Here are some posts I enjoyed this week. A short list again. Keeping life going strong with the healing husband–that takes a lot of time!
Jane Smiley puts a self-righteous historian in his place when he tells her historical novels are a “secondary form” compared to writing history. She tried to remind him he has to have a theory, a construct to structure his writing just as she does, but he was sure he was all about truth and we novelists are all about made up nonsense. Congratulations for this articulate rebuttal to this historian’s false sense of his own exclusive access to truth. Both historians and novelists can and do include known facts, but truth is a challenging goal, more often reached by placing oneself imaginatively in the past than by sitting on a high horse.
A favorite quote from Smiley: “My motto as a historical novelist has been: “You are there.” But in order to put you there, I have to use my imagination to make connections, to evoke feelings, to show patterns, to build a logical structure.”
Click here for The Guardian “History vs Historical Fiction”
A secret tunnel connecting to a system of cisterns, dating to the Hittite period, found by archaeologists in Konya, central turkey at Gevale Castle. The tunnel was later used in the Seljuk period. The castle doesn’t appear in any of the photos, but I gather it dates to medieval period and probably is in ruins. There’s an elaborate tunnel and cistern system underneath Troy dating to the same Hittite period, so this fun confirmation that such water storage and secret passages was a more widespread practice in late Bronze Age citadel protection. Once again demonstrating how much Troy was part of the Anatolian world rather than Greek in terms of cultural influence. If you watched the PBS show last week on Troy, they took a camera down into the water tunnels.
Click here for Hurriyet Daily News “Secret Tunnel Found in Historical Castle”
Tut’s beard is going to get a proper repair, you’ll be happy to hear. A German restoration team has advised the Egyptian museum about the restoration. Tut’s beard was knocked off by a man repairing lights and then hastily glued back with epoxy. I still have trouble visualizing how many incompetent bloopers it takes to let that happen to a treasure of this value and public significance. The epoxy will be scraped off manually with wood sticks and then the original method of attachment will be studied and recreated. That’s the hope.
Click here for Archaeology News Network “Egypt Fixing Tutankhamun mask after Botched Repair”
I’m sure by now you’ve heard of the exciting discovery of the shaft grave of the “Griffin Warrior” in Pylos, Greece. I’m so jazzed by this. The site of Pylos always spoke to me. I visited Pylos twice and in my first (unpublished, forgettable) attempt at novel writing thirty-five years ago, I set my contemporary romantic suspense story here about a find of Minoan sacred objects. Kinda weird.
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