The Coconut Effect

A review of several of my books in an attempt to pin down the political situation on LBA Crete didn't get me that. Instead it surprised me with a travel plan.

A couple more rants on writing historical fiction first. Say someone figures out my Cretan weaver has a glimpse into the future. They can't call her a sibyl. Or a Cassandra. Probably! I mean, the term "sibyl" is documented from before Tarquinus purchased the surviving Sibylline Books. And Pythias goes back before that, too. It seems rather more likely the term was indigenous, like "Homer," before being appropriated for a later myth. And although there's several hundred years and a Dark Age to go before the Illiad, stories of Cassandra might have entered the oral tradition at any time prior (possibly prior to the semi-historical event she later gets attached to).

I'm also snarking that the Pythias might be one of the first documented cases of mansplaining. Women were the seers with a vision of the future, but war and conquest and profits are serious business, much too serious for a mere woman to understand. So everything the prophetess saw would have to be properly explained by a male handler. In honesty, though, how things were conducted at Delphi are unclear; the Pythias may have spoken for herself -- the whole story of the magic smoke seems to have been made up whole-cloth and doesn't occur in accounts from writers who were actually there.

Still, it is an ongoing problem I'm having with terms that exist in classical Greek. I could probably manipulate them to something that fits the orthography of Mycenaean Greek, but I don't see that helping. At best it slows the reader while they digest the unfamiliar, at worst it looks like I'm trying to be clever for clever's sake.

But what do you do? I was imagining a conversation (relating to the supervisory positions indicated in the Linear B records of textile workgroups) and the term "meritocracy" came up. Which to me is too obviously originating among the political thinkers and philosophers of Classical Greece, and something that is going to be making the reader stop and ask, "Did they have that yet?"

Well, I'm pretty sure the concept wasn't invented in Athens. There were certainly bronze age situations where it would have come up. Sorry, professors; you can think the thought without having to have the (later, Greek) term.

In any case, it is part and parcel of the Coconut Effect problem. And as I'm reviewing the history of the "Restorations" (or as Evans put it, "Reconstitutions") of Knossos and associated Minoan art and sculpture, I'm reminded forcefully that much of what the casual reader "knows" about the Minoans is unsupported and deeply suspect. (And, yes, one should see the Mycenaeans as a continuation and adaption of Minoan culture -- one with a more pronounced warrior slant, among other changes, but one that has a continuity of evolution from the earlier culture).

It is a difficult choice the writer or other creator has to make. Sometimes you fight the battles you can win; in Assassins Creed Origins, set in Ptolemaic era Egypt, the Pyramids are properly clad in their shining white complete with the gold cap on Cheops, and the buildings are painted. The statuary, however, is still an ahistorical marble-white. With this, I have to agree with them. Whether or not the player would accept the historical painted statues, even whether painted or unpainted is aesthetically more pleasing to the modern eye, in the end it is a fighting game and having what looked like a bunch more NPCs standing around the area would be visually confusing.

I'm making the same choice. I'm hitting the books to try to figure out which part of the Palace of Knossos are still standing at the time of the novel, but in the end I need material, I need material which is colorful and detailed and I'll take the reconstitutions of Evans' hired artists. And that the reader will probably have encountered the Dolphin "fresco" (almost certainly a floor decoration, historically) is only a bonus.

(The Coconut Effect is a phrase popularized on TVTropes, specifically referring to the way coconut halves were used to represent the sound of horse hooves for decades until audiences were finally trained to accept something more realistic.)

So back to migration patterns.

Allow for the moment the idea of a flow of invasion that is roughly North to South, starting in Greece, moving to or joining a wave starting from around the Bosphorus and moving sequentially down through Anatolia and the Levant before finally crashing into Egypt. Don't worry who is invading; that's a later problem.

So I start in Crete (and in simultaneous/back story, in Amarna) late in the rule of Merneptah or early in the reign of Rameses III. A time of growing tension but still generally peaceful. The coming-of-age story, the Weaver's Hall and saffron-gathering on the hills and all that, and a soft revolution that is more Summer of Love than Storming the Bastille. These chapters bring the clock forward, in stages, a decade or more; Kes is at least young teen when the dominos start.

First the Palace of Knossos is burned. But here's the thing; the archaeological burn layers of many of the sites cited aren't necessarily markers of change in occupation. Hattusha gives evidence of having been quietly evacuated years before. Occupation signs are present on top of burn layers in many palatial centers. So Mycenaean rule and some overall structure remains in Crete even though the palace is damaged and the population is migrating into the interior and the mountains.

Our characters leave Crete to discover cities on the Greek Mainland already destroyed. They head across the Aegean (possibly not by choice) and meet the third member of the party in Miletus -- which he has has finally reached in his long struggle back from Willusa. They head down the coast and pick up the fourth and final member of the party (depending on how you count Paneb) at Byblos and set sail for Ugarit -- arriving just in time for the final days of that city. They flee towards Egypt and there is some political skullduggery towards what will eventually be Rameses III's triumph at the Battle of the Delta.

And that's a plan. It tells me more-or-less what will be happening in two books or more, and tells me which places are going to need research.

It does leave undecided what exactly is happening in Crete, who the Black Ships are, what connections the Sea People have to all this, etc. There are some intriguing ideas, however. There's the Sherdana, who despite fighting on both sides at the Battle of Kadesh and the Battle of the Delta, may be largely mysterious to the insular Egyptians. Hence good reason for my Egyptian nobleman to be peering into the Amarna Letters and getting concerned.

And then there's the suggestion that some of the Sea Peoples may have originated on Crete. Unfortunately not the Sherdana -- that would be too convenient.

It's here

The outline came to me today. An illustrated book on the Sea Peoples arrived too, but the outline is what I mean.

Not the whole thing. Just the bones of what happens on Crete. Wanotreus is key (might be Wanotrias...I'm unclear yet on the correct masculine endings in Mycenaean Greek.) Oh, and Didalios. I'm still working on his name, too. Actually, might be telling he (like Kessandra) has a Mycenaean name, not a name with (presumed) Minoan forms (as is glimpsed in the Knossos tablets).

Anyhow, I've figured out the basic progression, the one that folds in physical location, evolving goals, evolution of understanding, useful shifts of perspective, etc. The inner and the outer plot as well as the thematic plot that sits over it. And it folds in the historical Palace of Knossos, un-repaired damage and Mycenaean redecoration and all, the Pylos-style workgroups, the Knossos style workgroups, the big festivals alluded to in some tablets, Scribal Hand 103, the vision of the Stone Birds, the Saffron Gatherers....

This means I can stop with generalized research. I can break down into a chapter plan and break out specific research questions. And as I find the answers, instead of trying to tuck them away against further use in a bramble-pile of general research, I can plug that data directly into chapter notes and character notes and setting notes. This just made the heap of research a heck of a lot more manageable.

Oh, and I'm going to redeem Paneb. But I'm getting ahead of myself. One of the big structural questions I still have to answer is if I'm interleaving episodes with the other characters during the Crete sequence. I don't want to do a lot of time jumping if I can help it, and the Deir el Medina stuff is too much fun to try to cram it into an epic flashback. I'm not against resetting the clock once at the top of Book Two but the Crete outline has some very convenient gaps/time skips in it anyhow where it would make sense to cut away from Kes for a while and return months or years later.




Also arrived is a new order for a Holocron or two, some metal-wound strings for my U-Bass, and a new prescription from my surgeon which is currently kicking my ass. So it is going to be a busy time here. Or I'll decide I need a break and play a little Mass Effect...

(Yeah, I'm starting to grasp harmonic analysis and reharmonization. The Hellboy theme I'm trying to re-arrange for U-Bass and trumpet seems to be alternating A minor with A Major...going up to an AM7 chord at the high note. But there's something else in the original recording, after the first statement of the theme...some further harmonic development I'm not quite grasping yet.)

Cow-Lifting

Time to step back and regroup.

I've seen what detailed research can turn up on daily life in Mycenaean Crete. The biggest things I've learned is that far too little is known (and those scraps are fought over far too much). And that it takes a lot of time and no little expense and I really don't have the kind of mind that can bring in, store, and organize all those little tantalizing clues.

Conan was created because at $.05 a word Howard couldn't keep doing that depth of historical research.

I'm not under the same financial pressures as Howard and I'm certainly not as creative, but where I am in my life I have to make the same choice. When all is said and done, it is fun to try to tease out the nuances of what might have actually been, but I'm a lot more interested in what is colorful and amusing. And I really don't mind if I get it a little wrong.

Sure, I can make a good argument that making fiction vivid should weigh more strongly than making it accurate. The tasks of historical fiction are to entertain, to teach, and to (when it is done very well) to illuminate. In all these cases, having a clear picture -- even if it is what Gene Roddenbury insightfully called, "a uniformity of error" -- is paramount.

What that boils down to is that I need to be working on what I want to say about the Mycenae and the end of the Aegean bronze age, how I want to portray them, and how to best support an interesting story around them and the other players of that time and place.

The original idea (from almost one year ago today) was a fast-moving adventure, taking a motley crew of heroes on a whirlwind tour of the Late Bronze Age. And that really hasn't changed. I've flirted with doing something more serious, and in a sense I am going in a more serious direction -- not so much more careful history: more like semi-deconstruction of some of the adventure tropes. But when it gets down to it, the basic conception of the characters -- heck, the essential conception that they are plural; that people from social circles and civilizations so far apart become stalwart friends -- requires that they be larger than life.

I love the challenge of trying to make the most authentic picture of a textile workgroup as depicted on the Linear B tablets, but to go through the length of a novel with my Cretan Weaver I also want her to be able to invent a new loom, fall in love, hang out with an Egyptian nobleman, join a revolution...yeah, and probably jump a bull or two while she's at it ("When in Crete..." as the saying goes.) So basically exceed historicity and the statistical likelihoods of her life.

In Greek Mythology, most of the heroes were born that way. They generally had a god or two in their parentage. There is certainly plenty of fiction in which a character is presented as hero qua hero; a few throw-away lines about "thrice-decorated ex-green beret with a doctorate in particle physics and an expertise in medieval weapons," so the reader won't be surprised when he emerges from his time machine into the Battle of Nicopolis and proceeds to kick Ottoman ass.

The other common mode, however, is the hero by circumstance, hero by experience; the ordinary man who rises to the challenge. Thing is, a novel is long. A series is even longer. And series inflation is totally a thing. Just by virtue of living, this once-ordinary protagonist becomes bigger than life. Just like Hercules* lifting a newborn calf above his head twice daily, and continuing the exercise until he is benching 1,600 lbs of beef, the well-done series character is never seen jumping the shark. Each challenge they face is just that little incremental bit tougher. Just that bit more exciting, with more at stake, and more and tougher enemies than the last time.

For the writer consciously trying to do this, you want to be able to drag the reader along on the journey, beginning from a point of identification, "Hey, I could do that. Or at least I think I could, if properly motivated," through to -- without ever losing the reader's investment -- "Of course he can do that! He's Indiana Jones!"

And, yeah. Where my Cretan Weaver -- where my Athenian Mercenary and my Egyptian Scholar-Magician and my Phoenician Merchant Adventurer -- are going character-wise is to something that doesn't work solo. By herself, Kessandra** would be seen as a Mary Sue. The reader needs to know the context is that of the Team Adventure. That this isn't a polite historical, but that it plays by a different set of ground rules.

Which suggest to me I may want to bring in the other characters early, in interleaved scenes or prologues or other material. Heck, I might go so far as to show Setna at Deir el-Medina at the moment he realizes Paneb is trying to kill him, and my as-yet unnamed mercenary somewhere in the Troad with Hittite chariots on his tail, all as prologue before we settle down to 30-40,000 words with the people of Knossos.

This may get a bit rambling. I'm drinking my first glass of Ouzo. A necessary experiment -- I have my flight tickets to Crete, and I need to be ready to down a friendly glass of Raki. (They don't, unfortunately, sell Cretan Raki at BevMo. Hence the Ouzo.)

So, basically, it is time to step back and orient on the larger plot, on what exactly this band of heroes is going to do in regards to the LBA Collapse. I'd like to do more than travelogue, but I also feel constrained to the realities of history. The Collapse had no single cause -- and is also what in NuWho gets referred to as a "Fixed Event." The heroes aren't going to stop it.

The best I've been able to figure so far is that their victories are local. And as for the fight, in general? I like having the narrative essentially walk through a para-historical overview of the collapse; that is, moving from potential cause to potential cause (although for them it is more like moving from perceived threat to perceived threat) and allowing the reader to experience some of the academic paradigms as they were considered and discarded.

At the heart of it, Kes has been given a prophesy. And there are signs and portents for those who wish to look for them (some real, some less so); earthquakes, famines, etc. And I still haven't decided, but the Red Tide could be a powerful portent and symbol as well. I also haven't decided how much of an end-of-an-era spirit to infect people with. How much of a 14th-century (AD), or for a more recent example, late Weimar Republic vibe to give it. There is certainly reason to be fearful for the future -- again, if you go looking. But at the same time, I want a spirit of hope on Crete, and in Byblos if I get there. And Egypt dreams of eternal stability.

Yeah, and apparently consensus now is there is nothing in the Pylos Linear B tablets suggesting that this was a time of panic and mass mobilization. Whether or not anyone was conscious of re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic the tedious documentation of ordinary grain disbursements and shrine donations and legal cases was business-as-usual up until no more than a week or two before the palace burned.

When it is obvious the known world is in trouble, my Egyptian can go on about ma-at, and my Athenian mutter about gods playing games with people's lives (he was at least near Troy so he had a front-row seat to that kind of behavior). Not that there are gods at play here in this story. I am still reserving a little magic but I've decided gods are out.


*Actually, Theseus. I asked a retired classics prof I know at the pub. Theseus of the Minotaur, appropriately enough, who left Ariadne at Naxos, fit Procrustes to his own bed, and kept his ship in better condition than did Jason (sorry...very classics in-joke there contrasting the philosophical Ship of Theseus -- a nautical version of George Washington's Hatchet -- with Jason's ignominious end, broke and alone and camped under the rotting remains of the Argo until the prow fell off and crushed him instantly.)

**It is a name from the Pylos tablets, of a woman with surprisingly large land holdings. I might have originally reached for it because of the clang association with another famous (and famously unlucky) prophetess, but it clicked for me when a shortened "Kes" (which I suspect is entirely un-idiomatic to Mycenaean speech patterns) seemed the perfect fit for my cheerful, geeky little goat girl. As Wanotreus is probably going to say (in a "how would you write my name?" scene); "That's too long a name for so short a girl."

When first we practice to deceive

I've been reading pages of "ko-no-si-ja ki-re-te-we-ja-i LUNA 1 GRA 100..." for a week now. Well, actually mostly the excellent analysis Barbara Olsen makes of two collections of Linear B tablets (at Knossos and Pylos.)

Of course there wasn't a work group described in detail, with a couple names included. That would be a pipe dream. And I already knew my picture was probably inaccurate. Well....

So. In some ways the model at Pylos is what I expected. This is sweat-shop industry; women and underaged children in groups of ten to thirty under a handful of supervisors work at one single element of textile production (usually spinning or weaving). For a stipend of grain and figs.

The older children are recorded as being trained in to the job. Or, if they are male, sent out to "the rowers" or other appropriately gendered tasks. There is no record of the women's names, or any economic activity except for the stipends, strongly suggesting an extremely servile status. In one of those tantalizing but telling glimpses, one tablet set appears to record how more than one group conveniently married en masse a corresponding male workgroup. Others, as I said, suggest the grown male children are separated and sent to other work. The recognized Linear B word for "slave" does not appear in these contexts but other than that...

So if my weaver protagonist was within one of these groups (as I had first imagined her) her life would be extremely circumscribed. It is unclear how a worker would ever advance from this drudge work, for instance.

The Knossos tablets, which although more numerous are also heavily damaged and thus harder to draw conclusions from, seem to record a very different world. Rations are not listed in any tablet series known to exist; instead, quotas are given. Analysis of the quotas suggest a given year's production could be achieved in as little as three months; this, and other details, strongly suggest a corveé labor system.

These are mixed groups. The meticulous documentation of children by age and gender in the Pylos tablets is absent; the presence of children could be inferred but the work group is essentially treated as a whole, under a single personal name who can be assumed to be the manager. The groups appear to be agile, assigned to different tasks as needed, and also as against the assembly line style of the Pylos work a single workgroup is capable of processing an entire garment from raw wool to finished cloak.

So these are obviously a better match for my character. But they are also not an isolated group of weavers ensconced in the palace; they appear to be, in fact, a group selected from the surrounding community, who spend the rest of their year working their own farms and whose social circumstances are otherwise ordinary.

There is suggestion of a live-in palace staff on some tablets, but Olsen makes convincing argument that the textile workers stationed at the palace (well, at Pylos, at least) are basically taking care of the domestic needs. They are not creating material for export.

But then, there is a lot of discussion in the field about whether export is the primary, or even an important, purpose of the centrally controlled textile industry. It is just as reasonably the utilitarian needs of a state, and the expensive luxury goods that sometimes find themselves traded to far-away countries are produced in independent...well, call them Merchant Houses.

Why all the bother about this?

See, I'm not writing about free agents, about people who can trod the empires of the LBA into the dust beneath their sandals (well, at least not at first). The details of the "Weavers Hall" are not a paragraph of background before the characters set out from their Bronze Age Shire on an epic journey. They are the story (for at least a good part of this novel.

Funny. My last novel was also very much about a strongly hierarchal society and, although my protagonist was technically a free agent (granted power she didn't want) she had already internalized her society, its structure and values. Her hardest fight was not any of the external enemies (and there were many) but trying to resolve within her the competing expectations, roles, and obligations.

I am my own programming language

Half way through the massive book of analysis of some of the Linear B archives. Bunch of other papers to read, prime among them an argument that depictions in The Odyssey can illuminate coastal raiders in the LBA, in particular those by the Sherdana.

I think I'm kicking my timeline back. The subject is both more complex and more contentious but basically the wave of destructions (for which, in an earlier age, the Sea People were often blamed) occur around the middle of the 13th century. This is apparently when the records at Pylos were baked in the destructive fires. It is also closer to the most likely historical analogs of the Trojan War.

Actually, I've got a pet theory. Just as I'm borrowing some names from the Pylos archives and moving them to Knossos, I think Homer may have borrowed Alexandros and Piyamarados (err...Priam) from the Hittite records, displacing them in time and changing some details to make a better story.

(The final wave which sweeps down along the coast and dashes itself against Egyptian shores is roughly 1190 too 1170 BCE, or some fifty years later).

I think I want to start after the Battle of Kadesh, and preferably after the death of Rameses II, but if I were to bracket my choices now I'd say the latest date I'd pick to start the story would be the year Rameses III comes to the throne. (There's two or three Pharaohs in the middle there, BTW. We don't get into the endless Rameses' until later in the Ramesid era).

A big reason is that I'm understanding the changes that happen in the Easter Mediterranean better. By the time Ugarit is sacked there's very little in the way of functional governments anywhere and sea trade has essentially collapsed. I want to tell a story of the storm, and of the coming storm, not of the debris field left after the storm.




I'm also backing away from the slippery slope of modern conception. I really do like the idea of people feeling they are living at the end of the world, and there are ways this is supportable, but they wouldn't and shouldn't construct it as the "Late Bronze Age Collapse" and they certainly won't construct the causes the way we do. Not to call it a simpler time -- it isn't, no time is simpler, just different -- but just as later historians came up with facile explanations that fit the preoccupations of their time, the locals should construct causes that fit their view of the world.




I'm still in a huge ball of fuzz about the relationship between the Mycenae, the Acheans (or whoever actually fought at Wilusa/Troy), the Sea Peoples, the Minoans, the eteocretans/pelasgians, the Dorians v. Ionians/Attic, etc. And folding all that in with whatever is happening on Crete, between the Palace, a Peasant's Revolt, and the Black Ships. Who represents or is connected to what? There are so many potential links, subtle as they are, but no single coherent pattern is coming out of it.

It has been suggested, for instance, that the Dorians are essentially the lower classes and military conscripts, who after central collapse moved out as a colonizing/invading force. Except the language map largely works in the wrong directions and paints in the wrong places. Similar for any connections between named Sea Peoples and any of the Mycenae locations; they sort of work, but then there's a counter-fact to blow it up again.

I'm willing to believe at this point that the evidence is thin enough that you could make convincing argument for just about anything. If that is so, though, I still have a big problem; I haven't decided what I want to be saying, and what kind of patterns best supports the story logically and dramatically.

All I'm sure of is I'm against the obvious; peaceful Minoans over-run by warlike Mycenae, and rising up to throw off their yoke. Or coalition of Mycenae try to take over a vassal state of the weakening Hittite Empire but end up destroying it. Of course in rejecting what appears to be trite I may be forcing my plot to reach for strained but equally trite alternatives.



And another thing. I've realized there's no-one in my cast who really lives and believes the Homeric Ethos. The situation on Crete is almost in terms of how it contrasts with the society of the mainland, and in any case is told from the point of view of people far down enough in the social scale they aren't forced to grapple with honor the same way Achilles did.

So, sure. I could go back to giving my Athenian-born mercenary more of a story, and let him have a character arc in which he understands, even embraces the code before abandoning it.

However. The whole Achilles in his tent business makes me think of chivalry; specifically, how the epic poems going on and on about knights-errant and courtly love were essentially written in the gunpowder era; long after those modes of behavior could be called descriptive. And, yes, we are well aware Homer was writing in a Greece that was coming out of the Greek Dark Ages, an iron-age world far from the world his poems described. Point I'm making is there's no reason to assume the elaborate Homeric codes of honor are reflective of actual LBA society.

I think Homer gives insight into how things work when it is boiled down to small warrior bands without a unified government. And there are elements that last through into classical society; but again one must be careful, as The Iliad became functionally a bible for the Classical Greeks; it is difficult to untangle where some cultural habit is carried over from history and where it is consciously adopted.

In any case, it amplifies again for me what I want to do with this book. Homer has been done...first by Homer and that's a hard bar to clear. Actual historical Mycenaean society is less explored.

And for all the questions I'm struggling to answer, all the subtle details about how to date the multiple Knossos archives (there appears to have been more than one fire) on so forth, I have to write for an audience who is lucky to have even heard of the Sea People or the LBA Collapse.

Bull Session

I had the idea for so long this was titled "A Tribute to Georgia O'Keefe" but, really, Picasso was classier than that.

We more-or-less know the Greek gods. They were often regional, sometimes celebrated in veiled cults, but the playwrights and the philosophers alike wrote about them. We know significantly less about the Mycenaean gods. Homer and Hesiod are describing the Archaic gods, the gods (as far as we can tell) of their own time.

Some of the same names appear on the Linear B inscriptions, but so do unfamiliar names. Some of these names (or some of their attributes) appear oddly similar to Mesopotamian gods. But Linear B is always a narrow window. It records nothing of myth or philosophy; it records only when some temple with connections to the palace gave some valuable goods in or in the name of a god.

There are also frescoes and other illustrations, statuary that seems to have no other purpose but ritualistic, and the ruins of what appear to be places of worship. All the detailed reconstruction is conjecture, and it is thinly supported indeed.

The Minoans wrote in Linear A. The best that we have of Minoan worship is that there appears to have been some continuity from their time to Mycenaean; some of the same practices seem to have continued, even though some evidence points towards the Mycenae recognizing a difference. And there are some distinct changes in practice (the most major and obvious being that the Minoans appeared to have shrines in natural settings -- mountains and caves -- and though images of this kind of worship continue in frescoes and other decoration those shrines which have been recovered by archaeology show they fell into disuse during Mycenaean times.)




So, yeah.

Poseidon appears to have been in a place of prominence. He is a chthonic figure and associated with earthquakes, but not -- until Homer and Hesiod -- with the sea per se. He seems a more rooted fertility figure but that gets very odd in the early worship as pretty much everything seems to figure in some sort of death/life cycle, fertility and animals, sort of thing.

Zeus is appearing on the scene, perhaps a new guy, and there are various myths important to his birth and early years that are placed in specific locations in Crete. A place he comes back to again and again; he drags Europa there, to what in Roman times was Gortyns. He's a bull at the time, and I'll come back to that.

There is at least something of Potnia, but this name, meaning "mistress" and generally attached to a variety of goddesses, could mean practically anything in this period. Tantalizing mention is made in some places, for instance, of a Mistress of the Winds. There is also, unsurprisingly, a fluidity of relationship; sometimes Hera is a goddess equal to and/or consort of Zeus, or perhaps Poseidon, or there is a male "Hera" in addition to her.

And there are a whole set of images of a boy god seemingly worshipping an elder/more powerful goddess; possibly the young Zeus, or possibly some completely other character. This Boy Zeus stuff in particular makes me think of the Silver Age Wonder Woman; originally Wonder Girl and Wonder Tot were presented as stories from Diana's earlier days, but then they started showing up in the same timeline and having adventures together and now nobody knows how they are actually related any more.

Gods. They can do stuff like that.

Let's not even start on the whole Minoan snake thing (except to mention that the famous "Snake Goddess" figurine is almost certainly a priestess, not the goddess being worshipped). Bulls. Snakes. Oh, and boobs. The Minoans also seem to have been into boobs -- that is to say in a ceremonial/religious context -- and yeah once again the same iconography shows up in Mycenaean art but we can't tell if they kept the religious practices (and the outfits) or just liked painting topless women. Same thing for the bull-leaping. We assume the Minoans did it. The Mycenaeans painted it. They may have even done it -- but we have no idea what religious significance (if any) they gave to it.

Of course there's bulls. Bulls figure prominently in various Mesopotamian religions as well. The Mycenae seemed as fond of them -- at least decoratively -- as the Minoans. They also kept the Labrys, although it looks a lot more like just a decoration in Mycenaean times. And they seemed to have lost the Horns of Consecration that the Minoans put on every available roofline. But we can't read too much from Mycenaean figurative art. In Mycenaean art it is more likely to find the lions and other animals hunting or being hunted. Man is in the picture now, and He usually has a sword. And they kept the sea life -- but for some reason the Mycenae were really into octopus. Like, way into octopus as a motif. I'm pretty sure octopus-leaping was never a thing, so...does it mean anything other than "cool thing to paint on walls and make into really nice pieces of gold jewelry?"




So I'm playing with some very odd ideas. I want to reference The Chalice and the Blade but as a pleasant dream, not as a past reality. For the middle part of the book I am basically doing Berkeley in the 60's. (What? I went to school there.) So a people's revolution that has all of that wonderful illusion that within their reach might be a change in consciousness, a reshaping of the very paradigms of power and control. And some of the inner struggles too, a revolution that believes it is for everyone but is not always there for all the disenfranchised. As, for instance, so many women have written in oral histories of the Peace Movement; "First we stop The Man from trampling on our rights. Then we'll get around to your issues." A story which alas is familiar to anyone in the Atheist movement today.

Or to put it in the most simplistic terms; some of the revolutionaries see their struggle as returning the power and prestige of the Minoans (and their gods). A subset among them like to think that perhaps that this age of glory had also been a matriarchy.

(And, yes, this is very much going to run into realpolitik. Among my odd ideas for the politics of the time is the weak rulership is in a Devil's bargain with the Black Ships. If the revolution actually overthrew the palace...there would be nothing to stop the raiders from cleaning up before they left for greener pastures.)

How this works with what we know or conjecture about actual worship practices is, well...   Heck, I have a lot of trouble trying to work out what the people of Knossos in 1200 BCE even know about what was happening in 1450, much less in 1700.  (Those being roughly, the time the Mycenaeans came to prominence in Crete and a time of widespread destruction, and the time of the Thera eruption and, similarly, widespread destruction. And rebuilding into what is likely the Minoan Golden Age.)

Among the really odd directions I'm tempted by is that the bull of so much Minoan decoration is not being worshipped, per se. It is being feared. It is The Sleeping God, a power they keep propitiated lest it rise up and destroy them. Part of my reason for this is the bull motifs and the goddess figures of the peak shrines, surrounded by animals, don't seem to have anything to do with each other. The bull just sort of appears, sus generis. Or is that os generis?

And somewhere here, also, is the possibility of a change in order. Poseidon and Zeus have changed character by Hesiod's time. Was that happening already in 1200 BCE? Was it visible to worshippers of the time? Can you describe this as one religion being supplanted by another?

Oh, yeah. And everything I know of the actual iconography and historical traces of the old forms and plausible reconstructions says no way, but I can't shake a mental image of the bull of the Labyrinth, a massive and mysterious chthonic figure whose stamping hooves shake the earth...

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.

e-ni-jo-te

I just realized I've been here before.

I've been reading an exhaustive analysis and comparison of the Linear B archives of Knossos and Pylos. Also reading a series of papers by John Younger which attempt to infer something of the lives of Minoan and Mycenaean women through surviving art.

And then I remembered. Way back when, I was reading a ton about contemporary (or at least post-war) Japan.  At some point I wrote a novel set in a pastiche version of that world. You could cast that as anthropological research, especially as the material was about a living culture (a big chunk was oral histories, even). And I'd cast the stuff I'm reading now as primarily archaeological and epigraphic. But it comes down to the same things; trying to understand a society, its material culture, and the way individuals within it experience it.

For the Mycenae, the depths of time are so great and our windows so narrow and strangely-shaped. It is like trying to reconstruct the economic functions of the poultry farm through Foghorn Leghorn cartoons. We just don't have the deep cultural understanding to be able to detect biases in the material.

(I think the primary difference between my study of post-war Japan and my study of pre-collapse Mycenae is I'm in much closer proximity to the primary materials. To properly understand the conclusions based on the available epigraphics you have to understand a little of how those actually work, and the majority of scholarly writers make sure to aid this understanding. Plus, the Linear B tablets are not just documentation of the world of the novel, they are props within the novel. So I'm making some smallish efforts to understand how you read it).




Every day I discover new resources. I had to start a new Scrivener doc to start actually organizing the research. Thing is, I can't just collect data. This isn't like writing something in a well-documented period where you can just add to your notes; "Made in Detroit, introduced in 1937, seats four." Especially within papers (which is half of what I'm reading now) the presentation is more, "Based on this one specific data set that is the focus of this study, a potential conclusion is that the object came from somewhere outside the empire and was larger than the better-documented one that is known to only seat two. And a pen case marked with the serekh of Seti I was found in the same archaeological context giving it a tentative dating of in or after the latter part of the 19th Dynasty..."*

So I've been typing out quotes from the material, with full citations so I can look back at the full context if need be. Not the easiest way to document research. I haven't figured out how to cross-link within Scrivener, either. (Worse, half the stuff I'm reading is in scanned form only so I can't cut-and-paste. Unless I learn and am prepared to go through the whole OCR stage as well.)




And I'm still dealing with the word count problem. As close as I can estimate, the Crete material is going to hit around 60,000 words. That's too short for a novel and too long for anything else. If it was under a third of the page count it would let me collect it with other material, but you can't go over half way with one plot then spend the remainder of the book doing something completely different.

I do mean to decompress. I've been aware over several of my recent efforts in fiction I'm overloading my paragraphs, right down to the sentence level. Yes, every paragraph should accomplish more than one thing, but I've been trying to stick too much detail and too much nuance, and doing it badly; doing it with comma splices and stacks upon stacks of adjectives. I need to give each concept, and each moment, each "beat" of dialog the room to breathe.

But that's not going to get me to 90K. Sure, it seems easy to add material (it certainly was for the Tomb Raider/SG1 fanfic. Too easy; I'd dream up two or three interesting things for each chapter and discover that between them they'd bloat the word count over 10K). You can pad description. You can pad dialog. You can even add incident. But none of these are story. And it is story that I need.





* "...although Evans argues convincingly that the Seti I pen case had slipped from a higher level during the original excavation and can not be used to date that particular horizon..."

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.

***

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.

***

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

The Clay Thickens

Sir Arthur had a thing on about the Minoans. He was so adamant that the Palace of Knossos represented a Minoan structure he insisted on interpreting the final fire and destruction as happening at the end of the Minoan era.

His reconstruction of the palace included tearing down many of the later Mycenaean additions to the structure. Even worse, he was the one that came up with the nomenclature Linear A and Linear B as he insisted the latter were Minoan. He even blocked access to many of the Linear B clay tablets -- one possible reason why it wasn't until the 1950's that Michael Ventris figured out they were actually Greek.

So. Back in 1958 Blegen took a look at the collected tablets of Pylos and Knossos and asserted that due to their strong similarity the destruction horizon must be the same for both. And he wasn't the only one. A Belgian epigraphist was able to show scribal communication between sets of the Knossos tablets, leading to a general consensus that they all shared a horizon; so if one set could be securely dated, they would all be securely dated.

The arguing heated up in the 1970's with in-depth studies of the earlier excavation notes in an attempt to reconstruct the primary data Evans and others had been making assumptions from. There was also primary excavation -- this made vastly more difficult by the multiple stages of reconstruction by Evans and his followers (originally with native materials, which decayed far more quickly than expected and were replaced a decade later with poured concrete and iron reinforcement...which in turn did not last the ages in the harsh Cretan climate and have had to be reworked since.)

Oh, yeah. And fold into all of this that archaeological dating is generally relative, using identified phases (usually pottery) as markers and attempting to correlate those between different civilizations. In the late bronze age, we have the Santorini problem (cultural and isotope dating of the eruption disagree by up to 200 years), the Egyptian Dating problem (trying to measure dynasties by the Counting of the Cows), and the difficulties of correlation when the same pottery sequence is not duplicated in societies that share only distant trading connections.

And then there's the Linear B archives themselves. After all, I came up with the core idea of the Cretan book based on what was in the Knossos tablets.

 I think I can get away with shifting the final destruction of the Palace -- the one that took place during the Mycenaean era -- to closer to the final days of the Aegean Bronze Age. That fire that swept through the structure seems a bit of a fluke. There's no systemic explanation for it; it happens before even the first-wave destructions (generally blamed on earthquake) that came at the start of the final phase of the palatial era.

Crete is different than the mainland, but so is Cypress. The documentation is thinner and thinner as you get to the close of the 1200's. One could argue for it being almost everything from a developed Mycenaean city to full-on anarchy to completely abandoned. Thematically and dramatically, it works well to have that final conflagration recorded in the archaeological ruins happen at the climax of the book. And practically speaking, I need to stop with the primary research and start into actually writing.

And when you come down to it; most of the people who know enough to realize I've shifted the date to be in a more useful place are the same people who will fully recognize why I did it -- to make the fullest possible use of those Linear B tablets. I think they will be more pleased with this than they are upset that I left the Palace of Knossos stand an extra hundred years.

Palatable, Palatial, Let's Call the Whole Thing Off

Did some research. I have at least three choices.

First is "just" get the history wrong. Have Knossos looking like any other Mycenaean palatial center right up to the LBA Collapse. On the one hand it feels right; the nearly identical Linear B tablets, the way it is described in Homer, etc.

But on the other hand it isn't hard (once you look for it!) to discover that in the real world the palace was destroyed and abandoned a hundred years earlier. It got argued over from Evan's first chronologies until at least the 70's, but the question was more-or-less hashed out to everyone's satisfaction when the Cretan pottery horizons were re-organized and...anyhow, date was pushed forward to no later than 1350.

Second option is to shift the timeline back. Instead of setting the story in 1190 when the palaces are all crumbling, push back to around the time Knossos was (somewhat mysteriously) destroyed. Which is not too far in time from some of the suggested dates for the "real" Trojan War, being up to 200 years in advance of the collapse of the Mycenaeans. As back as far as say Rameses the Great, which is the time the historical Setne Khemwass was digging for the Book of Thoth, the Hittites are suffering the first major defeat (against the Assyrians) and are on the road to their final destruction, or around the Battle of Khadesh...and, yes, there are already Sea Peoples out there so you don't even lose them.

Third option is to go for history or close to it. Recent investigations have shown that even after 1350 the ruins of the palace continued to be used for administrative purposes. This may not have lasted all the way until 1190 but since there were still administrators (presumably Mycenaean) at Chania it isn't too much of a leap to take. On the downside, this isn't the time of the real Scribe 103 and all those lovely records and the true power grandeur and beauty of the palace. Or a time of peace and apparent stability to contrast what happens later.

But on the flip side; I can see the potential in setting in the ruins of what had been the Minoan center (the rebuilding and modification by the Mycenaeans had never been all-embracing. What finally got abandoned was more Minoan in appearance than Mycenaean. Dolphin frescoes and all). And better yet, as a sort of failed (or failing) state. Or perhaps, from the Egyptian perspective, a rogue state. Where Mycenae still has a Wanax, Knossos stumbles on with a mere Bassillus, their economy down to subsistence levels, no money to rebuild the palace or create defensive walls. The countryside largely wild...except that it also bases the Peleset.

(Although really, a more reasonable theory for the Peleset would be from the much earlier Minoan colonizing period, and based somewhere in the Levant.)

Damn you, Agamemnon!

I don't know how I missed it.

Knossos was sacked between 1380 - 1350. It almost certainly had a Mycenaean presence afterwards but it was not a Mycenae capital; basically, the palace was abandoned from that date on.



That's the problem with historical research. Most of the stuff you will read is concerned with patterns and similarities, changes and processes. They don't really care if a particular example or discussion is happening on a specific date or range of dates. This is why almost all generalist work that discusses Knossos focuses on the Minoan and then touches upon the Mycenaean. Or even if the focus is on the Mycenaea, will randomly drop stuff about the Minoans into the mix.

And, yeah. I'm getting into a depth where there sort of aren't books. The few books written for a generalist audience aren't specific or detailed enough. That specificity and detail is in papers, and papers are written by specialists for specialists. There are very few books on "A Primer on Linear B" because either you just want a gloss on it or you are an academic who is going to be studying original inscriptions. So a doc search tends to pull up, instead, "A new interpretation of the meaning of pa-a-mo-ta in the inscriptions of Scribe 143."

I should have seen the signs. Knossos never got the cyclopean walls that almost define LHIIIB on the mainland. It retained much more of the Minoan flavor than other edifices of Mycenaean culture. And there's otherwise an odd paucity of detailed descriptions of Crete in LHIIIB.

Thing is, the two big collections of Linear B tablets are at Pylos and Knossos. Everything I read inferred the Pylos tablets came from just before the mainland destructions around 1190. And the Knossos tablets were always described in contemporary terms, with words and symbols being cross-referenced between them.

And the Homeric sources omit any mention of this destruction (they also skirt over the whole Minoan issue, too). Odysseus proudly proclaims himself grandson of King Minos himself and no-one blinks an eye. The Catalog of Ships lists several Cretan sites.

And the various and sundry maps I've been studying that document waves of invaders to and fro across the Aegean have the same little icons of cities on fire in Crete as they do for the mainland, and with contemporary dates.



So, what next?

First is to confirm. I'm not sure how; the problem I identified above is still there. There's not a good way to refine search terms to separate the final destruction of Knossos from the destructions at the end of the Minoan period. And check the firmness of the dating; it might just be possible to slide the destruction close enough to the point where things go generally to hell (although at the moment, it doesn't look so).

Next, and even harder, is to try to detail. Who was still there, what were they doing? What did it look like, and more importantly, can this still work as my setting?

Or move to another capital. Because I'm pretty rooted to the whole Palatial Workshop at this point. Except I also love the idea of Crete, not just the Minoan heritage, but the whole package. Still, an island outpost town that isn't a Mycenaean capital has some potential.



Okay, I feel a little less stupid; it is a question that's been bugging archaeologists since the 1970s. Enough for them to question Sir Arthur Evans' dating, even. The similarities between tablets inscribed 200 years apart is suspicious. The lack of any mention in Homer or similar texts is suspicious. But on the other hand...the problems seems to have been resolved to most people's satisfaction within the same era.

Troy. Troy Never Changes

The primary goal of historical fiction is the primary goal of all fiction; to tell a good story.

Historical fiction has the secondary goal of bringing a past period to life. Of giving the reader the impression that they are experiencing a part of the past. The expectation is two-fold, two faces of the same core idea; if it is wrong it shouldn't be obvious about it (or, alternatively, that it has good and justifiable reasons to get it wrong), and it should give the appearance of informing, even educating the reader, with new insights into the period and events in question.

There's not a lot, in short, which is off the table. Readers may -- readers most certainly do -- complain about errors and bias but Mel Gibson's bank account isn't hurting, not at all. (And, yes, that's Hollywood, which has their own escape clause of spectacle, but there is a lot of poor historical fiction out there as well.)

The Aegean Bronze Age has a really big escape clause of its own, and that's Troy. The reverence for The Illiad is such that a writer can get just about everything completely unlike any actual bronze age, as long as they hover within at least distant recognition of Homer's epic. (Or any of the mythological sources that supported hundreds of peplum films and several of Ray Harryhausen's best efforts.)

Which is all a long preamble to where I am now. I've shopping carts full of expensive books of research that would take another couple years to read, but it has become time to stop and make the hard calls and spin a version of the Late Bronze Age that at least looks historically justifiable but, more importantly, can be used to spin a good story.




So here's my ground rules, all strongly defensible from textual and archaeological evidence:

There was a sharp transition in many of the major societies of the Eastern Mediterranean but there was not a single cause, a single event, nor a single process. Different empires transitioned into the Greek Dark Ages in different ways, and for a different mix of reasons.

The Mycenaeans do not have a single strong central organization. Nor is palatial control all-embracing; there are at the least industries outside of palace control, and very possibly a splintered bureaucracy without a strong center.  The Mycenae are inheritors of the Minoan culture and there are enough similarities to call it a continuation.

Crete is a multi-ethnic, polyglot society. Not all parts of the island are under central control.

The Sea Peoples come together in a coalition at least once but are otherwise disparate, with no central organization, no single origin, perhaps not even significant similarities.

Outsiders to the Mediterranean have their parts to play, but there is not an overall pattern of outside invasion kicking off the final collapse.

And where I'm thinking of going with it? I still love the concept of Sea Peoples, even if this shows up only as a way to look at a single cultural group with a more specific and documentable history. And I still love the concept of a three or four way fight in Turkey, regardless of whether the Towers of Illios are topless a generation (and a Hisarlik archaeological layer) earlier.

But I'm starting on Crete. And that means defining something that I can go forward with. And here it is; the aftermath of revolution. A tragedy of the commons, you might say. A bronze-age version of Fallout 4. Climate shift, populations grown too large to be sustainable. Drought and famine. On the heels of an earthquake storm (and possibly the Hekla 3 eruption -- why not?) the palatial centers are becoming more centralized behind ever-growing cyclopean walls.

I am painting these bureaucracies as benevolent despots. Exercised no doubt by self-interest, but still; the centralized control and irrigation and coastal defense projects is what makes it possible for the people to survive. And as the drought ends, they are even showing signs of possibly turning the corner.

Except it is always easier to take than to build. So piracy and raiding and warfare between the primitive city-states is increasing in a deadly spiral; the more people turn to arms as a way of surviving, the less agriculture there is to go around in the first place.

This puts of course the most pressure on the people, who revolt both passively (immigrating out of the field of influence of the larger palatial states) and actively. Abetted by the military in that usual conundrum of needing to pay the people who you've hired to loot everyone else lest they add you to the list.

This is on the ground largely orthogonal to the ethnic/linguistic patterns worried over by so many, but as the majority population on Crete is more etocretan than Mycenaean, you can sort of map this on to one of the versions of the Dorian Invasion phantasm. Or in little words, the peasants are revolting, the military stages a coup, then the military takes to ships to grow their own power with flocks of civilians in leaky boats trailing behind hoping to find a better world.

And in the process destroying any real hope of recovery (certainly not of the wide-spun trade and tightly organized industry of the palatial period).

(Yeah...part of this thought came from realization that when the ten-year war was finally over, Agamemnon had not secured a prosperous and well-placed trading port and started a new great empire. The place was dead broke by the time the horse arrived and was burned by the tired and hungry besiegers. Talk about winning the battle but losing the campaign!)

And yes, yes, I can defend some of this, at least with a certain glibness. Oxcarts full of women and children in the Medinet Habu inscriptions, etc. etc. What would be hard to defend is that the motion starts in Crete. Almost certainly, the mainland has problems first, and Crete is caught in the conflagration.

Which is fine. It works just great for the story like that. 

(I'm currently tracking down a thought...the Ekwesh, who may have been the Achaeans aka mainland Greeks, making up a mainstay of the later Sea People's incursions, and the rather more complicated story of the Peleset, who may be both Philistines and Cretans. Not as much fun in some ways as the Sherden, who had a long association with Egypt -- fighting in the Battle of Kadesh, the Pharoah's private bodyguard, etc. -- but have potential as a vague sense of happy ending in that after all of the fighting Rameses III settles them in.........Palestine. Well, nobody said it was happily ever after.)

A Lovely Theory

I found a fun little map at the Wikimedia Commons showing the Aegean Bronze Age ending in a wave of invasions. Boldly and confidently it showed the Dorians sweeping down through Greece, Thracians crossing the Bosphorus, and Sea Peoples sweeping in from...the Black Sea. Maybe they were coming from Colchis?

I love Jason's expression here; a sort of "What the hell am I holding!?"

At least it showed Libyans as the major threat to Egypt. And it didn't have -- as so many maps have had -- the Sea Peoples as the do-everything, Swiss Army Knife invaders of the Aegean.

Really, there is no such beast. There is no single mysterious tribe that sweeps out of nowhere in their boats to lay waste to the empires of the Late Bronze Age. The closest any period accounts come to lumping together the various named tribes and identities is from the pharaoh Merneptah, who singles out three names from a longer list with a parenthetical "...of the sea." In another spot he makes mention of them coming out of islands.

Otherwise there are all sorts of people who sometimes worked together. Rameses II focuses his ire on the Libyans, casting the various other names he lists as hangers-on to their unjust and unwise attack on his majesty.

Heck...I don't know enough about Pharaoh-speak, but I can't help think that these inscriptions go out of their way to come up with as long an enemies list as possible to make the Pharaoh seem greater. (Unrelated, I think the Catalog of Ships is a later bardic addition; "Yes, you guys are in this story, too; your town sent two ships." Apparently scholarly agreement is Homer didn't write that part, anyhow.)

In any case, you might as well be inventing aliens or Atlanteans or something. Although it is both plausible and likely new peoples migrated into the area and caused trouble, it is entirely counter to both the archaeological record and to the political situation of the time to suggest the Sea Peoples are responsible for everything.

Anyone else instantly recognize the Raft of the Medusa?

Look; Greece was ravaged, but the coasts did not suffer worse and inland regions less. Egypt was attacked by land and sea but in any case that's nothing new; for all that apparent stability Egypt spent most of its history fighting to maintain its borders. Look at how much ground was lost while Akhenaten had other matters on his mind. Rameses II fought the Hittites at Kadesh and is really not that far from the period of Hyksos rule.

And the Hittites? They aren't a naval power. They barely have coastal access (depending on where you feel they stand in regards to the coast around Miletus, Assuwa, Arsawa, the Troad...) And they have known and powerful enemies on their borders already. The Kaska have long been a pain in their neck and the Assyrians -- fresh from stomping Babylonia -- have trounced them once in the field and will go on to take over when they are gone.

There's a world view in which an idea like the Sea Peoples can flourish. And that's a world view that has too narrow a focus on, and invests too much importance in, what happens in the Mediterranean. And, particularly, what happens to Greeks (or in this case proto-Greeks.)

It is a known problem in classical scholarship. As a field it inherits a whole cultural baggage of "Foundations of Western Civilization" that focused on the Greek texts. We've got some great texts about when the Greek city-states (well, some of them) faced off agains the Persian Empire, Thing is, that empire was huge. It is absolutely certain they had battles just as large on other frontiers. Those battles didn't get recorded by Herodotus and recited by bored British schoolchildren for multiple generations.

Come at me, bro

(One suspects the Persian account of Thermopylae was along the line of, "Met mild resistance at a narrow pass. Delayed one day. Took Athens in the morning.")*

The same idea has to be true of the sack of Hattusa. The Classics buffs have been poring over Latin and Greek texts, not looking at the archaeology of Mesopotamia. There's no need to postulate mystery guys in boats when there's known and attested mobs of extremely competent charioteers to the East and South of the Hittites. Some of whom had been already beating on them for a while.

You've got not just Mesopotamia, but Libya and all of sub-Saharan Africa to launch an attack from. You can't even leave out Europe; there's no textual or archaeological evidence for anything larger than tribal groups but, hey, whatever else you might say about him and his Iron Swords Beat Chariots ideas Robert Drews makes some compelling arguments.

Sea Peoples in all their glory

Still, saying you can't blame the whole Collapse on the Sea Peoples doesn't mean they didn't have an influence. Not as a single unified source, though. Even the accounts that lump them together into a single invading force imply that theirs is a coalition of convenience, not a singular command. Really, there is no sign in any period account that anyone in the Bronze Age would have thought of the various named peoples in the aggregate. The very idea of "Sea Peoples" -- like the term itself -- is modern.

And within the accounts, not all are associated with ships, the sea, or even islands. The exceptions, however; the exceptions have some of that mystery and excitement of the archetype. The Lukka, for instance, are described as pirates and raiders who live on their boats. The Sherden are described as expert sailors against whom none could stand. Although, oddly, the same Pharaoh who had those remarks carved in stone hired several of them as personal bodyguards. Yet another tidbit that one would love to hear the full story of!

And, yes, it is a pity. As a story-teller, the classical conception of the Sea Peoples (like that of the...sigh...Dorians) is perfect. The causes of the Bronze Age Collapse are mysterious and likely are neither singular nor all-embracing (I personally think it is a mistake to lump the Fall of Troy in with the Burning of Mycenae; they as likely had different causes and happened in very different ways). It doesn't make for a compelling story, though. How much better if you can blame it on Atlantis, or Aliens, or Zombies (yes; the latter book does exist. It's pretty good, too.)

Or Sea Peoples. Because in the classic form, they are well-organized pirates swarming out of the mysterious sea in huge fleets. And what writer couldn't use a few pirates?

The unforgettable Kelly Freas -- making a joke no-one today will get

* Okay, this is a bit unfair. Besides, say, Marathon et al, the Athenian navy trounced the hell out of the Persian fleet. Xerxes literally couldn't afford to keep fighting them. Given the relative poverty of the Greek city-states, from his POV this is starting to look like the Russian Front.

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).