Category Archives: The Flame Before Us

The changing place of women in the ancient Near East

Image of Seshat (from Wikipedia)
Image of Seshat (from Wikipedia)

So far as we can tell, the place of women in ancient Near Eastern culture shifted rapidly between the second and first millennia BC. At the start of that time, say around 1400BC during the Late Bronze Age, it was possible in some places for women to own and manage property, hold positions of considerable social rank, be literate, and so on. By the middle of the first millennium, say around 600 or 700 BC, just before the Babylonian armies conquered most of the Levant, women had a distinctly subordinate role, defined by the status of their father or husband.

We understand this partly through the written word, and partly through artefact. Some Egyptian letters written by or for women document their business transactions, for example. Or in other cases letters written by a husband show that his wife was trusted with the business while he was away. The Hebrew Bible describes women in the pre-monarchy era who were recognised as owners of land and leaders of the people.

Physical artefacts such as amulets or official seals from the earlier period show roughly equal numbers of male and female figures – usually, though not always, gods and goddesses. Later ones showing figures are heavily skewed towards male subjects, and where a scene would previously have called for a woman to be shown, an abstract representative symbol such as a star or tree often appears.

What these sources do not tell us is what social or cultural impulse was behind these changes of representation, and the shifts of attitude they reveal. Certainly, the region had become a more dangerous place. The Bronze Age great kings with their extensive vassal territories had been swept away, replaced by small localised kingdoms in permanent strife. Life, and travel, had become hazardous. So did the place of women change because of the widespread unrest? Did communities feel a need to protect their women, or less positively simply want to assert ownership over a valuable resource?

In fiction, I have chosen to present this change in several ways. The Four Towns, including Kephrath, are traditionally arranged matrilocally… a man moves into the household of his new wife, rather than bringing her into his family home. Descent and property is reckoned through daughters rather than sons. This is the world of In a Milk and Honeyed Land. There is no solid evidence this was done in Canaan, but the Hebrew Bible records traces of such traditions in Mesopotamia.

The Approach of the Sea Peoples
The Approach of the Sea Peoples

In my fictional world, the advent of the Sea Peoples signals the change. The ancient world cataclysm is described in The Flame Before Us. Greek women were, at least in classical times, strictly subordinate to men. I have assumed that this also applied to their Mycenaean precursors, who carried this cultural habit with them as they moved through the Levant. So the social disruption brought about by so many newcomers – whether for war or peace – changed the nature of the existing culture as it absorbed them.

The exact historical cause is unknown, and will probably remain so. However, it seemed to me that the interaction of European and Middle Eastern cultures at this early date might well lead to some unexpected results. Perhaps this was one of them.

Shipping and boats in the ancient Mediterranean – at sea

Cover - The Flame Before Us
Cover – The Flame Before Us

Now that The Flame Before Us is happily released,  my thoughts are turning to the next venture. I have several ideas which I want to pursue, but the one for today involves a sea journey, out from Phoenicia along (and ultimately outside) the Mediterranean Sea.  Right now I do not have a working title, but the action will start very soon after Flame finishes.

But leaving aside plot details, this means that I have been reading up about ships and shipping in the ancient near east and beyond. Now, much Mediterranean shipping of that time was purely coastal, returning to beach on a handy shore as night fell. But there were what you might call “long-haul” vessels as well, which even if they routinely remained in sight of the coast for navigation, were fully able to remain at sea for long periods of time.

A lot of our information about these comes from shipwrecks, such as the one recovered from the south Turkish coast which has provided a wealth of information about 14th century BC maritime life. She was lost approximately 100 years before the events of In a Milk and Honeyed Land. The ship was carrying about 10 tons of copper ingots, a rather smaller quantity of tin, and a wide selection of valuables and other cargo originating in Mycenaean Greece, Cyprus, Canaan, Babylon, Egypt, Assyria, and various parts of Europe. The ship herself was around 15m in length. Scientific American reckoned that it was one of the ten most important archaeological discoveries of the 20th century.

Model of the Uluburun ship (from Wikipedia)
Model of the Uluburun ship (from Wikipedia)

So shipwrecks give us a lot of information, and pictorial evidence from various sources gives us more. For example, the pictures of Rameses III’s battles against the Sea Peoples show us both Egyptian and other vessels. We do not always know if the artist meant the drawing to be strictly accurate, particularly where rigging is concerned, but they are a good start.

There have been several recent reconstructions of ancient sea-going ships, such as the Phoenician vessel that I blogged about some time ago, based on a ship dating from about half a millennium later than the Uluburun wreck. The best known mariners of this era were the Phoenicians, but many other nations had their own ships as well.

Something else that I recently found out is how prevalent river transport was across much of Europe… but this will be the subject of another blog.

Reminder

A quick weekend reminder that not only is The Flame Before Us now available, but there’s a countdown offer on Scenes From a Life for the next few days (UK and US Amazon stores only). Prices began at £0.99 / $0.99 and rise periodically through the course of a week to their normal values.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Scenes-Life-Richard-Abbott-ebook/dp/B00H8Y0F7E/
http://www.amazon.com/Scenes-Life-Richard-Abbott-ebook/dp/B00H8Y0F7E/

Cover - The Flame Before Us
The Flame Before Us
Cover - Scenes From a Life
Scenes From a Life

Three announcements

9780993168413
Cover – The Flame Before Us

Well, today’s the day for three announcements. The first is that The Flame Before Us is now available on Amazon stores world-wide in both Kindle and soft cover format. Some of the links are

Along with that, I have put Scenes from a Life on a special promotional “countdown” deal (UK and US only). The current Kindle price is £0.99/$0.99, rising back to the regular price in a week.
Finally, it is time to unveil the relocated blog, right here. This holds back copies of all previously posted articles and comments. I will continue to maintain the original one (http://richardabbott.authorsxpress.com/) for some time to come. The main reason is technical – the previous location has become very slow and erratic, with some periods of unexplained down time. Trying to get technical support and explanation has been frustrating.

The new location is with the same technical providers as the main Kephrath site, who have repeatedly proved themselves to be skilled and responsive at handling such things. So hopefully things will be more stable from now on!

That’s it for today – enjoy all that’s on offer!

The Flame Before Us – this week

Cover image - The Flame Before UsThis week sees the release of The Flame Before Us in Kindle and softcover versions – preorder is available now and delivery will be shortly after.

I have already posted various snippets from the story, so today I thought I would bring these together into the four strands which make up the whole.

  1. Refugees from IkaretAnilat and her husband Tadugari, their three children, and two members of their household remain in a group together after the defeat and sack of their home city of Ikaret (Ugarit). Anilat’s nephew and niece, Yasib and Dantiy, leave with them but soon separate to pursue a different route.
  2. Newcomers in the landNikleos and Kastiandra and their two children are Sherden migrants, working their way south through the land. Their clan is distantly related to the Sea Peoples’ groups which sacked Ikaret, but they themselves took no part in the attack.
  3. The Egyptian occupying forceHekanefer is a military scribe, attached to an army contingent based in Gedjet (Gaza), and subsequently dispatched north to defend against the incursion.
  4. Inhabitants of the landLabayu is a native of the town of Kephrath, currently living in a town near the Sea of Kinreth (Galilee) to help protect the people and their homes.

These four groups start with very little reason to know of or feel empathy for one another. The changing situation throws these groups into contact with each other several times as they all head south to the city of Shalem (Jerusalem). There, the city governor arranges an encounter which will decide all of their futures.

Not long to wait now…

The Flame Before Us release date getting closer!

April 16th is the Kindle release date for The Flame Before Us. The soft-cover version passed its last physical proofing check and will be going live at such time as CreateSpace can process it. It will be round about the same time but I have not tracked down a way to synchronise both, so cannot be sure it will be the exact same date. All very exciting…

Preorder links are:

To celebrate, I shall also be making Scenes from a Life available on the Kindle Countdown scheme from April 16th for a week, starting at £0.99, $0.99 or equivalent, and slowly rising through the week. Your opportunity to get both at the same time!

Here’s the start of The Flame Before Us:

“But father will be back from the north before we have to leave?”

Anilat looked carefully at her mother, hoping to see some sign of the truth of the matter. But the old face, schooled in a great many years of diplomacy, was giving nothing away, and the old voice did not directly answer her.

“You will be leaving as he instructed, a half-month from now. I will wait for his return and follow on after. He has been called to attend to the wishes of the King of the North even now.”

The last was, surely, a simple guess, perhaps even a needy wish. Anilat nodded slowly, wondering if, after all, her mother had no more information than she had already shared. All that she herself knew came from the brief report delivered by the weary rider as he passed by the envoy’s house on his way to the royal palace of Ikaret.

Not long after his arrival, the city gates had been closed, and the priests were called out from the temple to bless and prepare the few city guardsmen who remained. Most of the army had already been sent north to join the collected forces of the great King of the North, assembling somewhere in the vassal territories along the coast. As well as force of numbers and weapons, they had taken wagon loads of supplies, honouring the requirements of the treaty.

The army had travelled by land, along the great Sea Road that ran all the way from the southern sedge lands of the Mitsriy up to the rugged hills in the north. But Ikaret had grown up facing the sea, and the sea still brought most of the wealth to the people. Although the hinterlands were fair, and the overland trade routes reliable, it was the port that gave life to the city. There were so few good harbours north or south along this coast.

For a time the royal family of Ikaret had offered allegiance to the Mitsriy, but no longer, not for many generations. Their loyalty had turned away when the ruler of the Khatti-lands, the great King of the North, had started to expand his sway. He was much closer to them in both distance and culture.

The Mitsriy protests were in vain; the city was simply too far north from their homeland to be retained. It was too far for an effective campaign of retaliation to be considered, even from the unruly collection of Kinahny vassal lands they controlled. Even the most warlike among the Mitsriy kings had never been able to secure their conquests this far along the coast. It suited Ikaret to have her ties of allegiance holding her to the north. The huge flocks of wading birds that feasted in the shallow waters around the bay, emblematic of Ikaret herself, had enjoyed prosperity and comparative peace for a very long time.

A little over two years ago, the first stories of raiding groups harrying the fringes of the settled lands had reached the city. A long way north and west of Ikaret, they mostly struck at island settlements, or very remote coastal towns which could not be easily reinforced. Rumours of troop losses had spread, and the great king had been swift to silence the more vocal of his critics. But the reports were still carried, by traders and officials more concerned about the immediate risk to their life and livelihood than the king’s displeasure. Then there had been a lull for a while, and it seemed that peace had returned.

But as the weather turned colder, and winter drew close this year, forlorn and homeless groups had started to come down the Sea Road. The first few dozen of these were treated with kindness and a spirit of welcome. But dozens swelled to hundreds, and generosity could only stretch so far. Some of them stopped around the outskirts of the city, clustering in great tented pools around the streams and wells. Others moved on again, southwards, hoping to find better favour among the Fenku, or even the Mitsriy. They would have a long journey southward, along the Sea Road, but perhaps the effort would be worth while.

“Are the children ready to leave? Yours and your brother’s?”

Recent activities on other sites

As readers will know, much of my time recently has been put into getting The Flame Before Us ready for publication. It is now available for Kindle pre order at Amazon.com, Amazon UK, Amazon India, and elsewhere. The softcover version is going through the last stages of production and will be available at round about the same time.

But outside that I have been involved with a range of other things. One that I was particularly pleased to take part in was a contribution to Suzanne Adair’s “Relevant History” blog. Entitled Stamped on these Lifeless Things, it was an exploration of early writing. A lot of fun to write, and judging from the comments, readers enjoyed it too. One lucky reader got a free copy of In a Milk and Honeyed Land which at the time of writing has just successfully made its way across the Atlantic.

There are a few reviews which have appeared on other sites recently –

Historical Novel Society

  • The Queen of Washington (Francis Hamit) – spies and intrigue during the American Civil War.
  • Will Poole’s Island (Tim Weed) – again in America, but this time in the early colonial days, exploring different interactions between the settlers and original inhabitants.
  • Turwan (Richard J Carroll) – over to Australia and a fact-based account of one man’s relationship with aboriginal groups.

The last two had a lot of points of similarity, setting personal cross-cultural friendship in contrast to a background of social prejudice.

The Review Group

  • Splintered Energy (Arlene Webb) – a near-future first contact science fiction book taking a different approach to the subject. This book is only the first in a series of four, so is far from complete at the end – plenty of material for enthusiasts to get their teeth into.

All of the above reviews are live at the sites indicated, and will be making their way onto Amazon and elsewhere shortly.

Other books – reviews planned but not yet written –

  • Camp Follower (Suzanne Adair) – again in the US, exploring military actions and intrigue in North and South Carolina in the War of Independence. I am slowly getting my head around the twists and turns of American history. I am part-way through Suzanne’s Hostage to Heritage at the moment, also exploring the same context from a different perspective.
  • Lincoln at Gettysburg (Garry Willis) – not a work of fiction, but rather an analysis of the rhetorical and social background to Lincoln’s speech. As a non-American I found this fascinating, particularly the place in American thought of this and other early documents, in contrast to our own British attitude to things like Magna Carta.
  • The Oblate’s Confession – monastic life in Northumbria after the synod of Whitby, tackling both personal and religious life.

Plenty of excitement there…

The Flame Before Us now available for preorder

Well, here’s some great news about The Flame Before Us – both Kindle and soft-cover versions are now queued up for full distribution. The Kindle version can now be preordered at
http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00V2JVRGO
or
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00V2JVRGO,
but the physical version will take a little longer to become available. Both should be accessible for purchase from mid April.

To celebrate, here is the final, full cover image:Kindle cover image

And here is the cover blurb:

Conflict and commitment in the shadow of a city’s downfall

The raiding ships have come before, but this time it is different. This time the attackers are coming to stay, and defensive walls will not hold them back. Nowhere is safe. One by one, the great kings and their vassal cities collapse as the newcomers advance.

The land is already a patchwork of many different peoples, bound together in a fragile web of traditional alliances and rivalries. How will political and personal promises change with the arrival of the new clans? Is war inevitable, or can a different answer be found?

Walk with refugees, migrants, and defenders of the land alike, as they struggle to create a different way of life beside the ruins of the old. Can alliance, commitment and love survive the turmoil?

(Cover artwork © Copyright Ian Grainger www.iangrainger.co.uk)

The burial place

Today it is time for another look at a cover element of The Flame Before Us, and another extract to go with that. Like my other cover designs, this has been put together by Ian Grainger (www.iangrainger.co.uk), whose skills with photography and image manipulation have been essential. Ian’s site is well worth a look.

Lamp and smoke cover image partSo, the cover piece today is the third individual element of the whole, being an oil lamp nicely lit. Ian and I had a lot of fun tracking down a suitable lamp and working out how to get a good flame with olive oil. Other than being manufactured within the last year or so, this is a pretty good match to an oil lamp of the era described in the story.

Today’s extract is from near to the end of the book. In the extract, we have been following Anilat, her daughter Haleyna, and their nurse Damatiria throughout the book. Damariel and Nepheret are priests: readers of earlier books in the series will recognise them.

Some time later, they stood at what had been the gateway of a walled area. Wild grasses and bright flowers straggled between the buildings. It had indeed been a short distance, but the old couple moved only at a slow pace. They had headed south from the city, away from the house near the city wall, away from the area containing Anilat’s new home, past the scattering of dwellings starting to spill outside the old boundary.

The spring sun shone on the holy place. It was deserted now, the buildings of the interior lying empty. Anilat recognised the design from places that her mother had spoken of. Beside her, just outside the walls, was a guardhouse. Ahead of her was the main shrine, stripped now of everything valuable. Over to one side were halls where the women would have eaten, sung, and slept. On the other side was a low stone enclosure wall. The priest, Damariel, led them towards it.

The track they walked on curved around behind the wall, and then stopped at a flight of steps going down. Anilat realised that they led underground, under the walled area. The stone flags of the steps were still neat, but trailing thorns and briars were starting to encroach. The bottom of the stairs lay in a pool of shadow. Nepheret struck fire from a stone and lit a small clay lamp.

They went down the stairs in a group. The two priests were first, with Anilat following closely. Haleyna was on her right, and Damatiria on her left, and all three women had linked arms. As they descended the steps into the shadows, the flame in Nepheret’s hand cast ever darker shadows behind them. Little rustling sounds came from crevices in the rocks.

At the bottom of the stairs they stood on a bare earth floor. Rock pillars, decorated with twisting painted vines and lotus flowers, supported the vaulted ceiling. The air was a little damp, and the patterns on the pillars were already starting to fade. The lamplight was lost in the curves of the roof, but Anilat could see that the dark expanse above them was sprinkled with stars. Damariel took Anilat by the hand and stepped confidently across the floor away from the daylight, then turned to his right through a narrow arch into a second room.

Pillars leaned out of the gloom like tree trunks. Here, the darkness was thick, silent. The little flame cast only a small puddle of light. They approached the end wall.

A great figure of the Lady Nut stretched from side to side. Her feet were arched, with her toes on the ground to their left, her body stretched over their heads, and her fingertips touched the earth again on their right. Her naked body was speckled with the stars of the heavens, and her eye gazed at them without blinking. She was glorious, magnificent, life-affirming.

The wall itself was pierced with little alcoves and pockets. Small jars and pots rested in some of them, but most were empty. Damariel gestured towards them, the shadow of his hand ranging across the wall as the flame bowed and danced. His voice sounded hollow in the chamber.

To find out who is being laid to rest here, you will have to be patient… the release date for The Flame Before Us is set as mid-April, probably 15th for the Kindle version and a few days later for the paperback to become available.

The Origins of the Sea Peoples

Versatile Blogger logoBefore I get started on the blog post itself, I should briefly mention that I was nominated by Helen Hollick (http://ofhistoryandkings.blogspot.co.uk/) for the Versatile Blog award. My explanatory post for that will follow in a few days.

So, today’s post explores theories about the original home of the Sea Peoples. These appear in The Flame Before Us in the form of a small clan of Sherden, travelling in ox carts south through the province of Canaan looking for a new home. The story, and the history behind it, has the Sherden as one group among many, and it seems that the Sea Peoples as a whole consisted of a collection of tribes linked loosely together. We know the names of many of these groups, though not their inter-relationships – as well as Sherden, we have Lukka, Tursha, Peleset, Danuna, Peleset, Tjekker, Weshwesh, Shekelesh and so on.

The various ancient literary sources do not give enough information about these people to be sure of their original homeland. Their names appear first as small groups of fighters allied to larger powers, with the suggestion that they served as mercenaries. Earlier texts describe them in north Africa, forming part of a Libyan army. Later ones place them on the move south through the Levant, this time in larger numbers and with family groups. It is not clear whether their journey from the north was voluntary migration, or if they were forced out by pressure of events.

The Egyptians, from whom we get the term “Sea Peoples”, recorded where they met various groups, and not their ultimate point of origin. One Egyptian word used of them is, unfortunately, ambiguous: it can be applied to either islands or coastal regions. The Hebrew Bible focuses on one group, the Philistines, (identified with Egyptian prst) as they moved south and settled in the coastal plain. We are told that the Philistines arrived from Caphtor (Crete), but, this is generally viewed in the same way as the Egyptian material – it tells us an immediate embarkation point rather than an original homeland.

So, research has largely focused around a few areas to give indirect information. The most popular one has been to look at place names around the Mediterranean, and decide if these give clues. Other people have looked at language relics, or archaeological links from their later settlement in the five cities in Canaan given by Egypt to different possible starting points.

Four major theories have emerged:

1. Various Mediterranean islands, with the links supplied by name – Sherden from Sardinia, Shekelesh from Sicily, and so on. This theory arose in the 19th century, and is probably the idea most commonly encountered.

2. Various places in Asia Minor, or more specifically southern Turkey, with name links such as Sherden from Sardes, Shekelesh from Sagalassos, etc. This theory was proposed by the Egyptologist Maspero, and is occasionally revisited. However, it has never really gained a great following, perhaps because it does not tackle the question of their relationships with the Hittites.

3. Various locations in the Balkan peninsula, along either the Aegean or Adriatic coasts. For example, Pliny lists Sardeates and Siculi as people-groups in this area, which recent scholars have linked to Sherden and Shekelesh respectively.

4. Various Mycenaean Greek locations. Although various name correspondences with the writings of Homer have been suggested, such as prst from Pylos, the main argument here is in fact archaeological. The twelfth century BC bichrome pottery from south-west Palestine known as Philistine Ware is considered similar to Aegean Late Helladic IIIC, suggesting that a travelling people brought their pottery techniques and designs with them.

In The Flame Before Us, I have gone along with the fourth of these. This is partly because I think that basing the link only on a correspondence of names is quite weak, and – clearly from the above list – open to multiple different possibilities. But in terms of the story, this also allows me to make links between the Greek participants in the Trojan War, and the Sherden of the story.

It seems to me that the destructive pattern attributed to the Sea Peoples is best seen as an extension of the Trojan War recounted in the Iliad and elsewhere. That war, stripped to a basic historical core, tells how Mycenaean Greeks travelled in ships to plunder a city on the western edge of the Hittite world. Seen in this way, the fall of Troy is simply the first episode in a chain of events that rippled around the eastern Mediterranean, encompassing Ugarit and Hatsor among many other cities.

At the end of the day the historical homeland of the Sea Peoples remains obscure, but in story-telling terms I am proposing a way for early Greek ideas and culture to enter into the Levant.