(Apologies for taking my sweet time)
Era 6: The Conquerors
(map: click for big version - dots are now only shown for the most important cities)
This age has often been thought of as the time of
the great leaders, who waged some of the most famous and epic campaigns in history. Other eras appear quiet in comparison. Our view has probably been distorted simply because so much of this period's writing and commentary has actually survived, to be enthusiastically read over and over again by future historians. Nonetheless, great leaders were certainly around at this time, epic wars were certainly fought, and even more huge new empires
could have been born, if not for the fact that many of these great leaders met equally talented and charismatic leaders on the opposing side...
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First to Central America, where a large new empire was forged by the great king Huchuklikan, originally the leader of one of the Axlmec city-states. Benefiting from border conflicts and a civil war in the Zutlnutla kingdom, he was able to carve out a large new kingdom of his own, and his successors expanded along the gulf coast towards North America. At the same time, the Oltaxlatl raids were becoming less of a problem, as the Timiquicans settled down to build their own Carribean kingdoms. Trade increased throughout the region - boats of Timiquican design, made from simple materials, were able to sail all across the Caribbean, if not beyond - and this allowed a settled lifestyle to spread further into North America. Panto peoples mastered the art of farming maize (clearing large tracts of forest in the process), and tobacco for trade with outsiders. The Panto were technically unified under the rule of a single great chief, perhaps a response to roaming tribes such as the Makota, as well as a reaction to growing trade and wealth - but there was not yet any real centralised rule. At the same time, Timu city-states were appearing in the Andes mountains. How much the Central Americans had to do with this is unclear, but its certain there were coastal trade contacts by this time.
In the remains of the ancient Washagon site at Whaglogan, signs of both iron and bronze working have been found, dated to around this time. Some believe the technology was brought from east Asia by ancient Yeuren or Hai-Ren explorers, while other historians believe the Washagon worked out the methods on their own. In any case, metal working in the Americas still seems to have been reserved mostly for decorative, ceremonial objects - signs of wealth - rather than practical tools. The beginnings of Washagon pictographic alphabet can also be traced back to rock carvings made at this time near Whaglogan - some see a link with the mysterious obelisks erected by the Xanto people of the nearby mountains.
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In far east Asia, the relative peace was shattered by the northern Tianshi tribes, this time inspired by the great warrior-leader Duanbie (Short Turtle), said to have been as short as the famous Hongweishan had been tall, yet seemingly just as invincible in battle. The Tianshi first subdued the Wucheng kingdoms and then began a reign of terror in the southern Yueren states. But the Yueren rallied together, as they often did, and after several great battles, finally forced Duanbie to retreat south. Duanbie did not give up though, rather he turned his sights on the Tiandishi state - despised as a collection of weak people unfit to call themselves Tianshi, but envied for its manpower and wealth. Tiandishi (and the capitol, Mushi, in particular) was in the grip of a cultural revolution begun by the philosopher Tiandizi, who was given almost complete control of the government. Many Yueren customs were adopted, and great monuments built in a mix of Yueren and Tiandishi styles (many of which still survive today). Unfortunately for Duanbie, Tiandizi had also instructed the building of a strong defensive wall around Mushi. Tiandishi was able to negotiate its survival as a vassal of Duanbie, who returned north with extra manpower to wage a long and grinding war of attrition against the cities of the Yueren heartland.
By the time of Duanbie's death - shot it the back of the neck by a stray crossbow bolt - his territory had grown large, but was as much Yueren in culture as it was Tianshi. The successors of Duanbie built the first great eastern empire, with Tiandishi and the survivng Yueren kingdoms as vassals (among many others), and a simplified written language used by all of the bureaucracy (developed by the legendary scribe Xueqishi Xingfu, based on original Yueren script). It was no longer a true Tianshi state - indeed, the Yueren would never have given up any powers to the 'barbaric' Tianshi - yet it was not Yueren. It had maintained Tianshi warrior culture, but it was mostly civilized. It had great cities, but it had vast tracts of empty land where few people lived. The Yueren feared their culture and religion were being polluted, while the Tianshi feared they were being absorbed by the fabulous art and architecture of the northern urban centres. It was an uneasy combination of things, which nonetheless survived its first few centuries.
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In the mediterranean, two men called Chandeg and Tesnarn played a vital role in uniting the various Pargian colonies into a new empire of their own. Although never more than a sailor and minor politician himself, Chandeg organised the creation of a great new navy (building on centuries of seafaring tradition, plus much copied from Mavan seafaring culture), while Tesnarn inspired resistance against eastern Pargian authority. A divide had already been growing due to difference in religious beliefs, with western Pargians worshipping the ancient emperor Jonsar I (the most famous of them all) as a god, while rejecting the divinity of the current Pargian emperor and his 'tainted' bloodline. The Pargians were decisively beaten at sea, and with new threats brewing in the Middle East, they were forced to accept the new order in the west.
By the time Tesnarn died, he was influential enough that his capitol city was named after him, and the Tesnaran Empire was born. Chandeg lived long enough to start a war with the Mavan Kingdoms - officially a war to end rampant Mavan-sponsored piracy, but inevitably it became a war for supremacy in the central mediterranean. Great land and sea battles were fought, but with the Mavans tied down in the Muretti wars (and later wars against the Kriliks who refused to give up lands near the Po Valley), the Tesnarans eventually emerged the victors. With their fast and robust sailing boats, the Tesnarans explored far south along the African coast, and far northwards to the mysterious, cloudy lands of northern Europe, where native kingdoms were emerging. Wars in defence of allied chieftains turned into coastal land-grabs, especially in the Aelari peninsular. It seemed that a new empire in Europe beckoned, but the Tesnaran leaders were wary of stretching too far at the expense of trade and wealth, which were always their main priorities.
In the Middle East, the mighty Kraman Empire began to collapse. Great military expeditions into the southern deserts - against Utuap chiefdoms and Nayir tribes - cost the empire at least one hundred thousand dead, most from thirst and exhaustion, with little to show for it. Utuap resistance was especially fierce (as the Pargians had already discovered a few decades earlier), and they were quicker than the Kraman armies to adopt the horseback-riding tactics that were spreading from central Asia. The authority of the ruling dynasty of Kraman was weakened by the military disasters, just as a massive revolt began in the vassal kingdom of Iphas, where legendary King Aggeartu (in this case, famous for his cruelty and ineptitude) was slaughtering his own people, ruining the wealth of the land and starting fights with neighbouring kingdoms.
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At this point, the fate of the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East lay in the hands of four men. The first two of these were Sarvonian half-brothers, known as Velosk and Felesy, each the young and newly-appointed leader of a rival tribe. According to legend, the brothers met to make peace between the tribes, and a challenge was laid down - that whichever one of them became the most successful warlord in the next twenty years would become ruler of both their tribes. Some suggest there had been a general migration of Sarvonians southwards, due to conflict with the hardy Amestrian tribes of the north. Land, food and wealth were already at a premium. Whatever the case, the two chieftains set out into the far south, to seek their fortunes on an ambitious, fearless campaign of violence. First, Velosk and his tribe overran the Kupato peninsular, pillaging the Pelonesian colonies there, before uniting with other Sarvonians and some Sheshegi groups of the Yiphesh area, then moving through the Caucasus, to attack the already-weakened lands of Iphas and the north of the Kraman Empire. A famous battle at Artaxut in 404 BC saw the heavy war-chariots of the Kraman nobles defeated by the Sarvonians and Sheshegi, many of whom were now fighting from horseback in the style of the Sai-Hsin. With his acts of cunning on the battlefield, as well as the fortuitous deaths of his rivals, Velosk established himself as overall leader of the invasion, and oversaw the systematic plunder of both the northern Kraman Empire and the northern Pargian territories. In many ways, it was the end of a whole chapter of history.
Yet the Kramans were soon on the rebound with a new ruling dynasty, another new army, and thousands of mercenary horsemen of their own, moving in from the eastern provinces. Fatefully, they chose to deal with the troublesome Utuap first - and thanks to the great general Axistor, descendent of leaders who had fought Pagrians and Kramans for centuries, the Utuap fought another great defensive war. They mauled the Kraman army and finally sealed the fate of the great empire. All sides now closed in for a piece of the spoils, and eventually the Utuap army of Axistor faced the horde of Velosk itself. Although both men were now in old age, they had lost none of their keenness for war, and a great cavalry battle was fought. Scribes of the time say that Velosk, after seeing the battle was going well, retired to his tent near the front line for a short rest, and was served a cup of poisoned ale by a servant under the pay of Axistor. With his last words, Velosk cursed Axistor so greatly that he too soon perished, dying in his sleep a few days after the battle. The battle itself was a narrow victory for the Velosk's horde, though the Sarvonians headed back north after the death of their great leader (taking a vast amount of treasures with them). And so, the great leaders had cancelled each other out, and chaos reigned in the former Kraman Empire for nearly a century, with too many migrations and battles for any contemporary historians to keep track of (though we know that the Garakal tribes who ended up in the deserts of the Nayir peninsular had Sarvonian ancestry).
The final of the four to be mentioned is Orimudis, supreme general of Voresila, the city-state that emerged victorious from a long war between Maitan city-states. Voresila was struggling to establish itself as political capitol of all the Maitan people, when it was provided with a common enemy to rally them against - Felesy, the half-brother of Velosk, who had travelled along the western coast of the black sea with his tribe, the Zevon, before plundering the heart of the Pelonar Kingdom (already weakened from backing the wrong side in the Maitan wars). The Zevon also sacked several Maitan cities until Orimudis's army was finally able to confront and defeat them at considerable cost. One tactic favoured by the Maitan was that of masses of long pikes, backed up by archers and some cavalry on the flanks, which was a harder target for cavalry than the mass levies of Kraman troops. And in any case, Felesy never gained the same support as his half-brother from other Sarvonian or Sheshegi tribes. Nonetheless, the Zevon were never pushed back far from the borders of Maitan territory, where they gradually settled down and established their own kingdoms, while Orimudis and his successors expanded their power in other directions - Pelonar was rebuilt as a weak vassal of Voresila, and then came intervention in the Murettian wars - the Voresians aided their cultural brethren the Mavans in winning control of most of that peninsular, and helped retake the southern Mavan lands from a Tesnaran invasion, after which the Mavan kingdoms became 'protectorates'. An alliance with the Pargians put them in an even stronger position, and by 100 BC the Voresian Empire was tentatively declared (although many of its cities clung fiercely to as much independence as possible).
A couple of centuries after the time of Felesy and Velosk, the chaos in the Middle East began to subside. The Utuap, after being exiled from temporary rule of the upper Nile nearly a thousand years earlier, finally reinvented themselves as a true civilized people, with new kingdoms built on the old Ummite lands (at this point, traditional Ummite culture is no longer recognisable from the confused mix of different alphabets and languages of the area). They were technically allied together with the Hannuri (displaced peoples who settled on the east coast of the mediterranean) against outside threats. Meanwhile one group of Sai-Hsin, perhaps originally mercenaries of the Kramans, created the Haithan kingdom, based at the ruins of the former Kraman capitol (with much of its grand monuments still standing, according to contemporary accounts).
More importantly, though, a large new empire suddenly appeared in the north - The Savisian Empire was a near-equal mixture of Sheshegi and Sarvonian culture, led by a dynasty descended (allegedly) from the great Velosk, whose sons had united most of the Sarvonian tribes in the aftermath of their father's great conquests. Sarvonians still made up most of the military elite, while the Sheshegi organised the taxes and laws of the state (benefiting much from the former Sheshegi kingdom of Yiphesh in particular). Other ideas from the south were shamelessly copied and adapted, as foreign writers often comment about the surprising sophistication of the 'barbarian' capitol (built at Kaffah, one of the former Pelonesian colonies in the Kupato peninsular). The Empire actually had very few cities and consisted mostly of nomadic territories, only a few of which were ruled directly. But reports of the empire being able to summon 100,000 warriors from its vassals and allies may not be too exaggerated. We know from writings of the time that neither the new Voresian or Utuap-Hannuri states felt safe about their northern borders.
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Finally, to India, where things were relatively quiet. As nomads and exiles were dragged into the vacuum left by the fall of Kraman, the Kaj Empire had less trouble to face on their own borders. Nonetheless, the Kaj Emperors took no chances, and large walls and ramparts were constructed along parts of the frontier over several decades - an epic task that required large amounts of forced labour, and led to the deaths of over a million people by some estimates. Labourers travelling to the north-west frontier from other parts of the empire brought the mystical faith of Syhinism with them - the faith had crossed the Himalayas from the state of Syhin and had been embraced by the Kaj Emperor and the ruling classes. Unfortunately the Jornmarin peoples had their own faith, the worship of the goddess Waina, the Goddess of All. Religious tensions led to riots and uprisings in the Jornmarin city states.
Later emperors brought temporary calm to Jornmarin, and expanded further to the north-west, in an attempt to restore the silk road which had been severed in the previous centuries. They didn't have much success, and so overseas trade became more important. Kaj influence (particularly aspects of Agrian culture, which was dominant in the empire) spread further to the east. By 150 BC, the empire was receiving regular tribute from the Champay Kingdoms and had indirect trade and contact with the Tianshi Empire (the culture they encountered was that of Tiandishi, with the written language developed by Xueqishi Xingfu). The Kaj also saw increasing trade with east Africa, especially the emerging Zuru kingdom. Most of the trade was carried out by Zuch seafarers, many of whom settled in the coastal cities of the empire (the Zuch tribes were a mix of Zul and Bharu peoples who had their own lands in southern India). Pargian traders also visited Kaj in greater numbers, as Pargia was expanding south along the Nile and Red Sea, following the loss of its northern territories. Incidentally, the Pargia and Kaj were the now oldest surviving empires in the world.
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Its now around 50 BC.
Cultures and Factions Ownership:
Amestrian tribes: Crezth
Savisian Empire: Lord Iggy / lord_joakim
Zevon Kingdoms: Lord Iggy
Garakal Tribes (north-east Arabia): Lord Iggy
Pelonar Kingdom: Fuschia / human-slaughter
Voresian Empire: human-slaughter
Mavan Kingdoms: human-slaughter
Tupistok Kingdoms: lord_joakim / human-slaughter
Hannuri and Utuap Kingdoms: lord_joakim
Tesnaran Empire: Neverwonagame3 / human-slaughter
Pargian Empire: Neverwonagame3
Krilik Kingdoms: Ninja Dude
Syhin State: Ninja Dude
Kaj Empire: Luckymoose / Ninja Dude
Champay Kingdoms: Luckymoose
Jornmarin Kingdoms: Luckymoose
Khayuta Kingdoms: Luckymoose / LightFang
Tiandulong tribes: LightFang
Tiandishi kingdom: LightFang
Tianshi Empire: LightFang / kkmo
Yueren chiefdoms: kkmo
Yueren kingdoms: kkmo
Hai-Ren kingdoms: Charles Li / kkmo
Sai-Hsin tribes: Charles Li
Washagon tribes/chiefdoms: Bestshot9
Timiquican Kingdoms: BananaLee
Nanto chiefdoms: Nick014 / BananaLee
Xanto tribes: Nick014
Panto chiefdoms: Nick014
Zuru kingdom: mythmonster2
Zul sea-peoples / Zuch tribes: mythmonster2
Hom kingdom: mythmonster2
Tuzan tribes: flyingchicken
The rest: NPC, and may be claimed by new people. Feel free to ask for details.
Note that there are some mixed cultures which are under the dual authority of two people, who may well give them conflicting instructions, and I'll try to decide the outcome.
It can be assumed that there are tribes all over the place. They will get names on the map as and when they become relevant.
Feedback/suggestions about anything in general are very welcome!
Notes:
@ lord_joakim, lots of people were in the way of Yiphesh reaching Gibraltar
@ Warhead, you can make a culture in Britain or anywhere else if you like.
@All, again, apologies if I ignored any input. There was too much to use, even after all my ranting.
Next Era:
Era 7 will be the Age of Scribes. This is not so much a battle of armies, as a battle of beliefs. Ideas are extra important now. How to empires and kingdoms justify their existence? Is it for war and glory? Do they have a mission to civilize the world? This would also be a great time to create major new religions: currently we have mystical Syhinism (assumed similar to buddhism), unnamed Yeuren religion (similar to celtic druidry), and the first monotheist religions - the worship of the goddess Waina by the Jornmarin people, and the worship of Jonsar by the Tesnarans.
I intend to post Era #7 tomorrow, if I can avoid going into OTT epic mode. Its still not neccessary to send more than 1 sentence of input for this, despite how much I wrote above
Reminder: Please feel free to give any kind of input you want, but a simple list of priorities would be good. Names of great cities and leaders (NEW: and places!) could also be useful, though may not actually appear in the updates for some time. I will accept PM's if need be, otherwise you can just post in the thread. It would be helpful if you could take a second to
boldify the name of your tribe/chiefdom/people, so I know what you are talking about, and can easily find that post again...
New Cultures:
These are still accepted at this time, please refer to the template on first page. NPC's on the map can also be claimed.
The Golanur where a minor tribe somewhere in anatolia, during the last 'dark age' they ruled the real-world israel area for a while, before getting displaced to their current position. They aren't very strong but may have horse-riding now.
