these things blur together
shards, thorns, and daggers
ribbons, leaves, and flowers
Two traders talk about their summer expeditions. One has taken a risk, riding out to the Cyclades, another, Deltaic by origin, talks about a trip home. They drink an imported wine from Ur, watching the sun set by the port while their wives gossip, hair dyed blue in Sumerian fashion. In the distance, singing as a procession of white burial jars are carried to chambers and pits. In hindsight, we think of this period as a growing world of connections, but on the scale of a millenium, on the scale of a single lifetime, the frontier is always a foggy place. There is no manifest destiny, just a succession of oppurtunities to grow fat off. They probably did not see their work as that of frontiersmen. Of the Delta, he complains about new trends, new nobility, new laws, of all the changes since Narmer. Of the Cyclades, he talks of stories he hears from that society of merchants, stories from an Adriatic full of clung-to traditions, from ever changing Sicily, from wealthy Sardinia, from isolationist Gozo. Most prominently, of their neighbors on Knossos, embracing the palace that the Cycladics reject. In these places are stories from southern Iberia, their love of ivory and ostrich eggs, donkeys transporting north, and their own domesticate of horse. Unlike Knossos, this society is one in miscarriage.
An expanse of rumors, hearsay, and stories, conveyed on rowboats, overland among troupes of actors, brought down from sacred Alpine mountains where lie icemen. Songs, jewels, drinks.
cold autumn. i cant tell how well im internalizing the content. today sucks.
uhhhhhhh: https://archive.org/details/18-a-funpost-in-three-acts