A fierce and loving family of mountain rebels struggle to rise from the ruins of their long-civilized Minoan Crete. If they and their Dionysian priest-chief Deucalion feel the time is right for vengeance, escape and new life---what then?
How do these ancient island women, men and children come face to face in Palestine with the Israelites? What happens when their hopes for very different “promised lands” collide?
Discover the surprisingly human beings who lived all around The Bible’s Old Testament beginnings. Here in People of the Sea are the rest of our real Western ancestors---their long-erased adventures, spiritual ways, triumphs and tragedies, woven from multicultural myth and the latest archaeology.
“People of the Sea is an ancient epic and an astounding recovery of our real, wise and most successful Western ancestors. It shows the goodness and values that were lost as the conquerors wrote their versions of history---a history we should all know, as these relevant new stories can take us once again where humanity yearns to go.”
Adventures That Change The Bible---People of the Sea: A Novel of the Promised Land
IRAKLION, CRETE: In a public forum here where myth and history shaped the Western world, Dr. Jack Dempsey pointed to new scientific digs into our crucial, formative turning-points. “Discover the people who lived all around the first Israelites, for example, and we open a door to a positive new inheritance.”
· “The roots of The West are deeper and more dazzling than King David or Athenian democracy. Our first and most successful founders were high-tech lovers of life for 2000 egalitarian years long before them, in Minoan Crete. That’s longer than the Roman Empire. Not Utopia. Just very smart. And their children’s real-life stories put our idea of ourselves in constructive new light.”
What Changed The Original West? The Sea Peoples’ grand-elders hailed from that stable dynamic Minoan life within nature’s cycles. There were no entrenched kings. Their proud families honored women and kept peace with festivals like Olympic Games. Religion and society focused on an Earth Mother: leaders answered to their people in fixed terms of political power. Suddenly, the worst-known volcanic explosion crippled that life (around 1525 BCE). And into the ruins came “Homer’s heroes,” the Myceneans from mainland Greece with the manly ways of kings and love of war---only to collapse in a few centuries.
“The true story is that many families fled these disasters in tiny boats, and harrowing adventures carried them to the land called Palestine.”
So Began The Conflict With Us Still: People of the Sea are women, men and children of long painful memory determined to build themselves a new life. These “Philistines” (long maligned as “brutish invaders”) plant, build, trade and marry with native Canaanites and Hebrews. Their “promised land” means keeping order on Pharaoh’s highways of trade---but, when they meet the highlands’ emerging, sternly-patriarchal tribes of Israelites, they face a militant claim on the entire land, promised by a god unknown to anybody else.
“This conflict was fundamental to what The West became. So, with our own crises in nature and culture, the Sea Peoples’ lives point a long, luminous, liberating heritage, a way toward many-sided human being.”
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