Le Guin, Herodotus & Earliest Alphabets

From My Fantasy Writing Desk

I’ve been reading Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea series. I’d never read all the way through. I saw a documentary about her last night in which she talks about the seventeen-year gap between the first three and the later books. I’m in the middle of the third. She talked about facing in the later books the traditional central role of men she had given to her wizards and magic in general. I’ll be intrigued to see how she comes to terms with that. She is the master of description that combines world-building and symbolic setting. Here’s a passage from the Tombs of Atuan that I particularly love. It does include major spoilers, so skip the next paragraph if you’re planning on a first read of this iconic series. Earthsea brought us wizards and a wizard school before there was a Harry Potter.

Next day they crossed the summit of the tawny range. In the pass a hard wind blew, with snow in it, stinging and blinding. It was not until they had come down a long way on the other side, out from under the snow clouds of the peaks, that Tenar saw the land beyond the mountain wall. It was all green—green of pines, of grasslands, of sown fields and fallows. Even in the dead of winter, when the thickets were bare and the forests full of grey boughs, it was a green land, humble and mild. They looked down on it from a high, rocky slant of the mountainside. Wordless, Ged pointed to the west, where the sun was getting low behind a thick cream and roil of clouds. The sun itself was hidden, but there was a glitter on the horizon, almost like the dazzle of the crystal walls of the Undertomb, a kind of joyous shimmering off on the edge of the world.

“What is that?” the girl said, and he: “The sea.”

-Tombs of Atuan

Archaeology I Enjoyed   

Unexpected Accuracy from an Old Friend

Herodotus, the ancient Greek historian, often told tales more fantastical than strictly historical—or so they seem. But archaeologists excavating a “ship graveyard” in Egypt have found a cargo ship made of acacia wood that exactly matches Herodotus’s remarkably precise description.

From Archaeology Magazine: “It’s a very rare case when a written source and archaeological material make such a perfect match,” says archaeologist Alexander Belov of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The short, thick planks of local acacia wood that form the hull of what is known as Ship 17 are arranged in the staggered, brick-like pattern described by Herodotus, and its keel contains a shaft that the historian notes held a rudder.”

There are many appealing descriptions in Herodotus that would be so great if they had actually existed. The legendary often contains far more history than we’ve traditionally given credit to. Got any Herodotus moments you’d love to have “come true”? Click here for Archaeology Magazine “As Told By Herodotus”

Liberation or Cultural Loss?

Earliest alphabets? This post on the ASOR blog discusses the first 1000 years of the alphabet. There’s the issue of whether an alphabet writing system includes vowels or not. It turns out leaving out the vowels was borrowed from Egyptian scripts and helps point to the location of the alphabet’s origination.

I enjoyed the way the new, quicker, easier system of alphabet bumped up against the dominant and very long-established cuneiform system. The scribes who’d invested years learning the complex system maintained cuneiform, but there are interesting examples of their play with the new alphabet and adoption of it. Stuffy elites defending an old, outmoded system against new, sleeker competition? Sound familiar? But also, a culture’s identity is bound up in its writing system no matter how much it doesn’t “play” well with other people’s—think about the modern world and the continuing range of writing systems.

Click here for Ancient Near East Today “The Alphabet the First Thousand Years”