The Persian Postal Service

Darius built a road system to criss-cross the Persian Empire. His roads made it possible to send messages back and forth at unheard-of speed. There were changing stations along the way so his messengers could get a fresh horse and a meal. Persian royal mounted messengers became the primo reliable mail service. The Greek historian Herodotus’ description of their dependability became the unofficial motto of the United States Postal Service in our time—“Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.”

Ancient Persia’s Pony Express

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Darius the Great

As you look at those old, old clay tablets with the weird, impossible-to-read cuneiform inscriptions, you have to wonder: how do we know what’s written on them? None of those symbols seem to resemble anything we recognize today. Yet somehow we got the epic of Gilgamesh.

Who figured it out? Who cracked the code? How was cuneiform deciphered?

Good question. To be honest, it was only a hundred or so years ago that archæologists even found out there were Sumerians living in Mesopotamia. The land between the rivers was very desirable real estate—people who didn’t live there really wanted to live there. When a nation wants to take over a piece of land, its army usually straps on armor and makes war on the people who live there. It’s a bad old world we live in, gang. So the Sumerians were conquered by the Akkadians who were conquered by the Babylonians who were conquered by the Persians.

At one point, the Persians’ head guy—the emperor, the shahanshah (king of kings)—was Darius the Great. What made him so great? Well, for one thing, he was a monster for organization and standardization. In other words, he liked understandable systems for complicated things. He liked it when merchandise weighed and cost the same wherever he went. Darius made weights and measures standard throughout the empire. He instituted universal currency—coins—which made it a whole lot easier to do business, because everybody knew how much something cost.

https://www.livius.org/articles/person/darius-the-great/6-organizing-the-empire/

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In case you hadn’t remember’d—

John Manders' Blog

(Originally posted Oct 25, 2013)

Happy St Crispin’s Day!

But we in it shall be remember’d;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition:
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.Spoken by Henry; from William Shakespeare’s Henry V, Act IV Scene 3

Gang, this beautiful language is our inheritance—a gift to us from people long gone. Here is the entire scene. More info here. If you saw the Queen Elizabeth movie that came out a few years ago, you’ll remember Cate Blanchett in armor giving a speech to her troops just before they battle the Spanish. I assumed the screenwriters had…

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The Bull of Heaven

There are so many fun visual elements in the Gilgamesh story. I think it would make a terrific graphic novel, like 300.

One lively part is when Ishtar, the Goddess of Love, wants Gilgamesh for her boyfriend. Gilgamesh says no, Ishtar gets steamed and asks the other gods to send the Bull of Heaven down to Earth to destroy him (am I the only one who thinks it really funny that the gods worry about the Bull leaving giant-sized cow-flops all over the landscape? I am? Oh). Gilgamesh and Enkidu have to fight for their lives against the Bull. For the ancient Sumerians, the Bull of Heaven was/is a constellation—a group of stars. Thousands of years later we still call that constellation ‘Taurus’—Latin for ‘Bull.’

http://www.seasky.org/constellations/constellation-taurus.html
http://www.mesopotamia.co.uk/gods/explore/bullheav.html
http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/section1/tr1812.htm
Hey, look at Douglas De La Hoz’ interpretation of the Gilgamesh story!
https://hozart.artstation.com/projects/nQOq1K
Lynnie McIlvain shows us some parallels between Gilgamesh and Homer’s epics and the Bible—
https://www.thecollector.com/epic-of-gilgamesh/

I realize now I should have put horns on my Enkidu character design.

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That dirty rotten Rochefort

Here’s a little scene from The Three Musketeers where our hero, D’Artagnan,  recovers from having been knocked out by Rochefort’s henchmen. Rochefort has a quick conversation with Milady DeWinter—and you can see that he has stolen D’Artagnan’s letter. That scoundrel!

Reference photos (yes, that’s a Wells-Fargo stagecoach), thumbnail sketch, tight sketch, color sketch, work in progress, final art—bon appetit!

Christopher Lee and the astonishingly lovely Faye Dunaway

The birth of Western Lit

Literature, that is.

Because of the cuneiform writing system and the scribes who could write in it, the Sumerians left us a beautiful gift: the first ever epic poem, Gilgamesh.

We have this treasure because of a disaster—the library at Nineveh burned to the ground. But here’s the good news: the cuneiform books and records were written on clay tablets and so they were fired in the blaze. They became as hard as pottery and lasted though the ages.

Gilgamesh

Gilgamesh is the hero of this story. He’s semi-divine—both god and human. Gilgamesh has been translated into modern English. You can likely find a copy at your library. Parts of Gilgamesh are rated R so you probably shouldn’t read it until you’re at least 30. But, because I’m a prince of a fellow, I will tell you the entire (cleaned-up) epic poem in one sentence—

The gods create Enkidu

Gilgamesh is two-thirds god and one-third man he’s the super strong handsome king of Uruk a Sumerian city he built towers and walls and orchards well he didn’t he made everybody else do all the back-breaking work because Gilgamesh is a cruel king who goes around kissing other people’s wives of course nobody is happy about this so the people pray to the gods and the gods create a man-beast Enkidu who is strong enough to teach Gilgamesh a lesson Enkidu is a hairy wild savage he lives in the forest with the animals a hunter finds Enkidu and brings him to a temple where a priestess gives Enkidu a kiss and all his hair falls off and all the animals reject him because now he’s civilized Enkidu goes to Uruk and has an almighty wrestling match with Gilgamesh afterwards Gilgamesh and Enkidu are best buds they go to the forbidden cedar forest and fight and kill the terrible monster Humbaba who was guarding it when they get back to Uruk the goddess Ishtar chooses Gilgamesh to be her boyfriend but Gilgamesh says no thank you ma’am your boyfriends tend to die unpleasantly so Ishtar is pretty steamed and sends the Bull of Heaven to punish him Gilgamesh and Enkidu fight the Bull and kill him the gods say this is a problem and decide Enkidu must die Enkidu dies and Gilgamesh is heartbroken so he sets off to find the meaning of life and achieve immortality he needs to meet Utnapishtim who is immortal Gilgamesh travels to the mountain Mashu and convinces 2 gigantic scorpions to let him through the tunnel under the mountain on the other side is a beautiful garden Gilgamesh meets Siduri who owns a restaurant she tells him to give up looking for immortality and just enjoy his life but Gilgamesh isn’t convinced so Urshanabi the ferryman takes Gilgamesh on a boat across the Sea of Death to Utnapishtim who tells Gilgamesh all about the Flood and how the gods decided to destroy humankind but Ea the god of wisdom warned Utnapishtim and told him to build a really big boat Utnapishtim built it and loaded his family and every kind of animal into the boat after the flood was over the gods said okay that was a bad idea sorry dude we’ll never do that again and they gave Utnapishtim immortality Gilgamesh says I want to live forever too so Utnapishtim says okay hotshot you can be immortal if you can stay awake for a week but Gilgamesh can’t do it so Utnapishtim sends Gilgamesh back home Utnapishtim’s wife tells Gilgamesh about a plant of Eternal Life Gilgamesh finds the plant and means to take it with him but a snake eats it so Gilgamesh returns to Uruk with nothing bupkis nada but he’s older and wiser and he realizes that Kansas isn’t so bad after all.

Enkidu runs with the animals

Gilgamesh isn’t merely the first epic story. It’s a blueprint for all the stories that followed. Every great story has an arc—a character moves from Point A to Point Z and undergoes a transformation. His character is fundamentally changed. Gilgamesh starts out a selfish bully and ends humbled by his experiences, and wiser. The same kind of arc happens to Lightning McQueen in the Pixar movie Cars. Lightning is a selfish and self-centered user; an accident resulting from his selfishness forces him to spend time with characters in a place way outside his narrow world; in the end Lightning values and cherishes his new friends and his life is richer for them. In The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy Gale is unhappy with her dull life on a Kansas farm; when her dog’s life is threatened she and Toto run away from home; she has a whirlwind adventure in Oz; when Dorothy returns she realizes how blessed her life is—and maybe now has the moral strength to stand up to Miss Gulch and protect her little dog.

The temple priestess gives Enkidu a kiss

Gilgamesh is about a hero who refuses to accept life without meaning. That theme is universal, which means we all feel that way. Everybody wants to leave something behind. Gilgamesh left behind towers and walls and orchards, but the story he left behind is the most enduring.

Enkidu loses his hair and becomes civilized

Side note: You alert readers will have noticed one or two details that can be found in the Hebrew Bible: a beautiful garden, a global flood and the man who preserves creation by putting a pair of every species in a big boat, a Tree of Life (and a treacherous serpent nearby). It’s no secret. The Bible uses themes from ancient Middle Eastern story-telling. The big difference is that—unlike Gilgamesh—the heroes of the Bible are all regular schmoes. No immortals, no demigods. The God of Abraham linked His destiny with ordinary people like you and me.

https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/gilgamesh/summary/
https://www.ancient.eu/gilgamesh/

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The Channel of old England

Update: I apologize—Wordpress.com’s new, pointless, irritating, impossible-to-use editing feature seems to have wiped clean the comments and likes from this post. I don’t know how to retrieve them. I dearly wish the geniuses at WordPress had never monkeyed with their editor.

More from Starry Forest’s The Three Musketeers. D’Artagnan must cross the English Channel to collect the Queen’s jewels from the Duke of Buckingham—and so restore her honor. Here’s our hero braving the sea-spray on the fo’c’sle deck. Thumbnail sketch, tight sketch, color sketch, some work in progress, final art.

The original art is available at my Etsy shop.

In the shadow of Notre Dame

UPDATE: I’m selling the original art on my Etsy shop. https://www.etsy.com/listing/915731637/in-the-shadow-of-notre-dame-cathedral?ref=listing_published_alert

Swordfight! D’Artagnan and the three musketeers abandon their plans to duel in order to fight the Cardinal’s guards. Thumbnail, tight sketch, color sketch, work in progress and final painting. From Starry Forest’s The Three Musketeers.

D’Artagnan arrives

Here’s the opening scene in Starry Forest’s The Three Musketeers. Our young hero, D’Artagnan, desires to be a king’s musketeer more than anything in the world. And so he leaves for Paris. As he nears the city D’Artagnan meets the bully Rochefort who makes fun of his horse. D’Artagnan won’t stand an insult—even to his horse—so challenges Rochefort to a duel.

Here are: thumbnail sketch, tight sketch, color sketch, a couple of work-in-progresses and final art. Also a photo of the immortal Christopher Lee playing Rochefort. Linear perspective enthusiasts will notice that the vanishing point is where D’Artagnan is standing.

The Three Musketeers is here!

A while ago I had the pleasure of working with Starry Forest Books on their version of Alexandre Dumas’ The Three Musketeers for very young readers. I just got my advance copies so I guess it’s okay to show you the illustrations. 

Here are character designs I submitted to get the job. It’s Porthos, Athos, Aramis and D’Artagnan. They’re based very loosely on the 1973 Richard Lester movie with Frank Finlay, Oliver Reed, Richard Chamberlain and Michael York (screenplay by the mighty George MacDonald Fraser).