The Lady of the Lions – now available through Amazon

The Lady of the Lions - cover image

Well, Amazon have duly done their bit and this short story is now on sale on Amazon .co.uk and .com, though not so far as I can tell on the other international sites. Links are:
Amazon.co.uk and
Amazon.com

I have also updated the links on the main kephrath site and the Matteh Publications site. Phew…

Feeling truly geeky, I also started preparing the epub files for uploading to other ebook vendor sites once the Amazon KDP Select exclusive period is over. This turned out to be more of a trial than I had expected. First go – just use the auto-convert feature in the excellent Calibre program. But that turned out to mess up all of the contents links. So I turned to the internet, and the first web page I looked at was breezily confident. Seemingly, all you had to do was put files in the right folders, use the same metadata specification file as you had with kindle, add a couple of extra config files, and compress the result. Well, the steps were easy, but the result omitted the cover art and had a number of other annoyances. Eventually I solved the problem with the help of a handy tool called Sigil which did a nice job of disentangling the various bits and pieces. A few tests on various epub apps were (broadly) successful so now I have the basic principles OK. When epub distribution time comes I feel in a much better place now than I did last night.

Talking of being geeky, my next plan is to add a timeline feature to the Kephrath site to clarify when the different bits occur, and what was happening in terms of near eastern history…

The Lady of the Lions – now uploaded to Amazon

The Lady of the Lions - cover image

Last weekend I talked about the remaining steps of the process for this short story – today I went through the process of uploading to Amazon. The Lady of the Lions will be part of Amazon’s KDP Select program for the first three months at least. After that I will probably distribute through other channels as well as Amazon. It will be ebook only at this stage. According to Amazon’s estimate, it should be live on the UK and US sites within 12 hours or so, and worldwide within the next two working days.

The Lady of the Lions will sell at around $0.99, £0.75, or equivalents in other currencies – some regions also incur a download fee over which I have no control. Even so, it’s an economical purchase, especially for readers with an Amazon Prime account.

The story is set around 150 years before In a Milk and Honeyed Land, in the same small Canaanite hill country town of Kephrath. Of course none of the characters overlap but the culture is not very different from that of the full length novel. Anyone who has read the book will recognise the town.

The story was inspired by two letters which are part of the Amarna correspondence, a large archive of clay tablets which are mostly from one or other city-state ruler to the Egyptian pharaoh of the time (Amenhotep III or Akhenaten, depending on when exactly the specific letter was written). These two particular letters may have been written from the town of Kephrath – they were certainly written by a woman and so are a rare and exciting insight into female participation in both literacy and politics. The story seeks to put some flesh onto the bare bones of these two letters.

As soon as I know more details, I shall be updating the purchase links on the Kephrath and Matteh Publications web sites – and of course posting the information here!

The Lady of the Lions – out in about a week’s time

'The Lady of the Lions' - cover image

I have been talking about this short story for a little while now, and it has finally come to be time for its appearance on the online marketplace. I now have the ISBN registered (978-0-9545-5353-1) with Nielsen bookdata, and finally have to go through the process of one last edit, then the upload to Amazon. The Lady of the Lions will be part of Amazon’s KDP Select program for the first three months at least, so anyone on an Amazon Prime account will have very easy access. It will be ebook only at this stage.

The Lady of the Lions will sell at around $1-£1 depending on the final details, so it will certainly not break the bank! It is set around 150 years before In a Milk and Honeyed Land, in the same small Canaanite hill country town of Kephrath. Of course none of the characters overlap but the culture is not very different from that of the full length novel. Anyone who has read the book will recognise the town.

The story was inspired by two letters which are part of the Amarna correspondence, a large archive of clay tablets which are mostly from one or other city-state ruler to the Egyptian pharaoh of the time (Amenhotep III or Akhenaten, depending on when exactly the specific letter was written). These two particular letters may have been written from the town of Kephrath – they were certainly written by a woman and so are a rare and exciting insight into female participation in both literacy and politics. The story seeks to put some flesh onto the bare bones of these two letters.

I am hoping – depending of course on Amazon’s upload and distribution process – that they will be available next weekend, March 16th/17th. More details nearer the time… Meanwhile here are a couple of extracts:

Belita-Labiy found it difficult to concentrate, though, with the news rippling around the hill country. So far the raids had not been too close, but from all that she had heard, these groups of men were swift to move, and swift to strike, wherever they pleased. Who could say which town they might visit next?

So she knew that her dancing, while apparently as fluent and potent as ever, lacked the whole-hearted commitment that she preferred. It could not be helped, but the distraction nagged at her. So all the while that she danced like Taliy in the earliest garden, and later as her body thrilled and her voice cried out in lovemaking, part of her soul was anxiously flitting around the uplands, trying to guess what would happen next.

* * * * * *

Belita-Labiy realised that she was nearly cut off on her own. He turned his head, suddenly seeing her there. His breath was hot, panting, urgent. The look in his eyes terrified her. She waved the little knife at him and dodged to one side while there was still time. He grasped at her with his free hand, catching at her arm. She pulled free, and the fabric of her sleeve tore in his hand as she ran over to the window.

Kelizzi and Jarrar placed themselves front of her, but they seemed small and frail before the man advancing towards them. He laughed at them as he approached, and Belita-Labiy felt her groin clench tight with anticipatory fear at the expression on his face.

Robert Miller – “Israelite Life Before the Kings”

The magazine Biblical Archaeology Review is currently showcasing an article by Robert Miller entitled Israelite Life Before the Kings. Not having a subscription to this, I have only seen the promotional blurb and not the full article, but it would make a great description of the setting of In a Milk and Honeyed Land.

Their tag line question is “What was life like for the settlers of Canaan during the time of the Biblical Judges”, and Miller is particularly interested in the Iron I period, roughly 1200-1000 BC. He has written on this topic before, typically from an archaeological perspective. I cited his book Chieftains of the Highland Clans – also on the Iron I period – during work in my PhD thesis Triumphal Accounts in Hebrew and Egyptian.

Now, In a Milk and Honeyed Land is set right at the start of this time, before the period of the judges got under way, but of course many of his observations apply equally to that time. For example, he says

villages … were quite small, possibly 400 people in the largest of these — Shiloh or Gibeon, for instance. These towns were mostly unwalled, though they were part of larger political units or regional chiefdoms that provided security…

Israelites lived in nuclear households, often with their relatives in clusters of houses around a common courtyard. Houses were made of mudbrick with a stone foundation and perhaps a second story of wood. The living space of the houses consisted of three or four rooms, often with sleeping space on the roof or in a covered roof loft…

the hills were densely overgrown, covered with a thick scrub of pine, oak and terebinth trees…the early Israelite settlers of Canaan would burn off some of the brush, terrace the hillsides within an hour’s walk of the village, and plant grain, primarily wheat…They had orchards on these terraces as well.

Readers of In a Milk and Honeyed Land will recognise all of these features in the story. BAR’s normal coverage is of popular academic presentations of biblical material, but maybe it’s worth seeing if they would review my book…

The link to the abridged version is http://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/ancient-cultures/ancient-israel/daily-life-in-ancient-israel/

Review: Fargoer – On Treacherous Ground

This week I posted up in Goodreads a review of the last full episode in the Fargoer cycle – On Treacherous Ground. There is also an epilogue which closes off the cycle, available as a conclusion to the whole novel but not (so far at least) as a stand-alone item. The review can be found at http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/546120191, though not on Amazon yet as the separate story is not yet there.

In exciting news for Fargoer, and its author Petteri Hannila, the collection is being released as a complete novel shortly – on Amazon the paperback version can be found already with a quick search, alongside the separate episodes. Long term blog readers well know that I am very enthusiastic about Fargoer, and so I very much hope that this new move will bring the series wider recognition. There is a Goodreads launch event this weekend.

Other news – well, I am heavily involved in editing The Lady of the Lions, which I mentioned a couple of weeks ago. The story itself is not quite finished, though very nearly so, and there is a reasonable chance that it will go live as a kindle download by Eastertime. More news – naturally – as and when it gets closer.

Second historical fiction blog hop

This post is for the second of Jessica Knauss’ historical fiction blog hops – once again huge thanks to Jessica for coordinating this. Her blog post lists the other participants – please hop over to them and read through the other extracts which people have chosen to post.

This time around I am posting a section from work in progress. The novel has working title Scenes from a Life, and is set some twenty years after In a Milk and Honeyed Land, so shortly after 1200BC. There is some overlap of characters, but this will not be obvious until some way through the book.

The central character is Makty, an Egyptian scribe who specialises in decorating non-royal tombs in the area we now call Luxor. Anyone who visits the so-called “tombs of the nobles” a little way outside the Valley of the Kings might hope to see some of his work (had he really lived). As an aside, I have imagined the scribal culture he works in as similar to the world of IT contractors that I inhabit in my day job… with no mobile phones, and stone tablets rather than electronic ones, of course, but with quite similar attitudes and relationships.

The start of the book sees Makty largely ignorant about his upbringing, and content with that. The subsequent story then combines the physical journey he takes along the Nile river, with the interior metaphorical journey he takes as he uncovers his own origins.

The ten sentence extract I have chosen is from about 2/3 of the way through. Makty is now in the Nile Delta, and has arrived at a temple to the goddess Hekhet – in modern terms a convent. He remembers growing up here as an orphan, and thinks that this will be the last stage of his journey… Some of his initial hardness of attitude has worn off, and he has become more open and vulnerable. Senenptah, who is casually mentioned in the middle of the extract, is a very old priest in Luxor, and his former employer.

The chantress, a considerably older woman who walked slowly with the help of a long stick, limped heavily as she came towards them. Both her feet were turned in on themselves, and her gait was very awkward.

Makty realised that she had been one of the many crippled babies who were turned over to the temples by families or owners who did not want the burden of raising them. He watched her come towards them, proud in her difficulty. He wondered suddenly if his heart limped in just this way as it passed through life, if only one had eyes to see the shapes of the inner world? What had Senenptah seen as he looked at him?

The lady came into the room. Moved by years of boyish habit, Makty moved across to her and knelt at her feet on the dusty floor. She put one hand on the crown of his head in blessing and he felt old memories of homeliness flood his body. He had been a very long time away from home, and he put his arms carefully around her twisted legs and clung on to her.

Of course this is not the final stage of his journey, but the information he gains here allows him to take the next step. I am hoping to finish the book this year, but was rather alarmed to find that January has already been and gone! Comments and general feedback are very welcome…

Thanks again to Jessica; please remember to check out the other participants in this, accessible from her blog entry.

Writing and reviews

This week I got back to some writing – specifically some more work on a short story, of which more below – and also had the opportunity to catch up on reviewing the next two episodes in Petteri Hannila’s Fargoer series. This brings me to numbers 5 and 6 in the series, and brings the central character Vierra well on her way back towards her homeland – though not there yet. The reviews can be found on Goodreads (http://www.goodreads.com/review/list/8796846-richard-abbott) or Amazon (https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/pdp/profile/A2BRVREN5PWOZW) so I do not propose repeating them here! Suffice it to say that I am most thoroughly enjoying them, am happy to give 5* reviews, and am greatly looking forward to further instalments.

The short story I mentioned – The Lady of the Lions is the working title at present – is based around a real letter preserved in Egypt that was written by a woman who may have lived in what I call the four towns. Naturally I am slightly bending the details in my favour to assert that she actually lived in Kephrath, but it is a reasonable possibility. This letter was briefly referred to in a conversation between Damariel and his younger brother Baruk in In a Milk and Honeyed Land, and was a request for help from the Egyptian authorities. There are two of these letters, and the first reads (approximately) as follows:

A message for my lord the king, my god, who is my Sun:
This is a message from Belita-Labiya your maid-servant, who is like the dirt on which you tread. I prostrate myself at the feet of my lord the king, seven times twice over.
May my lord the king save all the land which is his from the power of lawless men, or else it will be lost. Sapuna has been taken. May my lord the king be aware of all these things.

The name Belita-Labiy is a rough translation into Canaanite of the name she gives herself in the letter, Nin-Ur-Maḥ-Meš, or in English ‘The Lady of the Lions’. The story is set something like 150 years before In a Milk and Honeyed Land, so none of the same characters overlap. In historical terms we know nothing about what happened after this letter (and another of broadly similar content) was written. We do know, however, that the land was not lost to the Egyptians at this stage, not until several decades after Damariel’s lifetime, so presumably at some stage there was a response. The story explores how the provincial governor and his army officers might have done acted. More will, of course, be revealed in time…

First historical fiction blog hop

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!

Sabiya Seega released

Well, last week saw the release of my new game-app Sabiya Seega, out to various app stores for both Android and Apple phones and tablets. While I can’t say that it has taken the world by storm yet, I have been delighted by a quick response, especially at the iStore and Barnes & Noble. Perhaps people really have been waiting anxiously for this game to appear on their mobile devices! So I thought I’d say a bit more about it here.

Seega icon
Like most board games from the ancient world, we cannot be certain of the rules, and it is a fair guess that there were many local variations rather than a single universally agreed form. Seega boards are nowhere near so commonly found as Senet or Aseb (the Royal Game of Ur), although it has successfully retained a following in parts of Africa through all the years until today. Although the Greeks said they had learned the game in Egypt, direct evidence for this is lacking. Where we do have possible remains of boards – such as in Petra – these are not unambiguous, and might have been used for a different purpose altogether.

Seega screenshot
What we do know is that the principles of Seega became popular in a range of games across Europe. In particular, the capture method of sandwiching the target counter between two of your own counters appears in games spreading all through the Greek and Roman worlds up eventually to the Vikings.

The original game seems to have been played on several different sized boards – all of odd numbers of cells on a side, so that there is a central cell which in the early stages must be left blank. The first release of Sabiya Seega only allows 5×5 boards, with 12 pieces on each side, but future releases will be more flexible about this.

Something that fascinates me is what role games were thought to have in ancient cultures. Senet, for example, seems to have been strongly linked with religious and spiritual issues, and many of the pictures we have show a tomb occupant engaged in play. Was this just a picture of elite relaxation, or was a direct link seen between the game stages and the progress of the player through the afterlife? Some modern writers think so, suggesting that the game was played by different people with very different aims in mind, from fun or gambling through to religious symbolism and engagement with the other world.

With Seega we cannot be sure, as visual images are scarce. Something that might have made a key difference here is that Seega involves no chance element. Unlike Senet or the Royal Game of Ur, where skill and chance are combined and so even the best of players might suffer ill-fortune, the moves in Seega are completely under the players’ control. Perhaps this set a trend for a mental attitude that inclined towards the military rather than the religious?

So such is unknown about this game, and I have tried to reflect that by providing multiple game options. Players can tweak the settings how they please between games to give themselves different experiences of play.

I hope you enjoy playing Seega – it is available for both Android and Apple phones and tablets from the major app stores. There are even other board or pencil-and-paper versions you might play! Open up your favourite app store and search for Sabiya Seega (or DataScenes Development) and see what you think. For more information navigate to http://apps.datascenesdev.com and follow the links there.

Back to writing – or maybe reviewing – next week!

A digression into the Kalevala 2: differences

Last time I explored ways in which the ancient Finnish poetic tradition presented in the Kalevala was similar to ancient Middle Eastern material. Today it is time for some differences.

The main way that it differs is in genre. Early Israel and Egypt did not use poetry for epic mythic purposes – or if they did, it has not survived – but instead developed a prose narrative tradition for that. The poetry that has come down to us is in the form of fairly short pieces, nothing like the long series of interlinked tales of the Kalevala. Think for example of the biblical psalms, together with their parallels from other nations. The closest analogy to the Kalevala from the ancient Middle East is the mythic material from Ugarit. The episodes in both of these cycles share a great deal – a few characters turn up several times in different contexts, usually so as to contrast loyalty and rivalry – although the Kalevala is very much longer. You even get the same sorts of formal declarations when characters speak to each other – rather than the plain “so-and-so said” you get a couple of lines of introduction to set the scene –

well, such-and-such a person
uttered a word and spoke thus

– even if you have just had a very similar opening a few lines above!

There are other differences too – for example the Kalevala has a great many of what one can call stock phrases – short descriptions of a character or an action which are reused in different places as the need arises. So in one sequence we read many times over of

steady old Vainamoinen

and

Louhi, mistress of Northland,
the gap-toothed hag of the North

This is a feature shared with Homer’s Iliad, and with the Balkan poets whose work was studied by Milman Parry some years ago. Such stock phrases are extremely rare in Hebrew and Egyptian.

Now, it is unlikely in the extreme that the Finnish bards and poets had direct contact with the Homeric or Egyptian traditions, let alone Ugaritic, though biblical influence cannot be ruled out. So why is it that this sense of familiarity constantly pervades the Kalevala? I suppose one reason could be the logic of oral tradition. The Finnish poets behind the Kalevala material recited their work orally to live audiences, just like bards in other cultures have done. Parry’s study in the Balkans showed that such performances displayed great flexibility and innovation. They combined older material in new ways by bridging together familiar scenes, characters and episodes with original links and connections. Depending on the occasion and audience, the same basic story could be expanded or contracted to fit the need. Stock phrases and patterned scenes help the poet in this task.

The Egyptian and early Hebrew material that has survived is a few steps on from this. Most likely there were such oral poets in those nations at the time. What we have now, though, is not a direct record of their performances. It is a variation that was committed to writing, reworked to be successful in new written traditions. The epic cycles from Ugarit are quite raw and fresh, closer to their oral or ceremonial roots – had Ugarit survived longer it would have been fascinating to see how this material evolved. What we have in the Kalevala is, perhaps, an insight into how oral traditions themselves can begin and be sustained as a living art form, whether in northern Europe or the eastern Mediterranean. As well as a whole lot of material which is riveting in its own right!

Finally, I mentioned last time about a promotional slideshow / video. Well, that is now finished and can be found on YouTube at http://youtu.be/JcuvhxPazMs, and also at http://www.kephrath.com/. Enjoy!

Writing, both historical and speculative