Writing Academic Expository Fiction

We advertise ourselves as nearly 90 years old by our cumulative compositions, but only 3 years old at our syntheses of Bronze Age Antiquity. That makes our founding date of 1924 important. Then, we began annual releases of published symposia, from which arose several trajectories through prehistory of that deepest past. The sweep of our arcs included proto-historical exercises at fiction, a process of delivering the past as both literary myth and century-long tableaus of period interactivity between empires and quasi-imperial regimes. 1939, moreover, became our key date for the very beginnings of our academic expository fiction, as built off a voluminous correspondence enabled by most generous benefactors. The year 1924 was when our founder, R. R. Bardot, sought and won the backing of the Saltonstall Trust (no relationship then or since to a philanthropic trust of that name that is located in Boston). He had assembled scientists and engineers evocative of times since 1895, whereby their contributions might contribute to scholars of the humanities and social scientists, who had been intense at the disciplines of cultural anthropology, archaeology, and geo-stratification. A few years later, the Weld Scholarship Fund expanded its programs of academia to entice visiting scholars to the United States.

Through residency programs, the Weld Scholarship Fund’s primary area of antiquity became the Bronze Age of the entire Eastern Mediterranean. The Welds excepted only Egypt of the Upper Nile from their generosity, because the studies of Egyptologists already were amply funded by benefactors of our same bents and proclivities. Not that Egyptologists have been outsiders to our good company of like-minded scientists and engineers since 1939. For then the Saltonstall Trust and the Weld Endowment of Studies in Antiquity married and merged to become their good child, the Bardot Endowment, in 1946, standing as permanent funding that has sustained our modest means of existence ever since.

The Bardot Group has since become a very large archive of correspondence and quiet communications between luminaries at the analytical studies, tools-at-field, and forensic sciences that the great archaeological digs have nurtured. Most of our scholars passed during the 1970s, and their disciples are now deep into their retirements. Our residency programs and internships are mostly about the re-study of the legacies by such oldsters, by which our re-examinations can both fully appreciate and validate them. So much had once been controversial, or stuff to be wary of, in particular, the divulgences of the active digs between World Wars I and II. Since the wars, our activities have kept sound distance from many detractors of whom the Greeks, Hittites, Canaanites, and other maturing ethnicities were during the Late Bronze Age. We concentrated on eras of great peace and stayed out of trouble accordingly. We helped grow the field of cultural anthropology; it has evolved in accordance with our development of the discipline.

The only controversies we have not avoided have been matriarchal heritage and agronomy of rural common-wealth that some scholars regard as too communistic. Notwithstanding that we are neither Marxists nor other types of statists; it took us a long time to define ourselves as scientists and other inventive disciplines from which we had made our earliest beginnings in 2008. Since the late 1950s, though, or just after the decoding of what had been Linear B Minoan Entablature, we have been engrossed in the history of writing in general, and in that syllabary of the 13th Century BC in particular. Our residents have been mostly philologists at the study and synthesis of the Late Aegean Bronze Age’s Oldest Greek. Much as our Anatolian scholars had done with their composite languages by writ of the imperial Hatti (e.g., the Apology of the Tlabarnas Hattushilish III), our literary intent has been to replicate a formal language of former great courts. We have also kept close, even at arms-length, to scholars of Semitic and Near Eastern Studies, via last usage.