Stymied

     So.

    I am:

• Overwhelmed.
• Lost.
• Confused.
• Frustrated.
• All of the above.

    You see, I'm trying to get to work on the rewrite of book four of the Atalanta and Ariadne books.

    Precis version:  I wrote the original drafts (for all seven books!) of these quasi-YA Greek-myth-based fantasy novels back in 2014.  During 2020's COVID lockdown, I re-visted them and decided they were worth salvaging, unlike most of what I was writing back then.

    Since 2021, I've managed to get the first three polished up and released, both on AO3 as plain text and on itch.io in a slightly interactive form.  (Though having just re-read the AO3 versions, all three still need a lot of work.  😭)  Anyway, having gotten book three out of the metaphorical door, it is now book four's turn.

    And.  Um.

    See, in book one, my heroic trio are mostly just in the region of Troy.  In book two, they return to their roots and go to mainland Greece.  In book three, they visit Athens, Aiaia (home of Kirke (aka Circe)), and then spend most of the novel in Thrace, which I had to give a fairly Greek-adjacent cultural setting, because it had to fit the myths of Heracles' visit to deal with the man-eating mares of Diomedes of the Bistones.

    Book four, however, is when they start doing a little globe-trotting.  (Or the closest you can get to same in a Bronze Age setting, anyhow.)  After visiting a trading town, they head to Babylon, looking for information on the big bad of the series.

    So.  Um...

    Mesopotamia is not my region of expertise.  (Technically, I have no region of expertise, being at best an amateur and at worst an unqualified hack.)  I needed to research it before I could write the first draft.  And I did research it.  Not as much as I needed to, but I did do research.  I read the Enuma Elish (not realizing that it probably wasn't written until several generations after my novel takes place 😰) and I looked at quite a few books in the library of the university where I had just started working on my MA in History.

    I was aware, of course, that the books were not the most recent, as the university hadn't been keeping all that up to date on history and archaeology in general, and particularly not Mesopotamian history and archaeology.

    If I was also aware of how much of a problem that actually was, I had forgotten in the intervening decade.

    I, um, I'm aware of it now.

    Having read both a general survey of Mesopotamian history and a specialized history of Babylonia itself, I dived into rereading the latest draft of book four so I could make notes on what needed to change for the next draft.

    Basically...everything.

    Apparently most of those books I used back in 2014 were approximately as old as I am, maybe older.

    Virtually everything that can be wrong is wrong.

    Whole sequences are centered around traditions that either I made up out of whole cloth or that someone else made up out of whole cloth.  Wherever they came from, what they are is completely incompatible with what is actually known of Bronze Age Babylon's culture.

    If it was just little things, I wouldn't have too much of a problem.

    But like...there's so much that's so weird that I have no idea what to use to replace it.  For example...

    For some reason, I had decided that it was "typical" for supplicants to sleep in the temples to request divine visions in their dreams.  This cannot be much more wrong:  temples in Mesopotamia were such sacred spaces that no one except priests and the most upper of upper echelons of society were allowed inside.  Random people--particularly foreigners!--absolutely would not have been allowed even to set foot in one, let alone sleep in one.  But I have to do something, because the trio had not so much visions as actual divine visitations, and these were vital to communicating the plot to them.

    Which, really, maybe is super-weak and I should do something else.  But what?  That's the problem, you know?  I have to put something in there to let the trio learn what they need to learn.

    And honestly I don't want to let go of some of it.  I love the visuals of Ariadne's visions, in which she's confronted with a giant blank expanse of clay and words and shapes appear before her to show her what the god in question wants to communicate to her.  (Which requires him to divinely teach her cuneiform so she can understand him!  And that's vital to what follows...)  And in Atalanta's dream, which starts out as a nightmare, she has a vision of an enormous ziggurat filled with praying statuettes (which I thought were still a thing in their day, despite that they were long outdated by then) which come to life and surround her and grow and chase her, and it's actually a pretty effective nightmare sequence, one which I have some interesting ideas about how to give the sequence a bit of a visual punch in the Ren'py version.  Eurysakes, as I recall, just has a conversation with the god he talks to.  That one's not particularly interesting, tbh, and could easily be disposed of.

    Another sequence that is both vital and kind of weirdly pointless is one in which they encounter a procession taking the statue of Ishtar to a temple to the underworld gods, at which time the goddess literally enters the underworld (again)...for apparently no reason whatsoever?  On top of me misunderstanding just why Ishtar went into the underworld in the first place (suggesting that the book I read that talked about her descent into the underworld was especially ancient, considering the full text that explained it was discovered in like the early 1950s), did I think she did it repeatedly, or that it was that important a part of her cultic presence?  Because...no.  None of that.  Additionally, the statues of the gods were essentially their physical forms to the ancient Mesopotamians, and while there were a few rituals that involved moving them around, they wouldn't have been wandering the countryside in the care of merely a few...a few...I don't even know who those people were accompanying the statue, because my original draft didn't make it clear, but they certainly seemed to be absolutely nobody!

    As a sequence, it's not necessary, but it accomplishes some important things, especially in that it's the final part of the Babylonian gods giving the trio gifts to ensure that they can triumph over their enemies--the enemies, in this case, more of the Babylonian gods than the trio--and is directly addressing Ishtar as the Lady of Battles, a function her Hellenic counterpart doesn't have.  Honestly, I need to address Ishtar's unique qualities more, since she has both masculine and feminine qualities, and in that respect she is actually kinda similar to Atalanta and Ariadne.

    Realistically, if they're going to get gifts from the Babylonian gods who want them to defeat the threat that looms over Babylonia, then they should have to do tasks to earn them.  (Admittedly, they did at least fight off enemies who were attacking that procession carrying the statue of Ishtar, but it was never explained why those enemies were attacking it, nor why Ishtar had on hand Marduk's bow and quiver to give them.)  They should have to seek out sites in the wilds where those items have been carefully hidden away, but...I don't know of any appropriate sites for that.  What they're being given are weapons the gods themselves used to fight their own foes, so it's not like they're things that mortals would normally have in their possession.

    Hmm.

    It would be a massive amount of new text, but it's gonna need that regardless, so maybe I do just need to invent challenges for the Babylonian gods to set before them, and for each challenge they pass, they get one of the weapons they need to defeat the villain-du-jour, plus a fraction of the information they need.

    It's a bit formulaic--especially compared to the earlier books--but it's a tried and true formula that's literally been around since ancient times.

    In the current draft, Atalanta--and only Atalanta--is taught "Babylonian" by Marduk so that they can communicate without him having to lower himself to use her language.  (I'm not sure if I didn't know at the time that the language was called Akkadian or if I figured she wouldn't know and it therefore didn't matter.)  I'm not sure how plausible it is for only her to learn it in the new set-up I just described, and yet I feel like certain points aren't going to work very well if they all know it.  (Not sure why Ninurta didn't have to teach it to Eurysakes when they spoke.  It doesn't seem even slightly probable that Ninurta would know Mycenaean Greek...)

    <sigh>

    I feel like this one draft is going to be the hardest part of adapting, rewriting and releasing the entire seven book series.  (They do visit Egypt in book five, but that's just a brief stop-over, more akin to visiting Aiaia in book three, rather than being the major portion of the novel.  Plus Egypt was better understood culturally at the time the books I was consulting were written.)

    Anyway.

    Final, bizarre parting note.

    In 2021, I had taken the most recent drafts of the novels (they had mostly just received minor rephrasings and such since their completion) and left annotations on them in the form of comments in Word.  For rereading book four, I opened up that annotated version in Google Docs so I could read it on my phone and leave myself further notes.

    For some reason Google Docs decided that all those comments I left on the document were made on December 31st, 1969.

    Which is:

• Before there were home PCs
• Before Microsoft Word existed
• Before Microsoft existed (as far as I know)
• Before the novels were ever written
• Before I was born
• Insanity
• All of the above

    Yeah.  Just wanted to share that.  (It's definitely not an error on the file or a dating error on the computer I was using when I left those notes, because when I open the same file in Word on this computer, each comment has the correct date from 2021.)

Some Thoughts on Ancient Burial Practices

             So, lately (when I’m not working on my visual novel), I’ve been reading a book about the royal tombs at Ur.  Specifically, it’s an out-of-print book I found at the antique mall near my house; the book was the one that was published to accompany the national tour of the artifacts from said tombs when their home museum was being renovated about twenty years ago now.  (Ugh, I feel old.  I remember being awed by the artifacts when that tour came to town here…after I had moved back home after dropping out of my first attempt at getting a Master’s Degree.)

            Anyway, while the book has me pondering a lot of different things—mostly regarding the appropriateness (or rather lack thereof) of a bunch of European and American archaeologists going around digging up everyone else’s ancient kings and then toting (many/most of) the grave goods back home (as Hergé pointed out in The Seven Crystal Balls, how would the people of Europe feel if a bunch of Egyptians came and started digging up all their kings?), also wondering just what those ancient dead would actually think about the matter if you could travel back in time and tell them what would happen to their graves a few thousand years later—what I just read last night has put me on a more precise and yet also highly speculative train of thought.

            Specifically, what I read late last night was about Ur’s excavator, Sir Laurence Woolley, trying rather futilely to explain why one of the “Royal Tombs” had more than seventy other bodies in it, apparently the bodies of retainers sacrificed at the time of the king’s burial.  This was accompanied by various more modern scholars trying to explain it—with a four page sub-essay on some literary examples from recovered Mesopotamian texts (a sub-essay that was not marked out in any way as different from the rest of the text, so it looked like a page was simply deleted from the file pre-printing)—and ultimately the only answer anyone could come up with was “well, we don’t really know why so many people were sacrificed, but it’s not like other cultures didn’t do the same thing, even if 70+ is a lot more than the usual number.

            It got me to thinking, though, about just how such a practice could have gotten started in the first place.  Because, if you think about it, funerary human sacrifice is typically found in the cultures whose technological level is still pretty low.  They’re stratified—obviously!—and certainly highly sedentary and agrarian, but it’s not the sort of thing you normally find in a culture that has, say, developed the steam engine.  The kinds of cultures that usually practiced funerary human sacrifice were typically also cultures where you would expect human life would be pretty highly valued, since life was so hard; why throw away a strong, healthy young person who could help the civilization survive?  (It would be another matter entirely if the extra bodies in these tombs typically belonged to old, sickly people!)  Now, yes, of course they’re more valuable as sacrifices for exactly that reason, because of their value to the society, and yet if you think about the typical items buried with regal dead, they’re things with artificial value, rather than true value.  All the gorgeous gold jewelry in the world has very little true value in a survival sense:  its value is based entirely on aesthetic reasons, nothing utilitarian.  (And, now, educational value when the jewelry in question is ancient, of course.  But that’s our civilization, not theirs.)  Sure, the dead were often buried with weapons, but they were often elaborate ones that were decorative more than functional.  It’s not a perfect point for a great many reasons (even when you only look at cultures and funerary human sacrifices that fit my basic point) but I hope the core of my logic at least makes sense:  I’m more trying to set up the reason that the entire practice, world-wide, feels like it’s a bit off and could do with some theoretical explanations that come from outside the box.

            Most of the modern scholars trying to explain the phenomenon, in terms of the particular examples at Ur, were really bogged down in typical archaeological theory.  One even structured it as a change in the nature of kingship, etc.  The kinds of reasons that are only applied by scholars at great remove from the subject in question.

            I want to look at the notion from a more human, more “in-world” view, even if it’s also far more speculative and entirely unscholarly.  Though what I’m about to go into is purely in the case of those cultures that didn’t also practice non­-funerary human sacrifice:  when human sacrifice is already part of the culture’s everyday operating parameters, applying it in a funerary context is going to seem far more normal.  (And it is, of course, extremely possible that some of these ancient cultures did, in fact, practice non-funerary human sacrifice, but only in a way that left no material traces, or at least none that archaeologists have so far discovered.  Or that they practiced such sacrifice at a time in their even more remote past, and it was that which shaped the funerary version, which remained part of the culture long after the non-funerary version ceased.)

            So the question is, what would make a culture decide to kill the healthy in order to bury them with the dead?

            The typical scholarly answer is usually “so that they may attend on the deceased in death as they did in life” in one form or another.  The form of service varies—household servants, concubines, guards, etc.—but that’s the basic motivation that’s usually used as an explanation for the sacrificial practice.

            And I’m not saying it’s wrong.  It’s probably right…but that’s after the practice was established.  How did the practice get started?

            Like so many questions, it’s one that can’t be answered (without a time machine).  But I feel like I’ve hit on some possible explanations.

            Take a culture where the king (or other powerful/wealthy male) was often buried with his concubines, lesser wives, maybe even his primary wife.  How did that get started?

            There are a couple of possible explanations, or rather two major pools from which many possible explanations can be derived.  The most charitable one would be to assume that the first king (or whatever) who was buried with one or more of his concubines/wives/etc. was buried with concubines/wives/etc. who had loved him so much they took their own lives in mourning at his death; their suicides might have been covered up and called a sacrifice, particularly if suicide was viewed as shameful for the culture.  A less charitable (and more likely, in my opinion) explanation would be along these lines:  king (or whatever) dies without issue, but a handful of concubines/wives, with whom he was known to have been intimate not long before he died.  His successor does not feel secure in his position, and worries that if one of the dead man’s concubines/wives turns out to be pregnant, then the baby would be a threat to his position.  The solution?  Sacrifice all the concubines/wives before they have time to figure out if they’re pregnant, and then the dead man’s potential children die with him, and the successor’s position is secure (at least from that particular threat).

            How about a culture where the king (etc.) is buried with his household staff.  What might explain that?

            There are a lot of possible explanations for the start of that one.  Maybe he was assassinated, and his household staff needed to be silenced quickly lest news get out…or the assassin-turned-heir be fingered as the responsible party.  Or maybe he was assassinated and it seemed to be an inside job, but no one was quite sure which member of the household staff was responsible.  Or maybe he died of a particularly nasty illness and it was worried that it might be a plague (or it just plain was a plague) and his household staff was judged likely to be contaminated—or maybe they were in fact visibly suffering the same illness—and needed to be put to death to keep the disease from spreading.

            And one where the king was buried with some of his soldiers?

            The easiest explanation is that the soldiers in question were deemed too loyal to the old king, and likely to turn on the new king, particularly if the new king was not the old king’s son.  Or maybe the old king died in battle, and the soldiers in question were those who failed to save him (though depending on the culture, it might seem like rewarding them for their failure).  The assassination possibilities from the household staff bit above could also easily apply here, too.

            Of course, all of these describe individual incidents, not an entire cultural tradition.

            But see, that’s the kicker.  All of these also involve secrecy, right?  The new king doesn’t want anyone knowing he’s killing the old king’s concubines in fear that they might be pregnant, so he says he’s “sacrificing them so they can continue to serve his late majesty in the next world” or whatnot.  So what happens when he dies?  His own heirs, remembering what he had done for the previous king’s funeral, decide they should emulate it, because surely he knew what he was doing, since he was king and all.  Then the heirs’ heirs do the same thing, and it becomes tradition, accepted into the culture’s basic beliefs.

 

            Obviously, I’m not saying “yes, this is what happened!”

            I’m saying “this makes sense to me as how this sort of thing may have gotten started.”

            I could be so totally wrong that no civilization ever went through any of these steps.  Or maybe it happened once or twice, but most of them came to their funerary human sacrifice in radically different ways.  (Maybe those cultures originally had non-funerary human sacrifice practices that we just don’t know about because they were just too old.)

            But I thought it was an interesting “what-if” kind of theory.

            Also the kind of thing I might use in some piece of fiction at some point.  If I ever have a situation where it might apply.  (Probably more as world-building than as a direct incident in a story...or maybe not.  Who knows?)

            And I thought I’d post it to the blog because…hey, I need to start posting things that aren’t just the monthly Insecure Writers’ Support Group stuff, right?