Writer, mouthless and mumbling
Some posts I recommend:
Victorian Lesbian Cobblers (not warm berry desserts, but a historical canard)
Funeral Fights (regarding “the superstition that the last person buried in a church-yard has, in addition to his other troubles, to carry water to allay the thirst (in Purgatory) of all those previously buried there”)
Jokes from World War I (actual humor was strictly rationed during wartime, so they made do with what they had)
The Maya Papyrus by Richard Coady is an ebook available for only $3.20 at present. I decided to buy it before I finished the sample. At one point in this book, I was paging through my Kindle with one hand while stirring pasta sauce for dinner with the other. That, my friends, is engaging fiction.
In this novel, Akhenaten is shown as a madman, at first a pitiful, acromegalic child and then a cruel, bitter man, reliant upon secret police and a culture of fear. Coady has a gift for depicting the inner lives of men torn by duty, and doubting the heavens. In Yuya, particularly, he creates an affecting portrait of a man worn down by the demands of his position. Coady also excels at action scenes, and at the everyday shoves, barks and bites of daily life in ancient Egypt, the bitter and the sweet. The brief but affecting time spent with Hittite royalty, including the ill-fated Prince Zannanzash, was also excellent. Coady’s depiction of Tutankhamun as a complex character, not a naif, is also not something I have generally seen in fiction of this time.
The framing device is an old friend, the confessional false document (by which I do mean a plot device, and not a fake ID). Personally, I am very fond of false documents, and write them all the time for my own fiction, but they slip easily into anachronism, especially so for ancient times. We lack documentary evidence for a first-person narrative of candor and descriptive ability until much, much later, which is why that whole bicameral mind business got any traction. Still, as I say, I enjoy false documents more than otherwise, and expect them to have some flaws.
Where The Maya Papyrus falls down is in the plotting. At nearly every turn in The Maya Papyrus, the Most Villainous Thing is done by the Most Villainous Character. Eventually, you think, the Most Villainous Character can’t possibly get away with the Most Villainous Thing again, can he? And he does! More brazenly than he did the time before!
Half of the characters don’t have much agency to begin with, because they’re women – a very strange notion to have about the Amarna Period, or about ancient Egyptian women in general. Every single woman in this book is either passive or insufferable. Only one woman in Coady’s book seems to have any driving ambition of her own, and that is Thuya, the mother of Tiye and Ay. She is depicted as a domineering nag whose only concern is for the propagation and power of her family. To be fair, that is probably an accurate assessment of her, and of most highly-placed women at any given royal court.
But why is Thuya the only woman in this book who decides to want anything? None of the royal women in this story – not the prominent Tiye, not the smiting Nefertiti, not Ankhesenamun who plotted to place a Hittite prince on the throne beside her* – has a single idea about governance or religion on her own. All of them, according to Coady, originally came from one or another of the men beside her. To imagine that this happened in the Amarna Period, out of all eras of Egyptian history, is to cut yourself badly on Occam’s Razor.
Nonetheless, I recommend this book, and I dare say I’ll go with Coady’s next as well, which is to be set in ancient Greece. If you need to read an absorbing, intrigue-packed book about ancient Egypt, and you need to get it right now on your iPhone, this one is here for you.
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* Unless she didn’t do that, but in that case, either Nefertiti or her daughter Meritaten probably did it.
To start with: I will admit I am That Guy. I am a lady, but nonetheless I am That Guy who, at any given ancient historical film, says, that’s not how it worked! They were using clay tablets for that, not papyrus or The nemes headress was for royalty only or She didn’t marry him, she married… In any case, it’s irritating of me.
For this movie, I hardly want to bother. Sure, it’s a wildly inaccurate retelling of history, but then the flaxseed pita with American cheese I had for lunch is a wildly inaccurate sandwich, and who cares? The point is not to be accurate; the point is to get the job done.
This 1961 film from Italy (see it here if you want) is a basic sword-and-sandal movie of the time. I am reminded of what TV’s Frank once said about the TV movie Stranded in Space: “Let’s face it: People need to kill time – it’s human nature. And for anyone watching TV on the night it was first broadcast, Stranded In Space did indeed kill time. A whole two hours!” That is what Nefertiti, Queen of the Nile did – killed time, provided jobs, put butts in seats, moved the economy along in its own little way. Myself, I cannot say I do as much.
The plot centers on Tumos, a sculptor – there was a historical Thutmose the sculptor in the Amarna Period, which suggests that someone involved at some point read a book. In any case, Tumos the sculptor is naturally best friends with Prince Amenophis, but what Tumos does not know is that Amenophis is going to marry the woman he loves, and she doesn’t know that either, and she also doesn’t know that she’s going to become Queen Nefertiti, because her evil father, whom she doesn’t know is her father . . .
Anyway, it is ridiculous throughout, and not in a campy or delightful way; it all becomes fairly dull in the middle. Vincent Price does show up to do some quality Vincent Pricing as the High Priest, though, so there is that. Interestingly enough, you can see that they couldn’t bring themselves to cast anyone who looked like Akhenaten as Akhenaten, and went with the basic ’60s-man looks of Amedeo Nazzari, who maybe had a longer chin than most guys, but only if you squinted.
In conclusion, if you want to experience being a sick child at home sometime in the late 1960s watching the matinee show that was the only bearable thing to stare at on one of the three channels you could get, Nefertiti, Queen of the Nile is indeed one of your options, but I don’t particularly recommend it.
Like most anyone who asked themselves why King Tut was only ever a boy-king, I have had a fascination with the Amarna Period of Egypt’s Eighteenth Dynasty since small times. I’ve decided to seek out novels, films, or other literature dealing with the crisis of the Amarna Period – that is, the late reign of Pharaoh Amunhotep III, his son Akhenaten the religious reformer, and his succession – and review them.
There are a great deal of books, many of them bad, some of them merely outdated, and I dare say I will never get tired of them. Personally, I think there should be more films. Why don’t we see nearly as many screen depictions of the Amarna Period as we do, say, the Tudors? I should think it offers as much, if not a great deal more, to appeal. Instead of poorly-bathed white people in badly heated castles, all backstabbing each other for the attentions of fat, rotten old Harry, you can have bright sun and golden palaces and characters in various states of bejeweled shirtlessness. You can even examine the same disputes over the power of Church in State. Is Akhenaten a mystic visionary or a tyrant, a Mad King Ludwig or a Kim Il-sung? Is Nefertiti a politician or an opportunist – an Evita or an Imelda? Is Ankhesenamun a pawn, a traitor, or in control of her own destiny?
All these things, we are in no position to know, and barring further discoveries, we never will. That is why they will be endlessly examined in fiction, and why I will endlessly read about them. What draws me to read and to write historical fiction is that, where we do not faithfully tell the stories of the past, we are telling instead stories about ourselves; and those, though inadvertent, are no less of interest to me.
“You should never read the comments on a news article.” Personally, I think it is important. Here we have CNN.com’s Scientists find signs of life in Australia dating back 3.48 billion years.
. . . [The discovery] centers on something called microbially induced sedimentary structures, commonly shortened to the acronym MISS. It’s a mouthful to many, but some scientists believe this phenomenon could be the key to finding the first demonstrable evidence of life.
A MISS forms via a process involving microorganisms (found in what’s called microbial mats) with rocks (or sediment), something that can only happens under certain conditions.
As the study’s lead author, Nora Noffke of Old Dominion University, notes, “The signal of early life forms has been preserved more clearly in MISS” compared with other prehistoric finds. Another unique thing about them, unlike some other geological phenomena, is that a MISS structure formed a few billion years ago can look much like one a few hundred-thousand years old. Yet another is that it can show not just evidence of one organism but an entire ecosystem, one in which living things coexisted with one another...
In the comments section, the news is greeted with an argument about God ending in:
The best part of you ran down your mother’s leg.
Few places on the internet can show us the breadth and depth of the human intellect quite like a pop-sci article with an open comments section.
Currently, I am struggling with a flare-up of a chronic disorder. One of the only effective ways to manage this is to maintain a meditation practice. It is not easy to do this right, of course. Simple, but not easy. To think of nothing but one’s own breath is an accomplishment. I require a little help.
I have never liked concentrating on breathing, on feeling the breath rise and fall. It reminds me of all the times that people have been angry at me, and visibly stopped to breathe, to count several quiet seconds, before they took any action. In turn, that reminds me of how much I felt like I had failed those people — or had I failed them? Was it their problem that they were angry? Whose fault was it? I told them, that one time, I said —
And all this is the opposite of meditation.
It is not bad that I don’t like concentrating on breathing. Breathing is not there for me to like, or to dislike. It simply is. Memories and thoughts are not breath.
But what, exactly, am I to concentrate on, when I concentrate on the breath?
Consider the lightlessness of breath. Consider, indeed, the darkness of the entire body. Your soft meat-sack lungs inflate and deflate every moment, sorting out oxygen and carbon dioxide, without the aid of a single photon. The work of the whole body continues in utter blackness. Our perceptions of this architecture, even today, are only sketched. The purple alveoli, the silver-yellow nerves, the Pep-o-mint shape of red blood cells, the Tinkertoy molecules – all false, or useful only as a tool for professions.
Unless you have a surgical procedure, an endoscopy, or a horrible accident, much of you will never come to light. It will return to its constituent particles, after your burial or your cremation, without the necessity of sight, of human intervention.
In these thoughts lies a perfect peace, if it may be touched.
This is not the same as concentrating on the rise and fall of breath alone. One has to fetch back the wandering mind from the cremation chamber, and so forth. It is, however, a fine and private place to spend ten minutes working to reconcile one’s self to the body.
I do. I try to deduce as many things as I can about her life without historically unwarranted guesses. She was, in her time, simply one among the women, and distinguished only by the fact that she must have raised at least two daughters to adulthood. Since my knowledge of prehistoric life and times is, as time goes on, increasingly based on popular works such as Before the Dawn and The Seven Daughters of Eve (but not the fancruft), it is necessarily flawed. But I can begin to see her.
“Eve” — although she should really have been given a different nickname, like M’tdna — lived 140 to 200,000 years ago, probably in Western Africa, but it is unlikely that she looked like the Western Africans of today. She may have resembled one of the Khoisan, although that is only a better guess because they appear to be the oldest extant human ethnic group. It is certain that she had dark skin and thick hair. She did not wear clothing; full-body clothing seems to have begun some 75,000 years ago. But she may have decorated herself with paint, ornaments and loose string-garments, and engaged in social hair-grooming with her friends. Menarche probably did not happen to her until age 15 or 16, and until that point — since foragers have no estates or empires to consolidate — she probably felt little pressure to enter a pair-bond.
Bearing a dozen children to a poor household is a custom from an agricultural society, not a foraging society. M’tdna probably did not feel obligated to have any more children than the two that she did, although she may have borne two or three more. As her band stayed constantly on the move, she and her age-mates probably practiced infanticide to keep the group mobile and to keep the population in control. Times were probably rather good during her life, if she managed to rear to adulthood two girls who then had children of their own — even if the girls were not considered lesser beings, such a survival rate was generous.
She may have raised her children with her brother, rather than the children’s father, if her group was agnatic. She may have been monogamously or polygamously pair-bonded with the children’s father — which is to say, plain old married, whether she was a single wife or one among several. How much control the man had over her, whoever he was, we could not say.
If she managed to see two daughters to a childbearing age, she probably reached a decent one herself — 35 or 40. (Stepmothers would be a poor bet for young people in a marginal society.) Her family probably did its best to assist her through her final illness or injury, but senilicide may have been her final destination, or even her choice if times were hard. That would have been it — that would have been all — fifty, perhaps, if she was lucky.
It was a simple life, a small one, and to add more to it is to become the worst kind of historical novelist. So why am I endlessly fascinated with it? She was probably a very ordinary woman. She might have been vain, cruel, manipulative, dull — she was a survivor, that alone is certain. But I could look at her life the way she could have looked at the stars in the sky.
. . .I don’t know if the stars are campfires in the sky. Or holes in a skin through which the flame of power looks down on us. Sometimes I think one way. Sometimes I think a different way. Once I thought there are no campfires and no holes but something else, too hard for me to understand.
Rest your neck on a log. Your head goes back. Then you can see only the sky. No hills, no trees, no hunterfolk, no campfire. Just sky. Sometimes I feel I may fall up into the sky. If the stars are campfires, I would like to visit those other hunterfolk – the ones who wander. Then I feel good about falling up. But if the stars are holes in a skin, I become afraid. I don’t want to fall up through a hole and into the flame of power.
I wish I knew which was true. I don’t like not knowing.
— Carl Sagan, Cosmos
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