This is a hysterical story; totally absurd - which hits all my buttons.

The tyrannical ruler of Aelia, Gyges, had just invaded the country a few years previous.  He isn’t done but before he can invade the next country, he needs a little public support.  So he has to find a pretext to invade or…invent a pretext.  Now, this isn’t a new idea; the film Wag the Dog comes to mind – which was also hysterical, by the way. 

Gyges calls together his best scholars and gives them a proposal.  If they fail to deliver, their lives are forfeit.  And the proposal?  Simple, actually; they have to excavate an ancient city, with all the attendant civilization trappings, within their borders.  And the point of it all?  Again, simple, really.  The inscriptions that they will translate will tell the tale of this advanced peaceful civilization that was overrun by savages from the north. Only a few souls survived and became Aelians.  It really was a tragic tale; so many died at the hands of those nasty northerners.  Maybe their descendants should ask for restitution; failing that, they might have to go to war.  Bingo!

But, of course; no such city actually exists.  So it falls to these scholars to design an entire city, create a language, design their art…everything.  The story follows the linguistic scholar as he throws himself into reverse-engineering their language to go back several generations.  The study of ancient languages is really interesting; much affects language development – trade, disease, invasion, fads, new technology.  So the gentle reader gets quite a grounding in such things.  Others are progressing well with the architecture, art, pottery and the like.  And they are on schedule.  Until…while at the docks attempting to purchase some wine off a strange ship, our linguist – who is conversant in several languages – has a brief conversation with the ship’s master.  This man used a word that our linguist easily translated mentally and they concluded their business.  It wasn’t until later in the day that he replayed the conversation and to his shock, he realized the man had used a word that he had made-up!  The odds of such a thing were great but not impossible.  The linguist had almost convinced himself that such a coincidence could have happened until he met up with the art historian who was upset.  Apparently, he had found an old bronze sheet at a local market that, amazingly enough, portrayed the faux art style that he had invented for their city.  Two such coincidences just couldn’t be.  The group decided they had to get their hands on the rarest book in the world that would substantiate the now very real possibility that the civilization and the city had really existed.  But the truth was going to be something else entirely.

The point of this little novella is the old maxim “history is written by the victors.”  And then it’s rewritten by new conquerors. And then rewritten again to serve a new polity.  And so it goes on and on.  It’s actually rather terrifying to consider that so much of our own history is suspect.  But that keeps scholars employed, I guess.

The whole story is written in the first person and I don’t think the author ever named the linguist.  It moves very quickly and it was great fun to follow.  And I did not see the end coming; it was a hoot. The truth (which is a slippery concept in history) was something neither they nor I had anticipated.  ~~  Catherine Book

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