Ahhiyawa!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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