Hello everyone,
here is my third timeline.
It is going to be much more limited in content (the framework is a History Class at an alternate institution of higher education which discusses one single source), and at the same time much more insanely divergent from anything we know than any of my previous timelines (Res Novae Romanae and A Different Chalice).
I have the syllabus of our fictitious seminar already planned. Any thoughts and reflections, input and corrections are very welcome, though. If you choose to follow me, we shall embark on a journey into a truly distant world, and such a journey is always fraught with intellectual risks, I`m aware, so please feel free to comment on anything you find questionable or which you have to add to the debate.
The framework of the timeline, as I´ve said, will be that of an alternative History Class (in TTL´s Egypt), which means each installment consists of a segment of the source (which our alternative students are supposed to have read for preparation) and the ensuing seminar discussion between the fictitious students and their fictitious lecturer on said segment of the source. That means, there will be only 12-15 installments. (After my first timeline exploded into all directions under my hands, and my second timeline petered out somehow, I felt this clear and strict frame was necessary to motivate me to begin writing at all.)
This is not intended as some sort of role play, I don`t mean for you to pretend you`re the students of that seminar, and I am most certainly not its lecturer, so please post what in a DBWI thread we`d call “OOC” comments, that is: speak naturally. Both the students and the lecturer of this class are going to be fraught with their own prejudices, interests, cognitive frames, theories. What I´ve aimed at is for at least some of these mindsets to be traceable in part to the divergences I´ve created. I hope it`ll transpire.
Oh, and since this is a timeline dabbling in alternative prehistory, I´ll add quite a few OOC / authorial footnotes for explanation myself. Do let me know if they`re too much, too little, or whatever.
But now, let`s plunge into our alternative academia… (here goes nothing…)
Seminar description:
Course OH2422 The Book of the Holy Mountain
The class focuses on a single source, “The Book of the Holy Mountain”. The text comprehensively comprises the foundational myths of the Amaloxian civilization [1]. Seminar discussion will concentrate on the recent translation by Sofris.
In the shades of the sycamores of the, well let´s call it a university, of Nabwt:
“You`ve got your Old History module completed yet?”
“Nah. Always postponed it. But I guess I´ll have to tackle it this trimester. There`s this class on the Amaloxians by Hadjeamin, I guess I´ll be attending that one. I think they were not that uninteresting.”
“That crazy tyranny of man-hating priestesses? I can see why that sounds fun at first, but I´m not sure if it`s not going to be a big bore in the end, too. Also, you can read those scribblings?”
“Not really. But I hope it´s better than the boring stuff about the First Ten Dynasties that we`ve had a little of in the introductions, and I, for one, don`t find reading Medunetjer [2] all that easy, either, but with them, we`re expected to be rather fluent because, you know, it`s_our_history… a load of bollocks, if you ask me. While with Amaloxian, professors don`t really_expect_you to know it.”
“You go to Hadjeamin and have fun then…! If it´s any good, tell me.”
Lecture 1
[…]
Prof Hadjeamin: "So, now we`ve hopefully sorted out all the formal issues concerning attendance and term papers and credit points [3], let´s turn to our topic – the book of the Holy Mountain, the mythology and history of the Amaloxian civilization.
I´ve prepared bilingual copies of the introductory chant for those of you who haven`t got their Sofris translation yet. Could you please pass them around and take a copy if you need one?”
“Thank you. Now – at first glance, what do you see?”
(Translation) “I am Khepušopiň, and these words are the truth about the beginning of life, and how it awoke in this world, and how everything in this world came into being by the powers of the goddesses and the aid of their consorts.
And it is the truth about the women and men of the early days, and of the Holy Mountains of the old time, of the First Dark Age and of the Holy Mountains which still stood when our great-grandmothers were young.
These words are pure truth, as they were revealed to our foremothers by the Goddess, and as our foremothers told them to their daughters without adding a single world or leaving a single world out, and as their daughter`s daughters told them to my mother, and so I shall tell them to you so that they not be lost and forgotten in our dark and wretched times, when the donkey-men have sat themselves above us and eat our bread and drink our wine and rape our daughters and desecrate that which is holy and sing empty songs in their coarse voices; I shall speak these revealed words to you without adding a single word or leaving a single word out, this I swear to you, for adding a single word would be spreading falsehood, and leaving a single word out would be falsehood, but you know me, I am Khepušopiň and you know I am not a liar and a speaker of falsehoods.”
Student 1: “I see that I can`t read the left column, so I`ll have to look at the translation in the right column.”
(Laughter.)
Prof Hadjeaminr: “Do you happen to know anything about that which you unfortunately can`t read?”
(Embarassing pause.)
Student 2: “I can`t read it, either, but from the topic of our class, I`ll guess that it is Old Amaloxian.”
Prof Hadjeamin: “Almost. It´s actually Neo-Amaloxian, but there is a good reason why people could be forgiven for thinking it´s Old Amaloxian. The author, Khepušopiň as she calls herself, uses a lot of symbols from the oldest stock in Amaloxian script here, so many that we must actually assume she does this deliberately. Maybe she attempts to give her text and its tales of the past more credibility this way? Or maybe she believed that these old symbols possessed a sort of magic power? We don`t know – but we can safely assume that what she did here, she did it on purpose. Not only does she choose some of the oldest symbols of Amaloxian – she also uses these symbols most of the time in exactly the way they had been used in Old Amaloxian, that is, as logographemes only.
Look at the third-but-last sign in the first line, for example. It is the sign for “néš”, it can be used to denote this syllable, but usually in Neo-Amaloxian it is used as a grammatical morpheme indicating the aorist tense. In this text, though, a syllabic reading makes no sense, and it is not followed by anything which could be taken as a verb - it is quite simply taken to denote its semantic meaning, which is the same as in Old Amaloxian: “coming into being”.
This is how Old Amaloxian worked.”
Student 2: “But how do we know it`s not Old Amaloxian then?”
Prof Hadjeamin: “Indeed, how do we? The only clue we have are the second and the third signs. If we were to read the first line as Old Amaloxian, it would render the meaning of the symbols as I Assembly house Sick Daughter Speak Life Come into being Awake World All World Goddess Do Male deities Do. While we can make sense of most of this sentence – compare the translation –, the second and especially the third don`t make a lot of sense when read as logographemes. But if we take their syllabic value in one of the languages which used Neo-Amaloxian, namely in Late Tawrixian, then we have a very common female Tawrixian name: “khepu” and “šo” together yield “Khepušo”, and together with the daughter-sign, we have Khepušo`s daughter, or in Tawrixian, Khepušopiň. And so, at once, we also know a lot more about the time and place in which this text was written: it was written on the Tawrix peninsula, at some point between 3,700 and 3,200 years ago.
Does anyone dare to make a more specific guess as to when this text was written?”
Student 3: “I think it must be towards the end of the time frame you gave us. In the text, Khepušopiň says that donkey-men have conquered their lands and committed all sorts of atrocities. That sounds like the Wolgosu invasions at the time of the Bronze Age Collapse.”
Prof Hadjeamin: “Excellent! That is absolutely right. Anybody else observed anything interesting?”
Student 4: “The text goes on and on about it being true and who told it to whom and such like.”
Prof Hadjeamin: “Yes, it uses various formula to emphasise authenticity and veracity. That fits with our hypothesis about its time of origin, as it was still rather typical, even if slightly archaic, for the period. But our Khepušopiň seems to like ancient traditions… Anything else?”
Student 5: “It puts the female forms of everything first. It`s, the goddess did it, and then, oh, some male gods helped, too, but they were obviously not so important. Also, the story was handed down from mother to daughter. The sons and the fathers seem to be really irrelevant here. And that fits with what we`re on to, too, of course, since the Amaloxians were a matriarchal society, as far as I know.”
Prof Hadjeamin: “You could put it that way, yes. Good! Indeed, that is striking to us Remenkemet [4], the important functions in the culture from which this text stems, as well as in the transcendental cosmos it imagines, are all occupied by females. This is not the case for the culture which appears as Other, here, though: the Wolgosu are not described as “donkey-women”, but as “donkey-men”, and they are presented as doing a cliché male invader thing, namely raping the Tawrixian daughters.
Now, that was a lot we could see in just a few lines. We now know where the text comes from, we know some things about its author – a female Tawrixian named Khepušopiň, who is fond of ancient Amaloxian symbols and other archaisms – and we can assume a few more. She is writing in a situation which she perceives as a cataclysmic catastrophe, and we can assume her contemporary readers viewed things in the same way.
In this context, Khepušopiň writes down what she calls the true history of “the old times” and “the dark ages” and of comparatively more recent times. This is what we`ll be discussing most of the time in this seminar, and when we do it, we had better not forget what we`ve found out so far about the author and the context, and I hope or I´m sure we´ll find out a lot more about them soon. But she also says she`s going to give us an account of her people`s mythology – always an important aspect of any culture – and that is what we`re going to look at next week.
So please read what Sofris in his edition named “Chapter One” in preparation for next week. If you find any striking similarities or differences to our own mythology or any other mythologies you know about, take notes and we can discuss them in class.”
______________
[1] At this point, I won`t reveal just who these Amaloxians are yet. (Speculations are welcome, though. The script may give you a clue.)
[2] Hierogyphs
[3] Some things must stay the same in any possible universe…
[4] Egyptians
here is my third timeline.
It is going to be much more limited in content (the framework is a History Class at an alternate institution of higher education which discusses one single source), and at the same time much more insanely divergent from anything we know than any of my previous timelines (Res Novae Romanae and A Different Chalice).
I have the syllabus of our fictitious seminar already planned. Any thoughts and reflections, input and corrections are very welcome, though. If you choose to follow me, we shall embark on a journey into a truly distant world, and such a journey is always fraught with intellectual risks, I`m aware, so please feel free to comment on anything you find questionable or which you have to add to the debate.
The framework of the timeline, as I´ve said, will be that of an alternative History Class (in TTL´s Egypt), which means each installment consists of a segment of the source (which our alternative students are supposed to have read for preparation) and the ensuing seminar discussion between the fictitious students and their fictitious lecturer on said segment of the source. That means, there will be only 12-15 installments. (After my first timeline exploded into all directions under my hands, and my second timeline petered out somehow, I felt this clear and strict frame was necessary to motivate me to begin writing at all.)
This is not intended as some sort of role play, I don`t mean for you to pretend you`re the students of that seminar, and I am most certainly not its lecturer, so please post what in a DBWI thread we`d call “OOC” comments, that is: speak naturally. Both the students and the lecturer of this class are going to be fraught with their own prejudices, interests, cognitive frames, theories. What I´ve aimed at is for at least some of these mindsets to be traceable in part to the divergences I´ve created. I hope it`ll transpire.
Oh, and since this is a timeline dabbling in alternative prehistory, I´ll add quite a few OOC / authorial footnotes for explanation myself. Do let me know if they`re too much, too little, or whatever.
But now, let`s plunge into our alternative academia… (here goes nothing…)
Seminar description:
Course OH2422 The Book of the Holy Mountain
The class focuses on a single source, “The Book of the Holy Mountain”. The text comprehensively comprises the foundational myths of the Amaloxian civilization [1]. Seminar discussion will concentrate on the recent translation by Sofris.
In the shades of the sycamores of the, well let´s call it a university, of Nabwt:
“You`ve got your Old History module completed yet?”
“Nah. Always postponed it. But I guess I´ll have to tackle it this trimester. There`s this class on the Amaloxians by Hadjeamin, I guess I´ll be attending that one. I think they were not that uninteresting.”
“That crazy tyranny of man-hating priestesses? I can see why that sounds fun at first, but I´m not sure if it`s not going to be a big bore in the end, too. Also, you can read those scribblings?”
“Not really. But I hope it´s better than the boring stuff about the First Ten Dynasties that we`ve had a little of in the introductions, and I, for one, don`t find reading Medunetjer [2] all that easy, either, but with them, we`re expected to be rather fluent because, you know, it`s_our_history… a load of bollocks, if you ask me. While with Amaloxian, professors don`t really_expect_you to know it.”
“You go to Hadjeamin and have fun then…! If it´s any good, tell me.”
Lecture 1
[…]
Prof Hadjeamin: "So, now we`ve hopefully sorted out all the formal issues concerning attendance and term papers and credit points [3], let´s turn to our topic – the book of the Holy Mountain, the mythology and history of the Amaloxian civilization.
I´ve prepared bilingual copies of the introductory chant for those of you who haven`t got their Sofris translation yet. Could you please pass them around and take a copy if you need one?”
“Thank you. Now – at first glance, what do you see?”
(Translation) “I am Khepušopiň, and these words are the truth about the beginning of life, and how it awoke in this world, and how everything in this world came into being by the powers of the goddesses and the aid of their consorts.
And it is the truth about the women and men of the early days, and of the Holy Mountains of the old time, of the First Dark Age and of the Holy Mountains which still stood when our great-grandmothers were young.
These words are pure truth, as they were revealed to our foremothers by the Goddess, and as our foremothers told them to their daughters without adding a single world or leaving a single world out, and as their daughter`s daughters told them to my mother, and so I shall tell them to you so that they not be lost and forgotten in our dark and wretched times, when the donkey-men have sat themselves above us and eat our bread and drink our wine and rape our daughters and desecrate that which is holy and sing empty songs in their coarse voices; I shall speak these revealed words to you without adding a single word or leaving a single word out, this I swear to you, for adding a single word would be spreading falsehood, and leaving a single word out would be falsehood, but you know me, I am Khepušopiň and you know I am not a liar and a speaker of falsehoods.”
Student 1: “I see that I can`t read the left column, so I`ll have to look at the translation in the right column.”
(Laughter.)
Prof Hadjeaminr: “Do you happen to know anything about that which you unfortunately can`t read?”
(Embarassing pause.)
Student 2: “I can`t read it, either, but from the topic of our class, I`ll guess that it is Old Amaloxian.”
Prof Hadjeamin: “Almost. It´s actually Neo-Amaloxian, but there is a good reason why people could be forgiven for thinking it´s Old Amaloxian. The author, Khepušopiň as she calls herself, uses a lot of symbols from the oldest stock in Amaloxian script here, so many that we must actually assume she does this deliberately. Maybe she attempts to give her text and its tales of the past more credibility this way? Or maybe she believed that these old symbols possessed a sort of magic power? We don`t know – but we can safely assume that what she did here, she did it on purpose. Not only does she choose some of the oldest symbols of Amaloxian – she also uses these symbols most of the time in exactly the way they had been used in Old Amaloxian, that is, as logographemes only.
Look at the third-but-last sign in the first line, for example. It is the sign for “néš”, it can be used to denote this syllable, but usually in Neo-Amaloxian it is used as a grammatical morpheme indicating the aorist tense. In this text, though, a syllabic reading makes no sense, and it is not followed by anything which could be taken as a verb - it is quite simply taken to denote its semantic meaning, which is the same as in Old Amaloxian: “coming into being”.
This is how Old Amaloxian worked.”
Student 2: “But how do we know it`s not Old Amaloxian then?”
Prof Hadjeamin: “Indeed, how do we? The only clue we have are the second and the third signs. If we were to read the first line as Old Amaloxian, it would render the meaning of the symbols as I Assembly house Sick Daughter Speak Life Come into being Awake World All World Goddess Do Male deities Do. While we can make sense of most of this sentence – compare the translation –, the second and especially the third don`t make a lot of sense when read as logographemes. But if we take their syllabic value in one of the languages which used Neo-Amaloxian, namely in Late Tawrixian, then we have a very common female Tawrixian name: “khepu” and “šo” together yield “Khepušo”, and together with the daughter-sign, we have Khepušo`s daughter, or in Tawrixian, Khepušopiň. And so, at once, we also know a lot more about the time and place in which this text was written: it was written on the Tawrix peninsula, at some point between 3,700 and 3,200 years ago.
Does anyone dare to make a more specific guess as to when this text was written?”
Student 3: “I think it must be towards the end of the time frame you gave us. In the text, Khepušopiň says that donkey-men have conquered their lands and committed all sorts of atrocities. That sounds like the Wolgosu invasions at the time of the Bronze Age Collapse.”
Prof Hadjeamin: “Excellent! That is absolutely right. Anybody else observed anything interesting?”
Student 4: “The text goes on and on about it being true and who told it to whom and such like.”
Prof Hadjeamin: “Yes, it uses various formula to emphasise authenticity and veracity. That fits with our hypothesis about its time of origin, as it was still rather typical, even if slightly archaic, for the period. But our Khepušopiň seems to like ancient traditions… Anything else?”
Student 5: “It puts the female forms of everything first. It`s, the goddess did it, and then, oh, some male gods helped, too, but they were obviously not so important. Also, the story was handed down from mother to daughter. The sons and the fathers seem to be really irrelevant here. And that fits with what we`re on to, too, of course, since the Amaloxians were a matriarchal society, as far as I know.”
Prof Hadjeamin: “You could put it that way, yes. Good! Indeed, that is striking to us Remenkemet [4], the important functions in the culture from which this text stems, as well as in the transcendental cosmos it imagines, are all occupied by females. This is not the case for the culture which appears as Other, here, though: the Wolgosu are not described as “donkey-women”, but as “donkey-men”, and they are presented as doing a cliché male invader thing, namely raping the Tawrixian daughters.
Now, that was a lot we could see in just a few lines. We now know where the text comes from, we know some things about its author – a female Tawrixian named Khepušopiň, who is fond of ancient Amaloxian symbols and other archaisms – and we can assume a few more. She is writing in a situation which she perceives as a cataclysmic catastrophe, and we can assume her contemporary readers viewed things in the same way.
In this context, Khepušopiň writes down what she calls the true history of “the old times” and “the dark ages” and of comparatively more recent times. This is what we`ll be discussing most of the time in this seminar, and when we do it, we had better not forget what we`ve found out so far about the author and the context, and I hope or I´m sure we´ll find out a lot more about them soon. But she also says she`s going to give us an account of her people`s mythology – always an important aspect of any culture – and that is what we`re going to look at next week.
So please read what Sofris in his edition named “Chapter One” in preparation for next week. If you find any striking similarities or differences to our own mythology or any other mythologies you know about, take notes and we can discuss them in class.”
______________
[1] At this point, I won`t reveal just who these Amaloxians are yet. (Speculations are welcome, though. The script may give you a clue.)
[2] Hierogyphs
[3] Some things must stay the same in any possible universe…
[4] Egyptians