Ludy Morza

Drat. Outline failure.

I've been thinking a lot about the Bronze Age Collapse and how that interacts with the story I'm trying to write. I'd been aware since I'd first encountered the event of parallels with our own time. The more I read, both in history and in the news, the more I'm seeing things that I feel like I should talk about.

Heck, during the recent fires, when everyone was walking around suffering and hacking with all the smoke in the air, it struck me that the mass sacking and burning of the palatial centers of the Bronze Age would have to make things "interesting" for the poor peasantry downwind.

The evidence is fairly strong for a long period of drought at the end of the Bronze Age, possibly brought on by a small-scale climate change. There is also the possibility (as has been raised for several past cultures, particularly some mesoamerican ones, but also the dust bowl Steinbeck wrote about), that some of the problems may have been self-inflicted. There is good evidence for famine and plague as well (the latter, of course, is almost a given anyhow).

So there's a nasty echo here of the predictions of the results of modern climate change; the crop failures and famines and the loss of habitability leading to mass migrations and, when those migrations are opposed, warfare.

Plus it has certainly been mentioned before the extreme stratification of the palatial societies was itself a stressor. The interdependence of wide networks of trade has certainly been discussed; the Bronze-age equivalent of strategic minerals being of course copper and tin (and cedar) -- with the very real possibility of reaching Peak Tin. There's even been theories in some circles (looking at you, Drews) of a technological advance that changes the balance of power -- and not in the favor of the side that's been investing generations in the construction of elite Charioteers.




Be all that as it may. From the ground, the picture looks very different. I am looking at the motivations and world view of my cast and they are ill-suited to join forces to try to stop a catastrophe. For my Egyptian scholar, Egypt is eternal. Not necessarily unchanging -- very much, the people of the distant past had knowledge and technical abilities (pyramids, anyone) that the current generation can only search for.

The Mycenaean's views I'm still working on. It is possible that he sees already the ending of the heroic age that Homer will write off; the old kings, the great cities are falling, the older heroes like Perseus and Theseus have already passed on, and even the more recent heroes like Achilles were left in the dust of fallen Wilusa. He is, however, part of the new martial world of the Greek Dark Ages; he's a fighter, a noble son, a mercenary captain.

From his direct experience, though -- like that of most in the time -- there isn't so much an overwhelming pattern. They don't see the simplified sweep of invasions and collapses that we, with our paucity of records, draw on maps today. They see instead a series of discrete events. Of many alliances and changes of power and changes of ownership. They see the tumbling rock, not the avalanche.

The Minoan may have the best perspective here. (Actually, she's a Mycenaean weaver on Crete, brought up in a mountain temple and somewhere along the way picked up a romanticized proto-nationalistic understanding of the previous Minoan culture). If she knows any real history, she knows of Thera and the tsunami that may have triggered the decline and eventual destruction of the Minoan centers, paving the way for the new Mycenae thallasocracy. In short, she knows it can happen here, because she's "seen" it happen.

The Phoenician has the most potentially balanced understanding of the changes that are going on. His is also, in some ways, the most distant. He's not going to describe this is a disaster, or the movement of the various peoples lumped together by some historians as "the Sea Peoples" as an invader. He's going to see the trends of change in technology and philosophy and population density and balance of trade.



So for both these reasons, I've moved pretty far from the idea of doing some light adventure thing where my met-in-a-tavern group of unlikely heroes tour half the Mediterranean like a package tour, fighting off endless bad guys with various spectacular feats of derring-do and eventually saving the world from something even worse than a Dark Age.

But that leaves me very uncertain of where I am going to be. I had a bit of an outline that at least was an emotionally logical progression of people just trying to survive and figure out where to go next.

Even that, though, got me in trouble. I was just reading again about our favorite "heretic pharaoh," Akhenaten, and I realized there's the whole great city of Amarna, the former capital, abandoned to the sands not two hundred years ago as of the time the novel is set. What better place for my Scholar-scribe to go Indiana-Jonesing?

Go a bit north by north-east, and if my Mycenaean Xenephon actually gets his less-than-ten-thousand to the sea, he might just want to sail back to Greece and who knows what kind of fun is waiting for him back at Ithaca (or, rather, the post-palatial destruction Mycenae and other great cities).

The party is so split at this point, though, that's two different...well.....BOOKS.