
After more than a year of work, I am at last getting to the end of a major revision to the first novel of three that retell the Exodus story with the benefit of modern archaeology. All my posts since September 2023 have addressed issues I’ve encountered while doing research for Book I, which takes place in the Land of Goshen — the Nile Delta as it empties into the Mediterranean — during a series of natural disasters that will later be known as the Ten Plagues. But as I settled in to write this latest blog post, I realized I had made quite an oopsie writing the very last, brief chapter in that section of the trilogy.
Intending to provide a glimpse of the world beyond Egypt, I looked around one afternoon for a major city on a trade route not connected with the Exodus. I immediately found Mari, a metropolis on the Euphrates with a 2,500-year history. Mari boasted many extraordinary features, including a fabulous 250-plus room palace and innovative fortifications that protected the outer city from flooding and the inner city from invasion. More resonantly, however, Mari was similar in a distinctive way to the Nile capital of Ramses, which is the setting of an episode earlier in the book about one of my Israelite protagonists becoming a slave to Pharaoh. Both cities were built as artificial islands in the middle of major rivers, although Mari is older than Ramses by millennia. So I decided to make Mari the hometown of my character’s husband, and drafted a short coda to Book I in her voice that briefly compared the two municipalities.
Unfortunately, my character’s husband would have needed to be preposterously long-lived in order to have been born in Mari. The city was razed to the ground by Hammurabi, as in “The Code of,” about 500 years before the reign of Ramses II (who, I assume for the purposes of the novel, is the unnamed Pharaoh of the Exodus). I hadn’t read all the way to the end of the articles on Mari that I’d initially found, since I had done the research just for a kind of a throwaway line by my protagonist. I only uncovered the timeline quandary when I went back to the articles in preparation for writing this post. Oopsie.
So I needed a new hometown for the husband. The next big city on the Euphrates was called Terqa, but there wasn’t a lot of information on it and it didn’t look influential enough for long enough to still be well-known during Ramses II’s kingship. Eventually I settled on a center of the Hittite Empire in today’s Syria called Emar. This meant that my character was married to a Hittite and I had to find a new name for him as well.

As I dug deeper into the pageant of Mesopotamian politics, I realized that things were (ahem) pretty messed up. There were fathers murdering sons and vice versa, treaties signed and betrayed, endless churn of empires and rising and falling fortunes . . . and through it all cities and their gods flourished and then withered — or were, like Mari herself, erased from human knowledge for thousands of years.
So often during this project, I have felt an upwelling of awe and astonishment at how the Hebrew Bible, the stories of my people, has preserved a sliver of antiquity up to the present day: awe at the precision of its preservation over so many centuries, and astonishment at the puniness of its insight into human history. Large though the Bible looms in world culture today, there are oceans more to discover about our past. Every drop of real information is thrilling.
Which brings me to ostriches. My character’s Hittite husband from Emar is a caravan owner, so I had to find a product that would bring him to Ramses in order to end the book by revisiting the site of one of its most dramatic scenes. The Egypt Museum in Cairo has the remnants of an ostrich-feather fan that portrays King Tut actually hunting the giant birds to provide the cooling apparatus of this rake-sized ventilator; I doubted that the royal schedule would allow him to provide enough feathers for all the fans in Egypt, so that seemed like a commodity worth making a caravan trip from Emar to the Kingdom of Kush in Africa to pharaoh’s capital for. The illustration below is actually from a virtual “tour” of Akhetaten’s (a.k.a Akhenaten, or the supposedly monotheistic pharaoh) palace at Amarna, not a photo of an item in a museum. Its detail is lovely, but the tour itself is pretty paltry compared with today’s role-playing video games based in mythical pasts. Call me a writer, but I still think a powerful yet economical description does the best job of evoking a different world.

Bonnie, – good catch on your historical dates/facts. That’s a trait of a great author.
Thanks! I need to become a more thorough fact-checker, though.