The Singer from Memphis

by Gary Corby

  A few other place names are worth mentioning. Libya is the Roman (Latin) name for that country. The Greeks called it Cyrenaica, based on the city of Cyrene, which was originally a colony of Thera, which was in turn a colony of Sparta! Eastern Libya is still called Cyrenaica to this day. I was a bit stuck on which of those names to use in this book. If Nico said Cyrenaica, which is what he would have said in real life, then modern readers would have conceived only half the country he really means, so I went with Libya, which name won’t be in use for a few more hundred years.

  Likewise, Nico refers to the continent as Africa, because that’s how the modern reader knows it. But the name Africa for the continent was unknown in Nico’s day. Africa is believed to be the one and only surviving word from the language spoken in ancient Carthage. We call them Carthaginians, but they called themselves Africans. The name stuck for the entire land mass.

  As far as the Greeks were concerned, everything south of Egypt and Libya was Aethiopia. Yes, our Ethiopia is a Greek name too. To the Greeks Aethiopia meant all of Central and South Africa, though they had no clue just how vast that area is.

  Ethiopia and the people who came from there had been known to the Greeks since time immemorial. Memnon, the King of Aethiopia, was one of the mighty warriors who defended Troy.

  The sailors say to Nico that nothing ever happens on Thera, the island at which they stop on their way to Crete. Little do they know that fifteen hundred years before their time, Thera was a volcano that exploded violently. That’s why Thera is the shape it is. There’s a theory that Thera’s explosion caused the end of the Minoan Age. There’s also a theory that the Thera explosion is the origin of the Atlantis myth. Nico doesn’t mention Atlantis, because he’s never heard of it. That nonsense was written by Plato a hundred years after the time of this story.

  Thera is officially known these days as Santorini. It’s one of Greece’s most popular holiday destinations. A lot of the tourist pictures you see of pristine whitewashed homes against a perfect blue sea were taken on Thera.

  The statesman Themistocles is the subject of the second book in this series, The Ionia Sanction. Herodotus in The Histories gives two different versions of the great man’s death. In one story, Themistocles died of natural causes. In the second, it was suicide by drinking bull’s blood. Obviously they can’t both be right, as Herodotus points out in this book.

  We now know the source of the paradox: Nico and Diotima lied to him, and in The Ionia Sanction, I give a third way for Themistocles to die!

  Nico and Diotima have a severe problem with pirates.

  The Greeks get credit for inventing a lot of things, but did you know one of them is piracy?

  Even the word “pirate” comes from Ancient Greek. When he wrote about pirates, Plutarch uses the word peiratiko.

  There have been pirates in the Aegean Sea for at least three thousand years. The Aegean is ideal for this sort of thing. There are hundreds of islands, the coastlines are rocky, and the only way for trade to move about is by sea.

  The world’s first known pirate was a Greek. His name was Piyamaradus. He’s mentioned in a tablet written by the King of the Hittites to the King of Mycenae. That tablet has to be older than 1,200 BC.

  By classical times there were highly organized pirates with for-real pirate bases. Many of the bases were on Crete, which was famous as a land of pirates. I’m afraid you’ll have to do away with ideas of eye patches, peg legs and parrots screeching for pieces of eight. Your average pirate looked like any other sailor. Successful pirate chiefs became wealthy and could marry well.

  Nico and Diotima are saved by the appearance of a trireme. No pirate in his right mind would have taken on a trireme. Triremes were the fighting ships of the ancient world. Before the invention of the trireme, warriors treated ships like a particularly unsteady form of land. Men fought over the water using the same techniques that they used in the army. Then some naval genius (who was probably a Phoenician) realized that the ship itself could be a weapon, and thus was born the trireme, a floating battery ram.

  Ships in the classical world did not fly national flags, not even in battle. Hence Nico can’t tell whether a distant ship is friend or foe. We know about the lack of identifying flags because of a famous incident that occurred during the Battle of Salamis. One Persian boat sank another Persian. Three nearby Greek ships thought the attacker must be Greek, when it wasn’t, and the Persian King, watching from the shore, thought the destroyed boat must be Greek, when it was actually Persian!

  The Blind General is my creation, but the story he relates about the fall of Psamtik and the destruction of the last native royal family is all documented history. You can find it in The Histories, Book 3, section 14. In my world, Herodotus wrote this down after hearing it from the Blind General.

  In the Herodotus original, Psamtik and the Egyptian noblemen see their daughters being led away as slaves. Then they see two thousand of their sons with horses’ bits in their mouths and nooses about their necks. The young men are led off to be executed.

  I inserted the Blind General because I needed someone who could live long enough to speak with Nico and Diotima. Psamtik’s daughter was enslaved and his son executed after the fall of Egypt. Psamtik had no other child in captivity. I made up that bit.

  It must be pointed out that the atrocities were not all on the Persian side. When the war began, Psamtik was none too pleased that his former trusted advisor, Phanes, had gone over to the Persians.

  Phanes had unwisely left his sons behind in Egypt when he departed to betray the Pharaoh. Before the battle, Psamtik had the sons of Phanes dragged to the front of the battle line where, before the eyes of their father, the throats of the boys were slit and the Egyptians drank their blood. After this terrible event, the chance of Psamtik receiving any sort of leniency was approximately zero.

  Later, when the Egyptians were defeated in battle, Cambyses sent by ship an ambassador to Psamtik to request he surrender. The Egyptians tore apart the ambassador on the spot. They also murdered the entire crew of the ship on which he came. Whence the death of the two thousand sons of Egyptian noblemen, which was judged a fair reprisal.

  The ship on which the ambassador arrived was from Mytilene, which is a Greek city. Obviously they were mercenaries working for the Persians. There’s nothing odd about this. Greeks were quite famous for their mercenary work. Indeed even Xenophon, one of the great friends and biographers of Socrates, made his name as a mercenary captain in Persia. That there are Greeks in Egypt fighting on both sides is par for the course.

  Phanes really did come from Halicarnassus, as did Herodotus. The coincidence was too good to pass by. I made up the bit about Uncle Phanes’s being related to Herodotus.

  Nico refers to Charitimides as nauarch, meaning Admiral. The nau part lends itself to the English nautical. The arch part means leader, as per archon being a leader of Athens. Thus nauarch means leader-at-sea.

  The title nauarch for an Athenian commander is problematic because, although Sparta nominated an admiral with that title, the Athenians elected ten men with title strategos (meaning strategist, or General) who then commanded on both land and at sea. Some commanders, however, were naturals at fighting on the wet stuff. They always got that job, and I imagine their admirers would have referred to them as Admiral.

  Charitimides was a for-real naval commander of the time. He was highly rated by his fellow citizens and is praised by Herodotus, but history has largely forgotten him. With the two hundred triremes of his command, Charitimides crushed the Persians in the last great sea battle between those two peoples. For sheer size, that fight upon the Nile was second only to the Battle of Salamis.

  Indeed, Charitimides was almost certainly a junior officer at Salamis, which had been fought twenty-three years before. Which means he and a handful of his veterans are the only men in history who could put their hands on their hearts and declare that they
had fought in both of the two largest naval actions up to their day.

  After the close of this book, when the Persian relieving force arrived, Charitimides led his sailors onto land to assist their Egyptian comrades. He fell in battle, leading his troops from the front.

  Inaros, the Prince of Libya, was a for-real person. He gets enormous praise from Herodotus, who says that no man ever did greater harm to the Persians (when you’re a Greek in 455BC, that’s praise).

  Inaros conquered Lower Egypt, killing in battle a member of the Persian royalty. However he was stuck trying to capture the White Fort. Ancient sources say outright that the leading Egyptians in Memphis supported Persian rule. Since Memphis was the capital, it seems obvious that means those who administered the government.

  The dating on the rebellion is somewhat variable, depending on how you want to interpret the ancient texts. The latest possible date suited Nico and Diotima’s very busy schedule for this period. As I noted in The Pericles Commission, the years following the birth of democracy in Athens are among the most important in all of history. There was a lot happening all over the place, and Nico and Diotima can’t be everywhere at once!

  You’re probably wondering what happened to the rebellion after the book ends.

  The Persians held out in the White Fort for two years. It took that long for a relieving force to arrive. When it did, there was a great battle, during which Admiral Charitimides fell. Inaros surrendered on terms. Part of the agreement was that Inaros’s son would continue to rule Libya, which he did. Inaros was guaranteed his personal safety as a permanent prisoner at the Persian court.

  Alas, the Dowager Queen of Persia remained angry about the death of her husband’s brother. She badgered her elder son, the King, for five years, until he gave in and allowed Inaros to be executed, completely against the terms of surrender. Inaros was impaled on a pole, a particularly gruesome and painful death.

  The status of the White Fort in Memphis is something of a mystery. Not a trace of it remains. Some people have suggested that “White Fort” was simply an alternative name for the entire city. The problem with that idea is that Herodotus specifically refers to “the White Fort at Memphis” (in Book 3, section 91, if you’re interested), and by context elsewhere there is a stronghold inside a larger city. Diodorus Siculus, writing four hundred years later, refers to the White Fort as close to Memphis. However you choose to interpret it, it is clear that whoever held the White Fort controlled Memphis, and that the place was pretty much impregnable.

  In fact, trying to understand the layout of any part of ancient Memphis is tricky. Nearby Saqqara, the site of the pyramids, is probably one of the best surveyed and mapped sites in the world, but once you get to the ancient capital not far down the road, it’s a whole lot harder.

  Memphis was founded by Menes, the first Pharaoh of Egypt. Menes had to fight a war to unite Upper and Lower Egypt. To save arguments over which of the two former independent nations would host the capital, he founded a new purpose-built city. Thus ancient Memphis was founded for much the same reason as modern Washington DC and Canberra.

  The patron god of the city was Ptah. We know for sure where the grand temple to Ptah was. A temple to the Apis Bull was next to it. Both were located at the southern end. Also at this location was found an enormous statue of Ramses II. The statue was moved far away in modern times because pollution was destroying it. We also know the location of the Palace of Apries (a former Pharaoh) to the north. There is known to have been a Temple of Bastet, who was the cat goddess and consort of Ptah. I made up the bit about a secret chamber beneath Bastet’s temple.

  The famous modern poem Ozymandias is based on an inscription recorded on a statue of Ramses.

  Tjaty is ancient Egyptian for Vizier, or Prime Minister, depending how you want to translate it. After the Pharaoh, the Tjaty was the most powerful man in the country. The names of the Tjaties are recorded in much the same way as the Pharaohs.

  Contrary to any Egyptian mummy movies you may have seen, Imhotep was not an evil wizard bent on world domination. He was in fact the Ancient Egyptian version of Leonardo da Vinci. Imhotep is credited as the architect of the Step Pyramid. He invented the pyramids.

  Imhotep was also the world’s greatest doctor in his day. He wrote books on ethics and philosophy, and he was a top-class mathematician. But being the world’s best in three different fields were just his hobbies. His day job was being Tjaty to the Pharaoh Djoser. One gets the impression from the surviving stories that Imhotep was the one running the show and that Djoser, who knew a good thing when he saw it, was happy for Imhotep to get on with the job.

  Imhotep was so awesome that some time after his death, people decided that a god had been living among them and he was raised to divine status.

  The location of Imhotep’s tomb is one of the great unsolved mysteries of Egypt. There must be a tomb. Most people assume Imhotep’s tomb will be found close to the final resting place of his boss, the Pharaoh Djoser. If so, Imhotep lies within a few hundred meters of the Step Pyramid at Saqqara. I took great delight in relocating him far, far away.

  Imhotep wasn’t the first Tjaty, though. Nobody knows who that was. The incredibly ancient Narmer Palette, which is at least 5,000 years old and which commemorates the unification of Egypt, appears to show a man who is serving as Tjaty to the first Pharaoh. Either way, the first Pharaoh founded Memphis to be the capital of Egypt, and it’s certain that he created a Public Service to administer his new nation.

  The Egyptian Public Service is thus the world’s oldest running organization, far older than the Roman Catholic Church by several millennia, older even than the Chinese equivalent, since China had several catastrophic social breakdowns which caused them to have to start all over again. The public servants of modern Egypt belong to an organization that has been in operation for seven thousand years.

  Barzanes says at one point that he has read every book in the world. He would have to exclude books written in China, and a few books written in ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt and India that were already lost, but with those exceptions, this was in fact possible for a good linguist at the date our heroes lived.

  The total number of books written before and during the fourth century BC would not fill your local library. The reason for this is very simple. Writing had been invented, and reinvented, several times, but always to do accounting, record proclamations and send messages. The idea of writing either fiction or non-fiction had only just been thought of. The two oldest books in Europe are from Homer (bestselling fiction author of The Iliad and The Odyssey) and Hesiod (non-fiction: he wrote Works and Days which is The Dummy’s Guide to Being a Bronze-Age Gentleman). Both men had lived a couple of centuries before, but their work had only been written down for the first time a few decades before this story. Likewise on the shelves, you would find poetry collections from Sappho, Archilochos and a few others, plus the Greek plays written in the last fifty years. In the Egyptian section you would find The Book of the Dead that Tutu the embalmer mentions, and other religious texts, and instructional texts from Imhotep and a few others.

  The two biggest books of the ancient world are about to be written: The Histories, by our hero Herodotus, followed by The History of the Peloponnesian War, by Thucydides.

  The crossbow was invented in China, centuries before the time of this story.

  We don’t normally associate crossbows with classical Greece, but it’s certain that they had them. Their first documented use is at the siege of Motya in 397BC. By the time of Alexander the Great the army had catapults and ballistas (both Greek words) for siege work and infantry support.

  The Greek version of the crossbow was invented by Zopyrus of Tarentum. He lived in the last quarter of the 5th century BC, at least forty years after the time of this story.

  Thus it’s impossible that Markos could have a Greek crossbow. They haven’t been invented yet! The weapon that Markos
carries is an import from China.

  The Persians never used crossbows. I find that puzzling. The Silk Road isn’t officially open, and won’t be for another two hundred years, but the Persians and Chinese have definitely been trading at this date. The Persians must have seen crossbows, if only in the arms of the guards who protected the Chinese traders. The Persians, being a deeply militaristic people, would have adopted anything that would help them win wars. I can only assume that the Persian powers decided ancient crossbows were too ungainly for standard issue.

  The Spartans never adopted crossbows either, despite Markos’s having one in this book, and despite seeing them in action in real life forty years later. But that’s easy to explain. There has never been a more conservative people.

  The Nile is absolutely full of crocodiles at the time Nico and Diotima visit.

  The incident where Nico saves his wife from a crocodile actually happened to another couple. Not the crossbow, but everything before that. In 2008 in the Northern Territory in Australia, a woman was caught unawares and was being dragged back into the river by her leg, when her husband jumped on top of the creature. He couldn’t even scratch the croc, let alone hurt it. He eventually found its eyes and pushed. The croc let go and swam off. Husband, wife and crocodile all survived.

  Ancient Egyptian place names are a real challenge for a modern author.

  The Egyptians in Nico’s day spoke and wrote an early form of Demotic. Demotic was descended from the incredibly ancient Egyptian tongue, and thus belonged to the rich and extensive family of languages known as Afro-Asiatic. The bad news is that Demotic is a thoroughly dead language. What’s more, written Demotic used only consonants. The words would be wildly unreadable if I used any location names as Nico and Diotima heard them.

  Memphis is the Greek name for the city. In 455BC the locals wrote the city’s name as mn nfr (converting the characters into their English equivalent, of course). This gets expanded with a few choice vowels into Men-nefer. I’ve stuck with what’s familiar.