Stephen Baxter - Bronze Summer

Riban’s peroration was almost done. He raised his hands to the sky, and called in plain language on the little mothers of sea, earth and sky to welcome the Annids to their undying hearths.

And in that instant snow blew in, a sharp, thick flurry that came flying on the wind from the north, off the sea. People murmured in confusion and shock. The snow soon began to gather on the huge profiles of the stone heads, in their eyes, their nostrils.

Snow, at midsummer. Milaqa remembered a soldier’s curse. May your own gods, the mothers of sea and sky and earth, desert you. She turned away, sheltering her face from the sting of the snowflakes.

The ice waited in its fastnesses in the mountains, at the poles. Millennia had passed since its last retreat. Human lives were brief; in human minds, occupied with love and war, the ice was remembered only in myth.

But the ice remembered.

And now the long retreat was over.

The historical reality of land reclamation from the ocean is almost as remarkable as depicted in this fiction. In the Fenlands of eastern England there is evidence of large-scale water management projects dating back to Roman times (see Fenland: Its Ancient Past and Uncertain Future by Sir Harry Godwin, Cambridge University Press, 1978). Using earth dykes, water-pumping windmills and other technologies, from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries the Dutch increased their available farmland with reclaimed seabed by a third. However, the management of water by mankind has, of course, a much deeper history. Ancient civilisations including Egypt, Mesopotamia, China and the Indus Valley cultures were capable of tremendous feats of hydraulic engineering (see Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power and Civilisation by Steven Solomon, HarperCollins, 2010).

I have allowed the Northlanders to develop some technologies and techniques precociously. The Egyptians built the first recorded masonry dam some fifteen metres high at Memphis c. 2900 BC (see Solomon, 2010). To build their Wall the Northlanders used concrete (which they call ‘growstone’, a word cooked up in a discussion with Adam Roberts on the Latin roots of ‘concrete’, acknowledged with thanks). We associate the use of concrete with the Romans, but in fact forms of concrete seem to have been in use as early as c. 3000 BC in Uruk in Mesopotamia (see Reese Palley’s Concrete: A Seven-Thousand-Year History, Quantuck Lane Press, 2010).

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.