From my writing desk and beyond
I’m off to the Tucson Comic-Con this weekend. I’m looking forward to getting to know several Tucson area fantasy writers. I enjoy building my network of writer friends, and my expansion into the historical fantasy genre has opened up a whole new group of people I hadn’t met or read. Fun! I’m not on panels or anything–just getting to know this annual event.
Archaeology and History posts I enjoyed:
Really Old Seal
Archaeologists found a seal with a geometric design that dates to 7000 BCE in the southern, coastal town of Mersin, Turkey. The Italian team posits that the seal would have been used to mark ownership of property or “provenance in a developing trade system.”
It was found in the Chalcolithic layer along with stones used for counting. It is certainly the case that seals were used later in a well-documented way to mark ownership and even provenance, but this seems like a big leap for such an early find. Also, how did someone decide the sling stones were for counting?
But this is all very fascinating for this extremely early point in time. I confess to a happy obsession with seals, especially those of the Hittite royals I write about. Forgery and other juicy plot elements just beg to be written.
For my author logo, I use the actual seal of the Hittite queen I portray in my fiction. It’s at the top of this post, with Puduhepa (named Tesha in my fiction) on one side and her son under the protective arm of the Stormgod on the other. I met the archaeologist who found and brought the clay imprint of her seal out of the earth. When he described that moment, the excitement in his voice held me spellbound. Click here for Archaeology News Network “9,000-Year-Old Seal Unearthed In Southern Turkey”
More Forgeries Uncovered at the Pseudo Museum
5 more fakes at the Museum of the Bible, this time “dead sea scroll” fragments that are modern forgeries.
The explanations of how they bought and catalogued forgeries without realizing it are ridiculous. They boast about how transparent they are and how they check that their artifacts are genuine. Uh, wouldn’t you do all that checking before you paid a few million for these antiquities, not after you’ve been caught by knowledgeable experts and forced to have them checked?
And more importantly, why are you spreading money around for antiquities in this irresponsible way that encourages looting, stealing and forgery? It’s not like the dead sea scrolls are just sitting around waiting for a buyer at your local Walmart. This is the museum that the week before its grand opening was forced to pay $3 million in fines because it had acquired 5,500 smuggled artifacts, many of them cuneiform tablets from Iraq. Apparently World Heritage Pillaging is something they approve of.