My favourite room in the world? The library at Trinity College Dublin – now made even more special as the setting for Casey Morgan’s quite brilliant story in our charity anthology. (As co-editor, I shouldn’t really pick favourites from the many wonderful pieces of writing we brought together – but, honestly, “The Library” is the best piece of spanking fiction I’ve ever read).
Last weekend, I was fortunate enough to visit its twenty-first century equivalent – the Bibliotheca Alexandria. You may well know that, as well as being home to the great lighthouse (one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World), the Egyptian coastal town was home to perhaps the greatest library of the ancient world. Nine years ago, its modern successor opened to great acclaim.
Sadly, photographs simply can’t do justice to the main reading room – it’s too long, too sweeping, too tall – although the snaps here give something of an impression. But it’s utterly, utterly breathtaking: the sort of place that leaves one’s jaw literally aching as it drops. (The last time that happened for me was my first glimpse of Sydney Opera House; before that the Christ statue in Rio and the Treasury at Petra. This place really is in that league).
I felt bad perverting it, but you know me… For hidden in the vaults must surely be vault upon vault of the Pharoahs’ papyrus punishment books? Female criminals tied publicly in the sunshine to thick stone pillars and whipped; daughters of the ruling classes permitted the privacy of a private flogging – but with the number of strokes doubled compared to their commoner equivalents. Maids in Cleopatra’s royal palace, birched after dinner as their ruler looked on.
If you’re ever passing through the area… Unlikely, perhaps. But five-odd hot hours there and back on the Cairo-Alexandria Desert Road were a small price to pay to see a true wonder of the modern world. Whether or not the punishment records actually exist…
Surely though, no lower class servant would be permitted to lay a hand on the daughters of the ruling classes. They surely must have had whipping girls.
Would the daughters have been compassionate I wonder, and avoid misbehaving in order to spare their whipping girls, or would they have been careless, causing the poor whipping girls to live in daily expectation of punishment.
Might it happen that a royal parent, royally annoyed for some act which affected him or her personally would decree that he was going to break with tradition and himself carry out the punishment…
What implement might he use… reeds perhaps, gathered fresh and wet and stinging from the banks of the river (Nile, Tigris, Euphrates??)
As a matter of thought Abel, while you are in Egypt, see if you can find the papyrus writings, that state, if Julius Caesar, or Marc Anthony, spanked Cleopatra on her voluptous bare bottom. Or maybe the Rosetta Stone, located in the British Museum, has that same information. If so, I’ll drink to that. Maybe not, because I have already had one to many. Would’nt you agree?