About This Blog

“Ex Oriente Lux.” Or to put it another way, 'From the East, Shines'. It's a humbling thought that everything we are today, the entire basis of our civilization, steps from a collection of tribes and city-states nestled on the banks of a handful of rivers. The Tigris, the Euphrates, the Nile. The Indus, though we know far less about that ancient civilization than we know of Mesopotamia or Egypt. From Sumer, from Naqata, from Harappa, kingdoms rose and fell in the shadowy days of the Fourth and Third Millenium B.C., and it is this period that has always fascinated me, the times when all was knew, when the very concept of civilization was young.

My name is Richard Tongue; by profession, I am a novelist, currently focusing on Science Fiction, but for some time I have been planning to jump genres to historical fiction, a goal to which I have been labouring for a couple of years. For a time, I confess, I'd planned to take the road well travelled, and explored story concepts in Roman Egypt, the Languedoc of the Troubadours, Outremer during the Crusades. Finally, though, I decided to follow my instincts, and to venture back into the dark days of the Bronze Age, a time that has always fascinated me.

I think my interest in the Ancient World – and specifically Egypt – began thanks to Christopher Lee; specifically, Hammer's 'The Mummy'. Most of the movie is another one of their monster flicks, but there is a ten-minute sequence set in Ancient Egypt, following the embalming and burial of the titular character, and as a boy of about ten, I found it utterly compelling. Of course, life soon took over, and I found myself moving into other directions. Then, about four years ago, I got interested again, partly as I began to get into writing full-time, and ended up buying Bob Brier's 'History of Ancient Egypt' course. That finished the job, and since then, my Egyptian library has slowly grown, though pressure of work (writing a novel a month is about as gruelling a schedule as it appears, though I confess that it is tremendous fun, as well) left it on the wane for a while. 

Now, though, I've been smarter. I've found a way to – at least to myself – justify spending a lot of time in the dim and distant past, with the goal of writing several sequences of novels set in this period, both in Ancient Egypt and Ancient Mesopotamia. As a result, I've engaged in another frenzy of purchases, and am seriously starting to research the period, this time from a new perspective – that of the writer, rather than the hobbyist. One of the things I intend to do with the blog is review at least some of the books I've read (and there is always a word of caution when browsing Amazon for books covering the Ancient World. Never mind the Curse of the Mummy, the Curse of Von Daniken runs far deeper, and is far more deadly.) I also have plans to visit all of the Egyptian-focused museums I can, and you can expect to see some accounts of those here as well.

As I write this (August 2018), I am in the early states of researching a novel series set in the land of Kemet, one that perhaps could be best summed up as 'Ancient Egyptian Sharpe'. This is going to require a lot of research to prepare, but I'm aiming for a release date early in 2019 for the first of them; all going well, I hope to make this an ongoing series, and this blog will also serve as a repository for some of the historical notes associated with those books.