Something a little different – rather than a post on the ancient world today, here is something on the modern technologies that can be used to support authorship.

I guess it is fairly common knowledge now that authors can completely bypass the traditional publishing route and put their own content up on Amazon and other online retailers directly. There are huge debates – some would say arguments – as to the merits of this process of universalisation. I don’t propose to go into these, except to say that I don’t think that selection by a major publishing house necessarily confers literary merit (just think of all those series of airport romances one encounters), nor that going your own way necessarily shows independence of spirit and dedication to a cause (after all, it is true that some indie books have not been edited as carefully as they might, and some are not very good).

Nor am I going to go into a step-by-step account as to how to set up your files to download and then use Amazon’s KindleGen. There are some great tutorials out there and the world does not really need another one.

What I am going to do is talk a bit about my experiences of using these tools. The basic principles are easy – you take the document from your favourite word processing package, export it to HTML, then feed it into KindleGen on your favourite computer, and out comes a nicely produced mobi file. If you really want to short-circuit the process, you just take your word-processing file and throw it as-is into Smashwords and let their software do the work for you. What can go wrong?

Well, as ever, it is the little touches that make some of the difference. Personally, coming from a programming development background, I want to be in control of the process as much as I can. So the Smashwords approach (“just give us the Word document and we’ll convert it”) fills me with unease, even if I can then review the finished product. I am very happy to accept that it has been an enormous benefit to a lot of people who do not have the time, energy, and training to use a geeky tool like KindleGen. Geeky it certainly is! There is almost nothing in the way of online help, and whilst it does indeed have a sound inner logic, my guess is that some people find the raw listing of errors and warnings a bit intimidating. This, however, is just up my street!

I also like the way KindleGen allows you to get more pedantic and proper about the process as you learn more. So personally I would always split off my text styles into a central css file, and put supporting image files in their own folder. I prefer keeping my definition file logically separate from my content files, and both of these separate from the table of contents. That makes good sense!

But it has to be said that it is still a slow process. I have been working on two projects – a short story entitled The Man in the Cistern, which is set in the same world as In a Milk and Honeyed Land, and my former PhD thesis Triumphal Accounts in Hebrew and Egyptian. Both of these will see the light of day before long… but both have raised interesting problems. There are some common things – just how much geeky metadata does one need? What about getting an ISBN number? Just how many of the optional fields do I really need, and where to they appear in the online listing? When I look at it using the Kindle Previewer does it show up how I would like? In passing, this is another essential app, and one that encourages you to think about multiple different target devices rather than just the one you happen to own!

The thesis has been much the harder, partly because it is substantially longer, but mainly because the content includes funny fonts (well, Hebrew and Egyptian among others), together with lots of tables and diagrams. I have learned that things that work just fine in a word processor really do not work on kindle without a lot of fussing. I do think the effort is worth it – after all, if you are going to self-publish then you are denying yourself the expertise (and the cost) of professional layout. So you have to put in the thought and time yourself. Diagrams that look pretty good in a word-processor document have a tendency to go really weird in HTML and hence in kindle format.

Do I think it’s worth it? Definitely yes, even though my initial guess as to how long it would take has had to be revised upward quite significantly. And yes, I would happily go through the process again… once these two projects are finished and uploaded. For that, continue to watch this space…

While you’re waiting, remember that In a Milk and Honeyed Land is already for sale in kindle as well as other ebook formats, soft-cover and hard-cover. Check out http://www.kephrath.com/WhereToBuy.aspx for details.

This is a book review I placed on Amazon (UK) and Goodreads for the historical novel “Michal’s Window (A Novel: King David’s First Wife)”, by author Rachelle Ayala. I got some good feedback for the review, including the comments “What a beautiful review… You’ve definitely summarized it very well :)” and “This is one of the best reviews I’ve read”. I enjoyed both reading the book and writing the review!

The Amazon.co.uk Kindle book link is http://www.amazon.co.uk/Michals-Window-Novel-Davids-ebook/dp/B007CVT9F2/.
The Amazon.com Kindle book link is http://www.amazon.com/Michals-Window-Novel-Davids-ebook/dp/B007CVT9F2/.

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“Powerful and passionate, and going to be read more than once”
I am very happy to have read “Michal’s Window” and to unreservedly give it five stars. It’s set a little bit later than the time my own writer’s heart is given to, but all the more enjoyable for that as I could imagine how the descendants of my characters could fit into Rachelle’s world! The task she sets herself is an intricate one – how to weave the various snippets of information regarding David, Michal and the others, scattered among several biblical books, into a coherent and compelling narrative. The underlying biblical clues and hints are mined for possibilities and recombined into new patterns in a creative manner.

Some of the people she fleshes out in this book are decidedly minor players in the original David Story, and so in these cases the source material she works with is very flat – but they emerge as rounded individuals in the process. Likewise, although the books of Samuel (the primary source for the account) are very often nuanced and equivocal in their moral evaluations, some other biblical sources (like Chronicles) are not. She has chosen to follow the original design by extending and making ever more tangled the moral and ethical uncertainties faced by the central figures. I suspect that the author of 1 and 2 Samuel would have approved of this. If you like your heroes and villains simple and uncomplicated, this is not a book for you – here the people struggle both outside and inside their souls with issues of abuse, violence and conflict alongside desire, faithfulness and love. The world in which the kingdom of Israel emerged was small and highly inter-connected, and Rachelle captures this nicely in the way that people keep re-encountering one another, often despite their best efforts to keep apart.

The narrative style of sticking in any given scene to one of a few specific personal points of view is one that I enjoy – it allows for versatility of how events and interpersonal relations are depicted, and at the same time enforces the comparative isolation of people throughout so much of history. There was no way that a person could see “over the horizon” to know what was happening or who was coming towards them, and the frustration and anxiety that this creates is brought very much home. The central characters of this book struggle to see over their personal horizons, and consistently fail, and the choices they make because of this failure drive much of the plot. It also adheres faithfully to the style adopted by the authors of the Hebrew Bible – they may have been describing a God who could see all things, but the narratives they wrote, and the people they wrote about, were confined to a deliberately limited viewpoint.

On a purely historical basis I had a few minor reservations. I don’t share Rachelle’s confidence that both David and Michal would have been able to read and write as youths, nor that Michal would have been able to casually wander around the garden clutching the scroll of the Book of Ruth. Michal’s literacy is explained later on the basis of personal tuition by the priest Elihu, but the main plot purpose is to show the possibility of both connection and disappointment inherent in writing, and this is achieved admirably. The choice of Ruth is, I suspect, a piece of splendid irony – as well as it being the Hebrew Bible’s best known love story, the final half dozen verses (which could not have been written at the time Michal was young) are one of the more overt legitimising assertions of the Davidic dynasty, and were probably penned by the kind of individual Michal might have later despised.

Some of the religious events owed, I felt, more to later Judaism or to Christianity than to the probable worship of the age. But again, I think that this is a deliberate choice on Rachelle’s part. Her writing borrows not just from sources in the Hebrew Bible, but also later Jewish midrash and Christian typology. To get what she is doing with this, you have to read her own words in the appendix. It is interesting to see how different people tackle the thorny problem of the divine name – Rachelle has chosen to follow later traditions by setting it as LORD, except for a couple of deliberately stylised moments. I strongly suspect that this was not part of religious observance around 1000BC. But this is tied to her use of an older traditional Bible translation for quotations, and it would have seemed disjointed to use the old vocabulary in one place and something more fluid and contemporary in another. Finally, I have serious doubts that the Davidic kingdom reached anything like as far as suggested by the gamut of goods that the queens have at their disposal! At any rate, my historical reservations are all calmed by the wider sweep and purpose of these apparent intrusions, and I am very happy to overlook them since the narrative flow as a whole is gripping and emotionally credible.

It definitely passed my major test of a good book – it made me want to get back to writing something myself – and it joins the collection of books that I intend to re-read over the years to come. Warmly recommended, and I hope Rachelle returns to this era in writing at some stage in the future.
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The last two blog entries looked at examples of parallel coupleta, starting with:

Joe cooked the main course
    Mary made the sweet

This is called parallel because matching words are placed at the same place along each line – Joe and Mary, cooked and made, and main course and sweet. We made this more interesting last time with some variations, including chiasmus, in which parts of the second line – called the B-line – are crossed over, rather like the following example

Joe cooked the main course
    The sweet was made by Mary

What is there beyond the couplet? Well, the obvious next step is to add another line to form a triplet. This will be today’s subject, and the last in the present series about ancient poetry styles. The use of triplets allows several possibilities, depending on how the poet chose to integrate the new line. The simplest way is just to have the third line also parallel:

Joe cooked the main course
Mary made the sweet
Their parents brought the wine

This pattern is often called AAA, as all three follow the same basic shape as the first.

More inventive is a form where one of the lines is deliberately not set in parallel, but provides a way to either set the scene (ABB pattern) or sum the situation up (AAB). So we might have:

The day drew to its close –
    Joe cooked the main course
    Mary made the sweet.

This is ABB, and is an example of forked parallelism. Other ABB forms are called staircase and climactic parallelism, depending on the details of how the lines are developed.

Joe cooked the main course
Mary made the sweet
    And soon the meal was done.

This is an AAB example.

These patterns can quite easily be found in ancient near eastern poetry from different nations, and are often used at key points of the overall design. So we may well find them at the start or end of the whole work, or marking an internal division of ideas. At Ugarit, the ABB form was often used to introduce direct speech of a person or god.

There’s a lot more that could be said about this, which can wait for another day. Check out my online article Forked Parallelism in Egyptian, Ugaritic and Hebrew Poetry, which was published in the journal Tyndale Bulletin in 2011 and discusses the forked pattern in more detail.

In In a Milk and Honeyed Land, triplets make an appearance in several places. An AAB pattern example may be found in the closing lines Damariel speaks at the ceremony when his brothers Baruk and Bashur are buried:

So proclaimed most mighty El,
So spoke the lord of the earth:
    His judgement is true.

Much nearer the end of the book, at the point where the townspeople are deciding to confront the chief, we find:

Fourteen fathers in these hills begotten,
    fourteen fathers: all now overthrown
    and shattered lies the covenant of stone.

This shows how the ABB pattern can be used in a way that reverses the expectation of the starting line, and has been called climactic parallelism. This particular pattern was quite popular in Canaan and Israel in some parts of history, but was apparently not used in Egypt at all. Perhaps poets or their audiences in that country did not like unpleasant surprises!

In a Milk and Honeyed Land may be purchased online – see http://www.kephrath.com/WhereToBuy.aspx for a list of vendors.
Or ask your own local bookshop to obtain a copy – ask by title or else ISBN number:

Paperback: 978-1-4669-2166-5
Hardcover: 978-1-4669-2167-2
e-Book: 978-1-4669-2165-8

‘In a Milk and Honeyed Land’ now stocked at Joseph’s Bookstore, Temple Fortune, London NW11 0AD http://www.josephsbookstore.com/bookstore/

Today’s post looks at some of the general background to these issues – some later posts will look at how poets of the era composed their work.

Poetry and song make up an important part of In a Milk and Honeyed Land. They appear in the regular religious celebrations as well as major festivals and as a part of everyday interactions between people. The romantic and marital relations that Damariel enjoys are shaped by responses to music. What do we know about them in the real history of the second millennium Levant?

Prose accounts of various kinds – including everyday items such as personal complaints and lists of possessions as well as war diaries or historical annals – make up the majority of pieces of writing that have been recovered from the ancient near east. However, a great deal of poetry has also been found. Given the fragile nature of writing materials, and the fact that in this era a great deal of information was held and passed on verbally, we can be confident that both singing and public recital were of great social importance. Just as in In a Milk and Honeyed Land, they were used to keep hold of cultural memory and religious expression, as well as to have fun.

The Egyptian climate is much more suitable for preserving written items, especially in the south of the country, than the countries in the Levant. So it is from Egypt that we find not only poems written on papyrus, pottery and stone, but also wall pictures of male and female singers and musicians, typically performing at banquets or parties. Anyone fortunate enough to have seen the British Museum exhibition of wall paintings from the tomb of Nebamun (http://goo.gl/SgSy4), or at least to have read the accompanying book (http://goo.gl/dbHVF), will remember the group of women musicians there. We even have a few tomb paintings where fragments of songs are shown above groups of labourers at work – perhaps a romantic ideal, but also perhaps recording for posterity something of Egyptian working class culture. The overwhelming majority of poems found in Egypt address middle class and elite interest and preoccupations, naturally enough since the ability to write fluently was limited to people within these groups.

Within the Hebrew bible, of course, both poems and prose can be found, although it is not always clear from the original language which mode the author was using in every case. The very oldest layers of this complex book consist of poems, and some people think that the prose portions were developed later around a skeleton of songs and poems that held the emerging nation’s memory. Another possibility is that both prose and poems crystallised side by side out of oral tradition, and we recognise the antiquity of the poetic portions more easily than prose since it is less able to change without losing its essential core.

The poets and songsters of that age would have learned their trade from the cultures they encountered on a daily basis. Then as now, cross-cultural influences could spread as people moved about or met each other at shared venues. In a Milk and Honeyed Land proposes that Nepheret brought knowledge of Egyptian styles up into the hill country, and that she and Damariel together worked on a hybrid style blending together the music of their cultures. Later on, this fusion was introduced to the Israelites, who took up some parts and not others, merging them with their own traditions.

It is, I believe, a creative mix of this kind that we find in the oldest biblical poems – Egyptian, Canaanite and Israelite styles brought together into a unified whole. This was the major topic of the academic work I did, under the title Triumphal accounts in Egyptian and Hebrew, planned for ebook publication later this year. Meanwhile, you can enjoy the fictional presentation of these ideas in In a Milk and Honeyed Land.

In a Milk and Honeyed Land may be purchased online – see http://www.kephrath.com/WhereToBuy.aspx for a list of vendors.
Or ask your own local bookshop to obtain a copy – ask by title or else ISBN number:

Paperback: 978-1-4669-2166-5
Hardcover: 978-1-4669-2167-2
e-Book: 978-1-4669-2165-8

Writing of various kinds is an important background element of In a Milk and Honeyed Land. What is known about this?

The earliest writing appears before 3000 BC in Egypt and Mesopotamia. Both areas used signs that differed a great deal in appearance – hieroglyphs and cuneiform – but were built around the same idea of representing whole syllables rather than individual letters. This meant that the number of separate signs was large. The number of people who could read and write to a high standard was very small. However, it seems likely that at least in Egypt, where the signs were clearly linked to real-world objects, a larger group of people was semi-literate in the sense that they could recognise a number of important signs or words, without having either a complete knowledge or the ability to produce clear writing themselves.

During the second millennium there were several attempts to produce simpler systems. These had several features in common, including the crucial innovation that a sign represented a letter, not a syllable. This meant that they used a much smaller number of signs, typically 20-30. Also the letter names were chosen after a common everyday object that happened to start with that letter. This system is still used in teaching English – “A is for Apple-pie, B is for Bear”. All modern alphabets descended from Greek or Latin come out of this invention, which took place around 1800 BC or so.

These new scripts originally showed no vowel markers at all, only consonants, a pattern still followed in written Arabic or Hebrew. Rather later on, ways were developed of showing the vowel sounds expected, but for early inscriptions, we cannot always be certain what shade of meaning the original author intended.

During most of the 20th century it was assumed that since the new alphabetic writing had so few signs, it could be easily learned and so the rate of literacy might be much higher. This does not seem to be the case. Writing was still a minority skill, and a scribe still went through lengthy training. As well as the basics of making letters, a scribe would have learned how to reproduce them reliably with care and skill. It was also crucial that they could read and write in the older cuneiform writing, since official business was still carried out using this. Finally, a scribe must know other skills such as accounting, navigation, and logistical planning in order to satisfy the needs of his ruler or wealthy patron.

From what we can tell, there was as clear sense that some kinds of writing must be matched correctly with some kinds of material. For example, at Ugarit both traditional cuneiform and a new alphabetic form were used side by side, together with other scripts belonging to nearby nations. A scribe at Ugarit would need to be very well trained. Official letters and accounts were still written in the older syllabic forms, and the new alphabet was used for religious poems and similar material. This situation only changed later on, after the year 1000 BC, when the new alphabetic scripts finally began to achieve supremacy. Cuneiform and hieroglyphic writing, and variations of these, did not immediately disappear, but slowly dwindled in use.

In In a Milk and Honeyed Land, as well as village priest and seer, Damariel has the beginnings of a scribal training. It is unlikely that a small town would have opportunity to offer promising youngsters a complete training, but I have assumed that his apprenticeship would have included many of the elements of this. So he learns route lists in order to navigate around the land, and as well as the Kinahniy (Canaanite) alphabetic signs he learns enough of the older formal cuneiform writing to be able to draft a letter to the regional governor. However, he is not fluent enough to pick up and read straight through the portion of the Gilgamesh story that Kothar finds for him at the market in Bayth Shamsh. During Qetirah’s shorter apprenticeship, she would also have started to master the same skills, along with medical or practical talents of value to the community. Nepheret, meanwhile, although brought up in Egypt, cannot read hieroglyphic or hieratic writing to any real degree. She is able to recognise her name and a few other key words and signs. It is easy to imagine that many people in her position would be able to identify key signs such as “man”, “woman”, “town” and one or two of the names of gods of particular importance in their home town. Damariel is intrigued by the Mitsriy (Egyptian) picture writing he sees from time to time, and starts to use it with Nepheret as a spoken language, but never has the chance to learn to write it.

Towards the end of the story, the chief has cause to circulate several messages to the four towns. Since he cannot read or write, these messages are dictated to the priest Eli, who makes four copies and has them carried to each village. Committal to writing makes the matter more serious and less able to be ignored by the other seers. However, it also gives Eli the opportunity to add his own brief annotation, which the chief is unaware of.

The materials used for writing were extremely varied. At one extreme we find carefully executed royal or religious inscriptions carried out with great attention to detail. At the other, we find scraps of writing scratched on old broken pieces of pottery. Stone, leather, wood, pottery, papyrus, and wax – all of these were used at times. Some pieces of writing were clearly intended to last for generations, but others were very casual, and the original authors might be astonished – or amused – to hear that some of their writings have survived for over 3000 years.

So, writing is important to Damariel, but only for communicating with fellow scribes or others of similar training. He has no need to write to people living in the town, and they would not be able to read it if he did. Like many other cultures of low levels of literacy, oral tradition and skills of memory are highly prized and highly used. The personal and collective memory of the town functions in a similar way to written records in another age. A rare occasion when Damariel is asked to write something “ordinary” is when his brother Baruk asks for a copy of the agricultural calendar to be put up in the olive patch. Had he lived, Baruk would most likely never have been able to read this, but he would have memorised the contents and know exactly what it said. Sadly, he never had this opportunity.

‘In a Milk and Honeyed Land’ may be purchased online – see http://www.kephrath.com/WhereToBuy.aspx for a list of vendors.
Or ask your own local bookshop to obtain a copy – ask by title or else ISBN number:

Paperback: 978-1-4669-2166-5
Hardcover: 978-1-4669-2167-2
e-Book: 978-1-4669-2165-8