Did the ancient Egyptians have a religion, or did they worship cults?
Whether the ancient Egyptians had what we would call religion is a topic Egyptologists struggle with and disagree about.
What is Religion?
The word religion has a Latin origin. The ancient Egyptians had no word for religion and so the argument goes, therefore, they had no concept of religion. They also had no word of cosmos or art but they believed they lived in a god-made cosmos and they practiced all manner of arts. So, the absence of a word for something does not mean it did not exist.
Egyptologists take their lead on religion from anthropologists. This makes religion into the study of people, not the study of belief or spiritual beings and relationships with them. (Tylor, 1871). Tylor’s definition is not the most up-to-date. But it works. It provides a good definition of what most of us think of when we think about religion.
The anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor (1832–1917) defined religion as belief in spiritual beings and stated that this belief originated as explanations of natural phenomena. … They used this by extension to explain life and death, and belief in the afterlife.
In Egyptology, the term cult means the daily tending and worship of an image of a deity. In ancient Egypt, the temples were the houses of the gods. The gods were thought to descend from the sky temporarily to live in their cult statues which were located in the temple’s inner sanctuaries.
The temples were also the stage for daily rituals that were ideally performed by the pharaoh, but in practice were performed by the resident priests. During religious festivals, cult statues could be brought out of the temple. For example at Dendera statues were brought out onto the cult terrace so that people could see them.
The Daily Cult Routine and Ceremonies
The shrine containing the god’s cult image was:
opened at dawn,
greeted and praised with prayers and hymns,
purified with libations and the burning of incense,
clothed in fresh linen, and
fed with bread, cakes and water.
The Obsequies of an Egyptian Cat, John Reinhard Weguelin, 1886.
Every day at dawn the priests performed the ceremony of the creation of the cosmos. It began with a ritual called “Lighting the Fire.” This ritual was held in the most sacred room of the temple and was performed by the high ranking members of the priesthood in the name of the king. It was a reenactment of the first appearance,
and daily reappearance, of the sun.
Next, they performed a ritual known as “Drawing the Bolt.” During this rite, the priests opened the door to the shrine where the main cult statue stood. The statue’s clothing was removed; and underwent ritual purification, dressing, and feeding. The lower-ranking priests were responsible for preparing the ceremony and disposing of the food and water.
At midday, ceremonies of ritual purification for the lesser gods were performed and as the daylight faded the whole morning ceremony was reversed. The statues of the gods were closed again and left to sleep overnight ready for their morning awakening.
So, was there an ancient Egyptian religion, or was it a collection of cults?
When Jean François Champollion unlocked the secret code of Egypt’s most sacred language, hieroglyphs, in 1822 he unlocked many wonders of a long-hidden world. It was a world populated by strange and mysterious gods with human bodies and animal heads.
From the start, Egyptology committed itself to the study of Egypt’s ancient religion; particularly to its beliefs about life after death. But it has never agreed that the ancient Egyptians had a comprehensive worldview or ‘metaphysical moral vision’ that was accepted as binding because it was held to be in itself basically true and just even if all dimensions of it could not be either fully confirmed or refuted.
And so, since the translation of the ‘divine words’ Egyptology has fallen short in one important respect: it has failed to produce a description of the ancient Egyptian gods and religion that is in any way commensurate with the scale and impressiveness of its sacred monuments.
Egyptologists focused on words, almost to the exclusion of everything else. Buildings and monuments are the domain of the archaeologists; the wonderful art of the tombs and precious funeral artefacts found in them were the domain of art historians, and the anthropologists are processing ancient Egyptian religion through a variety of pan-world theories that render religion down to observable social behaviours.
Enthroned Osiris judging the dead
The Gods
Today the gods and religion of ancient Egyptians are portrayed as mundane and soulless; there is no sense that the gods were holy, divine, or transcendent and certainly no sense that once people believed they contained the ultimate mystery of life, death and, the cosmos.
The sun rises over the circular mound of creation as goddesses pour out the primeval waters around it.
Brooklyn Museum A figure of the Goddess Nephthys
In ancient times, the gods were kept from common view, they were kept or made pure and special. This kept them sacred and helped people to believe the gods were powerful enough to help them fulfill their deepest needs and longings. But the gods were not just there to help when times were bad they filled people with both reverence and terror. What was sacred was protected and adored. Sacred spaces and objects represented the intersection between the limits of temporal human effort and the unlimited possibilities of the metaphysical.
Egyptian religion was not an individual means for orienting or transforming oneself in the world as religion is in the West today. Instead, it was a complex and rich human phenomenon that formed the mental architecture of the whole of society.
The King
In Egyptology, sacredness is believed to lie primarily in the person of the king; in his tomb, his temples and in his cult statue, in his images and in the ritual objects he used in sacred performances.
In theory, it was the pharaoh’s duty to carry out temple rituals, as he was the human link to the gods - his dead father and mother were believed to be gods and he himself would become a god when he joined them in the afterlife.
For the Egyptians, the king was the pinnacle of Egyptian society. He was the head of the state, their supreme warlord, and the chief priest of every god in the kingdom.
The ancient Egyptian king was believed to be the son of a god, chief priest, and mediator between the gods in heaven and the people on earth. So, in reality, his ritual duties were almost always carried out by priests.
The picture above: Khafra (also read as Khafre, Khefren and Greek: Χεφρήν Chephren) was an ancient Egyptian king (pharaoh) of the 4th Dynasty during the Old Kingdom. He was the son of Khufu and the throne successor of Djedefre. According to the ancient historian Manetho, Khafra was followed by king Bikheris, but according to archaeological evidence, he was instead followed by king Menkaure. Khafra was the builder of the second-largest pyramid of Giza.
The Priests
The king’s priests were initiated into the sacred cults; they learned and maintained the sacred systems; its requirements, and its taboos; and they maintained the sacred order and the prevailing worldview among the non-literate. The concept of sacredness extended beyond the king to the natural world, to the river Nile, the sky, the sun, the moon, and the stars.
Once initiated, the priest led the community in connecting with the supernatural to access its divine benefits - health, good fortune, and life after death.
During the Old and Middle Kingdoms, government officials served as priests on a part-time basis. Full-time priests only appear in the New Kingdom.
The temple staff also included many people other than priests, such as musicians and chanters in temple ceremonies.
Outside the temple were artisans and other labourers who helped supply the temple’s needs, as well as farmers who worked on temple estates. All were paid with portions of the temple’s income. Large temples were therefore very important centres of economic activity, sometimes employing thousands of people.
There were many different types of priests:
Male priests were known as hem-netjer, females as hemet-netjer or servants of the god. The top priest was the hem-netjer-tepi, or ‘first servant of god’.
The wab priests, the lowest rank, did all the routine unskilled work in the temple.
The hour-priests were astronomers.
Sem priests presided over mortuary rituals and conducted funeral services.
The Lector priest or hery-heb or cheriheb wrote the religious texts, instructed trainee clergy, and recited the prayers invoking the gods’ presence in the temple and at festivals. In ancient Egyptian literature, lector priests are often portrayed as the keepers of secret knowledge and the performers of amazing magical feats.
Sacerdote kher-heb
The Moral Vision
Evidence from the archaeological record shows that the ancient Egyptians believed they were responsible for their own moral behaviour. They believed, at least in some form, of what we would call ‘free will’. The gods, particularly Osiris, were the ultimate judges of people’s moral actions. Leading a moral life was the gateway to a second life beyond death and was called ma’at.
The average ancient Egyptian was a lover of life. He or she felt sure that right-doing brought success and happiness, whereas evil-doing was bound to bring failure. This social ethic covered all members of society. Family, friends, neighbours, village and town, the nation and foreigners too. Fair-dealing and benevolence were viewed as the leading virtues; greed was deemed the most pernicious vice.
In sum, the ancient Egyptian recognized the brotherhood of mankind.
The presentation of ma’at
Conclusion
By understanding what was sacred to the ancient Egyptians it is possible to get a new view over ancient Egypt, a view that reveals the rich religious symbolism and philosophy of the world’s first great religion.
Egyptian religion was a very deep religion. It consisted of many levels of knowledge and participation.
Whether we could recreate this religion with all its rituals, ceremonies and mysticism is unlikely. It would be difficult to fool an ancient Egyptian into believing he/she was in a real temple, following a real service because there is so much we don’t know and perhaps will never know. However, I am sure the ancient Egyptians had a religion and that it was both deeply meaningful to them. After all, look what their beliefs inspired.
I know that the generally accepted academic view is that the ancient Egyptians had no influence on the development of Greek mathematics, philosophy and cosmology.
But I believe there is evidence, that has been overlooked by the mainstream. This evidence shows the Greek mathematicians and philosophers such as Meltis, Pythagoras (or the Pythagorean cult I know the character we call Pythagoras probably never existed) and Plato were all influenced by what they learned about numbers in Egypt.
In Raphael’s fresco The School of Athens, Pythagoras is shown writing in a book as a young man presents him with a tablet showing a diagrammatic representation of a lyre above a drawing of the sacred tetractys.
The Academics do not Understand
The reason Egypt’s contribution to the development of mathematics and Western culture has been misunderstood is because academics do not understand what the ancient Egyptians did with numbers. They have decided Egyptian numbers were used in a purely profane way, meaning to quantify stuff or put things in numerical order. However, there is a good deal of evidence that the ancient Egyptian also used numbers as metaphors to describe the cosmos. I’m working on a book about numbers as metaphors for what was sacred in ancient Egypt, and the evidence is compelling. Well, I can hear you say. ‘She would say that wouldn’t she.’ But I think when the book comes out a lot of people will agree.
In the ancient Greek civilisation where the first philosophers attempted to explain the creation of the Universe, the hymns of mysticist Orpheus proved to be of significant importance. These myths introduced the term ‘Chaos’ to our vocabulary. This is another reason Egyptian cosmology has not been understood. The Greek notion of chaos has been superimposed onto the ancient Egyptians whose prima materia was not chaotic but inert, dark, limitless, timeless and without form.
According to Orpheus, Chaos condensed into the giant Cosmic Egg, whose rupture resulted in the creation of Phanes and Ouranos and of all the gods who symbolise the creation of the Universe. Later, Greek philosophers supported the view that chaos describes the unformed and infinite void, from which the Universe was created.
Engraving of a marble relief of Phanes.jpg. From Wikimedia Commons …
After visiting Egypt, so his biographer said, Thales of Miletus (624/623 – c. 548/545 BCE) claimed that the Earth floats on water and that earthquakes occur when the Earth is rocked by waves, an idea he probably picked up in Egypt where they believed all of creation came out of the infinite waters of the Nun and where the Earth was believed to be surrounded by the water of Nun.
Thales was also known for his innovative use of geometry. For example, he said: Megiston topos: apanta gar chorei (Μέγιστον τόπος· ἄπαντα γὰρ χωρεῖ.) The greatest is space, for it holds all things. Again this is an idea he may have learned about in Egypt. The ancient Egyptian god Shu was the god of space or emptiness. Shu held the bubble of air that contained the Earth in the ancient Egyptian cosmology. Shu’s role in creating the triangle of creation occurred when he mythically lifted the body of the goddess Nut to form the vault of the sky, beneath him lay the body of the Earth god Geb. Flinders Petrie was the first to notice that the King’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid of Giza was based on a 3–4–5 pyramid, built c. 2,500 BCE and this may be why it’s there.
Wikimedia: Nut forming the arc of the heavens, Shu supported by Khumn in the centre, and Geb in a prone position lying on the Earth.
Mathematically, topos, Newtonian-style space, is connected with the verb, chorei. This word has the connotation of yielding before things or spreading out to make room for them, which is ‘extension’. Within this extension, things have a position. Points, lines, planes and solids related by distances and angles follow from this presumption. Thales’ understanding of triangles may have started in Egypt where the triangle is an enduring feature of their architecture and creation myths. However, unlike the Egyptians who used triangles for sacred things. Thales may well have taken what he learned about Egyptian sacred space and used in a more practical way. It is said that he measured the height of the pyramids by their shadows at the moment when his own shadow was equal to his height. This is possible because a right triangle with two equal legs is a 45-degree right triangle, all of which are similar. The length of the pyramid’s shadow measured from the centre of the pyramid at that moment must have been equal to its height.
Thales use of the right-angled triangle is a clear indication he was familiar with the Egyptian seked, or seqed, the ratio of the run to the rise of a slope (cotangent). The seked is at the base of problems 56, 57, 58, 59 and 60 of the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus which dates to the Second Intermediate Period of Egypt. It was copied by the scribe Ahmes (i.e., Ahmose; Ahmes is an older transcription favoured by historians of mathematics), from a now-lost text from the reign of King Amenemhat III (12th dynasty).
Wikimedia Commons: Rhind Mathematical Papyrus
Pythagoras of Samos (c. 570 – c. 495 BC)
Pythagoras was an ancient Ionian Greek philosopher and the eponymous founder of Pythagoreanism. His political and religious teachings were well known in Magna Graecia and influenced the philosophies of Plato, Aristotle, and, through them, Western philosophy.
According to Aristotle, the Pythagoreans used mathematics for solely mystical reasons. Their use of number was devoid of all practical application. They believed that all things were made of numbers.
The number one (the monad) represented the origin of all things.
The number two (the dyad) represented matter.
The number three was an “ideal number” because it had a beginning, middle, and end and was the smallest number of points that could be used to define a plane triangle, which they revered as a symbol of the god Apollo.
The number four signified the four seasons and the four elements.
The number seven was also sacred because it was the number of planets and the number of strings on a lyre, and because Apollo’s birthday was celebrated on the seventh day of each month.
They believed that odd numbers were masculine, that even numbers were feminine, and that the number five represented marriage because it was the sum of two and three.
Ten was regarded as the “perfect number” and the Pythagoreans honoured it by never gathering in groups larger than ten. Pythagoras was credited with devising the Tetractys, the triangular figure of four rows which add up to the perfect number, ten.
The Tetractys
The Tetractys was made using counting stones (psēphoi). Four rows of stones were placed one above another in the shape of an equilateral triangle. The equilateral triangle was considered a perfect figure.
The Pythagoreans regarded the Tetractys as a symbol of utmost mystical importance.
Iamblichus, in his Life of Pythagoras, states that the Tetractys was “so admirable, and so divinised by those who understood [it],” that Pythagoras’s students would swear oaths by it. As a mystical symbol, it was very important to the secret worship of Pythagoreanism.
Pythagorean cosmology was based on the assumption that the cosmos is harmoniously ordered according to mathematical rules. For the Pythagoreans, the Tetractys expressed the universal harmony of the cosmos. Therefore, some Pythagoreans assumed that there must be ten celestial bodies in motion.
The Tetratys
Modern scholars debate whether these numerological teachings were developed by Pythagoras himself or by the later Pythagorean philosopher Philolaus of Croton.
I believe Pythagoras whoever he was, and his followers developed the Tetractys after visiting Egypt.
The Pythagorean Mystery Numbers are not exactly the same as the meaning of the Egyptian sacred numbers I have discovered but I believe the Pythagoreans got the idea of modelling the universe with numbers from the Egyptians. I will show how they did it in the book I’m working on with the working title, ‘The Numbers of Thoth’ by Julia and Martin Herdman.
Short Bibliography
Imhausen, A. (2016). Mathematics in Ancient Egypt, A Contextual History. Princeton University Press
Rossi, C. (2004). Architecture and Mathematics in Ancient Egypt. Cambridge University Press.
Smith, D. (1958). The History of Mathematics: Volume II. Dover.
Thomas, I. B. (1983). Plato’s Theory of Number. The Classical Quarterly, 375-384.
Zhmud, L. (1989). Pythagoras as a Mathematician. Historia Mathematica, 249-268.
The preservation of the body, or mummifying, was an essential part of ancient Egyptian funerary belief and practice. The burial customs began with wrapping the body either in a mat or animal skin to prevent direct contact with the sand and to hold the parts of the body together.
The ancient Egyptians were terrified of the disintegration of the body. The hot sand drew out the body’s liquids to aid its preservation. This kind of preservation is known as “natural mummification,” meaning that preservation was carried out without human intervention.
Natural mummification
The practice of embalming or mummifying aimed to improve on what nature could do on its own. It was considered essential to mummify a Pharaoh. Early mummification involved the wrapping of specific parts of the body such as the face and hands. The best literary account of the mummification process is given by Herodotus, an ancient Greek historian. He records that the entire process took seventy days. There were 30 days of evisceration and drying and 40 days of perfecting with stuffing and embalming with oils.
Anubis, with the deceased on the lion bed of resurrections, beneath the four canopic jars face right, Anubis offers a libation.
Anubis was the god responsible for embalming, especially for the Pharaoh. The Pyramid Texts describe Anubis as the Pharaoh’s (Osiris’s) embalmer. “His entrails having been washed by Anubis; the services of Horus having been served in Abydos, [even] the embalming of Osiris”It is clear from this passage that the god Anubis had responsibility for washing the viscera of the deceased king. Egyptologist Bob Brier (1996) has suggested that embalming took place in a tent that was erected on the top of a hill away from the unpleasant smell that resulted from the process of treating the dead bodies. This suggestion is based on the titles of god Anubis that often occur in the offering formulae and the Pyramid Texts “Anubis, who presides in the sh-ntr” (896c), his tent. “He who is upon his hill (tp dw.f). the sh-ntr, which is translated as a “divine booth” (Wb. III, 465), was the place where the bodies of the kings were purified. The tent is described in various texts. it had a number of rooms, the central part of the tent was the place where the purification procedures were carried out. The doorways were shown as closed wooden doors (Merrewka), or curtains as in the tomb of Qar, or they were left open as in the tomb of Idu. There was a central ramp: In each tent, there was a central ramp, which connected the tent to a water channel.
Anubis mummifies the Pharaoh in his tent.
To mummify the body, the internal organs, apart from the heart and kidneys, were removed via a cut in the left side. The organs were dried and wrapped and placed in canopic jars, or later replaced inside the body. The brain was removed, often through the nose, and discarded. Texts suggest that the heart was removed during the Old Kingdom, although there is no proof this from the physical bodies. In a passage in the Pyramid Texts, the heart is removed from the body. The passage (1162a), which might be referring to putting a heart amulet in place of the original heart, reads: “To say: my father made for himself his heart, after the other (heart) was taken from him” In this passage, the word “other” could be a reference either to the god giving another heart to the deceased, or providing a heart amulet in its place.
The canopic jars.
Bags of natron or salt were packed both inside and outside the body and left for forty days until all the moisture had been removed from the remaining body tissue. The body was then cleansed with aromatic oils and resins and wrapped with bandages, often household linen torn into strips. Between the layers of wrapping, the embalmers place amulets to protect the deceased. Heart scarabs were placed in the wrappings with the mummy. They had spells carved on them to protect the deceased person’s heart from being lost or separated from the body in the underworld.
The canopic jars were used to store the soft tissue. “Anubis, who is the chief of the divine booth (sh-ntr), has commanded thy purification with thy eight nmst-jars and [thy] eight ‘3bt-jars, which come from the sh-ntr ” (2012b-c ). By the New Kingdom, there were only four jars. The lids of canopic jars represented gods called the ‘four sons of Horus’. These gods protected internal organs. Duamutef the jackal-headed god looks after the stomach Hapy the baboon-headed god looks after the lungs Imsety the human-headed god looks after the liver. Qebehsenuef the falcon-headed god looks after the intestines.
Scientific analysis of mummies using processes such as X-ray and CT scanning has revealed a wealth of information about how individuals lived and died. It has been possible to identify conditions such as lung cancer, osteoarthritis and tuberculosis, as well as parasitic disorders.
Sources:
British Museum website, Mummification in The Old Kingdom By Ahmed Saleh and, #ancientegypt #ancienthistory #anubis #pyramids #mummification #ancientegyptianmummies
Whether you’re a man or a woman the process of writing a book that is a good read about someone of the opposite sex can be tricky. Historical characters have to be every bit as complex as people today, they have to think and feel, have a back story, desires and beliefs.
People of either sex and those who class themselves as something in between are complex. Do you know where your characters score on the Big Five Personality Taits?
Openness
Conscientiousness
Extraversion
Agreeableness
Neuroticism
Where would your characters fit in the Myres Briggs range of personality types?
As an author who wants to write historical fiction books with believable characters, I try to make my characters multidimensional and rounded. I like to write characters who change and grow as they overcome the obstacles I put in their way. So, who they are and what happens to them affects how they react, and what they do and say.
As a writer, you have to show your reader the character.
To do this your actors have to understand some things about themselves, the people around them have to understand parts of their personality they are unaware of, and they have to discover things about themselves as the story unfolds.
Use A Johari Window
Think of the Johari Window – In the open pane there are things known to self and others, then there are things known only to self, there are things known by others and not by self, and finally things about the character that are unknown to both. These are the things the character will learn of their journey.
Making your character want something big will give you a good starting point to build around. What will Jane or Belle do get what her heart desires? Of course, what she will do wholly depends on how you’ve set her up. So much women’s fiction, historical and modern literary fiction is based on morally deviant characters these days because its an easy way to get Jane or Belle to do something extraordinary, something shocking and unexpected.
What makes these characters so well-loved is that they overcame the obstacles society and their families put in front of them.
So, to write an attractive female character, she needs a goal and a lot of opposition, not necessarily a bad-ass attitude to the law.
Draw a Picture - Warts and All
Angels are for heaven, not this earthly realm.
Being human, male or female, means we come with strengths and weaknesses and lots of imperfections. Try to make your characters interestingly flawed. Strengths, when we rely on them too much can be our downfall just as much as weaknesses.
Fears and Weaknesses
Overcoming weaknesses could be the making of a remarkable historical character, so don’t think to create a sassy heroine she has to be macho or fearless.
The most common fears for women are pretty much the same as they have always been. Which of these fears are you going to challenge your female historical characters with?
not getting married or finding a life partner,
not having kids or losing a child,
getting old, maimed, or scarred,
being killed or raped,
being trapped in a loveless relationship,
being abandoned
ending up in poverty or dying alone.
Good writers let the reader know which fate awaits their historical heroine should she fail.
Mesmerising historical characters use everything they’ve got, their strengths, weaknesses, and their ingenuity to save themselves from their horrible fate.
Not the Prettiest Girl in Town
Characters we come to love are not the prettiest girls in town or the girls who never lose their temper.
Jo March in Louisa M Alcott’s Little Women has a fearful temper, and so does my character Charlotte Leadam.
Charlotte Leadam suffers from secondary infertility and has a temper too.
Historical women had pride, intellect, and ambition. They felt pain, they hated people, and if you had been around to prick them they would bleed.
If your historical female character is the sidekick to an all-conquering male protagonist, why shouldn’t she feel peeved and throw the odd spanner in the works from time to time?
Surprises
Let your characters surprise you and surprise themselves.
Turn the tables on them, flip things around. Make what seemed impossible possible.
Let your characters find their courage, make fortuitous mistakes, try something they have never tried before even if it is taking the wrong advice.
Let your characters learn painful lessons, be confronted by their hypocrisy or the results of their stupidity.
Let them learn a secret that gives them power over others – lead them into temptation, and see how they perform.
Finally
Remember, whether you’re creating a female character or writing about a woman, she’s just human.
And that being human is to be full of possibilities.
Julia Herdman writes history and historical fiction. Her book Sinclair is set in the London Borough of Southward, the Yorkshire town of Beverley, and in Paris and Edinburgh in the late 1780s.
Strong female leads include the widow Charlotte Leadam and the farmer’s daughter Lucy Leadam.
Julia’s debut novel Sinclair is available on Amazon.
Sinclair is a story of love, loss, and redemption. Prodigal son James Sinclair is transformed by his experience of being shipwrecked on the way to India to make his fortune. Obstacles to love and happiness include ambition, conflict with a God, and sexual temptation and betrayal. Remorse brings restitution and recovery.
Sinclair is an extraordinary book. It will immerse you in the world of 18th century London where the rich and the poor are treated with kindness and compassion by this passionate Scottish doctor and his widowed landlady, the owner of the apothecary shop in Tooley Street. Sinclair is filled with twists and tragedies, but it will leave you feeling good.
Sinclair is set in the London Borough of Southward, the Yorkshire town of Beverley and in Paris and Edinburgh in the late 1780s. Strong female leads include the widow Charlotte Leadam and the farmer’s daughter Lucy Leadam. Sinclair is a story of love, loss and redemption. Prodigal son James Sinclair is transformed by his experience of being shipwrecked on the way to India to make his fortune. Obstacles to love and happiness include ambition, conflict with a God, temptation and betrayal. Remorse brings restitution and recovery. Sinclair is an extraordinary book. It will immerse you in the world of 18th century London where the rich and the poor are treated with kindness and compassion by this passionate Scottish doctor and his widowed landlady, the owner of the apothecary shop in Tooley Street. Sinclair is filled with twists and tragedies, but it will leave you feeling good.
Find a Good Starting Point:
When I wrote my book, Sinclair, I had no idea where or when to start my story. I had had the idea for a book for a long time, but it was very unformed. I wanted to write a book that was a good book to read, but I was struggling for somewhere to start.
I had discovered I had married into a family whose ancestors were apothecary surgeons working at Guy’s Hospital and living in Tooley Street close to London Bridge in the late 18th century.
The family were quite a well-documented, as the historical record goes. I had already done a lot of research, but I did not have a story and I could not see how I was ever going to write a book.
Determined not to give up on my quest to be a writer of novels I searched the internet for ideas and found one that I thought would work for me. I looked for a dramatic historical incident, adapted it and put my characters into it. Suddenly, my writer’s block had disappeared, and my characters were telling their own story.
The sinking of the Halsewell, by Turner
Keep the End in Mind:
When I was writing my book Sinclair, I always knew how the story would end.
I did not know how my characters would get there, but I knew where I wanted to get them.
Keeping the end in mind is a tried an tested technique in many endeavours, and it works well when you’re writing historical fiction or any book for that matter.
Hit the Books:
Getting the history right is important when writing historical fiction, but don’t get hung up on having to get everything right in the first draft. If you don’t know what they called something in the 1870s, just give the thing its common name and get on with the flow of your story.
Details can be corrected later. What cannot be repaired are fundamental errors such basing your book on an iron or steel ship in the 1780s when everything was made of wood.
Details matter, to the avid historical fiction reader. I remember reading a book set in the 1950s and the author described the stuffing coming out of an old settee as foam. It grated on me all the way through the book.
When I wrote my book I had to research the history of medicine and the key players in its development, particularly the London teaching hospitals.
To my horror, I found that medicine of the 1780s was very primitive. There were no anaesthetics, no antibiotics and doctors didn’t even have stethoscopes.
Visit Locations:
Getting a feel for scale is hard when you’re writing about the past.
Visiting the sites or similar locations to those you are writing about in your book will help you get a sense of how long it took people to do things in the past.
Putting the house or the street you are writing about into its context will help you paint a more vivid picture. I looked at old maps, old painting and illustrations and used contemporary descriptions of places I used in my story when I could find.
I also visited the central locations in Sinclair - London, Edinburgh and Beverley in Yorkshire.
When I write about the past, I know I am taking my reader into a foreign country.
Beyond the memory of your own generation, the past is a mystery, it is an uncharted territory that is both dangerous and exciting.
I aim to create a world my reader can believe because I want to write a book that is a good read. I want to show my reader a world that they might have experienced if they had lived in that time and place.
As a writer, I place myself inside my characters, I see the world I have created through their eyes because I am telling their story.
So, remember to think about the journey your characters will take, what will they be like when your tale is told. What will they have learned about life, themselves and their friends? No matter how accurate your history is if your characters are not believable and do not grow, you have not written a story, people will want to read.
Here are some websites to try if you’re thinking about writing historical fiction:
Guy’s Hospital, London
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