Bronze Summer (54 page)
Authors: Stephen Baxter
Writing emerged in Mesopotamia in
c
.3000 BC, but in our timeline Britain did not become literate until the arrival of the Romans. The Northlanders make their own independent invention of a form of writing based on the raw materials of their culture, such as rock art (see
British Prehistoric Rock Art
by Stan Beckensall, Tempus, 1999).
Our conception of cities as dense masses of buildings of stone and masonry is another relic of our civilisation’s origin in the arid Near East. The Northlanders’ communities, intricate hierarchical networks of communities embedded in a ‘green’ landscape, are based in part on archaeologists’ studies of similar communities in the pre-Columbian Amazon forest. Michael Heckenberger, (see
The Ecology of Power
, Routledge, 2005) interestingly notes that the temperate forests of medieval Europe were studded with towns and villages of similar sizes to those he studied in the Amazon.
Most importantly, my Northlanders are not farmers. All our civilisations have been built by farmers. Modern hunter-gatherer groups surviving in marginal territories are probably not a perfect model of the richness of their lives in the past; given time and a rich environment, hunter-gatherer populations could achieve huge feats, and develop complex societies. The Native American communities of the north-west coast, with towns, aristocracies, slavery, land ownership and patronage of the arts, were arguably the most elaborate hunter-gatherer societies in human history (see
Prehistory of the Americas
, S. Fiedel, Cambridge, 1992). This series imagines a sophisticated, complex, even literate culture developed by a people
without
farming.
Names used here are intended primarily for clarity.
My place names for pre-literate Britain and Gaul (Gaira) are derived in part from mentions in ancient writings such as those of the first century AD scholar Pliny the Elder, which in turn may be based on the reports of such adventurers as the fourth-century BC explorer Pytheas (see
The Extraordinary Voyage of Pytheas the Greek
by Barry Cunliffe, Allen Lane, 2001). I have used the anachronistic term ‘Greeks’ to describe the contemporary inhabitants of the Greek mainland, known to historians since the nineteenth century as the Mycenaeans. I have used ‘Anatolian’ for the inhabitants of modern mainland Turkey. The names ‘Ilium’ and ‘Troy’ derive from Homer, but according to analyses of Hittite records these appear to be based on the names of territories in the region of Troy: ‘Wilusa’ which was corrupted to become ‘Ilium’ and ‘Taruwisa’ which became ‘Troy’ (see J. Lacatz,
Troy and Homer: Towards a Solution of an Old Mystery
, Oxford University Press, 2004 (English translation), and chapter 14 of Trevor Bryce’s
The Kingdom of the Hittites
, Oxford University Press, 2005). The people of the great Anatolian Bronze Age kingdom we know as the Hittites – because of a link to their nineteenth-century discovery to the ‘Children of Heth’ of the Bible – seem to have called themselves ‘the people of the Land of Hatti’. I have called them ‘Hatti’ here. In our timeline, by 1159 BC the central Hittite empire had already collapsed. For recent surveys see Bryce (2005) and his
Life and Society in the Hittite World
, Oxford University Press, 2002. I have generally followed Bryce in spelling Hittite personal and place names and other terms.
The old idea that the Hittites maintained their empire through a monopoly on iron-working (see
The Coming of Age of Iron
, ed. Theodore Westime and James Muhly, Yale University Press, 1980) seems to be discredited through a lack of archaeological proof. The Hittites may not have mass-produced iron, but scholars such as Muhly (‘The Bronze Age Setting’, in Westime and Muhly, 1980) have argued for evidence of carburisation, that is making steel by heating iron in contact with carbon, in the Hittite period. The Hittites certainly manufactured high-quality iron goods, as attested by letters referring to prestigious iron tribute items – most famously given to Tutankhamun, who died in the fourteenth century BC and was buried with iron artefacts that may well have been Hittite. They do not appear to have used iron for weaponry; it was evidently too precious for that. Iron was produced in other areas at the time, but it does seem to be true that it was only after the fall of the Hittites that iron-making, particularly for weapons, became widespread, and the ‘Iron Age’ began. The main advantage of iron compared to bronze was actually the ready availability of iron ore compared to the scarcity of tin; high-quality bronze weapons could certainly be a match for lower-quality iron weapons. Here I have imagined that high-quality iron precociously developed in Hittite workshops affords a brief advantage to Northland in their conflict with the Trojans.
This novel is set at the end of the European Bronze Age. Just as depicted here it was a time of significant changes across Europe, from the abandonment of high-altitude farmlands in Britain to the collapse of ancient empires like the Hittites in the east, and the onset of the Greek ‘Dark Age’ in which even literacy was lost. These changes have been ascribed to cultural and systemic factors. But the advent of a new climate regime, punctuated by such events of global impact as volcanic explosions, may well have had something to do with it (see for example
The Long Summer
by Brian Fagan, Granta Books, 2004). In early 2010 a minor eruption of the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajokull injected enough ash into the air of north Europe to force airspaces to be closed. Hekla, called here the Hood, is a bigger brother of Eyjafjallajokull. And it did erupt in the year 1159 BC, as depicted here, as proven by ash layers in ice cores extracted from the Greenland ice cap; the resulting injection of smoke and ash into the air seems to have caused several ‘years without a summer’ which would have ravaged the marginal livelihoods of subsistence farmers. My details of the eruption have been taken from the geological evidence of Hekla’s eruptive history.
The use of plague vectors as primitive ‘bio-weapons’, as depicted here, seems to have a deep history. Plague was used as a weapon by the Hittites as early as the fourteenth century BC (see ‘The Hittite Plague, the epidemic of Turalemia and the first record of biological warfare’, Siro Trevisanato,
Medical Hypotheses
vol. 69, pp. 1371–4, 2007, and Adrienne Mayor’s
Greek Fire, Poison Arrows and Scorpion Bombs
, Overlook, 2009). The ‘coughing plague’ depicted here is a variant of the pneumonic form of the plague of which the best known manifestation is bubonic.
My ‘People of the Jaguar’ are Olmec, a Mesoamerican culture that flourished in an area within modern Mexico
c
.1400 BC–AD 100 (for a recent study see
Olmec Archaeology and Early Mesoamerica
by C. Pool, Cambridge, 2007). I have freely extrapolated details of Olmec culture here. My ‘Altar of the Jaguar’ is meant to be the site now known as San Lorenzo, preserved from the decline it suffered in our history by the intervention of the Northlanders. As the Vikings discovered around 1000 AD, to sail to the Americas via the Faroe Islands, Iceland and Greenland requires the crossing of no more than 800 kilometres of open sea. Of course the Vikings had the ship technology they needed; I have imagined here a precocious acceleration of ship-building after the first fluked crossings depicted in book one of this series.
In our world, a major feature of the fifteenth-century contact between Europe and the Americas was the devastating transmission of ‘herd diseases’ such as smallpox and measles to the American populations (see
Guns, Germs and Steel
by Jared Diamond, Vintage, 1998). In my different prehistory I have imagined continual contacts across the Atlantic since the eighth millennium BC, so American populations have had a chance to develop resistance to these diseases.
The plot of this novel hinges to some extent on the (apparently) humble potato, which is brought to Europe by the Northlanders millennia before the post-Columbus explorers of our own history. The potato is a crop that will grow in poor soils and unfavourable positions and climates, it requires only the simplest of implements and techniques to cultivate, and it is tremendously more productive than grain in terms of yield per hectare. Arguably, by fuelling the population growth that underpinned the Industrial Revolution and Europe’s rise to economic dominance, the potato changed world history – just as it changes history in this novel (see Redcliffe Salaman’s
The History and Social Influence of the Potato
, Cambridge University Press, 1985).
This is a novel, and not meant to be taken as a reliable history. Any errors or inaccuracies are of course my sole responsibility.
Stephen Baxter
Northumberland
Summer Solstice, 2011
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Xeelee: An Omnibus
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A Gollancz eBook
Copyright © Stephen Baxter 2011
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The right of Stephen Baxter to be identified as the author
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Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in Great Britain in 2011 by
Gollancz
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
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5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane
London, WC2H 9EA
An Hachette UK Company
This eBook first published in 2011 by Gollancz.
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.
All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons living or dead, is purely coincidental.
ISBN 978 0 575 08925 9
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