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.
Sunday, August 12, 2018
Saturday, August 11, 2018
"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.
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.
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.)
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).
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.)
Friday, August 10, 2018
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?
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.
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.
(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.
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?
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.
Thursday, August 9, 2018
Return of the Triads
Finally got the Behringer hooked up (61-key MIDI controller). Some weeks ago built a cute little 1U rack to let me stick the Firewire audio interface below the laptop and both of those over the keyboard. This weekend I dusted, then added music stand and mic stand...and there was still enough room left for the bass amp. And when I got back to work for the first time after surgery I took some break time for a personal project and sewed up a dust cover for the Behringer.
I'm reading up on theory, particularly reharmonization. I'm splitting my attention between a "folk" cover of the main theme from The Terminator and a sassy small-combo cover of the title track from Hellboy. The latter is where the reharm is really going on; I'm fiddling around with a piano part with some jazzed-up chords.
Having great fun staring at the things and going, "Is that the root? Does that make this a perfect fifth? Or am I actually in A minor and that makes this diminished?" I'm rather convinced -- my dad agrees -- that all these fancy chord names are applied after-the-fact. First a musician plays something that sounds good. Later they go back, figure out where their fingers actually landed, and go, "um, Am7flat9 extended, right?"
Of course since they carved up my nose I have to put off shoving air into a trumpet for a few weeks. Been good for violin and chin'cello practice, though. I've almost got the instinct programmed to complete the string cross before I start bowing, but every practice session I have to lean on it again. Still, progress; I can sometimes cross two strings at once without a horrible noise. Next up -- intentional double-stops!
(I'd say eighty percent of my practice time right now is just walking scales in first position, using the fourth finger instead of the open string. Because there's where the problem is; getting clean from the fourth on one string to the first on another, and back again.)
(Also asked for trouble going to arm vibrato. Means I've lost the security of the neck and sometimes when I leap over to another string I get totally lost. Err...basically, in the default grip the violin is nominally pinched lightly between thumb and the side of the index finger. When you do arm vibrato you pivot off the thumb and there's clearance between your hand and the violin. So when you make the jump to arm vibrato, basically, instead of sliding your grip up and down -- like on the neck of a guitar -- your hand dances spider-like above the fingerboard and you just have to try to keep track of where you actually are at any one moment.)
In the wings is a pop cover of the Assassins Creed III music -- soprano sax and maximum schmaltz -- and I have been dreaming of a mashup between I Am the Doctor and the last part of Tubular Bells -- "And introducing....Cloister Bell!"
Is my energy returning? Maybe. Confidence? I suppose. When I think about it, I'm still lousy at playing an instrument, but mostly I don't think about it and just enjoy whatever it is I am doing.
I'm reading up on theory, particularly reharmonization. I'm splitting my attention between a "folk" cover of the main theme from The Terminator and a sassy small-combo cover of the title track from Hellboy. The latter is where the reharm is really going on; I'm fiddling around with a piano part with some jazzed-up chords.
Having great fun staring at the things and going, "Is that the root? Does that make this a perfect fifth? Or am I actually in A minor and that makes this diminished?" I'm rather convinced -- my dad agrees -- that all these fancy chord names are applied after-the-fact. First a musician plays something that sounds good. Later they go back, figure out where their fingers actually landed, and go, "um, Am7flat9 extended, right?"
Of course since they carved up my nose I have to put off shoving air into a trumpet for a few weeks. Been good for violin and chin'cello practice, though. I've almost got the instinct programmed to complete the string cross before I start bowing, but every practice session I have to lean on it again. Still, progress; I can sometimes cross two strings at once without a horrible noise. Next up -- intentional double-stops!
(I'd say eighty percent of my practice time right now is just walking scales in first position, using the fourth finger instead of the open string. Because there's where the problem is; getting clean from the fourth on one string to the first on another, and back again.)
(Also asked for trouble going to arm vibrato. Means I've lost the security of the neck and sometimes when I leap over to another string I get totally lost. Err...basically, in the default grip the violin is nominally pinched lightly between thumb and the side of the index finger. When you do arm vibrato you pivot off the thumb and there's clearance between your hand and the violin. So when you make the jump to arm vibrato, basically, instead of sliding your grip up and down -- like on the neck of a guitar -- your hand dances spider-like above the fingerboard and you just have to try to keep track of where you actually are at any one moment.)
In the wings is a pop cover of the Assassins Creed III music -- soprano sax and maximum schmaltz -- and I have been dreaming of a mashup between I Am the Doctor and the last part of Tubular Bells -- "And introducing....Cloister Bell!"
Is my energy returning? Maybe. Confidence? I suppose. When I think about it, I'm still lousy at playing an instrument, but mostly I don't think about it and just enjoy whatever it is I am doing.
Sunday, August 5, 2018
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.
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.
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).
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).
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.
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
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
(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).
Paging George Berkeley
I'm visually oriented. No big surprise there; humans generally are. What I mean specifically is I'm at home, resting after surgery, and I find it really annoying when I need to use the ice pack because it covers my eyes. I'm awake and alert and thinking about the writing I'm working on and even if I'm listening to a podcast about writing (the Writing Excuses podcast, which I discovered through participant Howard Taylor, the writer and artist of webcomic Schlock Mercenary) I am bored and impatient.
Odd. It is about words, but more, about the concepts those words are intended to capture, but I want and need to see the words on paper. The podcasts are barely enough to divert my attention from cold eyes (literally; the ice pack, again).
Yeah, surgery. I don't remember it. They hooked me up, I sat around for about four hours until they had me walk over to the operating theater holding my bag of Ringer's in one hand, I lay down on the operating table and blinked the sleep out of my eyes in a quiet room with blood dripping out of my nose.
Retrograde surgical amnesia. Surgery might have been painful. I might have panicked going under. I might have complained about the fit of the mask. I will never know; those experiences were edited from me like the gaps in the Watergate tapes. Total lost a little over an hour. As far as I know I had contiguous memory from waking up in recovery but my only checksum is that the timing works.
That is; I had a blood pressure cuff on and I counted three inflation events in the time before my anesthesiologist came over to check up on me. They felt nominally the same elapsed time between each, and I know the machine is typically set to a fifteen minute interval, and the anesthesiologist confirmed it had been about an hour since I was wheeled in. So I may have lost a few bits here and there but I still experienced them as contiguous elapsed time (I have a pretty decent awareness of elapsed time when sleeping, generally able to guess within 25% of how long I've been under).
Yeah, it was kind of a Femi Estimation day. I had stuck my book (aka, iPhone with Kindle) at the bottom of my property bag and I got rather bored sitting there in gown with wires and tubes dripping off me waiting for the doctor to arrive. Started studying the parts of the IV, all the various glands and valves up to the bag of Ringer's Lactate (clearly marked, plus the cabinet it came out of was within my line of sight).
Wasn't until I thought about the problem of keeping air getting into the line that I realized the length of the tube had to be carrying saline and, from the looks of the valves, at sufficient pressure to keep my own blood where it belonged. Then I looked at the drip chamber where the level wasn't increasing and it became obvious there was a positive pressure in the system. Aka it had been dripping into me all this time.
So I estimated the droplet size and rate (2-3 mm in diameter, falling at one per second) and that came out to 500 ml/hour. Figuring the bag had been on for two hours at that point and presumably had started from one liter, that was within a factor of two. Tried to calculate column height versus blood pressure as a cross-check was a no-go, though. But there was another nice cross-check; I needed to piss, human bladder holds about .8 liters, typical urination from a less-full bladder is 1-2 cups and a cup is either 250 or 350 ml (I couldn't remember, but then I was only going for about a factor of 2 accuracy). Hadn't had any water since leaving home that morning so that was basically the Ringer's going through.
On the way back from the bathroom I let the bag in my hand go below my heart level and I got red tint in the line about ten cm up from my arm. Nice cross-check; the positive pressure was indeed column height. Over the next hour I made a mental mark on the bag and was able to verify a flow of around 100 ml over 20 minutes.
Yeah. This is how physics geeks pass the time. You should see me contemplating the competing regimes of convection, conduction and radiation over a cooling cup of coffee.
The operation? Nasal Polpectomy and turbinate reduction. I'm in the second day of recovery and mild inflammation is setting in but I'm basically able to breathe freely through my nose for the first time in at least a year. Too early to tell yet but I have a strong feeling this is going to return a lot of my strength.
Odd. It is about words, but more, about the concepts those words are intended to capture, but I want and need to see the words on paper. The podcasts are barely enough to divert my attention from cold eyes (literally; the ice pack, again).
Yeah, surgery. I don't remember it. They hooked me up, I sat around for about four hours until they had me walk over to the operating theater holding my bag of Ringer's in one hand, I lay down on the operating table and blinked the sleep out of my eyes in a quiet room with blood dripping out of my nose.
Retrograde surgical amnesia. Surgery might have been painful. I might have panicked going under. I might have complained about the fit of the mask. I will never know; those experiences were edited from me like the gaps in the Watergate tapes. Total lost a little over an hour. As far as I know I had contiguous memory from waking up in recovery but my only checksum is that the timing works.
That is; I had a blood pressure cuff on and I counted three inflation events in the time before my anesthesiologist came over to check up on me. They felt nominally the same elapsed time between each, and I know the machine is typically set to a fifteen minute interval, and the anesthesiologist confirmed it had been about an hour since I was wheeled in. So I may have lost a few bits here and there but I still experienced them as contiguous elapsed time (I have a pretty decent awareness of elapsed time when sleeping, generally able to guess within 25% of how long I've been under).
Yeah, it was kind of a Femi Estimation day. I had stuck my book (aka, iPhone with Kindle) at the bottom of my property bag and I got rather bored sitting there in gown with wires and tubes dripping off me waiting for the doctor to arrive. Started studying the parts of the IV, all the various glands and valves up to the bag of Ringer's Lactate (clearly marked, plus the cabinet it came out of was within my line of sight).
Wasn't until I thought about the problem of keeping air getting into the line that I realized the length of the tube had to be carrying saline and, from the looks of the valves, at sufficient pressure to keep my own blood where it belonged. Then I looked at the drip chamber where the level wasn't increasing and it became obvious there was a positive pressure in the system. Aka it had been dripping into me all this time.
So I estimated the droplet size and rate (2-3 mm in diameter, falling at one per second) and that came out to 500 ml/hour. Figuring the bag had been on for two hours at that point and presumably had started from one liter, that was within a factor of two. Tried to calculate column height versus blood pressure as a cross-check was a no-go, though. But there was another nice cross-check; I needed to piss, human bladder holds about .8 liters, typical urination from a less-full bladder is 1-2 cups and a cup is either 250 or 350 ml (I couldn't remember, but then I was only going for about a factor of 2 accuracy). Hadn't had any water since leaving home that morning so that was basically the Ringer's going through.
On the way back from the bathroom I let the bag in my hand go below my heart level and I got red tint in the line about ten cm up from my arm. Nice cross-check; the positive pressure was indeed column height. Over the next hour I made a mental mark on the bag and was able to verify a flow of around 100 ml over 20 minutes.
Yeah. This is how physics geeks pass the time. You should see me contemplating the competing regimes of convection, conduction and radiation over a cooling cup of coffee.
The operation? Nasal Polpectomy and turbinate reduction. I'm in the second day of recovery and mild inflammation is setting in but I'm basically able to breathe freely through my nose for the first time in at least a year. Too early to tell yet but I have a strong feeling this is going to return a lot of my strength.
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