The Sea Peoples

I've found my new novel. And the research is insane.

It came in a moment of inspiration. I can boil it down to one terse statement of purpose (always a good start!) But that statement would be phrased in keywords referencing some of what was going through my head at the time and thus would only make sense to me.

Things like Ozymandius (the Shelly poem, also a similar by Sandburg). The influence of W.W.I on J.R.R. Tolkien. H.P. Lovecraft. The Anabasis of Xenephon. The heroic quest and the concept of the five-man band. Minoan Crete. Bronze-age trade networks. Akhenaten's Egypt. The Belisarius series.

The part of my elevator pitch that I can share, however, is, "...during the Bronze Age Collapse."




Not that this is that explanatory either. It is a complicated and under-documented era in history. Which, honestly, attracted me; the sources are thin and contradictory enough that you can make a lot of shit up with a wave of, "it is defensible that..." or, "sources don't say..."

But that's for the actual collapse. See, here's the problem. Something collapsed and there's remnants of it and stories about it and a whole batch known about it. Oh, and worse? Dark ages don't last. New cultures flower, and some of their stories and myths are buried in that less-documented past.

See, the time of this story is also at the height of power of the Egyptian New Kingdom. Literally Ozymandius (Shelly was inspired by Ramses II, and he and Ramses III document fighting the Sea People.) Tutankhamen and the rest of his interesting family is only a few generations earlier.

And when we come out of the dark ages and the Greeks start writing stuff down again, one of them is a fellow named Homer. Yes, the Trojan War theoretically takes place during the Bronze Age Collapse. And if that wasn't enough...so does much of Exodus.

Yeah, sure, these are pretty heavily disputed and sources, as we say, disagree. But whether there was a Troy and where it is and when Jerrico fell and who was the Pharaoh of Exodus can be endlessly argued in academic circles, it still remains that if I'm writing a story during the collapse, and any of the peoples mentioned actually show up as characters, I'm going to have to know their cultural background. I need at least a smattering of the myths and beliefs and oral traditions and philosophies.



And it gets worse. The Homeric Age and Egypt's Golden Age are both very, very popular. On the one hand, then, you've got fans. On the other side, you are going to have critics. Harsh ones.

(And it doesn't stop there, of course. There's also the wee bit of Ancient Warfare, which has a lot of cranky opinionated people studying it, and it wouldn't hurt to know a little Biblical history, and even though it collapsed hundreds of years ago the Mycenae more or less took over the islands and trading empire but...deep breath...there's never anything wrong with studying the Minoans a little more.)



In a similar good news, bad news way, the popularity of some of these areas means there are unusual research opportunities. I'm all about the look and feel; it is one thing to be able to say "dromon," it is an entirely different (and much better, for the reading experience) be able to say something about what kind of wood or how the sails are used or otherwise put across what the characters see, hear, smell, etc.

There are re-enactors and mummy rooms and epic poetry and recreated historical music and foods and reconstructions of buildings. There's opportunity here to immerse in, if not the actual culture, then something similar enough so it can be extrapolated and approximated. And, yes, I've started pricing plane tickets to Athens.

So far my tentative research list is archaic arms and warfare, Homeric epics, ancient seafaring, Egypt's New Kingdom, Egyptian philosophy, early writing systems, early Greek philosophy, Mycenaean culture, the Hittite empire...

But the first step is getting a general grounding in the period and seeing if I can indeed write a heroic quest in which a rag-tag bunch of misfits (tentative list includes a Mycenaean mercenary, an Egyptian scribe/court magician, a Cretan born seer) fight their way across a war-torn world to solve the mystery of the Sea Peoples. "...during the Bronze Age Collapse."