I spent much of a week in an intensive editing immersion class, so this post covers two weeks of what I had time to catch outside my wonderful class. I’m buried pretty deeply redoing manuscript 🙂
Turkish newspapers report that a Hittite village will be constructed near the site of Hattusa, the UNESCO World Heritage site that was the capital of the Hittite Empire. They say they will recreate daily life and tourists can stay in said village. The goal is to bring more tourists. I happen to like the abandoned feel of Hattusa, where you can wander this amazing site without running into anybody (way better than Ephesus where it’s mobbed), but I can understand that’s not good for business. If done right, a village could be good, but the opportunities for not doing this well seem vast. I’ll hope for the best. Click here for Hurriyet News “Hittite Kingdom to be Revived in Hattusha”
I always wonder whether I can have one of my Bronze Age characters draw a “map” in the dust or some rough method of indicating geography in that interestingly abstract way. No evidence that I know of that maps as we conceive of them were in use, but still, you’d think they’d have some way of showing, the part of the land between this river and that is mine or some such thing. So I find this Neolithic “map” from Denmark a heartening discovery. People think this way, early. Seem reasonable? Or am I ignoring something I shouldn’t? Click here for Archaeology New Network “5,000 year old map unearthed on Danish Island”
I love it when I go out on a limb with a historical hunch in my fiction and it turns out to be completely correct. In this case I had a character make her own perfume using, partially, some grains of frankincense purloined by her sister from Ishtar’s temple. Now some serious perfumers have studied frankincense to see what the compounds are that give it the “old church” smell, as they put it. Yes, I knew it was burnt for its odor, but I didn’t bother to check whether it could also be used in some liquid format. It can and has been. How nice, because I’m quite sure Daniti wasn’t giving up her perfume. These guys call frankincense “the Queen of Sheba’s perfume,” so I probably was carrying that around in my head somewhere and just didn’t remember. Daniti will be scowling to hear that some queen is wearing her scent. She’s a bit territorial about it, won’t let her sister wear it, but then she adds some other secret ingredients, so it’s still all hers. Take that Queen of Sheba! Click here for Archaeology News Network “Lifting the Veil on The Queen of Sheba’s Perfume”
I have this idea that Briseis may move someday to Cyprus when I get around to writing another book about her. There are various good reasons why this works historically, but the best reason is that Cyprus is a great place to go visit. So I did. Now I have to write the book… Recent finds at the Late Bronze Age site of Pyla-Kokkinokremmos in Larnaca are intriguing for my purposes. Most sites are layer after layer and sorting out what was happening at any one time is tricky, to say the least. But this site was only inhabited at the key time period when my young lady would arrive. Newcomer to a new city? And it turns out to be quite a cosmopolitan mix of stuff there, if not people. I’m thinking people, too. This is a period of massive collapses of empires, great shiftings of populations, and in the midst of all this turmoil, Cyprus did pretty well. You can see why I’m thinking of moving my character there. I’m sure I wasn’t influenced by the gorgeous scenery, the abundant, excellent but inexpensive wine and the outrageously delicious food… Click here for Archaeology News Network “2016 excavations at Late Bronze Age site of Pyla-Kokkinokremos conclude”
People sometimes propose New World and Old World connections that seem fishy at best to me. I’ve had a couple people offering up Mayan and Hittite connections, for example, on my website. I’m always polite, but really, I don’t see it. The timing, the geography, the massive differences. In that light, I enjoyed this ASOR blog post answering the question, “How the Sumerians got to Peru.” Spoiler: they didn’t. But Alex Joffe’s discussion of why people think they did and other New/Old World suppositions is so authoritative and fascinating, that I offer it to you. Nice to have the world’s experts discuss something like this and put it to rest for me (It’s the ASOR blog—you can’t get more reliable on the Near East). Click here for the American School of Oriental Research Blog “Ask Near Eastern Professional”
I read today in the NYTimes about sunken ships in the Black Sea, preserved by absence of oxygen. Ship in the article dates to medieval times. I hope that they will find even older wrecks–maybe from your era of study. URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/12/science/shipwrecks-black-sea-archaeology.html?hpw&rref=science&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region®ion=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well
They actually have found a number of Bronze Age ships. I have a post on that called “The Wonders of Bronze Age Shipwrecks”. Some extremely key things survived on the shipwrecks that we otherwise only had references to. So, for example, the texts refer to “wood scribes”. That’s as opposed to clay. On the Uluburun wreck they found folding wooden tablets with room for the wax. We knew of Roman similar things much later, but there it was in Hittite/Eastern Med context much earlier. Our knowledge of trade routes and who interacted with whom also took a big step forward from the shipwreck data.
Thanks for that information. How wonderful. And I will look.
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