The Sea Kings: The Prophecy

By Les Cole

A novel of ancient Crete, set in 1730 B.C. Tanuati, a young Cretan trader, gets himself into sufficient trouble with pirates, slavers, and the gods that he must move around the eastern Mediterranean... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0965223108
• ISBN13: 9780965223102
• Release Date: October 1996
• Publisher: House of Adda Press
• Length: 389 Pages
• Weight: 1.45 lbs.

Customer Reviews

A good historical adventure

Cole's prose is sometimes awkward, sometime vague. The Sea Kings was self-published which is a shame because it would have benefitted from a good editor. Nonetheless, this is a good story with distinct, three dimensional characters and lots of historical detail. Our Minoan hero travels from Mycenean Greece to ancient Babylon and Egypt with encounters with traders, slavers, soldiers, and beautiful women along the way. Cole gives us a great taste of the ancient world as we follow along a likeable, believable lead character. Recommended to fans of historical fiction.

A great read and a good analysis of the Minoan Bronze Age

As a lover of good historical novels set in antiquity, I was looking forward to reading "The Sea Kings" and was definitely not disappoionted - it's a great read full of happenings and interesting bits of information about a past time. It is well-written and holds the reader's attention. As a professional Aegean Bronze Age specialist, I was a bit more apprehensive, as there is nothing more irritating than finding a lot of archaeolgoical mistakes, anachronisms and just plain errors. Luckily, these misgivings were not justified. Les Cole has shown a superb command of the 'facts' and has impressed me with his range of knowledge and scope. I recommend this book without reservation to both laymen and professionals.

You gotta read about the sea-fight off Melos...

Although marred by a somewhat "soft" beginning & a number of editorial/typo problems, this book is well worth a shot. It's a tale from an ancient era (which rarely gets attention) built on recent archaelogical finds & accompanying scholarly speculation.Once past the early part, which seems to lack that certain narrative "electricity" which really gets a plot cracking, this tale takes off as the protagonist, Tanuati, a scion of a small-time merchant family on the island of Crete in the Bronze Age, stumbles his way into trouble during a sea venture to the city of Ugarit on the eastern coast of the Mediteranean. There he is kidnapped by slavers and ends up indentured to a "magician" in the famed city of Babylon.Except for the fact that the prose seems awkard and forced @ times (odd constructions & vague transitions), this tale is basically fresh & highly readable.The events in Babylon are marvelously told and, while some of the occurrences are predictable, I loved the way that ancient city & its culture are brought to life...and how the art of glass-blowing is portrayed so "magically." The banquet scene in the house of a wealthy Babylonian merchant, in fact, seemed as real to me as the last wedding I attended (with its sumptuous and suggestively tempting central smorgasboard), while the life of the street could have come from a contemporary tourist's jaunt down a living Middle Eastern city. In fact, it really felt like I was encountering a real-time, human culture first-hand, w/out any of those silly pretensions which other writers often fall back on (see the Hollywoodisms of Nicholas Guild in his book The Assyrian, for instance).Although some of the protagonist's adventures seemed overly episodic, this was quite consistent with the type of tale being told & not, therefore, a serious flaw. And, while the characters don't leap out at you and, in many cases, seem quite ordinary, that very ordinariness contributes to the "feel & ! quot; of reality the book conveys -- so different from many other historicals which deal mainly with mythic characters, heros, etc.I was, by the way, a bit troubled by the device of an oddly ambiguous prophecy, which basically informs the plot of this novel, but which is never fully realized or explained. Yet the hero's adventures in foreign parts (besides Babylon he journeys to Egypt, Libya, Italy, Gaza and what was to become ancient Greece), were quite believable, as were his encounters w/the pirates on the high seas. In fact the final battle scene at the end of the book really makes this tale. I've rarely seen such a tightly and vividly depicted sea-fight, as this author gives us. And it kept me guessing as to the final outcome, more than making up for some of the telegraphed stuff in the early, and even middle parts, of the book. If this author doesn't have some real feel for, and experience of sailing, he certainly fooled me.I did, however, think the protagonist rather an odd mixture of pacifist & adventu

Powerful story! Immerses reader in aura of Ancient Crete

Since my reading time was limited, I read this book over a week period and, though I hated to put it down, each night returning to Crete and Tanuati's adventures was a wonderful reward. Plus, all day, the aura of those ancient times lingered with me. I only hated that the book ended. Les Cole caught me up in his thrilling tale and at the same time wove in fascinating insights of that long ago era when so many technologies were discovered and utilized, banking, methods of measuring time, the creation of incredible glass and many others. I recommend this book to anyone who likes a great story and the extensive research done by Les Cole gives an amazing amount of historical knowledge as a delightful bonus.

A very good read. Lots of adventure, lots of romance.

A great book. I couldn't put it down. You follow Tanuati throughout the Bronze Age Mediterranean world. You begin in his homeland of Crete, and then sail to Egypt, to Ugarit, down the Euphrates to Babylon. You learn about Bronze Age sailing, shipping, glassmaking. Most of all there is lots of adventure, and lots of sex. A rousing good tale.