From My Fantasy Writing Desk:
Sorcery in Alpara is coming soon. I’ve been juggling marketing duties for the Sorcery launch with laying out the next book. In book 3 (title a long way from decided) Daniti and Tesha are in conflict over Tesha’s ambitions about magical power—that’s one big piece of the arc, I think. There are also conflicting visions of the best plan, foreign policy, if you will, for the Hitolian Empire. Plotting trouble is fun. Way more fun than the marketing duties, but they are also an essential part of being a writer these days. More about book 2, Sorcery in Alpara, soon!
Archaeology I Enjoyed:
When Did the Ingenious Greeks Invent the Crane?
Those clever ancient Greeks. “The foremost discovery of the Greeks in building technology is the crane,” Pierattini said. “No previous civilizations are known to have used it, and it has remained central to building construction without remarkable changes for nearly 25 centuries—because it was perfect.”
Now architecture professor Pierattini’s research shows a more nuanced understanding of when Greeks first used cranes or at least the forerunners of them, moving the date from 515 BCE back to as early as 700-615 BCE. He draws his conclusion from grooves in the ashlar blocks from early temples at Isthmia and Corinth.
I suspect several theories about the purpose of the grooves could be generated. But I am enjoying thinking about the Greeks inventing the crane in any of these centuries, so I don’t really mind. The Romans get so much of the engineering credit, it’s good to give the Greeks their highly creative due. And the Parthenon is still my favorite monument. What’s yours? Click here for Archaeology News Network “Greek temple ruins suggest lifting machines in use 150 years earlier than previously believed”
Globally Connected Bronze Age?
“International” trade has been around since the beginning and across much longer distances than we previously thought. The ancient world was interconnected by strong threads of trade. That’s one of my “take aways” from the last decade or so of archaeology.
The evidence for one of the earliest significant long-distance trading networks comes from clay tablets found at the Early Bronze Age site of Kanesh in central Turkey. It’s referred to as the Assyrian Colony period. An Assyriologist has been using an economic modeling technique to identify major cities and trade routes in this network.
As Archaeology Magazine put it, “From about 2000 to 1750 B.C., this bustling city played host to a number of foreign merchants from Ashur, an Assyrian city some 700 miles to the southeast in modern-day Iraq. At the end of the third millennium B.C., Ashur’s king lifted the government monopoly on trade, opening the way for private merchants to operate donkey caravans that took luxury fabrics and tin north into the Anatolian heartland, where they exchanged their wares for silver and gold bullion in at least 27 city-states. In private archives at Kanesh, these entrepreneurs stored clay tablets inscribed with their business letters and contracts, as well as shipping and accounting records. A massive fire destroyed the merchants’ homes, but also baked and preserved these tablets, leaving a record of intensive trade whose detail wouldn’t be matched until the merchant houses of the Italian Renaissance began to document their activities.”
The massive fire part is important—without the homes having been turned into giant kilns, the unfired clay of the tablets would have disintegrated. That’s the tragedy underlying our knowledge of all of this world I write about, this early period and the later parts of the Hittite Empire—massive destruction had to happen in order to preserve the past. Click here for Archaeology Magazine, “The Mesopotamian Merchant Files”