In Search of Historical Accuracy
My writing goes slowly, primarily because of the amount of background reading I do. For each of my novels I have collected a bookshelf full of text books and a stack of academic papers, not only so I can accurately describe the inhabitants' material world but also to try to portray their mental processes in an authentic way.
Ancient Thought
For years I have been reading about the ancient Near East and learning to read Akkadian, the language of ancient Babylonia and Assyria. Working through the exercises in my Teach Yourself Babylonian book I must have translated dozens of personal letters, contracts, royal proclamations, and extracts from hymns and epic poems, and have come to realise that the people of the ancient world were not quite like us. Of course, they had to deal with many of the same issues we do, and much of their political, social and personal lives is familiar — they were, after all, the same species as us, with the same level of intelligence, basic needs and set of emotions. But there is much about their psychology that appears to be very different from that of modern, post-Enlightenment humans.
For a start they lived under an almost suffocating weight of superstition, seeing the divine at work in everything around them. Why does the sun rise and set? Why does drinking beer make you at first happy and then maudlin? Why do people die? Why is sand yellow? Why does the Nile keep flooding? Why has my neighbour just been eaten by a crocodile? Why does a dropped stone fall but flames appear to go up? What is the sky made of and why doesn't it fall down? To ancient humans, the only conceivable explanation for anything was that the gods made it so. These same gods were usually capricious if not downright hostile, sending disasters in the form of plagues, floods, wars and famines seemingly on a whim; in response the ancients developed elaborate rituals in attempts to placate their deities, and equally elaborate, if ultimately futile, systems of divination — such as astrology and extispicy — in an attempt to read heaven's will and predict what disaster was coming next and when.
Then there was the lack of "me-ness" which makes up such a large part of the modern Western psyche. We cherish personal liberty, believe there is such a thing as human rights, and have a notion that the Universe ought to be somehow "fair" (and are sometimes deeply unhappy when we find that it isn't). The ancients, by contrast, were less individualistic and far more fatalistic, seemingly resigned to the inevitability of suffering and death, probably because their fates were entirely in the hands of gods whose personalities sometimes bordered on the psychotic (see the above paragraph).
Existential Gloom
The ancients also seemed more accepting of violence than we are, and more resistant to its harmful psychological effects. They also seemed to have less reverence for the sanctity of human life. This is not to say that they grieved over the dead any less than we do; rather, it is simply that they lived in a world where unexpected death was an everyday occurrence. Modern adults, particularly in wealthy nations, take it for granted that all their children will outlive them; by contrast, in the ancient world — indeed, until relatively recently — most parents expected that they would have to bury a good proportion of theirs.
Perhaps all this explains the pessimism that pervades much of their literature — particularly that of the Mesopotamians. One of my favourite Akkadian texts is a 3000-year-old dialogue between a master and his slave. Called The Dialogue of Pessimism by modern scholars, it is thought to have influenced the writing of the books of Ecclesiastes and Lamentations in the Old Testament. Interpreted in a certain way, it comes across as being pretty bleak; a short quote can be found beneath the above figure.
Innovation vs. the Weight of Tradition
Some researchers think that the people of the ancient Near East — particularly the Sumerians and Babylonians — viewed time differently from the way we do, seeing history as an endlessly repeating cycle of events in which change and progress did not occur, yet at the same time acknowledging the linearity of personal experience. Perhaps it was this perception of time, coupled with a strong belief in supernatural agency, that caused them to be so hide-bound by tradition and blind to the benefits of reason and experimentation. For instance, Egyptian physicians used crocodile dung to try to clean infected wounds, the idea being that the foul smell would draw the evil out of the patient's flesh. They also used ground-up lapis lazuli mixed with oil to treat eye diseases, and all sorts of disgusting mixtures — including, once again, dung — to cure baldness. None of these remedies could possibly have been effective, and some would have been harmful; did nobody think to observe and take notes on what did or did not work?
And yet there are plenty of areas in which the ancients did progress, and to an impressive degree. The invention and development of writing, and improvements in agriculture and civic organisation, helped them to build city-based societies whose complexity almost rivalled our own. Some ancient civilisations, particularly the Egyptians and Assyrians, excelled in engineering, architecture and military technology; it is notable that the Assyrian were building huge aqueducts five centuries before the Romans. One cannot build an efficient war chariot or aqueduct without observing what did not work previously and making improvements. Why such methods were not applied to other spheres of their lives I do not know.
I am not suggesting that ancient humans were selectively stupid. Far from it. Their architectural achievements alone — from the stupendous stone temples of Egypt and mighty ziggurats of Mesopotamia, to the vast Assyrian network of canals and water basins — are a testament to their ingenuity and technical skill. It is simply that, unlike modern humans, who have no excuse for their useless superstitions and harmful beliefs in pseudoscience and quack medicine, the ancients did not have a long heritage of rationality and science on which to build their thinking. They lived in a world where, in many areas, tradition was more important than innovation, and ritual and superstition would always trump reason.
Too Much Realism is a Bad Thing
In writing an historical novel it is possible, I think, to take authenticity a step too far. Many of the inhabitants of the past were unpleasantly sexist and bigoted, and in the post-Classical era fanatically religious to a degree that is incomprehensible to modern humans. They also indulged in practices that, while perfectly acceptable in the past, would provoke revulsion now.
The first novel I wrote, which is set in Baghdad at the end of the eight century (and which may appear for sale some time soon), features as one of its minor historical characters a man named Abu Nuwas. He is regarded as one of the greatest of the classical Arabic poets, and even has a street named in his honour in modern Baghdad. Dissolute and ill-disciplined, he seems to have been not only an alcoholic but also a paederast; interestingly, in the society he lived in the former was considered to be a far graver sin than the latter. It may be fun to write about Abu Nuwas's drunken antics but certainly not the paedophilia, something modern humans — myself included — find abhorrent, and which in the novel I avoided.
Then there is the issue of how to deal with religion. I find the subject fascinating, probably because I'm an atheist. But I certainly would not enjoy writing, let alone reading, a novel set in the Christian world in which the protagonist invokes God in every other sentence and has his thinking moulded entirely by the Church. Yet such individuals were once common. And even in the pre-Christian world, where religions were less mutually hostile and less concerned with restricting human thought and behaviour, one encounters beliefs and practices which a modern audience would find unpalatable.
My most recently completed novel, set in seventh century Constantinople, touches on the issue of contemporary Christian attitudes to Jews, which were almost universally unfavourable. Were I to stick to historical fact, almost all the characters — including the protagonist — would come across as offensively anti-Semitic. The remedy here was to reserve the most egregious of the period's religious attitudes for the story's villains.
It takes skill to write a novel that gives an entirely authentic picture of the past without driving away one's readers. Mary Renault could do it, as could George MacDonald Fraser with his Flashman novels (whose protagonist displays attitudes which are meant to offend). I do not think I can do the same, and so in my writing I offer a slightly sanitised view of the past, and hopefully in doing so produce stories that others might enjoy reading.