The setting of the Raising Up Pharaoh epic adheres to circumstances in Eurasia and Northwest Africa in the late 4th millennium B.C., specifically 3,203 B.C., which is about 5,203 years ago. The story incorporates civilizations and people groups that actually existed around that time. The scattered but enormous body of information that is available for this period requires tenacity in the researcher. The author presents his integrated and overall perspective in this website’s blog–starting with post #1 and developing in logical order up through the latest post.
Readers of the epic’s novels who’ve become intrigued by the fact that such sophisticated thinking existed so long ago will find answers to many questions in the blog. Those who haven’t read the novels will profit by reading the blog, as they will learn much about everyday life in that era, and find reasons for the subsequent rise of nations with increasingly sophisticated legal codes and social standards built upon varying mixtures of divine and human intent. Some who haven’t read the novels will then read them because they chronicle the westward movement of culture from the Steppes and Mesopotamia to the Mediterranean. 5,000 years later, that culture has evolved and spread worldwide through language, science, religion, philosophy, and literature. Despite all that, the author hopes the great majority will read the stories because of their fast pace, exciting scenes, multi-dimensional and mostly likable characters, exotic circumstances, the enormity of what the central characters are seeking to accomplish, and the complexity and ferocity of their opponents. The story develops at several levels.
The author conceived the Raising Up Pharaoh story after encountering unexpected archaeological links between Mesopotamia, the Levant, Anatolia, and Egypt. At that point the storyteller in him would not let go until the epic was completed. Where he had hoped to write a single novel, the plot thickened and expanded in geographic and cultural scope, leading him to write six. After doing so, he realized that the unfolding historical and cultural tsunami didn’t end there, but had just begun. He has started work on the first sequel.
The six-novel story available through Amazon.com is described below.
5,203 years ago, eastern invaders devastate villages in the Sakros Mountains. Survivors flee westward seeking refuge among the powerful riverine cities of Reilend. Eleven orphaned teenagers band together and join fleeing widow Weida, Princess of an overrun kingdom far to the east. Arriving at Ausgrenor, Weida seeks Patros, the widower-brother of her late husband, and asks him to redeem her from suttee. They marry and adopt the orphans. Fortified allied cities north of Ausgrenor fall. Terrified, Ausgrenor’s citizens regress into a forbidden past. The king plots to rob and kill the princess’s new husband, then exiles him as a ploy. Neighboring Bedu tribes withdraw into the desert. Invaders encircle the city. Torn between ancestral loyalties and his new family’s survival, the husband must fight or flee. Where can they find refuge? Whom can they trust? It’s now or never.
Thus begins the six-novel Raising Up Pharaoh epic, a romantic adventure chronicling the origins of the city-states in the Fertile Crescent at the dawn of written history, and the planting of the longest lasting civilization and deepest cultural roots of today’s world.
The series is written for readers of all ages. The tone is controlled by zooming back to avoid close-ups of violence or sexuality, without diminishing the story’s intensity. The tale unfolds through the differing viewpoints of the teenagers, the couple, others drawn to them, and their foes.
The first book’s setting ranges across the western mountains of what is now called Iran, southern Iraq between the lower Tigris and Euphrates rivers, the marshes of their delta with the Persian Gulf, and is bounded on the west by the Saudi Arabian desert. In later books, the setting expands throughout the Middle East, West Asia, Southeast Europe, and Northeast Africa, bordered by northern India through the Hindu Kush, north of the Aral and Caspian Seas, through the Steppes passing west over the Caucasus to the Carpathian Mountains, south to the Aegean Sea, Crete, Cyprus, the Levant, south up the Nile to its headwaters, east to Djibouti and back to India. Each book has its own maps.
The characters speak a pidgin of proto-Indo-European, proto-Semitic, proto-Afroasiatic, and other languages, none of which have been heard for thousands of years. Their speech is presented in informal U.S. English
