From my Fantasy Writing Desk:
A busy week for me as a writer, but not so much on my own projects. It was a week of writing with friends.
People think of writing as a solitary activity, and so it is much of the time. But writing, for many of us, is also about community, and we couldn’t survive without our writer friends.
Last weekend I taught a workshop at the San Diego Writers Conference on how to edit. I covered deep point of view, setting that does a lot, fast paced, effective dialogue and action sequences. I made some new friends in the process and renewed old connections. I also learned and found inspiration in the workshops I attended.
Back at home, I pitched in with a couple friends’ projects, editing and brainstorming.
One writer friend within my circle, my community, wanted me to teach her how to “put her book on a board.” We spent an enjoyable afternoon doing that together. It’s a process borrowed from screenwriting that encourages the big-picture view of a writing project. It involves some kindergarten supplies such as a 3-sided board from the craft store, post-its, lines marked in with a yard stick. Then a lot of hard questions and big thinking. What’s the central problem? Where do the major crises fall? The climactic scenes? How does the overall arc of the book rise and fall? What really matters in this book? How do the characters develop over time? What do they find or suffer? When it goes well, and our afternoon did, epiphanies happen, mental sparks fly. It’s really fun.
Archaeology Posts I enjoyed:
A Maze of Mummies
Mummies, lots of mummies. The sands of Egypt (or rock cut tombs) keep revealing more sites. This myriad of mummies dates to Ptolemaic-era. It includes adults and children.
One of the photos in this article shows a beautiful painted portrait, or fragments of it, of the Roman period style.
The find is described as “a maze of tombs” underground and includes a variety of mummies and styles of burial. They found both wooden and stone sarcophagi. Other mummies are laid on the stone floors or niches or buried directly into the sand.
Papyri scraps have helped date the site. Ancient Egyptians used papyrus strips in the mummification process (a lot like papier-mâché). Some of our best literary fragments came from mummy wrappings, so we’ll see if any of these, down the road, produce a few more lines of Sappho or a new reading of a line of Homer. Meanwhile this apparently “middle class” burial site offers insights into Egyptian life.
Click here for Archaeology News Network “Mummy-filled burial chambers discovered in Egypt’s Minya”
Stone Age Questions raised by Göbeklitepe site
Göbeklitepe, at 11,000 years old, lays claim as the oldest temple in the world. That’s 7,000 years older than the pyramids, 6,000 years older than Stonehenge.
This post by a Turkish archaeologist who is a good friend of mine, Sevil Çonka, gives an overview of what this Stone Age site might have been used for and its significance. She also includes the video link to the National Geographic program about it, which is a fascinating deep dive into this mysterious site. A few of the ideas in the video seem like unsupported leaps, but it’s nonetheless really intriguing.
Potentially, this site has turned upside down one of the basic understandings of human development. This site predates agriculture and pottery. Traditionally, the thinking was that agriculture gave rise to settlement which gave rise to religion and civilization. And yet Göbeklitepe’s huge carved monoliths and circular structures clearly have ritual significance and required a huge dedication of manpower and the gathering of people in one place for extended periods of time.
The archaeologist who spent many years excavating this site proposed that religion in fact drove humans toward agriculture in order to feed the needs of temple construction and maintenance.
Pillar with bull, fox and crane at Göbeklitepe, photo from Wikimedia, by Teomancimit
Another idea he drew from the structures and art there, is that this place represents the moment in human development when humans ceased to see themselves as part of the natural world, equal or less than the animals. This is the moment, he posited, when humans viewed themselves as masters of nature, superior to the animals. The site has gigantic monoliths carved as humans with no faces. On and around the monoliths are many smaller carvings of animals. From this size and arrangement, the archaeologist drew this large idea.
He also believed the temple served as a sort of entrance to the underworld, a place of ancestor worship. The users of the temple collected skulls, which seem to have ritual significance. The Stone Age people of Göbeklitepe took skulls from bodies that had been buried, decomposed, dug up, and then re-buried after the head was taken out. Headless bodies are depicted on the rock carvings. The chief archaeologist viewed this as the earliest idea of resurrection.
Lots to think about in all this. Pretty amazing from hunter gatherers—just the labor alone of carving and standing the monoliths boggles the mind. As a species, we certainly started thinking deep thoughts remarkably early.
Click here for Sevil’s blog, Turkey: Istanbul and Beyond, A Gigantic Stone Age Site “Göbeklitepe”