This post is in response to Jessica Knauss’ “Historical Blog Hop” – ten sentences from In a Milk and Honeyed Land.

The setting here is that Damariel, village priest of the town of Kephrath, has just got back from a journey to be told by his friend Kothar that his wife Qetirah has died during his absence. He had departed after an argument and had stayed away longer than he had originally intended.

The two men embraced again, clung to each other for a long heartbeat, and then Kothar set off down the track to Shaharti’s house and the almond tree around the door. Damariel, left on his own, sat in the porch under his vine for a long time, looking across the stones of the high place, before gathering the torn halves of his kef and walking the slow path to the tomb of Kinreth’s family. Sitting in front of her resting place he took the knife he used for sacrifices and cut two long gashes down his arms and another across his chest.

He stayed by the great stone that sealed up the tomb most of the night, lying full-length with his face down on the flat stony space in front of it. The night went very slowly, and the chill in his heart swallowed up the chill from the cold, damp ground below as the blood from his arms soaked into the soil. At one point, when the stars had wheeled above him
for some hours, he found himself so racked with uncontrollable shivers that his own life seemed to be clinging only by a thread to the world on this side. For a little while it seemed best just to give in to the desire to let himself slip across the boundary. It was only a little step: how well he knew that. Ketty would be waiting just the other side. It was not far to go.

He wondered, in the slow, heavy way his icy thoughts allowed, if she would be angry about the extra time in Hatsor.

The next part of the book deals with the life changes Damariel has to make to adjust to his changed situation, and his responses to the person he considers responsible. Thanks, Jessica, for the opportunity of doing this!

For me, no doubt like many others, today meant going back to work after the holiday period – though the comparative emptiness of the underground train made me wonder how many people are staying away until next Monday!

So this naturally made me think about festivals, and the various ones I have written into In a Milk and Honeyed Land. In historical terms we know only a little about what festivals actually were celebrated in Canaan, and still less about the details of the celebrations themselves.

We are pretty sure that there were spring and autumn feasts, and it is highly likely that there were also particular days used to honour one or other deity. We do have written records of similar events further east, in Mesopotamia, and it is likely that the various religious ceremonies recorded in the Hebrew Bible owe their timing at least in part to these earlier traditional festivals. The timing is logical given the agricultural base of the culture – seedtime and harvest, winter and summer are good times to look forward with anticipation or backward with gratitude.

In keeping with the general theme of the book, I have written these as low-key events – plenty of food, wine, singing and dancing for the townspeople to share with one another, a ritual sacrifice of a locally caught animal, and so on. They are community-scale events, repeated dozens of times across the area in individual towns and villages, rather than great assemblies or pilgrimages involving the region as a whole. I have assumed that, human nature being what it is, these were times when normal social conventions and constraints were loosened, resulting in a whole mixture of personal delights and indiscretions. Writing about these events, and seeking to imaginatively fill in the gaps in our knowledge, was a lot of fun!

Other news – In a Milk and Honeyed Land is now listed at the excellent book promotion site askdavid.com, a splendid resource for writers and readers. So here’s looking forward to a productive and satisfying year!

This week has been a good writing week! Specifically, I have now got Scenes from a Life to about the 2/3 point… barring editing and such like which will mean going over those chapters several times in ruthless fashion. But in unpolished form at least, chapters 1 to 5 are complete, 7 is well on the way, 8 is fragmentary, and 9 has the basic shape laid out. 6 does not exist at all, though I have a reasonable sense what will be in it!

The story is set something like twenty years after In a Milk and Honeyed Land and, although it probably will not seem like it at first sight, aims to tie up some loose ends left unresolved in that novel. It starts in Egypt, well down the Nile near the town we now call Luxor – Waset at the time the story is set. The main character, Makty-rasut, is a scribe who works to create tombs – eternal houses – for the nobility of the region. We follow his story through a series of scenes both in the present time and as flashbacks to earlier formative events.

I find the scribal culture that Makty inhabits a fascinating one. He and others like him interacted with the elite of their day. Some of them moved up into those rarified ranks, while others remained at a level very roughly corresponding to what we would now call a professional middle class. A great deal of what we know of ancient Egypt and the surrounding lands was presented through their eyes, and therefore seen according to the presuppositions and ambitions of their class. Arguably, their culture also shaped the making of the religious literature that has come down to us in the Bible, since the evidence of archaeology and text is that Egyptian scribes found employment in the various Levantine states – including Israel – which emerged after the Egyptian empire in those regions collapsed.

I work in a very similar environment in today’s London, and anyone who has worked in IT will recognise many familiar features in the book. The way I write it, “agile methodologies” are not a modern creation at all, but a common and logical solution to the problem of directing the creative effort of a small team of talented but often opinionated workers. I hasten to add that although the attitudes and lifestyle I write about can frequently be seen around me, the individual people in the book are not modelled on individuals I know. Anyone who reads the book hoping to recognise one or other of my fellow workers will probably be disappointed! But maybe they will find some aspects of the professional life familiar.

Although the book starts in Egypt, it does eventually link up with the town of Kephrath. How and why it does is a matter for another day.

I’m hoping that Scenes from a Life will make it into print during 2013, and I will continue talking about its progress from time to time. Meanwhile, check out In a Milk and Honeyed Land for the background situation out in the Egyptian province of Canaan – http://www.kephrath.com/WhereToBuy.aspx