Ebisu Publications

This is what was, and what might have been.

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Category: Middle East

  • Assyrian Empire: Blood at the Banquet

    This week the big news in the U.S. has been about torture, as conducted by the C.I.A. after 9/11. I’ve spent some time with the comments section in my hometown newspaper: the majority of readers are outraged, while some defend the practice. Some even seem naïve enough to be shocked. However, most ruling elites, ours included, achieve and maintain their power by violence or the threat of violence.

    My novels about Jezebel take place when the Assyrian empire on the rise. A major predator without much in the way of natural resources (they didn’t know what to do with all that oil yet), it devoured the wealth and slave labor of other nations through conquest. Still, life was good for the elite and for what you might call the Assyrian middle class.

    In writing historical novels, I do my best to absorb historians’ and archaeologists’ descriptions and present the reader with snapshots that convey the color and flavor of an ancient civilization without descending into tedious academic detail. Below are a couple of the snapshots of ancient Assyria, from The Throne in the Heart of the Sea.

    Assyrian banquet1) The new Assyrian king has invited guests from other nations to celebrate the inauguration of his new capital. These guests include our heroine, Tamar. Wealthy and middle-class citizens are also in attendance.

    Hundreds of brightly striped awnings stretched from the riverbank up along the gently rolling terrain. Thousands of people milled about. Somewhere at the front of the mob the king was offering a sacrifice to Ashur. Tamar came late, so she waited at the edge of the crowd, hearing nothing of the ceremony, seeing nothing over the heads of those in front of them except smoke rising from the flames that would prepare their dinner.

    When the offering had been made, she threaded their way to the women’s section. Finely dressed ladies pushed ahead of them, trailing expensive scents, burbling effusive apologies without relinquishing a hair’s breadth of space, squatting knee to knee in every available bit of shade. Eventually they squeezed in across from a group of ladies in white linen, who seemed as cool as a school of fish in the Tigris.

    Servants carried jars of beer and copper trays up and down the aisles. The first course was roast chickpeas, pickled locusts, and pomegranate seeds, and a towel for the ladies to wipe their fingers.

    An enormous pastry arrived. They broke through the crust cover and found it stuffed with songbirds cooked in milk and sprinkled with mint. Then more beer arrived, along with the main course—a huge bowl of beef simmering in onions, surrounded by heart-shaped loaves. Within moments the ladies had torn the bread apart and were scooping up thick chunks of fragrant stew.

    “This is delicious!” Tamar exclaimed. “I’ve never had anything like it.”

    “Oh, I’m so glad,” said an Assyrian lady. “I do it this way at home. It’s one of my husband’s favorite recipes.”

    “How do you make it?”

    “Easiest thing in the world. Simmer chunks of fresh cow spleen with salted stomach, add milk, onions, and crushed dodder seed. While it’s cooking you pound more onions and some leek with fresh beef blood, add that during the last few minutes, sprinkle in a little mint and serve.”

    “Blood?” Tamar stared at the dripping hunk of bread in her hand. Dear Goddess, forgive me this sin against Your law and don’t let me throw up in front of everybody.

    2) Later, Tamar wanders through the city and accidentally encounters one aspect of the violence that supports the Assyrian empire and the comfortable life of its more fortunate citizens.

    Tamar was intending to stroll along the riverbank. After a while, however, she found herself in an unfamiliar quarter and realized she’d taken a wrong turn. She turned to retrace her steps and saw a large man coming on rapidly, hand on his sword belt. He yelled something. She began to run.

    In the distance she saw a flickering light and heard what sounded like drumming. A military band. She’d be safe with them. The man behind her increased his pace and she ran faster, until the stitch in her side became a stabbing. Then she rounded the last corner and arrived at a construction site. It was bathed in torchlight and surrounded by guards.

    She was standing at the edge of a plaza where naked men and women dragged stone blocks up ramps. Others squared the stones with chisels and shoved them into place. Work gangs slapped courses of bricks atop the foundation stones. Tamar forgot the stitch in her side, almost forgot the man behind her, as the syncopated ear-splitting hammering engraved this night in her heart forever: she drank in the stench of slaves who hadn’t bathed since their capture, drank the fetor of blood and the crack of whips, the black fumes of stone oil torches—

    Two men approached, hitched like donkeys to a heavy cart, its solid wooden wheels clattering on the cobblestones. She drew back to let them pass. The cargo of bodies was piled neatly, feet to front, heads lolling back at the rear. She gasped, and the donkey-slaves turned to look at her, displaying the brands on their cheeks, and something new in the world: the Assyrians, with their genius for organization, had tattooed numbers on their captives’ foreheads.

  • Elijah and Olive Oil

    Olive Press Ancient IsraelPeople have asked me how I went about researching a historical novel. Here’s one example.

    Developing Elijah was a major challenge, both in my first and second novels. He appears in the Bible quite suddenly, a full-blown champion of justice, complete with miracles. All we know about his past is that he was from a town called Tishbe, in the province of Gilead. Moses, by contrast, has a childhood and plenty of motivation for his actions. You can understand why he loses his temper and kills an Egyptian, why he flees the country, and why he eventually takes up the cause of his people.

    In Jewish (and Christian and Muslim) tradition, Elijah can do no wrong. He orders his followers to kill the priests and priestesses of a rival religion, but all’s well, because the one true God wants it that way. My pagan friends, who subscribe to some variant of that rival religion, see Elijah as a villain. I don’t believe in angels, devils, or miracles, so I had to create a complex, believable human being.

    He needed a childhood. The province of Gilead was known for production of herbal medicines (the fabled balm of Gilead). In studying maps of the area, I found that it is also olive-growing country and gave his family a large olive orchard. But it’s not enough for a writer to say that her character makes a living from olives; she has to show him doing the work. The best source was History and Technology of Olive Oil in the Holy Land. Of course the technology changed over time, so I had to decide what types of equipment and what methods of processing oil were most likely to prevail in the area during the 9th Century BCE. Then I could show Elijah rising in the damp morning, climbing on a primitive ladder, picking fruit or shaking it off the branches, and so on.

    He also needed a motive for challenging the existing power structure. Part of the answer was in the Bible: he must have been a child during the civil war in Israel (885-881 BCE). Half the people sided with General Omri, who prevailed and became king. My Elijah’s father Ben-Hanan dies fighting on the losing side. As we all know, winners take the spoils. Now the scene is set:

    Elijah is still mourning the death of his father. He and his mother and young aunt are preparing summer oil, an expensive product.

    Elijah squatted beside the mortar stone on the edge of the grove, tending the fire under the pot. Mama and Aunt Eglah stood on the mortar itself – a limestone shelf pocked with cup-shaped depressions – and pounded fruit. Fragrant green droplets glistened in the sun. It was the end of Etanim and would have been a lovely summer afternoon, except that Elijah had a hole in his heart and the pestles slammed into it like a gravedigger’s spade.

    Tsaduk the carpenter, who fought on the other side, comes through the trees. He proposes marriage to Eglah, and offers the rest of the family a home with him.

    “We already have a home,” Eglah said frostily.

    “Yes, for now. But Ben-hanan had no brothers who could claim it, and your nephew isn’t old enough to take on a man’s responsibilities, so Omri agreed to give me this land.”

    Elijah felt as though he’d been kicked in the chest. Mama was pale as dry grass. “You mean, you asked him for it?”

    “My dear Milcah, I just thought I’d be the best person to look after you. I’m trying to make it as easy as possible, but sooner or later I’ll have to take possess-”

    “It’s mine! You can’t have my inheritance!” Elijah threw himself at Tsaduk, who simply grabbed the boy and hurled him into the dirt. He jumped up and was knocked down again.

    “I don’t want to hurt you,” Tsaduk said, retreating. “And I don’t want to be unfair. You’ve tended the trees all year, so you can keep three-fourths of the harvest. I’d say that’s pretty damn generous. But after that” – he looked at Eglah – “you’d better think about my offer.”

  • Blood Sacrifice in Israel

    DomeOfTheRockImageThirty years ago I visited Israel for the first time, partly to do research for my novels about Jezebel. In Jerusalem I passed a store window with small but colorful posters—artistic imaginings—of the ancient Temple, supposedly built by Solomon. The storefront was the information center of a religious group that wanted to tear down the Dome of the Rock—Islam’s third holiest shrine—and rebuild the ancient Jewish Temple, complete with animal sacrifices. “But if you try to do that,” I protested, “all the world’s Muslims in the world, over a billion of them, will declare war on Israel.”

    “God will grant us the victory,” the woman behind the counter replied serenely.

    At that time, I dismissed her group as a tiny cult, destined to become less than a footnote in the history of a modern state. But this month the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz published two articles discussing the project of rebuilding the Temple. Apparently there are significant numbers of Israelis, including political and religious leaders, who intend to do just that. According to the November 29th article, a rebuilt temple would mean the end of modern Judaism and any pretense of Western liberal democracy: “…control [would be] in the hands of a priestly caste that is centered not around schools of Torah study but around one temple; one that does not pray but sacrifices animals, does not seek God in holy actions and at holy times, but at one special holy site.”

    So, a hereditary priesthood and bloody animal sacrifices. And quite possibly a man (certainly not a woman) claiming descent from King David would be chosen as monarch. Many Zionists argue that Jews have a right to all the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. This is appalling enough, but the Temple rebuilders take it even further. They think they are entitled to re-establish the legendary empire of Solomon. It supposedly extended all the way to the Euphrates, encompassing a large chunk of what is now Syria.

    I wonder how much bloody human sacrifice—soldiers and civilians—they will tolerate in attempting to achieve their goals.