Helmholtz resonator. Later papers show the critical factor is actually the length of the edge, not the area of the hole (which is why rosettes work, and why a violin has f-holes).

Basically, soundboard is like the head of a drum, and is where much of the volume is coming from. Cutting a hole allows the air inside the sound cavity to communicate with the outside, raising the volume but also changing the timbre (favoring the lower frequencies).

This is why you want a nice wood for the soundboard. Basswood is technically a hardwood and has been used for tonewood, but the best vote for it is that it is better than plywood.

There's an extra bit here. Pine and basswood are softer woods and might not support a tuning pin. As with other builders, I reinforced the crossbar with another wood (the red cedar). Routed down the thickness of the plank, stuck it in, glued down everything. I could have used more clamps.


TAILPIECE:

There are a number of different ways you can fasten the dead end of the strings. I followed another Sutton Hoo builder in carving a simple tailpiece out of red cedar. For simplicity in build I drove a dowel (actually, a piece cut off the end of a cheap foam brush) into the heel (where I'd intentionally made the wall a little thicker just for this. The tailpiece is fastened to this heel peg with a loop of steel wire.

The original tailpiece had this decorative hole. For strength I replaced it with a solid tailpiece. I've seen a bunch of different ways of tying on the strings but I haven't found one I like yet. Also, the test fit used leather laces. Those snapped. I tried a braided cord and that creeped. So now it is steel wire.

TUNING PINS:

The go-to for amateur luthiers is the zither pin; cheap, easy to install, holds well and doesn't take up a lot of space. It is what harps use, even the harp inside a piano. I was in a hurry and wanted to see if this could be done on a budget so I went for hand-fabricated brass.

Simple; cut out lengths of rod, pounded one end flat on the anvil, drilled a hole, the chucked it in a drill and "lathed" a rough point on the other end. Drilled a size too small and pounded them in with a block of wood.

BRIDGE

The bridge is also carved from that same budget-stretching chunk of red cedar.

Actually, three bridges. Basically, all sound comes from the vibrating string. But a string has a small cross-section. It moves very little air. To get a performance-level sound you need an impedance matcher. It's the same thing that causes a trumpet to have a bell. The soundboard provides the large area to shove air. The bridge acoustically couples the string to the soundboard.

And it is a dance. The violin bridge is thin and flexible because it is designed to steal the maximum energy from the string. A violin string is continuously energized and has very little sustain. Volume is a trade-off for sustain.

So my first bridge was too low. The second used a nut-and-saddle arrangement like a guitar bridge; the hard contact point steals less energy from the string meaning longer sustain but less volume. But that didn't sound good. So the final bridge was raw red cedar, and I'm shaving it down to be thinner and more responsive today.

Position is also critical. Unlike a guitar, I chose a captive bridge arrangement; it is held in place only by the tension of the strings.


STRINGING:

Yes, this is out of order. You don't need to stain and varnish your instrument in order to try playing it. Period instruments weren't. Well, not really (a little linseed oil at least).

For this build I put a knot in the end of each string and passed them through a hole in the tailpiece. Next build I'll try a bridge knot. Then wrapped around the tuning pin and through the hole. Get them all on and then stand up the bridge under them.

A nice benefit to the short scale length is I could get two courses from each guitar string. So this is strung with the top three strings of a nylon acoustic set; the G, the B, and the E (Gather Before Elrond).

The lyre is tuned diatonically, often omitting the second scale degree (aka for C Major you'd tune C, D, E, F, G, A) Also often inverted, starting on the third or fourth degree. I tuned mine to A Major, included the second, and since like all my examples it only has six strings that means I have no seventh.

Seven strings is better. Seven strings means you can play many melodies (just transpose down the octave) and you can "fret" all the triads of the major scale (with the appropriate inversions).


FINISHING:

This is more a "lessons learned" for me. It is really hard to tell when you've got the scratches out on softwoods. I sanded like heck, stained, and only then discovered a bunch more scratches. Sanded out the scratches, tried a different stain, and it made a lovely ancient-wood look but in the end I went for a darker serious instrument look. 

And really, I hurried too much. And no -- polyurethane is fast but it deadens the sound a little. Shellac next time.

Next time. Hardwoods, perhaps tuning pegs. Seven strings or better (historical depictions show a break around seven strings; either they have fewer and are played strum-and-block, or they have more and are played plucked like a harp, front-and-back-hand style). 

Rosette because why not (when I have a laser, after all). 

But, really, I've learned what I need from a Sutton Hoo. It is time to build a different lyre, or perhaps a proper harp...

Equipotential Point

On the good side, I'm largely finished with general research. On the bad side, I've barely started focused research.

Hopefully, if the outline holds together as I flesh it out, it will generate mostly specific questions. But, oh, so very many questions. I've been putting off worrying about stuff like what do people wear, what do people eat, because there are things I need to know that have a greater influence on my characters. Is Kes freeborn, a bondservant, a slave? I assume she's non-Greek but what does she think she is and how does that change her position in society? Is she a corvée worker who lives in a village when not called to the palace, or is she of an isolated group kept in a dormitory?*

I'm not to the point of describing pots yet. I'm watching the establishing shot come into focus. The palace...where I seem to be going is that the labyrinth (aka almost everything but the central court) was destroyed long ago, the Mycenae put up a few walls here and there (Evans tore most of these down, but at least he spared the griffons), but the Mycenae use it as an administrative center only. The royalty, whatever they are at Knossos, may be next door at the "Little Palace."

Phillip Boyes posted this wonderful LEGO Minoan Temple on his site Ancient Words

In an only slightly related question, I'm going to accept the isotope analysis of a sectioned stalactite that was done a few years back and say there was a previous drought -- this is the one that caused those, err, floods of letters back and forth between Ugarit and Hattusha and Egypt asking for grain to help their starving peoples. Then a period of recovery which very roughly corresponds with the cyclopean wall building in some of the Mycenaean cities. And then the real bad news; this is the year where the drought comes back, the drought the Navarino Environmental Observatory believes stretches a hundred years through the heart of the Greek Dark Ages.

And that cascades in a number of directions. The red tide is back in the picture (an invention of mine, totally unmentioned in any actual history). It is harbinger and what causes at least some of my cast to go into motion. Oh and yeah...if the Egyptian noble is going to be able to do half the things I want him to do, he has to be pretty awesome. Speak and write a dozen languages for a starter. Which means my etocretan weaver needs to step up her game, too, reaching that larger-than-life status of genre protagonists and other heroes before she leaves Crete.

And either that, or some other recent surfing through the blogs of Classics folks and ancient language nuts** and historical fiction writers has made me think that the Hittite Empire is not off the table. Nor is Cyprus, but boy is that place complicated. Even explaining the situation in Enkomi would be a massive info-dump. And I still need to leave room for some Sea People.

Frowsivitch, at DeviantArt.  I dunno which I like most; the authentic armor and helmets, or the cats fighting lobsters.

*I've got a book that may answer those questions, but it is seven hundred pages long and I'm only in the first chapters. On the plus side, I'm beginning to read (transliterated) Linear B. "pu-ro ri-ne-ja MU 9 ko-wo 3 ko-wa 3 TA" would be typical of a "PY Aa" series tablet, a documentation of personnel describing a work group of 9 adult women and 6 children of both sexes at Pylos or the Hither Provinces. 

(MU is the ideogram for "woman," named as are all Linear B ideograms in an abbreviation for a Latin descriptor. TA is an ideogram that is inferred in context to mean some sort of supervisor. Pu-ro is how you have to transliterate Pylos to get it into Linear B -- see why we hate the stuff?)

And as for "ri-ne-ja," Olson calls this "etymologically transparent," with that dry academic humor I'm getting so accustomed to. It means "Linen Workers"; from the Greek lineiai of course, plus the -ja worker suffix.

** I've found the blogs of two different people who do ancient scripts baked goods, like Phaistos Biscuits or cakes with cuneiform frosting decorations.

"Yes, wonderful things!"

So someone over at ApolloHoax* made an interesting suggestion.



Accept that Atlantis (or substitute the pseudo-historical claptrap of your choice) could only be real in an alternate universe. Set the story there, at the moment it becomes impossible to hide the difference.

See, there was a time when we believed the Greeks arose out of more-or-less thin air. Then Sir Arthur Evans uncovered the Minoans. There was a time the Hittites were a name from the Bible and represented a people from much further south -- not the powerful empire we now know them to be.

Now, sure, neither of these examples had science in advance of our own, or came from space, or even had magical powers. But from the point of view of the era that discovered them they are still pretty spectacular, surprising, paradigm-changing.

So set a story...heck, set a series...in that era where lost cities and forgotten peoples are still possible. Were still, in our universe, being discovered. An era that is already exciting with the real history of the excavations at Mycenae and Knossos and the opening of Tut's tomb, the cracking of Egyptian Hieroglyphics and Assyrian Cuneiform and ancient Babylonian.

And put in things that are just a little bigger and a little weirder than anything the real world threw up. And live with the consequences. Show the footprint anything resembling Atlantis would have left in the historic record. Show how electric lights in Luxor would have been archaeologically discernible, perhaps as early as by Napoleon's crew. And show how these discoveries change the world of the story, until by the second or third discovery you are clearly living in an alternate world.



(The biggest problem I have with this concept is most of the well-known ideas are such claptrap. They just don't work in any universe. Some of the older stuff -- your King Arthurs and Trojan Wars and so forth, are fine, although they tend a little too much towards gods and magic and those are just too damn game-changing. The latest crop are too tiny and disconnected; a single spark plug or whatever, hardly a fleshed-out culture or intriguing history to build on. And it still doesn't quite take away from the ethical problem. Sure, you could show all the ways in which if a Solutrean Migration was real, it would have a footprint and we'd all know about it. But you've still added detail and support to something some rather vile people want to believe in.)




 *It's not what you think it is. Or rather, it was but it isn't now. The site was started by someone who thought the Moon Landings were fake. He took a long deep look at the science and himself and changed his mind. Now it is a rather casual hang-out of space history buffs.

Plot Twist

So I went to TechShop -- sorry, "TheShop." (Idiots). And despite the calendar showing it was open, and even the tool reservation calendar showing tool reservations being made....it was actually closed. No, there wasn't any notice. Closest they came was a question asked by a member on the private Facebook group that was answered by another member.

Yeah, great communications. Why am I paying membership to these idiots?

Wasn't a total waste. I went over to MOMA and looked at art (I get in free all year -- more benefits of the full-time job).

Was kind of tired after closing night anyhow. Had a light go out. I have five front lights so I really, really needed it. Corroded socket of course, so all I could do is scratch out the worst of it with a nail file. On closing night the instrument dropped out right at the top of the show...fortunately it hangs right in front of the light booth so I was able to tap it back to life with a broomstick and then I spent the whole show carefully never turning it all the way off (because it would never turn back on).

So I still don't have anything I need at TheShop. But I'm eager to get checked off on the machines I've used in the past so when a future need comes I can go in and start bending metal. (Well, not bending metal...I didn't do the Safety and Basic Use classes on the brake and sheer yet).

What I have for the moment is random fun-to-do projects. Chief among which is making a mini loom. Honestly, for what I want in a loom I can tinker up something at my workplace. The only reason to do a laser-cut version is to, yes, get my permission in order for future lasering.

Could also cut some guitar picks, again just for the fun of it. Weaving tools gives me a few other excuses to unlock tools; 3d print a spindle whorl. Or even lathe one up on the wood lathe. Or could even CNC a spindle whorl out of aluminium but...

Oh, right. Haven't ordered the churro yet (did order some deerskin scraps and rawhide to make a tool roll for my traditional flint-knapping kit). Found a 1oz pack of wool roving in the embroidery supplies at my favorite local fabric store but my first attempt at hand spinning did not go swimmingly. Mocked up a quick drop-spindle from a bamboo chopstick and some red clay. Did eventually get a short two-ply that doesn't look horrible, but I went back another 2,000 years down the tech tree to create that one; I rolled it on my thigh.

Yeah, looms. Sure, I might make a ukulele strap with a tablet loom, but it is primarily for historical research. Even if I don't even know if my Cretan weaver is using a fixed heddle. Or any heddles. Certainly not tablets. Well, probably not. Remember what I said about adoption? It is a tech that is of limited use in that time and place, and I can defend that it might have arose here, been known to a few people but never documented or achieved any prominence.

As for prop projects: after I've gotten some cleaning done I'll dust off the Holocrons and see if anyone at the RPF still wants one. Unfortunately I haven't been able to think of anything that really leverages the kinds of equipment I have available at TheShop. There's always Aliens grenades, but they are a finicky machining project that takes way too long to be profitable. Or interesting.

Unfortunately top of my prop list right now seems to be re-doing the "Yamatai" necklace. This is actually a good lead-in project for the Wraith Stone as I intend to do the same sculpt-and-scan process to make a 3d file. Which I'll then have printed at Shapeways for the fine detail available there, clean up and hand-detail the print, then cast it in resin. Then make the 3d file publicly available.

References are of course poor. I'm almost tempted to play the game again to see if I can get a better screen shot. There are some visualization and promotional artworks, but they look rather different. In fact, there's almost reason to go with two necklace designs (at least in part because the artwork version has a clearer link to real existing traditions -- chiefly Maori -- and to my eye is a more pleasing design anyhow).

And actually, that might be a quick laser project too. Would make the sculpt easier if I created a flat "armature" out of some thin, stiff material like 1/16" acrylic...

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.

A couple of snakes

This is the sort of post that really should have footnotes. But this is my blog, not my book; I'd rather blather on in a stream-of-consciousness way, rarely slowing to even look up spelling.

Evans and Schliemann. It is odd how Evans gets more of a pass these days, considering how many deep similarities there really were between the two. It is sort of surprising these days when you run into a mention of Schliemann that takes him at face value; the "Discoverer of Troy" and all that. The guilding has rubbed off that one.

Both bought the land they excavated. Typical and accepted practice for the day. Schliemann does come off worse because he had an arrangement with the Turks to split the loot (non-western countries were catching up to the value, financial and nationalistic, in museum-worthy cultural artifacts) but he hid the good stuff and smuggled it out of the country anyhow.

Both essentially hired forgers, although Schliemann feels more underhanded about it (some people still think the "Mask of Agamemnon" is a modern forgery). Evans happily described his concrete-cast pillars and the frescoes painted by French artist friends of his with a term that hints the work is less "restoration" and more "recreation."

In the end, both came out of a specific cultural understanding of the cultures they unearthed, an understanding strongly colored by their own life stories, and both shaped not just how they interpreted the cultural materials they found but how they proceeded (in both cases, often destructively) in their investigations.

(Just to add to the problem of reconstructed "Minoan" palaces and repainted "Minoan" frescoes -- as none other than Evelyn Waugh put it, apparently the Minoans had a great fondness for the cover of Vogue -- another recent and exhaustive study of forgeries made for the antiquities trade found the vast majority of those so enigmatic and suggestive Snake Goddess figurines showed no sign of having ever been near Minoan hands.)




Two odd statuary tidbits. First is Venus figurines. Perfect name, really. It jumps right up and cuts off the instinct to view them according to modern standards of beauty and makes you consider that there are many plausible options as to how the culture that created them, saw them.

The name, alas, has two origins. The class artifact, the Venus of Willendorf, was named thus inspired by the appearance of Sara Baartman, a Khoikhoi woman who was exhibited on the London stage in the early 1800's under the name "The Hottentot Venus."

(After her death in essentially slavery she was dissected by Georges Cuvier...in that era's toxic atmosphere of scientific racism, and her corpse remained on exhibit until the 1970's. Her remains were finally repatriated to South Africa in 2002 and there was a nice ceremony to welcome her home.)




On a much brighter note, a recent anatomical reconstruction of the missing arms of the Venus de Milo suggests that she held a pose that would have been familiar to women of all classes from the Bronze Age out to Chaucer's time (where whilst spinning wheels were available, the distaff and drop-spindle were still in use).

She is, in short, spinning.

(Just a note for those not up on the social context. Spinning and weaving were necessary and time-consuming activities for pre-industrial societies but they were not class-restricted. One of the qualities of a well-bred woman of the nobility was weaving. Weaving finer clothes and more delicate patterns than the hoi polloi, of course, but still hand weaving. In Homer, Helen weaves. Penelope weaves -- and, as famously, unravels.)

The Great Filter

There was a guest post at the Scalzi-blog that got me thinking again about secret histories.

It is such a tempting idea for the fiction writer. Say, a young archaeology student turns over the wrong rock and becomes privy to a dangerous secret. They've discovered something huge and ancient and exciting that explains so many things that were previously mysterious -- but also puts them in the sights of powerful and dangerous forces. The ordinary world is cracked by an out-of-context problem, extraordinary threats coming out of the cracks to be met by previously unlikely (or at least uncalled-for) acts of daring and heroism.

You get the best of so many worlds. The fun of the spoof explanation ("See, the reason the Archduke was assassinated was actually...") and the ease of being able to use the ordinary modern world as a backdrop even as crazy erupts.

There are, however, problems.

One is that most extant pseudo-histories -- Atlantis, Chariots of the Gods, and basically the most common format of such things -- are implicitly insulting both to ancient cultures and the people who study them. (I'm not, however, saying it isn't possible to make a pseudo-history that doesn't tie into existing colonialist, racist, and of course anti-scientific narratives. But if you make up your own totally fresh secret history, you lose the ability to reference all that existing material).

A bigger problem for the writer is that these existing ideas are broken. Von Danieken's stuff has no internal logic. It is destructively contradictory, to the point where you can't make a functional narrative out of it.

The biggest hole being the one that confronts every story hinging on a masquerade, a hidden world, a giant conspiracy; why doesn't everyone already know about it?

One is tempted to look at this as similar to the Fermi Paradox. Assume there is a secret history. Or worse -- if one is contemplating a series, or a particular kind of character or organization with a history of investigating these things -- multiple hidden parts of history. How did they stay hidden? What mechanism is acting to hide all the evidence?



I don't have any good ideas.

One idea is perhaps that whatever the secret history is, it is by its nature something that can be hidden. The problem with this angle of attack is it doesn't leave much of that fun, "this explains all of those...."

For instance; aliens have been visiting in their nearly-undetectable ships for years. Why do we see them now? Radar got better. What evidence is there from the past, once we know how to uncover it? Um...Tunguska? (always got to work that one in!) Because all those thousands of UFO sightings aren't going to work. If they are visible to a guy in a pick-up, they were visible to hundreds over that flight path. If the Air Force chased them in 1940 and talked about it over the radio, then the Air Force would have caught them by 1950.

Sure, you can come with arguments why one sighting is legit, but the obvious flaw didn't get exploited massively. But it very quickly becomes a house of cards (or a game of whack-a-mole; pick your analogy). The more they actually did, the more there are un-coverable clues, the more it begs the question why it is still a secret.

Another tempting explains-everything idea is that there is a secret cult that's been hiding all the evidence. Well, that's a hell of an efficient cult. And it also basically takes the one problem and turns it into two; now you have to hide the cult, too. (Or Men in Black, or Templars, or Warehouse Regents, or whatever).

I think what it comes down to for me is the disjunct between the very precise and subtle ways we are currently looking at available data all the time, and the level of obvious the clue has to be for our Joe Schmo hero to stumble upon it.  And the scale of what is being hidden if it is to be really exciting.

That's why lost civilizations, especially massive, technologically advanced lost civilizations that left clues in the writings of peoples centuries later (hint: Atlantis) bother me so much. If Plato knew enough about it to write about it, the Amarna letters should be going into exhaustive detail. If they were ruling the Aegean, we'd still be seeing remnants of their contribution to decorative arts among the folk cultures of the region (because that's how long decorative elements and scripts and patterns remain). And so on.

So the impossibly huge, impossibly competent secret organization hiding the big important secret is implausible and the really subtle, really easy to hide and did basically nothing interesting in the first place secret is unsatisfying. This can't be a one-axis problem, though. There have to be ways of going orthogonal to this. Ways in which something magnificent and world-changing is intrinsically unknown (until the appropriate moment) in a way that unfolds in a logically satisfying way from their premise.

Right?

So far the only glimmer of an idea I have is magical/metaphysical; something about the thing nobody is supposed to know about rewrites evidence or alters minds as a side effect. Like the gamified version of what H.P. was writing about; you see the Elder Gods and you go nuts -- thus fail to communicate their reality to anyone else. Or the timey-whimey version; there used to be a different reality, but time was altered or something in some plot-conveniently messy way that leaves fragmentary clues to be stumbled on.

The latter is in one way rather cute; it means you can have the rational cake and toss it, too, as people can very rightly object that the kind of wide-spread evidence doesn't exist.

But even if the mechanism is pseudo-scientific -- mutter something about intersecting branes or nanotech or destructive memes -- it just feels stupid as well as stupidly convenient.

Hrm.  Maybe the truly viable orthogonal approach is to discard the masquerade; that academia already knows about Atlantis, it is taught in schools and covered at excruciating length on the History Channel (not that it isn't already, mind you). And the McGuffin that drives the story is you've got a better bit of it than anyone else has up to that point.

Invasion of the Cloak Pins

I almost wrote myself into a corner. After a week of despair I was finally able to back off from the impossible task of three full-length books each delving deeply into a different culture of the Late Bronze Age.

The back stories of the characters are going to have to remain largely back-story. But there are some good ideas left from that too-ambitious scheme.

I'm going to start in Akhetaton, with an official scavenging expedition into the ruins of the old city of the heretic Pharaoh. Opening that is with a distant lens on the Egyptian culture and with distant drums (the Amarna Letters have some very interesting mentions of a few of the so-called "Sea Peoples.")

I'll add on characters with small introductory/back story scenes for each until we have the full cast. And my thought was that instead of starting with Wilusa, as the first of the dominos to fall, this particular version of the Trojan War is the climax -- with our cast press-ganged along by the warlords who moved into the power vacuum in Greece following the burning of the palaces, as part of the "Sea Peoples" sweep of invasions.





And it turns out that isn't particularly out of the mainstream of archaeological thinking. The nature and extent of the Late Bronze Age Collapse are as much debated as the possible causes. We may some day look back at the idea of the Sea Peoples (who were never grouped and named as such in period sources) as as much of a relic as the idea of the Dorian Invasions.

That there were raids from the sea is not in question. Nor that there were mass migrations of people. What is in question is who any of them were; for every strong identification we manage to make on one line of evidence, there is counter-evidence. The LBA Collapse is, as has been noted, frequently interpreted to the tenor of the times. In the 1970s it was all about environmental collapse. Now the hot idea is climate change. In the pre-war years it was invasion by outsiders, some claiming the Sea Peoples swept down through Italy or even from as far as the Carpathian Mountains.

In the Cold War years invasion was closer to home; waves of raiders from Greece or from Anatolia, as if entire nations had suddenly decided to go a-Viking.

The thinking these days seems to be something like a perfect storm; earthquake, drought, famine, the complacence of too long between wars, leading to a generalized eruption of violence, piracy, mass migration, cascading displacement, and revolution against the stagnant palace economies. But there is no consensus. There is so little consensus, you can't even call the more outré theories outliers.

Like the Luwian hypothesis. This takes many forms, with the most extreme (and though-provoking) being that Troy and a big chunk of the Western coast is one powerful state, the Luwians, who drive out and all but destroy the neighboring Hittite Empire. Until a coalition of the powerful kings of the various Mycenaean Greeks form to take the battle to them.

Which would be what Homer wrote of. But I think the Luwians are selling themselves short. A powerful evil empire ruling most of the world until proud Athens stands up against them? I think we're talking Plato.




Ah, that's the fun of writing in this period. Of course, any day now could see the uncovering of something that will clarify the whole picture. Or, more likely, cause us to throw away what little we think we're sure of. And I have no guesses as to what is going to be discovered, but if you ask me where, the place that would surprise me least is the ongoing archaeological investigations at Byblos.

...or a children's toy*

I found myself liking Rise of the Tomb Raider much more than I expected. Sure, there are problems. Many of the worst problems of the previous game of this reboot series have been fixed, at least.

One thing that you can say, though; not only is it a decent game, it is, finally, a Tomb Raider game. The puzzles are back. There's more archaeology. And the Mansion is back (in DLC only, but that's why you wait two years after release and get the GOTY version on Steam sale).

I'll write a full review eventually. At the moment, I just wanted to comment on a more nuanced understanding of archaeology that almost sneaks in through the cracks. Yes, Lara Croft is a tomb robber, no questions asked. What she does to ancient monuments, even Schliemann would be shocked into making some remark. And the games still push the artifact-centric view of the popular press (in addition to the underlying "Ancient myths are just the hiding places of ancient super-science.")

It is almost like someone in the developers is taking the piss, though, when "Loot" is the verb that pops up whether Lara is standing over either a can of rags (useful for making bandages and flaming arrows), or a sarcophagus. There, and in other small places, it seems to recognize how she's a worse role model than even Indiana Jones.

But here's the place where I really feel like an archaeological voice was in the conference room. The game still has collectable items. Like the previous entry in the series, these pop up with very nice rotatable 3D model (based on actual archaeological artifacts) while Lara talks a little about the find. Here's the interesting difference. In Tomb Raider 2013 she would identify the culture and date and often give a little note on usage. Basically she'd read the museum tag. In Rise of the Tomb Raider she is more likely to describe the object, like one would in a field journal, and make some educated guesses as to its nature. Sometimes, in fact, she is truly puzzled.

The same is generally true when she is reading inscriptions -- this is due to an underlying Language mechanic, but still, it is refreshing to see her unsure of her translations.

And there is less of a clear distinction between information that will advance the plot, and information that won't fit into the current project. Again this is meta-game; it comes from the way documents are collectable, and these documents are little snippets of text nicely voice acted for the player.

The place where this distinction is really erased is in the "Bloodlines" DLC, a mansion-based exploration in which both the plot-centric mechanical resolution and the emotional resolution are developed in parallel as two of multiple twining threads. The game goes out of its way to tell you to read all the documents, as you do not know going in which of the various threads you are following through them will lead you to the desired conclusion. This, then, is a heck of a lot closer match to field research than the "find the address to the next game level written in a prominent place right after the boss battle" structure.

The "Bloodlines" DLC also does the Language mechanic one better, in that it requires you, the player, to recognize and use several hieroglyphic characters! (The best is when you have to identify a similarity between the character for a district of ancient Egypt and the depiction of said character in a child's cardboard crown).

Spoilers, by the way!



*yes, and she does make the "children's toy" comment over one of the artifacts she uncovers. Again, I'm convinced someone over at Core actually did some reading.

Is this just fantasy?

One year to first draft was the plan. Six months for basic research and outlining.

After four months I'm relatively certain that the original ideas either don't fit the real history or would be too difficult to pull off. That's as close as I've come to outlining the plot.

I looked at trends and genre classifications and what I've brought home from that is largely what I went in with; that there exists a contract with the reader, expectations that the book should try and fulfill. But I don't know what these might be.

I've followed a few attractive leads but I can't even say I've decided they are dead ends. It would be amusing to treat my Mycenaean mercenary as a displaced Homeric hero, applying classical Greek ideals to a rather different situation, for instance. And it is still a problem for research and a risk of going astray from what I really want to achieve.

Last week it was sort of historo-cultural thinking. The purpose of the book might be exploring the Bronze Age Collapse and trying to discover the reasons for it. And or the nature of the mysterious Sea Peoples. Trouble is, the locals don't know they are living in a Collapse. And the Sea Peoples? One of the things that makes them so frustratingly mysterious to us is the way period references strongly suggest that they were so well known there wasn't any reason to go into detail about them!

The Medinet Habu inscriptions aren't, "mysterious raiders from the sea!" they are more like, "goddamn, it's those guys again."

This week I'm thinking in terms of the Quest novel, which tends towards travelogue. With the point being if I can identify cool places to see, cool peoples to visit, cool things to do I might be able to arrange those like islands and then fill in around them as necessary.

Unfortunately it's a small list so far. I'd like to play barrow wights and looted weapons in a Tholos tomb. I'd like to do a little North by Northwest with some Hatti chariots against my protagonists. I really do want to see some of New Kingdom Egypt despite it being a real pain to do in so many ways.

And there's three other things that keep growing detail as I think about them, even as two of them may be impossible to fit into a reasonable plot. There's a confrontation with a god -- worse, a sort of sister of Eris, a being that even the other Greek gods are scared of. But I can't really make it work, and as I work on the rest of the story it seems more and more out of place with the rest. There's the Trojan War. I'm really liking it as something more than a move by some loot-hungry Mycenae, more a plot and counter-plot between Hittite and Kaska and others over the Luwian territories, with Mycenae on both sides of the fight. Leading to a small-scale anabasis as following the sack of Troy one band of warriors has to struggle their way down the coast through increasingly unfriendly territories (especially if they are just beating the Philistine/Sea Peoples en route).

The big problem with this one is the timing. Specifically, information timing. There are things I want the Egyptian scribe and eventual "head" of the party to learn in sequence. And I also want to develop the understanding of the reader about the collapse. And, to, give them a chance to experience the glories of the palatial age before it all starts coming apart at the seams.

And lastly there's the scene on the boat. Probably pirate, possibly more organized raider (aka Sea Peoples -- whatever that means!) With the Scribe and the Cretan girl acting out tropes of classical-era comedy (the drunken master, the clever slave) to keep the pirates entertained, whilst the exhausted mercenaries watch their dangerous game and try not to get involved, and a seemingly harmless Phoenician watches with too-astute eyes and is in turn studiously ignored by the pirates...

In the end, I think the road to my plot is going to look like the road to the Bronze Age Collapse. No single cause is sufficient. Instead it is a combination of things.

I put 150,000 words of fanfiction down playing in an attempted splice of the worlds of Stargate and Tomb Raider.  I learned there the joys of research and the joys of history, and how to very efficiently turn raw research into prose. I also decided I am not fond of compressed text and info-dumps and that reaction, too, will get folded into what I do in this new novel.

From the same source, from spending so much time (via extensive podcasts) in the company of working archaeologists, comes a renewed intent to be honest to real history. Fortunately the Bronze Age Collapse is not a terribly fertile ground for the science wars. We really don't know a lot of key details. That sort of takes the sting out of telling a story where it was the fault of zombies. Or the Sea People were all Deep Ones.

Somewhere along there, though, I realized that watching a city burn on the horizon is no way to understand and experience the history. Fortunately, the idea of wandering sword-swinging heroes who pass by on their way to their own goals (whether selfish or world-saving), doesn't on examination match up with most actual examples. Even in an open-world RPG the characters get involved. They go into a community, pick sides in a local conflict, learn and become in turn part of the story there.

Which does mean, though, my inchoate thoughts of viewing Ugarit from a distance or Mycenae merely as ruins is not going to work. I really do have to get down into those places and cultures. And that's gonna take a lot more research than I had hoped to have to undertake.

Because it has become increasingly clear. As much as I have tried to seek out the most opinionated, polemic works, the worst I have found are still reluctant to commit. The Peleset have been identified by many with the Philistines, and they appear to have settled near modern-day Palestine, but the language is unknown, the origin unknown, the influence and/or connection to Mycenae unknown, and plenty of writers reject the whole thing anyhow.

So for me to say this is how this town looks, this is what they speak, this is who invaded them, and so forth, I need to be familiar with at least some number of the various primary sources and other texts used by the people who are currently theorizing about them. I can not, for this book, take whatever is up that day on Wikipedia and run with it as "good enough." I have to be historian myself, and come up with my own hypothesis.

Ahhiyawa!

I think it was Mark Twain who said the world lost a perfectly good swear word when H. Rider Haggard chose to name a character "Umslopogaas." I've found myself saying "Ahhiyawa!" recently. But, really, half the names given on the funerary inscription of Ramses III at Medinet Habu would make pretty good swears as well.

Yes; "Ahhiyawan" is probably "Achaean" in yet another language (peoples of the Bronze Age had more names than a character in a Russian Novel), but where are they? Apparently in Southern Anatolia. Umm...isn't Greece, like, the other direction?

Welcome to the Late Bronze Age. As the potential itinerary of my novel expands, I've been having to read up on the Hatti (sorry...Hittites), Mitani, Khasa, Philistines, Phoenicians, Scythians, Assyrians, Babylonians (plus the various "neo" Assyrian and Babylonian empires), Canaan in general and outliers like the Ugaritic civilization...and that isn't the end of the list, I just got tired of typing.

And, yeah, Troy is back on the table. As Wilusa, of course. If there's anyone in ca 1190 BCE who even thinks that little siege would make a really spectacular story, they still haven't gotten around to adding random gods and damsels to the mix. Nor a wooden horse. They have no inkling at all that centuries later there's going to be Romans claiming descent from a survivor, and oh yeah if some old guy is still trying to row his boat back across the Aegean they haven't been talking about that yet, either.

A quick browse through the Kindle archives and there's at least two works of (recent) historical fiction set in Wilusa. Or at least starting there. Dunno if Homer is nodding or rolling but there it is.

So I started researching dates. And the first realization is that the progress of the Bronze Age Collapse can be roughly placed in three stages, with the middle one -- the time my story is set -- being as short as five years.

I could indeed cover most of the hot spots within a couple of years. It would be possible for someone to fight at Wilusa, observe the fall of Ugarit, visit the ruins of Mycenae, and still get back to the Nile Delta in time for Ramses III's big party.

(The other realization is more like a deepening appreciation for how much we still don't know and how much sources disagree. Boy do sources disagree. And that's after you take into account the huge changes that have been happening since the 90's and basically accelerating since; within this decade good data is finally starting to come out of Turkish and former Soviet Union excavations.)



Except that's also a change in plan on my part. It is a complex path I took to get there, but one of the big things to fold in is that many of the peoples moving about are refugees, not pirate gangs. Even in the inscription at Medinet Habu some of the attacking "Sea Peoples" are shown with families and oxen and everything else you need to do the Anatevka walk into a new land.

Match this with a peculiarity of the destruction in several places; that the palatial centers, the ostentatiously expensive palaces and temples and noble houses are the ones that got burned. And the reduced population continued to live in more or less the same area. This doesn't sound like an invasion.

It sounds like a peasant revolt. In any case, how ever you read it, I'm not seeing the massacre by Ramses III as being the happy ending.

Arsenic (Bronze) and Old Lace

Novel is giving me a hard time.

I came close to making a sketch for a prologue scene. Idea one was a pair of scribes working on the famous letter from the King of Ugarit in which he pleads for aid against the ship-borne raiders who are burning his country.

Idea two was the death of my Mycenaean's mentor in battle when someone breaks position in the formation. Except. Did they fight in formation at the time? The phalanx hadn't been officially invented, but formation is more the rule than not, and those shields look appropriate and oh boy I've still got a lot of research to do before I can actually write even a damned sketch.

(And the former idea, although easy enough to pull off from the research materials I already have available, highlights its own problem. Which is that between the Scribe, the Seer, the role of magical texts, and the importance to the plot of the Medinet Habu inscriptions, writing -- ancient languages -- are going to be a really big part of this. And I just don't have those chops.)



I like the characters. I've been living with them in my head long enough for them to really flesh themselves out. But I still haven't picked the settings, or nailed down the plot.

A recent thought is that they never actually make it back to Pi-Ramses. This would save me from having to do massive research on cities and palaces and armies of the New Kingdom. I could have the seer character "read" the Medinet Habu inscriptions instead, as a coda. And that moves the climax to Scythia, without having to confront a god then go racing back across the Ancient World to get to Egypt before 1170.

And that means I can take the characters out of their setting. Over the last lonely stages of their trek far from the centers of the Ancient World, they can change in ways that make them no longer the playthings of gods -- allowing that climactic confrontation to at least make some kind of sense. I know I said I didn't want them to move from their own setting, and certainly not to suddenly have all this future technology and tactics and (worse yet) modern attitudes, but I sort of like having them learn through the seer material from the Classical age, as well as other world cultures, and within their own tight private circle of the four of them develop along philosophical and moral lines that are entirely unique.

Anyhow, it's a thought.

(And, yeah, I really want to do Tale of Setne and have a journey into Duat. So that makes the plotting of the pivotal chapters...confusing.)



My main research task at this point has got to be charting every single date (or rather, range of dates) I can find on the key events I feel I want to reference or be influenced by; the fall of Ugarit and Mycenae, for instance. And also draw up my own map that highlights the possible places of interest and puts in as much as I can discover about what the possible political state, cultural make-up, travel routes, etc. are in each of these places.

And maybe when I look at those charts some kind of plot will start to make sense.

And maybe when I've plotted out the high points, I'll have a manageable list of research topics.

It's all driving me to put the thing aside for a couple weeks while I catch my breath. Maybe finish off the Tomb Raider/SG1 crossover fanfic while I'm at it. Figuring out what is under Mount Shasta is starting to sound simple....