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.

apes ingentes Hannibalis ad Romam ibant.

I keep reading, and I keep discovering random stuff there's no way I'll ever find again. Not when I want it, that is.

We've actually got the name of a pet cat from 3,000 years ago. It was Egyptian and named "Nedjem" (the hieroglyph nDm translates as "sweet, pleasing," so the cat's name was literally "Sweetie.") Mostly cats got called "miu" or "miut" which is an obvious onomatopoeia. And little Egyptian girls were often called "ta-miu" which I'm just gonna have to paraphrase as "kitten." It makes me think of the Japanese equivalent to "doggie," which is "wan-wan-chan"; two onomatopoetic barks and a diminutive.

But I can't let go of cats without mentioning Mike the Museum Cat, stand-offish guardian of the British Museum and so famed he got two write-ups in the Times and an official biography from E. A. Wallis Budge.




So back to Atlantis. I'm letting the Late Bronze Age novel simmer while I read Barbara Olsen's Women in Mycenaean Greece, a comprehensive work on the lives of Mycenaean women via exhaustive analysis of the Linear B texts.

I'm starting a Scrivener folder on this and I'm naming it "George Smith reads Plato." Although George is a little early for it; the period I want to set it in could be from 1860 to 1950 but for various reasons the first decade of the 20th century seems the best fit.

I want to write about the real people, and the real discoveries, but play them larger than life, and bring in more of the outsiders, the Gertrude Bells, the un-named Kurdish boy who scaled the Behistun Inscription for Sir Henry, etc. This is an Atlantis that could not have existed in our world, and as it comes into theirs the divergence becomes sharper, until people are moving well beyond their historical roles and accomplishments. The real Howard Carter once made a midnight rappel into a group of tomb robbers. This one should get at least a full gunfight.

And I want to follow the same patterns of historical discovery. That so much was gotten wrong, through the filters of cultural and religious preconceptions; Schliemann announcing proudly he has looked upon the face of Agamemnon, George Smith getting excited when he recognizes the Flood story in an earlier myth. And that for every Howard Carter digging out in the desert, there were a dozen men digging into papers at the British Museum, struggling to crack ancient languages and to find the world they expected to find in ancient texts.

I don't know what it is that Atlantis means or had or is, but it is important not just as a way of looking at the world and their place in it. A technology, perhaps. Even a threat. I could go a lot of different directions here, from something potentially useful to the war effort (something that gets Evans crawling back into the dig at Knossos in the middle of the war, say) Or go in more of a horror direction, with an ancient threat unleashed...or it is already rising and only the ancient knowledge can stop it.

I really don't know. But my final thought is that I'd like it to be funny. Not comedy, not even light-hearted, but to have some of the wonderful moments that happened in our world...like the moment George Smith started to strip in the reading room of the British Museum.

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.