Masada's Linear Macro-scale Simulation
- Thread starter Masada
- Start date
Crezth
i knew you were a real man of the left
Later times would remember the period of the latter Yù as the age of Jin Wu Zi, the first and most well-known emperor of the Yù and founder of the Jin dynasty.
The latter Yù, having successfully destroyed the Yan and subjugated the Yú, and for the most part finding no easy victims among the Ma - a subject that will be explored shortly - turned on themselves as great lords began to consolidate their power, sacking the cities of their rivals and consolidating ever greater domains. As time went on, this led to a smaller number of larger Yù domains, which were governed in a style of tributary patronage. Direct governance of conquered cities was not the forte of the Yù kings, and instead they exercised their authority through the leverage of taxation, demanding treasure, slaves, and the provision of skilled warriors.
This state of affairs led to the creation by the Yù kings of small courts, skilled nobles of conquered realms being taken as slaves for fighting and carving jade. This led to the creation of an upper servant caste, which was short-lived as an institution but directly contributed to a much longer-lived tradition of military service and court artisanship. Thus did great kings and their families benefit from the service of skilled servants, and grew fat on plentiful tribute and holy on plentiful sacrifice. Still they fought amongst themselves, though their ambitions waned as with only a hundred settlements it was possible to live in exquisite comfort and wealth. Kings, long-expected to lead military campaigns themselves, lost the appetite for such adventures and turned their martialism inwards in ritual tournament sacrifices, fought among members of the warrior caste, who battled for honors and riches.
However, most legal traditions and institutions of this period of the Yù were short-lived, lasting at most a hundred years, because of the disruption soon introduced by the Tian conqueror, Jin Wu.
The historical accounts of Jin Wu mostly come from a later era, and differ in terms of their presentation of facts or fiction, at times being laudatory and other times calumniatory; what is agreed upon is that Jin Wu was an exile from the Tian lands, and that, traveling south, he spent some time among the culture of the Ma, and thereafter arrived in a border kingdom of the Yù, ruled by the king Yao Ming Wang, where he was taken in as a courtier (and courtesan) by the local king, and became credited with introducing unique cultural practices of poetry and a philosophy of thought about the ethics of authority and law called Quan Ji.
Yao Ming Wang gave Jin Wu unprecedented authority of an army, entranced by the notions of Jin Wu's philosophy, and that army Jin Wu first used to conquer the Ma - a feat never accomplished by any Yù king - and then the rest of the Yù states. When Yao Ming Wang died, having long ceased to become relevant in his own realm, Jin Wu seized the throne from the the child heir of the Yao and became thenceforth known as Jin Wu Di - emperor of the land, founder of the Jin dynasty.
The details of this adventure are shrouded in mystery and legend, with the tenets of Quan Ji being the most surviving aspect of the entire endeavor. The reason Jin Wu was exiled remains a mystery, and the account of it tells more about the person telling the tale than the tale itself. Either Jin Wu was a rapist or a murderer, or he was a thief, or he dishonored the lord of the local court having disagreed with his methods; one way or another, Jin Wu was forced to leave the lands of the Tian, and headed south where he encountered the Ma.
In order to understand Jin Wu's time among the Ma, it is necessary to understand the Ma. The Ma were a pastoral people, who practiced farming in very limited amounts, preferring their herds of oxen and horses. They lived in sophisticated tents that could easily be moved, and never stayed in one place for long. They believed in combat as a show of strength over territory, but did not believe in extracting tribute or wealth, preferring instead to force their rivals off of territory that they coveted. And finally, they were ruled by communities of tribes and families, with one chief elected among them to speak for all tribes of a community.
It was exactly these qualities that made the Ma such a challenging target for the Yù. Although the Yù enjoyed the sport of hunting the Ma and taking them as slaves, the Ma were difficult to entirely destroy in these matters, knowing full well to simply pack up and move when the issues with the Yù became troublesome. This had the effect of making the Ma quite hardy against Yù ambitions, because the terms of extracting regular tribute were impossible to enforce. To the Ma, a lost battle translated always to an exchange of territory - territory the Yù neither wanted nor cared about.
In the company of such people, it is said, Jin Wu originated his philosophy of war: an enemy pushed off of territory could inevitably re-settle themselves and formulate as an enemy again. Likewise, tribute could not be enforced on moving targets. In the wars among the Ma, territory was changing hands, but long-term advantages were difficult to achieve; in wars between the Ma and the Yù, the Yù took what little they could get, and the Ma moved on. Jin Wu learned from this and came to realize a cardinal truth of conquest: that it was necessary not only to take land and tribute, but to enforce a new authority over the defeated in order to create the basis of a future compelling advantage.
Jin Wu is said to have somewhat pitied the Ma for their weak states and communal natures, but respected the way all people in those societies could be used to contribute to the goals of the community. He later elaborated in the Quan Ji the necessity of organization on this count.
Jin Wu came from the highly centralized walled communities of the Tian, and was deeply familiar therefore with their tall towers and philosophy of order. Leaving the Ma, he arrived in the realm of Yao Ming Wang, and introduced himself as a poet from the north.
Yao Ming Wang was quickly enchanted with Jin Wu, who learned the language of the Yù and amused the king with his tales of the Ma and the Tian. Tianren were generally prized as Jin Wu spoke of great communities where the king was raised up, and expressed a philosophy of Quan Ji whereby a great king could exercise his authority according to his mastery of the techniques of rulership. Much of his philosophy in this respect was derived from earlier works well-expressed at this point in Tian philosophy but being somewhat alien to Yù philosophy.
The Quan Ji emphasized authority through three elements: judgment, mastery, and strength. Through judgment a great king implemented standards for his rule and held ministers accountable to authority for their actions - a concept immediately recognizable in the Yù system in accordance with the principle of sacrifice to the lake spirits. Jin Wu was very tolerant of this concept in accordance with his own concept of Tian He - the river god of Tian culture - and expressed this connection more fully in the apocryphal inscribed texts of the Quan Ji Zi. Judgment, therefore, was the all-important attribute of the king that allowed him to identify worthwhile labor and correctly judge his subordinates, and the implementation of these standards would be known as the "methods of law."
Through mastery, or competence, or technique - shu - a great king executed his will through statecraft in his daily handling of affairs, and understanding of complex topics such as finance and military strategy. A good king had to balance his knowledge of all of these subjects in order to exercise his will in accordance with good rulership.
Through strength, or power, a good king expressed his material wherewithal to overcome enemies and conquer new domains. Thus was centralization of resources and the gathering of strong armies emphasized, whereby a lack of any of these things opened the gates to disaster.
In Yù culture, it is important to remember that regular taxation was largely informal, and direct governance was highly irregular; therefore the centralizing tendencies of Quan Ji were directly at odds with the cultural traditions of the realm. Officials acting on behalf of the king were called upon to enforce the king's judgment throughout the land, as well as to collect tax. It was not enough that the end results were effective: the entire process had to be refined. It was this purity that could allow a large kingdom to work with the same elegance as a single walled city.
The whole philosophy of Quan Ji was quite dear to Yao Ming Wang, and in time he determined that Jin Wu should be his lieutenant and chief administrator, and be given the title of Zi in honor of his stature as a master philosopher. Thus Jin Wu was given the chance to prove his worth in the field of battle, and he personally commanded an army. Yao Ming Wang was determined to increase his strength and, in so doing, prove his mastery and judgment - his judgment would be vindicated by his subordinate Jin Wu's success. It is said in texts that though Yao Ming Wang desired to be a great king, his methods actually contributed to the creation in Jin Wu of a great king, and this is no doubt a sincerely Yù bias - millennia of rulers leading armies into battle themselves would not be so easily undone.
Jin Wu's first conquest was the tribes of the Ma, whom he understood intrinsically as well as had the tools to conquer. Jin Wu was not satisfied merely with extracting tribute, as many Yù kings would have been, and understood the need to give a new lord to the conquered peoples. Therefore he extracted a tenth part of the population of every conquered tribe to serve as auxiliaries to his army, while he exchanged his army with exemplary subordinates whom he expected to serve as his lords - often drawn from the upper-servant class. His enforcement of standards in the new lands swiftly brought the tribes into line, and he returned to Yao Ming Wang free to report his success.
The rest, as they say, is history: Jin Wu was quick to conquer the other territories of the Yù in the same way, possessing a preternatural talent for military strategy (occupying a whole chapter of the Quan Ji, indebted heavily to the old Tian works, but implementing some Yù customs) as well as an experience whereof many kings of the late Yù period were denied. The order of these realms was all in all totally overturned, as nobility were co-opted or replaced with his loyal lieutenants and direct administration of conquered territories was adopted. The upper-servant class was quickly transformed into a magistrate class, and dissent was brutally punished in the pursuit of a strong authority.
Yao Ming Wang, grown sickly, perished soon after; his young son lacked any allies except Jin Wu himself, who determined (with the help of his plentiful subordinates) that he had demonstrated judgment, mastery, and strength in his conquest of the lands. Thus Jin Wu named himself Jin Wu Di and became the first emperor of the Yù.
His rule was marked by several cultural conflicts with the traditional Yù ways, and rebellions that continued with degrading intensity: human sacrifice, being tasteless to him, was outlawed, although that is not to say rebels were not bloodily crushed, and he maintained a practice of executing officials that disappointed him. The court of Jin Wu Di incorporated poets in addition to jade artisans, and the production of jade artifacts continued as a demonstration of wealth and a tool for rewarding powerful subordinates. Earthen mounds fell out of favor in this time, and Jin Wu Di encouraged the construction of tall towers in the Tian style - often sending ambassadors north to find Tian architects and engineers in order to enforce his new standards. This created a linguistic gulf between the upper and lower classes as the upper classes frequently spoke a kind of mixture between Tian and Yù languages.
On the ground folk traditions hardly changed, but there was a unified concept between the Tian cosmology and the Yù of a river spirit called Tian He. In this time, among the Yù, that spirit came to be known as Wu He and went from being the patron of man to the patron of civilization, and was depicted on pottery alternatingly as a giant falcon or a long serpentine dragon, whose form resembled that of a flowing river.
Jin Wu's son, Jin Xiameng, ruled the Jin dynasty until his own death without a male heir, the marriage of his daughter introducing the allied and more "native" Yang dynasty. At this point, the legacy of the Jin rule had left its mark on Yù culture by introducing notable Tian artistic influences as well as a philosophy of rulership that later kings in the realm sought to emulate, and most importantly the system of magistrates survived although the laws of the Jin themselves came to be forgotten. The Yang disavowed the harsh philosophy of Quan Ji, but could not escape the principles it had left behind. It was this dynasty that developed a sophisticated administration of its own with an emphasis on the at-this-point most agreeable and overarching trait of the unified Yù culture: meritocracy. From thence forward, the courts of the Yang were a place one could find great artisans, philosophers, poets, scribes, and engineers; and the culture that was once the Yù had permanently evolved into a new culture which posterity named the Yang.
[(Ma) 1 effort: seminomadic pastoralists both hardy and adaptive]
[(Yù) 1 effort: the philosophy of Quan Ji]
[(Yù) 1 effort: the conquest of the Yù and Ma under the empire of the Jin]
[(Yù) 1 effort: the great Tian-Yù courts of the Jin and Yang]
Yù -> Yang
Ma -> Ma
The latter Yù, having successfully destroyed the Yan and subjugated the Yú, and for the most part finding no easy victims among the Ma - a subject that will be explored shortly - turned on themselves as great lords began to consolidate their power, sacking the cities of their rivals and consolidating ever greater domains. As time went on, this led to a smaller number of larger Yù domains, which were governed in a style of tributary patronage. Direct governance of conquered cities was not the forte of the Yù kings, and instead they exercised their authority through the leverage of taxation, demanding treasure, slaves, and the provision of skilled warriors.
This state of affairs led to the creation by the Yù kings of small courts, skilled nobles of conquered realms being taken as slaves for fighting and carving jade. This led to the creation of an upper servant caste, which was short-lived as an institution but directly contributed to a much longer-lived tradition of military service and court artisanship. Thus did great kings and their families benefit from the service of skilled servants, and grew fat on plentiful tribute and holy on plentiful sacrifice. Still they fought amongst themselves, though their ambitions waned as with only a hundred settlements it was possible to live in exquisite comfort and wealth. Kings, long-expected to lead military campaigns themselves, lost the appetite for such adventures and turned their martialism inwards in ritual tournament sacrifices, fought among members of the warrior caste, who battled for honors and riches.
However, most legal traditions and institutions of this period of the Yù were short-lived, lasting at most a hundred years, because of the disruption soon introduced by the Tian conqueror, Jin Wu.
The historical accounts of Jin Wu mostly come from a later era, and differ in terms of their presentation of facts or fiction, at times being laudatory and other times calumniatory; what is agreed upon is that Jin Wu was an exile from the Tian lands, and that, traveling south, he spent some time among the culture of the Ma, and thereafter arrived in a border kingdom of the Yù, ruled by the king Yao Ming Wang, where he was taken in as a courtier (and courtesan) by the local king, and became credited with introducing unique cultural practices of poetry and a philosophy of thought about the ethics of authority and law called Quan Ji.
Yao Ming Wang gave Jin Wu unprecedented authority of an army, entranced by the notions of Jin Wu's philosophy, and that army Jin Wu first used to conquer the Ma - a feat never accomplished by any Yù king - and then the rest of the Yù states. When Yao Ming Wang died, having long ceased to become relevant in his own realm, Jin Wu seized the throne from the the child heir of the Yao and became thenceforth known as Jin Wu Di - emperor of the land, founder of the Jin dynasty.
The details of this adventure are shrouded in mystery and legend, with the tenets of Quan Ji being the most surviving aspect of the entire endeavor. The reason Jin Wu was exiled remains a mystery, and the account of it tells more about the person telling the tale than the tale itself. Either Jin Wu was a rapist or a murderer, or he was a thief, or he dishonored the lord of the local court having disagreed with his methods; one way or another, Jin Wu was forced to leave the lands of the Tian, and headed south where he encountered the Ma.
In order to understand Jin Wu's time among the Ma, it is necessary to understand the Ma. The Ma were a pastoral people, who practiced farming in very limited amounts, preferring their herds of oxen and horses. They lived in sophisticated tents that could easily be moved, and never stayed in one place for long. They believed in combat as a show of strength over territory, but did not believe in extracting tribute or wealth, preferring instead to force their rivals off of territory that they coveted. And finally, they were ruled by communities of tribes and families, with one chief elected among them to speak for all tribes of a community.
It was exactly these qualities that made the Ma such a challenging target for the Yù. Although the Yù enjoyed the sport of hunting the Ma and taking them as slaves, the Ma were difficult to entirely destroy in these matters, knowing full well to simply pack up and move when the issues with the Yù became troublesome. This had the effect of making the Ma quite hardy against Yù ambitions, because the terms of extracting regular tribute were impossible to enforce. To the Ma, a lost battle translated always to an exchange of territory - territory the Yù neither wanted nor cared about.
In the company of such people, it is said, Jin Wu originated his philosophy of war: an enemy pushed off of territory could inevitably re-settle themselves and formulate as an enemy again. Likewise, tribute could not be enforced on moving targets. In the wars among the Ma, territory was changing hands, but long-term advantages were difficult to achieve; in wars between the Ma and the Yù, the Yù took what little they could get, and the Ma moved on. Jin Wu learned from this and came to realize a cardinal truth of conquest: that it was necessary not only to take land and tribute, but to enforce a new authority over the defeated in order to create the basis of a future compelling advantage.
Jin Wu is said to have somewhat pitied the Ma for their weak states and communal natures, but respected the way all people in those societies could be used to contribute to the goals of the community. He later elaborated in the Quan Ji the necessity of organization on this count.
Jin Wu came from the highly centralized walled communities of the Tian, and was deeply familiar therefore with their tall towers and philosophy of order. Leaving the Ma, he arrived in the realm of Yao Ming Wang, and introduced himself as a poet from the north.
Yao Ming Wang was quickly enchanted with Jin Wu, who learned the language of the Yù and amused the king with his tales of the Ma and the Tian. Tianren were generally prized as Jin Wu spoke of great communities where the king was raised up, and expressed a philosophy of Quan Ji whereby a great king could exercise his authority according to his mastery of the techniques of rulership. Much of his philosophy in this respect was derived from earlier works well-expressed at this point in Tian philosophy but being somewhat alien to Yù philosophy.
The Quan Ji emphasized authority through three elements: judgment, mastery, and strength. Through judgment a great king implemented standards for his rule and held ministers accountable to authority for their actions - a concept immediately recognizable in the Yù system in accordance with the principle of sacrifice to the lake spirits. Jin Wu was very tolerant of this concept in accordance with his own concept of Tian He - the river god of Tian culture - and expressed this connection more fully in the apocryphal inscribed texts of the Quan Ji Zi. Judgment, therefore, was the all-important attribute of the king that allowed him to identify worthwhile labor and correctly judge his subordinates, and the implementation of these standards would be known as the "methods of law."
Through mastery, or competence, or technique - shu - a great king executed his will through statecraft in his daily handling of affairs, and understanding of complex topics such as finance and military strategy. A good king had to balance his knowledge of all of these subjects in order to exercise his will in accordance with good rulership.
Through strength, or power, a good king expressed his material wherewithal to overcome enemies and conquer new domains. Thus was centralization of resources and the gathering of strong armies emphasized, whereby a lack of any of these things opened the gates to disaster.
In Yù culture, it is important to remember that regular taxation was largely informal, and direct governance was highly irregular; therefore the centralizing tendencies of Quan Ji were directly at odds with the cultural traditions of the realm. Officials acting on behalf of the king were called upon to enforce the king's judgment throughout the land, as well as to collect tax. It was not enough that the end results were effective: the entire process had to be refined. It was this purity that could allow a large kingdom to work with the same elegance as a single walled city.
The whole philosophy of Quan Ji was quite dear to Yao Ming Wang, and in time he determined that Jin Wu should be his lieutenant and chief administrator, and be given the title of Zi in honor of his stature as a master philosopher. Thus Jin Wu was given the chance to prove his worth in the field of battle, and he personally commanded an army. Yao Ming Wang was determined to increase his strength and, in so doing, prove his mastery and judgment - his judgment would be vindicated by his subordinate Jin Wu's success. It is said in texts that though Yao Ming Wang desired to be a great king, his methods actually contributed to the creation in Jin Wu of a great king, and this is no doubt a sincerely Yù bias - millennia of rulers leading armies into battle themselves would not be so easily undone.
Jin Wu's first conquest was the tribes of the Ma, whom he understood intrinsically as well as had the tools to conquer. Jin Wu was not satisfied merely with extracting tribute, as many Yù kings would have been, and understood the need to give a new lord to the conquered peoples. Therefore he extracted a tenth part of the population of every conquered tribe to serve as auxiliaries to his army, while he exchanged his army with exemplary subordinates whom he expected to serve as his lords - often drawn from the upper-servant class. His enforcement of standards in the new lands swiftly brought the tribes into line, and he returned to Yao Ming Wang free to report his success.
The rest, as they say, is history: Jin Wu was quick to conquer the other territories of the Yù in the same way, possessing a preternatural talent for military strategy (occupying a whole chapter of the Quan Ji, indebted heavily to the old Tian works, but implementing some Yù customs) as well as an experience whereof many kings of the late Yù period were denied. The order of these realms was all in all totally overturned, as nobility were co-opted or replaced with his loyal lieutenants and direct administration of conquered territories was adopted. The upper-servant class was quickly transformed into a magistrate class, and dissent was brutally punished in the pursuit of a strong authority.
Yao Ming Wang, grown sickly, perished soon after; his young son lacked any allies except Jin Wu himself, who determined (with the help of his plentiful subordinates) that he had demonstrated judgment, mastery, and strength in his conquest of the lands. Thus Jin Wu named himself Jin Wu Di and became the first emperor of the Yù.
His rule was marked by several cultural conflicts with the traditional Yù ways, and rebellions that continued with degrading intensity: human sacrifice, being tasteless to him, was outlawed, although that is not to say rebels were not bloodily crushed, and he maintained a practice of executing officials that disappointed him. The court of Jin Wu Di incorporated poets in addition to jade artisans, and the production of jade artifacts continued as a demonstration of wealth and a tool for rewarding powerful subordinates. Earthen mounds fell out of favor in this time, and Jin Wu Di encouraged the construction of tall towers in the Tian style - often sending ambassadors north to find Tian architects and engineers in order to enforce his new standards. This created a linguistic gulf between the upper and lower classes as the upper classes frequently spoke a kind of mixture between Tian and Yù languages.
On the ground folk traditions hardly changed, but there was a unified concept between the Tian cosmology and the Yù of a river spirit called Tian He. In this time, among the Yù, that spirit came to be known as Wu He and went from being the patron of man to the patron of civilization, and was depicted on pottery alternatingly as a giant falcon or a long serpentine dragon, whose form resembled that of a flowing river.
Jin Wu's son, Jin Xiameng, ruled the Jin dynasty until his own death without a male heir, the marriage of his daughter introducing the allied and more "native" Yang dynasty. At this point, the legacy of the Jin rule had left its mark on Yù culture by introducing notable Tian artistic influences as well as a philosophy of rulership that later kings in the realm sought to emulate, and most importantly the system of magistrates survived although the laws of the Jin themselves came to be forgotten. The Yang disavowed the harsh philosophy of Quan Ji, but could not escape the principles it had left behind. It was this dynasty that developed a sophisticated administration of its own with an emphasis on the at-this-point most agreeable and overarching trait of the unified Yù culture: meritocracy. From thence forward, the courts of the Yang were a place one could find great artisans, philosophers, poets, scribes, and engineers; and the culture that was once the Yù had permanently evolved into a new culture which posterity named the Yang.
[(Ma) 1 effort: seminomadic pastoralists both hardy and adaptive]
[(Yù) 1 effort: the philosophy of Quan Ji]
[(Yù) 1 effort: the conquest of the Yù and Ma under the empire of the Jin]
[(Yù) 1 effort: the great Tian-Yù courts of the Jin and Yang]
Yù -> Yang
Ma -> Ma
Last edited:
jackelgull
An aberration of nature
Indian and Iranian colonies
Sindhi colonization arrived for several reasons. One was simple overpopulation - cities would become too crowded, unrest would follow, and the high priests would order an effort to create a new city, raising taxes for the purpose and finding volunteers. Another was security purposes - the Sindhi would build military encampments on the frontier for deterrence. These encampments would eventually grow into proper cities as the frontier moved and the barbarians became Sindhi. In the South, shipbuilding was in its infancy, and Srinagar (locate in OTL Gujurat, supposed to be analogous to Lothal) was the first naval nation - it had a large port and early galleys made from benteak trees, which lead to colonies in the South to secure lumber for ship building.
(1 effort)
Picture: Sindhi colony sites
Shipbuilding
In OTL Gujurat, the earliest forms of naval shipbuilding is taking place, with the world’s first port cropping up in Srinagar, a marvel of ancient engineering. The galley is primitive at this point and only suited for coastal travel, but it helps Srinigar form a trade empire by attacking foreign ships at sea.
(1 effort)
A Formalized Legal Code
Men would petition the priesthood for redressement of wrong, then the paramhita would grant them an audience as soon was available. Each man would make his case, and then the paramhita would pronounce judgment. The grievance and it’s judgment would be written down, and from these judgments formed the basis of a legal code. (1 effort)
Sindhi colonization arrived for several reasons. One was simple overpopulation - cities would become too crowded, unrest would follow, and the high priests would order an effort to create a new city, raising taxes for the purpose and finding volunteers. Another was security purposes - the Sindhi would build military encampments on the frontier for deterrence. These encampments would eventually grow into proper cities as the frontier moved and the barbarians became Sindhi. In the South, shipbuilding was in its infancy, and Srinagar (locate in OTL Gujurat, supposed to be analogous to Lothal) was the first naval nation - it had a large port and early galleys made from benteak trees, which lead to colonies in the South to secure lumber for ship building.
(1 effort)
Picture: Sindhi colony sites
Shipbuilding
In OTL Gujurat, the earliest forms of naval shipbuilding is taking place, with the world’s first port cropping up in Srinagar, a marvel of ancient engineering. The galley is primitive at this point and only suited for coastal travel, but it helps Srinigar form a trade empire by attacking foreign ships at sea.
(1 effort)
A Formalized Legal Code
Men would petition the priesthood for redressement of wrong, then the paramhita would grant them an audience as soon was available. Each man would make his case, and then the paramhita would pronounce judgment. The grievance and it’s judgment would be written down, and from these judgments formed the basis of a legal code. (1 effort)
Marcher Jovian
Emperor
- Joined
- Jul 12, 2013
- Messages
- 1,242
Step Pyramids - 1 point
The competition for prestige among the Karaiwasiq noble families shows itself in their architecture, as the nobles attempt to out-build their rivals. As a consequence of the struggle for the tallest temple and lack of more sophisticated architecture, the Karaiwasiq temples took the form of large step pyramids. Expansion of step pyramids would be a generational affair built one layer at a time, with each subsequent layer covering up the old ones. Thus, the height of a family’s temple pyramid could often be used as a measure of the family’s pedigree, with older, more established families having had more time to build up their pyramids
Artisan class - 1 point
The status of the artisan class becomes more codified in this period. This caste is further split between “high” artisans, who produce fine garments or works of art, and “low” artisans, who do not require unique artistry, such as dyemakers. Each family of artisan has a corresponding noble family that is their patron and owner. These owners and patrons provide life necessities and materials for the artisans, and in exchange has ownership of the artisan’s work The noble may give ownership of an artisan family to another noble as gift or tribute, though this is rare in practice and often constitutes an incredibly significant event.
Llaqta Atik - 1 point
Llaqta Atik was the head of a high-ranking noble house. He would challenge the traditional council dynamics of the Karaiwasiq by give gifts to lower-ranking houses in exchange for their votes on council matters. This arrangement proved powerful as Llaqta Atik could propose a controversial actions and pass them with broad support among low-ranking families. Furthermore, supportive families could be rewarded while dissenting families could be punished by unfavorable decisions, encouraging continued loyalty. Llaqta Atik transformed the political system and became known as the first Rimaqpaq. The Rimaqpaq could rule with uncheck authority so long as he had a mandate from the majority of the other houses. Should he lose the mandate, the nobles would engage in a period of fierce politicking before deciding on a new Rimaqpaq, almost always from one of the highest-ranked houses. Stalemates result in a period of anarchy until critical city matters force either defection or compromise.
The competition for prestige among the Karaiwasiq noble families shows itself in their architecture, as the nobles attempt to out-build their rivals. As a consequence of the struggle for the tallest temple and lack of more sophisticated architecture, the Karaiwasiq temples took the form of large step pyramids. Expansion of step pyramids would be a generational affair built one layer at a time, with each subsequent layer covering up the old ones. Thus, the height of a family’s temple pyramid could often be used as a measure of the family’s pedigree, with older, more established families having had more time to build up their pyramids
Artisan class - 1 point
The status of the artisan class becomes more codified in this period. This caste is further split between “high” artisans, who produce fine garments or works of art, and “low” artisans, who do not require unique artistry, such as dyemakers. Each family of artisan has a corresponding noble family that is their patron and owner. These owners and patrons provide life necessities and materials for the artisans, and in exchange has ownership of the artisan’s work The noble may give ownership of an artisan family to another noble as gift or tribute, though this is rare in practice and often constitutes an incredibly significant event.
Llaqta Atik - 1 point
Llaqta Atik was the head of a high-ranking noble house. He would challenge the traditional council dynamics of the Karaiwasiq by give gifts to lower-ranking houses in exchange for their votes on council matters. This arrangement proved powerful as Llaqta Atik could propose a controversial actions and pass them with broad support among low-ranking families. Furthermore, supportive families could be rewarded while dissenting families could be punished by unfavorable decisions, encouraging continued loyalty. Llaqta Atik transformed the political system and became known as the first Rimaqpaq. The Rimaqpaq could rule with uncheck authority so long as he had a mandate from the majority of the other houses. Should he lose the mandate, the nobles would engage in a period of fierce politicking before deciding on a new Rimaqpaq, almost always from one of the highest-ranked houses. Stalemates result in a period of anarchy until critical city matters force either defection or compromise.
JohannaK
Heroically Clueless
The consolidation of Tian cultured cities into aristocratic confederacies was a gradual affair. Arising in response to active warfare from the Li, western Tian coalesced under the leadership of a shaman-king known to us as Kai Ren. He subdued by force the cities who did not join them willingly, and formed a large army that drove the Li away, into the plains west of the mountains. Kai Ren's rule was marked by auspicious omens, bountiful harvests, and successful wars. The prestige he lent to his line devolved into the first established kingdom of Zhu. Though he managed to unite most Tian cities, many of them were rebellious, coalescing into confederacies or kingdoms of their own which would be the birthplace of this age's greatest heroes. (effort 1)
It was in response to Kai Ren's first Kingdom that Tian cities elsewhere entered into permanent alliances that eventually became confederacies, often ruled jointly by a council of the shaman-kings. Out of sheer convenience, the need arose for shaman-kings to appoint lieutenants to rule in their steed during the conclaves, which would be celebrated regularly in one city. It is at this period that the characteristic palace started taking shape, with the typical large hall and inner garden at the foot of a Tian tower. The confederacies of Shan and Wu to the east were notorious, as was the confederacy of Ying to the North. (effort 1)
Though war was a real fixture for all cities in this age, its ritualised form that had predominated in the south lived on.It was not as war between enemies, however, but as a competition between allies. As strife became more or less common between the different confederacies and kingdoms, a special kind of events developed whereby skilled warriors from neighbouring cities would test their skills against each other. In time, they became large festivals where each city in a realm would send their best and finest to compete and prevail for greater honour and glory. (effort 1)
Forced further out West by the campaigns of Kai Ren and his descendants in Zhu, Li society quickly consolidated. Though still smaller than Tian cities, new Li setlements grew considerably in size. Their main feature of palisades remained, with visible improvements as distinctly new and sophisticated walls and earthworks have been discovered. They remained fighters, raiding each other as often as foreigners, with power eventually consolidating into the hands of the women who were left behind and actually managed the settlment's life and needs day to day. (effort 1)
It was in response to Kai Ren's first Kingdom that Tian cities elsewhere entered into permanent alliances that eventually became confederacies, often ruled jointly by a council of the shaman-kings. Out of sheer convenience, the need arose for shaman-kings to appoint lieutenants to rule in their steed during the conclaves, which would be celebrated regularly in one city. It is at this period that the characteristic palace started taking shape, with the typical large hall and inner garden at the foot of a Tian tower. The confederacies of Shan and Wu to the east were notorious, as was the confederacy of Ying to the North. (effort 1)
Though war was a real fixture for all cities in this age, its ritualised form that had predominated in the south lived on.It was not as war between enemies, however, but as a competition between allies. As strife became more or less common between the different confederacies and kingdoms, a special kind of events developed whereby skilled warriors from neighbouring cities would test their skills against each other. In time, they became large festivals where each city in a realm would send their best and finest to compete and prevail for greater honour and glory. (effort 1)
Forced further out West by the campaigns of Kai Ren and his descendants in Zhu, Li society quickly consolidated. Though still smaller than Tian cities, new Li setlements grew considerably in size. Their main feature of palisades remained, with visible improvements as distinctly new and sophisticated walls and earthworks have been discovered. They remained fighters, raiding each other as often as foreigners, with power eventually consolidating into the hands of the women who were left behind and actually managed the settlment's life and needs day to day. (effort 1)
thomas.berubeg
Wandering the World
Haltafi
Effort 1 - Enclaves: The Haltafi, as a warlike, fractious group of pastoralists and warrior elites ruling over semetic cities, were often hired by more prosperous Gwonhelod and Sumerian cities as mercenaries to wage war against each other. Over time, while many Haltafi remained pastoral semi-nomads out in their ancestral plains, many cities developed Haltafi enclaves, distinct, but more-or-less assimilated. They maintained their ancestral tongues (though creolized to varying degrees with Sumerian), and many of the religious practices of their ancestors, but actively incorporated aspects of Sumerian culture, including calendar, cuneiform writing, and many of the Gods of the Sumerians (though interpreted through Haltafi lens as Ensha.) Therefore, when the Shekemboirat swept through the area, many Sumerian cities were both already used to Haltafi practices, and had an established local community from which to draw administrators and leaders.
Effort 2 - The Shephard, Boir, walked among the lands of the Gwonhelod and the Sumerians and the Murhelod and all of tribes of all the hills. He learned all their tongues, and made friends in all the biggest temples and meanest of tents. He gave offerings to all their Ensha, and learned the wisdoms of the Shekems and the Priests, as well as that of the fisherman and goldworker and farmer. It was one night, when he slept on the beach near where the Jenashek river met the ocean, that he dreamed. He dreamed of a great wave crashing over the whole of the world, washing away all that the people were, as the sea of dreams had once washed over his ancestors, sending them far from their homes on the banks of the Mawransa. Many Ensha beseached him in his dream, Prime among them Migwon and Eridu and Dephadir the Sky Father, to save the world, as he alone understood all the peoples and could unite them against the darkness that was coming. They gave him gifts with which to accomplish this task. Shiny new weapons of Bronze and Beaten Iron, and a herd of horses. Boir returned home, and marshalled all the greatest warriors and heroes of the Haltafi, and led them first against the cities of the Gwonhelod, Distant Kin as they were. With chariot and sword his united them, and marshalled their force, marching against the Sumerian Cities, so that, all together, they could weather the evil that was coming. One after the other, they fell, incorporated into his Shekemat. The Temples were demolished and rebuilt in the style of the Enshasal, and the kings deposed or appointed as regional governor's, depending on their actions. Finally, the entirety of the Sumerian Rivers had been united under the Shekemboirat. It was only upon his deathbed, as he made the Journey to the Mawransa, Migwon at his side, that he realized that the wave he had been warned about had been himself.
Gwonhelod
Effort 1 - Urbanization: The Gwonhelod have generally moved from small numbers of cities with larger numbers of pastoralist to becoming more and more urbanized, all throughout the area.
Effort 2 - Conquest: See above. The Gwonhelod cities formed the initial core of the Shekemboirat
Murhelod
Effort 1 - Expansion and consolidation over the sea. The Murhelod, generally speaking, expanded towards the coastline, either driving out or subsuming local settlements.
Effort 2 - The Murhelod on the coast have taken to the sea as fish to water. They build ships, trade far along the coast, and fish the bounty of the oceans. In fact, their first true cities were built upon the wealth of the sea, both the commerce it brought the Murhelod and the wealth of resources (Such as pearls and purple dye.)
Effort 1 - Enclaves: The Haltafi, as a warlike, fractious group of pastoralists and warrior elites ruling over semetic cities, were often hired by more prosperous Gwonhelod and Sumerian cities as mercenaries to wage war against each other. Over time, while many Haltafi remained pastoral semi-nomads out in their ancestral plains, many cities developed Haltafi enclaves, distinct, but more-or-less assimilated. They maintained their ancestral tongues (though creolized to varying degrees with Sumerian), and many of the religious practices of their ancestors, but actively incorporated aspects of Sumerian culture, including calendar, cuneiform writing, and many of the Gods of the Sumerians (though interpreted through Haltafi lens as Ensha.) Therefore, when the Shekemboirat swept through the area, many Sumerian cities were both already used to Haltafi practices, and had an established local community from which to draw administrators and leaders.
Effort 2 - The Shephard, Boir, walked among the lands of the Gwonhelod and the Sumerians and the Murhelod and all of tribes of all the hills. He learned all their tongues, and made friends in all the biggest temples and meanest of tents. He gave offerings to all their Ensha, and learned the wisdoms of the Shekems and the Priests, as well as that of the fisherman and goldworker and farmer. It was one night, when he slept on the beach near where the Jenashek river met the ocean, that he dreamed. He dreamed of a great wave crashing over the whole of the world, washing away all that the people were, as the sea of dreams had once washed over his ancestors, sending them far from their homes on the banks of the Mawransa. Many Ensha beseached him in his dream, Prime among them Migwon and Eridu and Dephadir the Sky Father, to save the world, as he alone understood all the peoples and could unite them against the darkness that was coming. They gave him gifts with which to accomplish this task. Shiny new weapons of Bronze and Beaten Iron, and a herd of horses. Boir returned home, and marshalled all the greatest warriors and heroes of the Haltafi, and led them first against the cities of the Gwonhelod, Distant Kin as they were. With chariot and sword his united them, and marshalled their force, marching against the Sumerian Cities, so that, all together, they could weather the evil that was coming. One after the other, they fell, incorporated into his Shekemat. The Temples were demolished and rebuilt in the style of the Enshasal, and the kings deposed or appointed as regional governor's, depending on their actions. Finally, the entirety of the Sumerian Rivers had been united under the Shekemboirat. It was only upon his deathbed, as he made the Journey to the Mawransa, Migwon at his side, that he realized that the wave he had been warned about had been himself.
Gwonhelod
Effort 1 - Urbanization: The Gwonhelod have generally moved from small numbers of cities with larger numbers of pastoralist to becoming more and more urbanized, all throughout the area.
Effort 2 - Conquest: See above. The Gwonhelod cities formed the initial core of the Shekemboirat
Murhelod
Effort 1 - Expansion and consolidation over the sea. The Murhelod, generally speaking, expanded towards the coastline, either driving out or subsuming local settlements.
Effort 2 - The Murhelod on the coast have taken to the sea as fish to water. They build ships, trade far along the coast, and fish the bounty of the oceans. In fact, their first true cities were built upon the wealth of the sea, both the commerce it brought the Murhelod and the wealth of resources (Such as pearls and purple dye.)
jackelgull
An aberration of nature
Sindhi colonies in Iran:
The arrival of the Gwonsheld in Mesopotamia pushed other nomadic groups out of the region and into Iran, causing them to brush up on Sindhi city state alliances on the other side of the Himalayas. While there was occasional conflicts, these nomadic groups were never an existential threat to the larger city states, however they were capable of sacking smaller settlements in the sphere of influence of the larger cities. In order to more carefully manage this frontier, defensive outposts were placed in defensible terrain. In time as the barbarians became Sindhi, these outposts became cities. Due to their origins, these cities functioned wildly different from other Sindhi cities. Unlike those cities which developed the temple-barracks of their large city state protectors, the Iranian colonies remained defensive outposts at heart. They were governed by a rajyapala (military governor) appointed on the authority of the Ganapravara. Because these were outposts, the priesthood had decided that the efforts of the paramhita in their parent city state applied to them as well, and it was not incumbent for these outposts to have a temple of their own. Combined with their lack of wealth and thus merchants, meant that the military was the sole authority in these colonies and the rajypala ruled with almost unchecked authority.
Sindhi colonies in the South:
Ostensibly, the first navy in the subcontinent, and the beginnings of a long and illustrious naval tradition, began with Srinigar. Compared to its brethern Sindhi cities, Srinigar was unique. It had a large port and a fledgling navy made of galleys crewed by as many as four hundred slaves pulling oars. In order to maintain this navy, the city state went raiding along the coast pulling young strong men from their towns and villages. The colonies founded to the South were also in service to this navy - they provided the Benteak wood that made the navy possible. They were different from the Iranian colonies though in that they were not solely run by the military - rather the were formed as a joint venture by merchants first with the permission of the military who subsidized the venture through protection and sometimes material means. In exchange for this aid, the merchant class promised to provide the required resources (The typical agreement was a large shipment in ten years, then smaller shipments every 3 years). This lead to a situation where several merchant families controlled the colony in a kind of oligopoly, with whatever priesthood existing there being coopted through large lavish gifts.
The First Kingdom:
At around the same time the Tian and Yu were forming their first kingdoms, so would the Sindhi. In the eastern most reaches of the Sindhi world a storm was stirring with the ascension of Asav as Ganapravara. A fearless warrior and excellent commander, his first step was to significantly expand his city's capability to wage war. He augmented the warrior caste, made of heavy infantry wielding bronze weaponry and armor with light infantry auxiliaries, using skirmishers to pin the enemy while his troops flanked them. This auxiliary was later armed by a state maintained armory, thus increasing potential recruitment. These men were drawn to join by the promise of loot and the chance to better their status by potentially joining the warrior caste if they distinguished themselves in battle.
In a series of wars over the next decade, Asav would strip the neighboring two city states of their allied smaller cities and surround and starve them into submission and force them to join the burgeoning kingdom before moving on to larger and larger alliances. In order to make maintaining his conquests easier, Asav would uproot dissidents from their homelands and move them East, settling them onto the Ganges. These colonies maintained the political social structure of traditional Sindhi city states.
Unlike developments in the West where security concerns expanded the power of the Ganapravara at the expense of the Paramhita, in Asav's case, the Ganapravara and Paramhita mutually upheld each other's power. The Paramhita agreed with Asav's claimage of divine parentage from the god of war, and in a symbolic marriage ceremony, married Asav to the goddess Sindhi (This was of course done after those who might cry sacrilege were already in exile), while Asav built temples in every city he conquered and filled it with a priesthood drawn from handpicked priests of the Paramhita's choosing.
In the end, Asav's kingdom didn't last. He died at the same time as his high priest causing political chaos which was taken advantage of by enemies domestic and foreign to throw off the shackles of oppression. His lasting legacy would be the book he wrote of his life and conquests. Titled simply "Asav" it opened with a challenge to future conquerors and was part mythic epic and part tactics and strategy. The book would spread and be considered a Sindhi classic.
The arrival of the Gwonsheld in Mesopotamia pushed other nomadic groups out of the region and into Iran, causing them to brush up on Sindhi city state alliances on the other side of the Himalayas. While there was occasional conflicts, these nomadic groups were never an existential threat to the larger city states, however they were capable of sacking smaller settlements in the sphere of influence of the larger cities. In order to more carefully manage this frontier, defensive outposts were placed in defensible terrain. In time as the barbarians became Sindhi, these outposts became cities. Due to their origins, these cities functioned wildly different from other Sindhi cities. Unlike those cities which developed the temple-barracks of their large city state protectors, the Iranian colonies remained defensive outposts at heart. They were governed by a rajyapala (military governor) appointed on the authority of the Ganapravara. Because these were outposts, the priesthood had decided that the efforts of the paramhita in their parent city state applied to them as well, and it was not incumbent for these outposts to have a temple of their own. Combined with their lack of wealth and thus merchants, meant that the military was the sole authority in these colonies and the rajypala ruled with almost unchecked authority.
Sindhi colonies in the South:
Ostensibly, the first navy in the subcontinent, and the beginnings of a long and illustrious naval tradition, began with Srinigar. Compared to its brethern Sindhi cities, Srinigar was unique. It had a large port and a fledgling navy made of galleys crewed by as many as four hundred slaves pulling oars. In order to maintain this navy, the city state went raiding along the coast pulling young strong men from their towns and villages. The colonies founded to the South were also in service to this navy - they provided the Benteak wood that made the navy possible. They were different from the Iranian colonies though in that they were not solely run by the military - rather the were formed as a joint venture by merchants first with the permission of the military who subsidized the venture through protection and sometimes material means. In exchange for this aid, the merchant class promised to provide the required resources (The typical agreement was a large shipment in ten years, then smaller shipments every 3 years). This lead to a situation where several merchant families controlled the colony in a kind of oligopoly, with whatever priesthood existing there being coopted through large lavish gifts.
The First Kingdom:
At around the same time the Tian and Yu were forming their first kingdoms, so would the Sindhi. In the eastern most reaches of the Sindhi world a storm was stirring with the ascension of Asav as Ganapravara. A fearless warrior and excellent commander, his first step was to significantly expand his city's capability to wage war. He augmented the warrior caste, made of heavy infantry wielding bronze weaponry and armor with light infantry auxiliaries, using skirmishers to pin the enemy while his troops flanked them. This auxiliary was later armed by a state maintained armory, thus increasing potential recruitment. These men were drawn to join by the promise of loot and the chance to better their status by potentially joining the warrior caste if they distinguished themselves in battle.
In a series of wars over the next decade, Asav would strip the neighboring two city states of their allied smaller cities and surround and starve them into submission and force them to join the burgeoning kingdom before moving on to larger and larger alliances. In order to make maintaining his conquests easier, Asav would uproot dissidents from their homelands and move them East, settling them onto the Ganges. These colonies maintained the political social structure of traditional Sindhi city states.
Unlike developments in the West where security concerns expanded the power of the Ganapravara at the expense of the Paramhita, in Asav's case, the Ganapravara and Paramhita mutually upheld each other's power. The Paramhita agreed with Asav's claimage of divine parentage from the god of war, and in a symbolic marriage ceremony, married Asav to the goddess Sindhi (This was of course done after those who might cry sacrilege were already in exile), while Asav built temples in every city he conquered and filled it with a priesthood drawn from handpicked priests of the Paramhita's choosing.
In the end, Asav's kingdom didn't last. He died at the same time as his high priest causing political chaos which was taken advantage of by enemies domestic and foreign to throw off the shackles of oppression. His lasting legacy would be the book he wrote of his life and conquests. Titled simply "Asav" it opened with a challenge to future conquerors and was part mythic epic and part tactics and strategy. The book would spread and be considered a Sindhi classic.
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Seon
Not An Evil Liar
Turn 2 Orders (Short)
1. Unite the Nehethoten people of the Nile River under a singular empire of the Manetho Dynasty
2. First great religious monuments of the Nehethoten people start to litter the desert: monoliths and faces of men and animals.
3. Mediterranean trade: As constant war along the Nile becomes less of a pertinent threat and city states of the Nehethoten people organize into the structure of Manetho Dynasty Egypt, trade blossoms more than ever before. Ambitious traders of Nehethoten people reach beyond the coastal waters of Palestine and along Asia Minor and Greece.
Palestine (Sisselthoten)
1. The first backers of the Manetho Dynasty are richly rewarded for generations by the new Empire of Egypt. Combination of unimaginable wealth in the hands of few leaders, as well as cultural influence of the centralized Nehethoten kingdom and growing concerns over migrant invaders see first kingdoms and even confederations arise in Palestine.
..........................................................................................................................................................................................................
Kingdoms rise, Kingdoms fall. Such was the way for centuries in the lands of Nehethoten. Ambitious and young Diviner Kings tried to dominate, and either failed or met success. Either way, their kingdoms would fall to dust soon after their death. This was the norm--until the unthinkable happened. King Manetho the Second, Ruler of Akmanetho, buoyed by mines of gold and copper within his lands, united all of the Land of Reeds (Upper Egypt) through bloody conquest, diplomatic marriages, and agreements of vassalage. When he died, he would leave the throne to his adopted son: Manetho the third.
The rulers of the Land of Marsh mocked the young Diviner. What could such a boy do? Surely this great kingdom would fall as it always did to the dustbins of history. When it did not, they grew concerned. The new Diviner, despite his age, was a brilliant young man close to the gods and the angels they bound. With gold and copper from his land, the armies of his city states did not waver in loyalty. Without soldiers, the governors and lords of cities along the Nile chafed, but could do nothing.
Eventually, as King Manetho the Third's influence creeped into the Land of Marsh, the still-free rulers of Lower Egypt rose to challenge the young king as one. The war raged for almost a generation, but the kings of the Land of Marsh were disunified and quarrelsome while King Manetho's realm was united and wealthy. The other Diviners were cast from their thrones or made to serve Manetho. He wed many daughters of the Land of Marshes, and the first Empire of Egypt formed from their union.
..........................................................................................................................................................................
Having united the lands of earth, Manetho III and his successors turned to the firmament. They sought to bound the flames of angels--stars in the skies--into material bodies, and give names to what was unnameable. Monoliths depicting the many-eyed, many-armed, and many-winged creatures, closely correlated with astronomical entities, begin to litter the cities of Egypt, erected by Diviners and their artisan priests whose skill with stone and dirt grows with every passing generations.
These angels are bound and caged in prisons of stone: great statues depicting faces of men and animals. Places of worship builds around the caged angels as the Diviners demand they carry their wishes to the gods. Manetho III and his successors would also seek to entrap their mortal souls in these constructs, where they will joyously be able to see their great empire grow for all time to come.
........................................................................................................................................................................
Traders of Nehethoten, now representing the interests of a unified Egypt and with more goods than ever before, flood the Mediterranean coastline, bringing unimaginable wealth and prosperity to the lands of Asia Minor and Greece, in exchange for slaves and tin. The Great Works of the Nehethoten demand more labor than ever before, and the unsatiable kingdom is always willing to pay, in bushels of wheat and bundles of gold. Enclaves of Nehethoten form in Cyprus, Troy, and the Island of Crete, bringing writing and strange painted figurines of minor angels to these lands.
...........................................................................................................................................................................
Sisselthoten warriors fought alongside the armies of Manetho, lured by promise of gold and loot in the lands of Marshes. They were rewarded for generations by grateful Manetho Dynasty for their invaluable services in the war, receiving gifts of gold and daughters of Egypt for many years. As time passes, angel-sculptures of the Nehethoten appear in the lands of Palestine too, and great kings arise along these shaded lands. While they are not united the way the Nehethoten are, they nevertheless come together either in bloodshed or fear of never-ending stream of migrating invaders to the east and north.
1. Unite the Nehethoten people of the Nile River under a singular empire of the Manetho Dynasty
2. First great religious monuments of the Nehethoten people start to litter the desert: monoliths and faces of men and animals.
3. Mediterranean trade: As constant war along the Nile becomes less of a pertinent threat and city states of the Nehethoten people organize into the structure of Manetho Dynasty Egypt, trade blossoms more than ever before. Ambitious traders of Nehethoten people reach beyond the coastal waters of Palestine and along Asia Minor and Greece.
Palestine (Sisselthoten)
1. The first backers of the Manetho Dynasty are richly rewarded for generations by the new Empire of Egypt. Combination of unimaginable wealth in the hands of few leaders, as well as cultural influence of the centralized Nehethoten kingdom and growing concerns over migrant invaders see first kingdoms and even confederations arise in Palestine.
..........................................................................................................................................................................................................
Kingdoms rise, Kingdoms fall. Such was the way for centuries in the lands of Nehethoten. Ambitious and young Diviner Kings tried to dominate, and either failed or met success. Either way, their kingdoms would fall to dust soon after their death. This was the norm--until the unthinkable happened. King Manetho the Second, Ruler of Akmanetho, buoyed by mines of gold and copper within his lands, united all of the Land of Reeds (Upper Egypt) through bloody conquest, diplomatic marriages, and agreements of vassalage. When he died, he would leave the throne to his adopted son: Manetho the third.
The rulers of the Land of Marsh mocked the young Diviner. What could such a boy do? Surely this great kingdom would fall as it always did to the dustbins of history. When it did not, they grew concerned. The new Diviner, despite his age, was a brilliant young man close to the gods and the angels they bound. With gold and copper from his land, the armies of his city states did not waver in loyalty. Without soldiers, the governors and lords of cities along the Nile chafed, but could do nothing.
Eventually, as King Manetho the Third's influence creeped into the Land of Marsh, the still-free rulers of Lower Egypt rose to challenge the young king as one. The war raged for almost a generation, but the kings of the Land of Marsh were disunified and quarrelsome while King Manetho's realm was united and wealthy. The other Diviners were cast from their thrones or made to serve Manetho. He wed many daughters of the Land of Marshes, and the first Empire of Egypt formed from their union.
..........................................................................................................................................................................
Having united the lands of earth, Manetho III and his successors turned to the firmament. They sought to bound the flames of angels--stars in the skies--into material bodies, and give names to what was unnameable. Monoliths depicting the many-eyed, many-armed, and many-winged creatures, closely correlated with astronomical entities, begin to litter the cities of Egypt, erected by Diviners and their artisan priests whose skill with stone and dirt grows with every passing generations.
These angels are bound and caged in prisons of stone: great statues depicting faces of men and animals. Places of worship builds around the caged angels as the Diviners demand they carry their wishes to the gods. Manetho III and his successors would also seek to entrap their mortal souls in these constructs, where they will joyously be able to see their great empire grow for all time to come.
........................................................................................................................................................................
Traders of Nehethoten, now representing the interests of a unified Egypt and with more goods than ever before, flood the Mediterranean coastline, bringing unimaginable wealth and prosperity to the lands of Asia Minor and Greece, in exchange for slaves and tin. The Great Works of the Nehethoten demand more labor than ever before, and the unsatiable kingdom is always willing to pay, in bushels of wheat and bundles of gold. Enclaves of Nehethoten form in Cyprus, Troy, and the Island of Crete, bringing writing and strange painted figurines of minor angels to these lands.
...........................................................................................................................................................................
Sisselthoten warriors fought alongside the armies of Manetho, lured by promise of gold and loot in the lands of Marshes. They were rewarded for generations by grateful Manetho Dynasty for their invaluable services in the war, receiving gifts of gold and daughters of Egypt for many years. As time passes, angel-sculptures of the Nehethoten appear in the lands of Palestine too, and great kings arise along these shaded lands. While they are not united the way the Nehethoten are, they nevertheless come together either in bloodshed or fear of never-ending stream of migrating invaders to the east and north.
Update 2: The First Empires (3500-3000BC approx)
Some say an army of horsemen, others
Say foot soldiers, still others, a fleet;
Is the fairest thing on the dark earth
I say it is whatever one loves.
Sappho, Fragment 16, trans. Diane Raynor.
"The storm that came to be -- its lamentation hangs heavy on me. Raging about because of the storm, I am the woman for whom the storm came to be. The storm that came to be -- its lamentation hangs heavy on me. The bitter storm having come to be for me during the day, I trembled on account of that day but I did not flee before the day's violence. Because of this wretched storm I could not see a good day for my rule, not one good day for my rule.
The bitter lament having come to be for me during the night, I trembled on account of that night but I did not flee before the night's violence. The awesomeness of this storm, destructive of cities, truly hangs heavy on me. Because of its existence, in my nightly sleeping place, even in my nightly sleeping place truly there was no peace for me. Nor, because of this wretched storm, was the quiet of my sleeping place, not even the quiet of my sleeping place, allowed to me.”
Excerpt from the Lamentation for Urim
Near East:
Sumeria experienced a period of consolidation under the rule of Ur. Ur, the largest urban settlement on earth, soon established itself at the heart of an empire under the rule of King Sukud. Sukud was not himself a priest and most of his early reign was concerned with breaking priestly opposition to his rule. Sukud made common cause with the smaller temples, cancelled debts which were mostly owed to the largest temples, and placed his own candidates in charge just to make sure.
With his domestic situation sorted, Sukud embarked on a programme of conquest which saw him subdue most of the Sumerian and Gwonsheld cities. Sukud died but his regime proved stable and his dynasty ran to a further three kings. The success to the Sukudian dynasty owes much to their mastery over their home city, but the real wisdom of Sukud can be found in his insistence on leaving reliable partners in the cities he conquered.
Sometimes the old rulers were left in place, but more often than not disaffected elements of the elite were placed on the throne and the old rulers deported to Ur. This served to neutralise opposition and the uncertain position of the new rulers, who often relied on Sukidan spears to remain in power, helped to strengthen the bonds of mutual dependence which held the Empire together.
Lagash, which surrendered before it was conquered was allowed to retain its old rulers and with their base secure Lagash’s kings could politick against the Sukidians. Under the rule of the fourth Sukidian King, Lagash rebelled and in the largest pitched battle in history recorded thus far defeated Ur.
The new Lagash kings were in time replaced with a dynasty from their great enemy Kish. The Kishites were replaced by another dynasty from Ur who were replaced in-turn by a dynasty from Uruk. The Sumerian world order had a certain stability to it. A well observed norm was a certain grace towards the losers. This was wise policy because the dynasties power rested on the might of a single city-state and even the strongest of these could not go it alone.
The Gwonsheld were bit players in this drama but their power increased over the period as more of them settled and their numbers swelled. A number of other cities were founded to accommodate this growth. Gwonsheld also became the language of most inhabitants of Suhldrep and Amohandrep. The Semitic influence having waned with time. Politically the Gwonsheld continued to follow Sumerian norms with their Kings overpowering the priests in their struggles for power. The growing urbanisation and the end of nomadism meant that the old Gwonsheld religion became extinct. Some small rituals and other ephemera were retained but in religious practice, at least, it was hard to tell what was Gwonsheld and Sumerian.
The Haltafi came increasingly into the Sumerian orbit around this time. Following Sukud’s unification, demand for mercenaries increased with the dynasties increasingly coming to rely on them. The Gwonsheld proved unable to service this demand and so their barbaric cousins began to fill the niche. Before long Haltafi mercenaries became a common sight in the region. For the Haltafi service in Sumeria became a means of amassing wealth in youth before retiring home in old age. Some did not however return home and so permanent Haltafi communities sprung up.
Uruk at this point was the greatest city on earth. Fat on the fruits of its empire, large beyond compare and master of the known world for two centuries. The death blow for her empire and what turned out to be the end of an era and the start of a new one came from a most unexpected quarter. The Haltafi were united by the charisma of the King-Prophet Boir, who began life as a shepherd and would finish life as the lord of the known world.
Sumerian accounts of Boir speak of ecstatic visions he had at the hands of the demons Migwon, Eridu and Dephadir as the reason for his success. This seems as plausible as any a reason for why the Haltafi unified. With a large army behind him and the dynasty of Uruk in dissary following a succesison struggle, there was little to stop Boir speaking in. He burned Uruk to the ground along with its temples and the just like that the jewel of the world was gone and for a time there was nothing to replace it.
The resulting Shekemat, which was what Boir called his empire, was unstable. Boir’s hosts had been lucky but luck could not make up for their lack of numbers or the undying hatred of the people they occupied. The latter having been achieved by Boir deciding to profane and demolish the temples in order to raise up his own in their place. The old elites were left in place, a move that most knew to be folly but with their numbers so few what other choice did the Haltafi have. These old elites soon began to plot and plan.
They did not have to wait long. Boir’s death followed soon after the foundation of the empire and hot on its heels was a succession crisis which never had a chance to resolve itself. The empire’s subjects rose up almost as one and ejected their occupiers. This occured even in the Haltafi heartlands, which were mostly Semitic in any case, and resentful of the levies and taxes needed to sustain an empire that gave them no benefit.
The Haltafi were no more fortunate than their empire and ceased to exist as a people. The proximate cause of this might have something to do with the Sumerians commemorating the fall of the Shekemat with poems which recorded dashing babies heads against walls and turning the twin rivers red with blood. The Gwonsheld were no less vengeful and the experience seems to have seen them abandon almost all that remained of their ancestors religion and culture. Perhaps because it was tainted by association with Boir.
Along the banks of the Nile, the Nehethoten also underwent a period of unification. King Manetho II whose finances were flush with a wealth of gold and copper, launched a war of conquest which saw Upper Egypt brought to heel. This was not the first such unification, but it survived. Manetho I held his kingdom together with a mix of carrot and stick. Those who resisted he murdered and those who surrendered he reward. He was also wise to adopt an able successor who ruled as Manetho II. His own children were murdered but his regime survived and that is what secured his immortality as the father of Egypt.
Manetho II was not quite as able a man as his adopted father. For all the disunity in Lower Egypt, he struggled for his entire life to subdue it even with the wealth and power of the entirety of Lower Egypt behind him. Succeeding only in the twilight of his life, he nominated his most component son, the product of a marriage to a northerner, on the throne. Manetho III tidied up the question of dynastic succession by murdering his male siblings and marrying his sisters. Manetho III hardened by wars fought under his father was no fool when it came to maintaining power.
He was however a fool for all things astrological. Manetho III’s court was full of astrologer-priests and priest-astrologers (there being a rather important distinction between the two). Manetho’s astrological regime became fixated on not just interpreting what the stars told him but also in capturing their essence for his own purposes. To do this Manetho III raised up great monoliths which he used to capture the spirits of the stars. On his deathbed, Manetho III posed the following question: “Would it be possible to catch my spirit in stone too?” The answer was a resounding yes from his astrologer-priests and priest-astrologers and his dynasty and the dynasties that followed continued the practice of raising up monoliths in their own image in a bid to live forever.
The unity and durability under Manetho III and his successors proved a boon for trade. Under Egypt’s eyes, the Sisselthoten in Palestine founded their first real cities in the region. The largest of these were to be found in areas where water was plentiful, for this was still a dry land. These inland settlements were the most influenced by the Nehethoten being the oldest settlements in Palestine. Most were sited with defense in mind, being built on hills and surrounded by mud bricks, but growing prosperity and security saw the growth of new cities on the plains.
A smaller number of cities also began to grow on the coast. Traditionally trade with Egypt had passed overland. But with peace reigning in Egypt, sea trade increased. The Egyptians proved to be mediocre traders in their own right with much of the commerce was captured by the wily Sisselthoten. Trade soon flourished with ships sourcing copper from Cyprus mined from the Troodos Mountains. Occasional journeys were also made further afield along the coast of Asia Minor which held little of interest except as a means of reaching Crete. Crete soon became an important trading link because of the sophistication and elegance of its statutory and pottery.
The Cretans lived in small cities, which tended to be at some distance from the coast. These were settlements lacked walls but had large palace complexes in which statutory and pottery was made by the leading clan. Other lesser clans lived in smaller dwellings which ringed around the main palace. As trade grew, these palaces also increased in size at the expense of smaller clans who soon came to live within the walls as servants and a significant number of new palace complexes were founded.
The Murhelod appear have been driven from the rich agricultural hinterlands in Cilicia and to have been forced to live on the coast. This proved a fateful choice because the coast was far less valuable and much more difficult to extract a surplus from. In these circumstances, the Muhrelod declined in power and were soon placed under the dominion of the native Taepabani who capitalised on the agricultural wealth of the hinterlands.
The Taepabani soon had Cilicia under their thumb and the collapse of the Shekemat allowed them to grab control of the Semitic Aleppo plateau too. The establishment of the Taepabani Empire proved a great help to the Muhrelod who were kept relevant acting as intermediaries in the robust trade that soon developed between the Taepabani and the Nehethoten. A smaller overland trade from Sumeria also soon passed through Murhelod territories too on the way to the imperial capital Felasaf on the Anatolian Plateau.
India:
The Sindhi underwent a great expansion as cities continued to found daughter cities. These cities grew in time and founded still more cities. Before long the Indus Valley which had cradled the Sindhi since time immemorial was full and the new foundations began to be made further abreast.
The greatest of these new cities was Srinigar which was founded on the coast. Its growth was underpinned by its access to a bewilderingly large number of exotic trade wares. These wares were sent overland to the palaces of the old elites back in the heartland.
The wealth generated from trade allowed Srinigar to found numerous colonies. These were placed at strategic sites to secure resources or claim good harbours. The city itself also raised up a truly impressive new temple to the Goddess herself. Built on top of a hill it shone as the beaten copper it was clad in reflected the sun onto the city below.
However, the most unusual feature of the city was the preeminent role merchants played in its governance. In all other cities it was the priests who mattered. But Srinigar’s wealth came from trade and the merchants decided to rule themselves. The connivance of the priests in this bold departure from Sindhi norms was secured through lavish gifts.
In the west, the Sindhi cities on the frontier were founded as military encampments and never lost that feel. Ruled by military governors, rajyapala, appointed by the high priests back in the metropole, they never developed a civil culture. Temples were rudimentary, the merchant class weak and the rajyapala despotic.
Unsurprisingly, a position as a rajyapala became a sure-fire means to advancement in life. Nigh unlimited autonomy and substantial military resources proved irresistible to anyone with the sense to make use of that freedom. One such figure was the warrior king Asav, who began life as a military governor, used his army to make himself high priest in his home city and then still not satisfied set about conquering everything in sight.
His preferred method to break the major cities was by picking off their smaller allied cities and starve them into submission. This proved to be economical in terms of effort and his management of dissent was much the same. Those who objected to his regime he exiled east to the Gangetic Plains with promises of support to build a new life. Those who declined at his generous offer lost their heads.
To further secure his power he co-opted the religious establishment and married the goddess Sindhi in what is called a symbolic marriage but one which he nonetheless fulfilled his husbandly duties through the spilling of his seed into the Goddesses waters. He also had an epic poem commissioned which recorded his life. However, Asav’s empire proved ephemeral, he had made no provision for his own death, and collapsed with his death.
Asav’s model proved inspiring and empire building became something of a rajyapala specialty. Most never lasted and eventually the high priests - some of whom were rajyapala come good - fought back by placing the frontiers more firmly under their control, rather a lot simply relocated themselves there, and by building larger political units that proved much more difficult for any single rajyapala to take over.
East Asia:
The wars between the Yu intensified with a cataclysmic effect which spurred radical change. Some of this conflict was between settlements, but the relatively fluid nature of Yu leadership meant that most conflict was internal. To manage the risk of being overthrown, the Yu Kings demoted in importance their nobility and raised up instead a class of slave servitors. These servitors were usually hereditary servants of the Kings, but many foreigners also found ‘employ’ in their service.
Jin Wu Zi a Tian by birth, perhaps, was one such figure. Jin Wu was a gift from a Ma chief to the Yu King Yao Ming Wang. There is some confusion as to whether Jin Wu was gifted as a courtesan or courtier. The characters for the two words being one and the same. Whatever the case, Jin Wu became first known as a poet of some skill. Later he was given control of an army which he led to success. When Yao ming died, Jin Wu usurped the throne and ruled in his place.
What followed was a bloody war of consolidation as Jin Wu destroyed the other Yu kingdoms and bought the Ma to heel. Some have detected in this a Tian mindset of control which is placed in opposition to a Yu mindset emphasising superiority. If we accept Jin Wu was a Tian, for which there is little evidence, and if we moreover accept his historicity itself an unproven claim, then we are left with the picture of a figure who was quite unlike figures found in either cultures.
Jin Wu’s regime survived his son but with no male heir the dynasty ended to the relief of many. The regime was too radical a break with the past and too many remembered the time before him. But it left in its wake an indelible memory of a powerful King who united what was the largest empire then seen on earth. Some of his works proved quixotic. Attempts to transplant Tian towers failed, although around this time mound building fell out of favour, leaving in their wake a much diminished architectural heritage. However, his new capital built on a grid with large walls proved to have a lasting impact.
Though we have no direct evidence of Jin Wu, we do have evidence of second emperor on one piece of pottery. The work depicts River God Hu We as a long serpentine dragon coloured a brilliant jade green while the second shows him as a falcon with sharp talons and beak picked out in magnificent yellow. The glazes remain clear and bright with little signs of cracking and the pots are of exquisite manufacture and the Emperor’s seal is still visible.
Another set of pots from somewhat later are copies of this work. These pots which were found in a Ma settlement are stamped with the seals of the third and fourth Yang Emperors. It has been suggested that this is evidence of tribute being paid from the Yang to the powerful Di Confederacy which had, following the fall of the Jin, become the preeminent power in the region.
The Yang were an indigenous dynasty who replaced the Jin. The first Yang Emperor was a member of the second Jin Emperor’s Court. A favoured servator slave he attempted to seize the entire empire for himself following his masters death. The old nobility, led by the Duke of Yin, raised their own forces though they were defeated after a decade of hard fighting. Yet the war had made the Yang a mere shadow of the Jin. The Ma had slipped the noose and coalesced into the Di Confederation named for its first King Di Jie. The Ma now with their own cities and towns, established as garrisons by the Jin, proved to be the stronger party and as the evidence discussed earlier suggests extracted tribute from the Yang.
The Yang practiced meritocracy during the reign first and second Emperor. Subsequent Emperors however forget their origins as servators and in a state of constant crisis instead came to rely on the nobility to stabilise the empire. This came at the cost of a weaker state at the worst possible time as the Di Confederation’s power increased. The subjugation of the Yang proved indifferent, the Di Confederation being too weak to do more than extract tribute from their southern neighbours. But the great inheritance of the Di was to be found in the Quan Ji which was a text, purportedly written by Jin Wu, that set out a set of principles for governance.
The Di Confederacy was an ethnically diverse state that welded together the Ma, themselves a polyglot group, with a range of other groups who were conquered or joined the confederation. The Qiang and Jie being the two most notable groups. The Ma spoke a language that was recognizable to the Yu but the Jie spoke a language that was alien to all other ears and were nomads who had migrated from the north. This was perhaps caused by the effects of the Li migration further north. The Jie were defeated by the Di after a long struggle but were allowed to settle provided they furnished the Di with soldiers. The Qiang were a group of Li who fled south and found sanctuary with the Di.
The Di Kings faced with a large state, comprised largely of non-Ma, there also being numerous agricultural people’s under the Di’s control, found the Quan Ji useful. It helped that the tribal politics of the Ma were meritocratic to begin with, with an emphasis on success expressed through martial success on the field. This aligned well with the values in the Quan Ji and provided the Di with ideological cover to add Qiang and Jie into their inner circle. This meritocratic approach to awarding office was paired with the aggressive use of marriage to bind the new ruling class together. Further reforms consistent with the Quan Ji, created a bureaucracy apparatus that answered to the King alone. The Di were soon the most fervent disciples of the Jin.
To the north the demands of fighting the Li drove the creation of the first Tian confederation in the West under the Shaman King Kai Ren. Kai Ren proved a conqueror every bit as skilled as Jin Wu. With force and threat he united most of the Tian, establishing the Zhu kingdom, but his death saw rebellions which drastically diminished the Zhu’s power and birthed new confederations, the Shan and Wu to the east and the Yang to the north, who stood opposed to the Zhu but fell out among themselves before long when the threat of Zhu reconquest had diminished.
The confederations were headed by a council of shaman kings drawn from the heads of each of the member cities. Regular conclaves were held and it was these that imparted the leagues durability. City elites who had hitherto only cooperated out of need soon began to cultivate marriage links between cities, building on existing practice, and developed their own league identities. This did not represent a sharp break in Tian culture: palace building on a monumental scale with large halls and inner gardens built at the base of the typical, but increasingly large, Tian towers occured all across the Yellow River basin.
The Zhu having recovered from their setbacks proved the most powerful of the confederations. In a series of wars over a hundred period, they broke the Li and seized for themselves vast territories along the Yellow River. These land was offered free of charge to Tian who wished to settle it. Sparsely populated at first, these lands soon filled up to their carrying capacity which drove a massive increase in Zhu revenue. While not rulers of the largest state on earth, the Zhu Kings are perhaps the wealthiest.
The only thing stopping the Zhu using their huge advantage in population to good effect was a lack of willingness to do so. The Tian had become averse to serious violence which has been suggested was as a result of a deeply held cultural memory of the dark time before the Zhu rose. War became increasingly ritualised with most conflict focused inwards in tests of marital skill between elites. Subsequent generations would find this faintly ridiculous and it has since been much remarked upon. War is not a game.
The Li who fled the Zhu and went west established petty kingdoms of their own. These were no match for the Zhu, but proved difficult to conquer with Zhu armies struggling against Li settlements that were built with defense in mind. Palisades of the earlier period were supplemented with walls of rammed earth, sometimes faced with stone, and punctuated with towers. The Zhu armies lacking the logistics to sustain a siege and deprived of the loot which motivated their spirits would soon tire and returned home.
Under influence from the Tian, the Li Kingdoms grew increasingly sophisticated over the period. Palace complexes were built and large-scale bronze working workshops were established. These workshops made bronze goods, mixing Tian and indigenous artistic motifs, were of a quality equal to the Tian. Agriculture techniques found among the Tian soon diffused across the porous frontier, which opened up huge tracts of land to agriculture spurring a sustained rise in population.
This rise in population was never sufficient given the amount of land available and unlike the Zhu, the Li had no hinterland to draw population from. Instead, the Li raided. What had been a normal Li practice soon became an institutionalised affair. Annual forays became a favoured method of securing labour, slaves, to bring into cultivation their abundant land. Most of these slaves were Tian, but increasing numbers came from other groups like the Jie whose flight south caused the Di Confederacy problems. On the back of this slaving the Li grew greatly in size and power to the to the great detriment of the Zhu.
The America’s:
The Aapo saw significant growth in their population during the period. This occurred in three stages. The first stage came about as companion planting of maize, beans and squash took off. Companion planting allowed for greater yields and reduced the amount of time that land had to be left fallow. The growth form this provided the labour needed to sustain the intermediate period which saw vast tracts of hitherto vacant land opened up for cultivation. Yields in these new lands were poorer. But this was remedied in the final stage which saw the construction of extensive irrigation networks to make up the deficit in water in the new lands.
The provinces which formed the backbone of Aapo society proved too small for this change in circumstances. Increasingly, supra-provincial groupings became the norm as the demands of massive irrigation projects outstripped the capabilities of any single province to supply the labour required. Specialisation also favoured scale with dedicated workshops becoming standard for the production of pottery and tools. Finally, the genteel violence of the previous era intended only to prove one’s manliness soon ceased and was replaced by endemic raiding undertaken by a warrior class keen to prove themselves through the taking of slaves.
Curiously, the Aapo’s did not develop cities. The lattice nature of their settlement pattern, with lots of small centres, and the ability to mobilise labour horizontally between settlements without the need for a central authority, except mutual consent, mitigated against their formation. Specialists however tended to congregate in dedicated villages which grew in importance over the period. Increasingly many of these were refounded on hills and surrounded with walls. A potter having become worth rather more as a slave than a farmer.
These fortified specialists villages soon became a world unto themselves. Having an effective monopoly on the production of most goods, they were in a good position to extract substantial rents from the farmer villages. The tradition of itinerant storytellers and calendrical experts continued but increasingly the real expertise was to be found in the specialist villages. It was the specialists who had the resources to support them and the leisure time and knowledge to appreciate their calendrical endeavours and stories. This appreciation took numerous forms. The most significant innovation however was the creation of pots which were fired black and incised with intricate calendrical calculations which were so well ahead of what everyone was doing they might as well have come from aliens.
The Karaiwasiq nobility continued to grow in strength over the period and the competition which had come to characterise their society increased. The most obvious manifestation of the growing power was the construction of ever taller temple mounds. The size of the mound became a shorthand for the power of the family itself. The labour demands of these temple mounds were immense and if the labour should stop the mound would soon begin to wash away.
Overtime these mounds began to take on a stepped appearance. Partly this was out of necessity, steps helped protect the temple from erosion. But an artistic purpose is also discernible stepped pyramids looked rather different to natural hills. These pyramids soon became the largest man made structures on earth. The largest such pyramid, the Llaqta Atik Pyramid, rose 50 meters above its surrounding plain and had a square base that was half a kilometer in width.
Llaqta Atik was a scion of one of the oldest and most powerful nobles in Llaqtawa and became the preeminent political figure of his era. A visionary he managed to subvert the clunky council structure that had hitherto governed Karaiwasiq society by the simple expedient of bribing the minor nobility who, in theory if not usually fact, had an equal vote to the most powerful. There are indications that this effort was soon met with opposition with Atik put down with violence. A number of large mounds appear to have been abandoned in Llaqtawa around this time the victims of a political trailblazer.
With a powerful voting bloc behind him, Atik proceeded to effect radical change. He gave himself almost dictatorial powers and set about reorganising the fabric of society. His first act was to create a new artisan caste. His second was to reserve for himself the sole production of culturally significant articles like regalia and devotional objects. This helped cement his position at the centre of life in Llaqtawa. His third act was to redistribute the remaining artisans to those he favoured. At the same time he abrogated himself the power to redistribute these artisans as he saw fit.
These changes created a sense of unity that allowed Atik to bring all of Karaiwasiq society under his control. He held it all together with gift giving and the redistribution of artisans. It also helped that the Llaqta Atik Pyramid which he increased in size massively during his life dwarfed everything else. His final act and perhaps his most significant was to create himself a new title of Rimaqpaq.
Atik’s dynasty did not long survive its charismatic founders lifetime. There were only so many artisans who could be redistributed without using violence and the Kawaiwasiq were, as yet, not particularly. Nevertheless, Atik had established a means by which Karaiwasiq elites could exercise control over the entirety of Kawaiwasiq society.
Rimaqpaq were unusual but they did arise with enough frequency to create a sense of a unified Karaiwasiq people. This was largely the result of the redistribution of artisans all around the Karaiwasiq world whenever a new Rimaqpaq managed to raise himself up to the throne. Later Rimaqpaq would even redistribute peasants and nobles to suit their political interests. This also helped to smooth over dialectal and cultural variations which would have otherwise arisen.
Eurasian Steppe:
A cooling climate on the steppes proved the death knell of the Sydevity culture. The black earth froze and the Mezhevity ceased to visit preferring warmer latitudes. The survivors split into two groups. The Vodyaki turned to the rivers for sustenance but continued to farm, remained living in villages surrounded by earth mounds and retained the material culture of their ancestors.
Some Sydevity not near rivers were forced to turn to the forests which were less productive. This caused a collapse in population and a simplification of material culture. Hunting also proved less reliable than fishing which made hunger and starvation constant companions. When food ran short, which it often did, the Dremuchi would become fierce raiders. Entire villages would attack each other in a desperate bid for survival with the losers encouraged to commit ritual suicide to honour Marena mother of famine and winter and Shatun god of hunger and war.
The Mezheivty adjusted their migration routes as the temperature fell extending their range south. In doing so they became fully nomadic. The material cultural of the Mezheivty blossomed. This came in the form of leather belts which were decorated with pieces of bone and their seams held together with threads of dyed wool. Felt which adorned the squat tents of the Mezheivty was of exceptional quality, with the Mezheivty favouring abstract images of great vibrancy.
These abstract images were used as prompts for the epic poems that the Mezheivty told around the fire. Each piece of felt would contain an image that contained details of the story. A meeting might be symbolised by two horses facing each other. A parting by the same two horses looking away. In this way complex poems could be remembered and presented to the appreciate audience in the right order.
The tale of Volodaya the Old is one such legend. A female chieftain, Volodaya, the story goes, formed the first steppe empire united by her charm and sexual appeal. As her youth and beauty faded, she relied on her smarts. She used riddles to humiliate the young chiefs who would seek to take her throne. Cows being the favoured subject material.
Volodaya’s empire did not survive her death, as legend would have it, it melted away the night of her death after a 70 year reign. The underlying truth of the story seems unlikely, the length of her reign alone supports that contention, but if one instead looks at it as a post-hoc explanation of the Mezheivty matriarchical structure it starts to make more sense.
Some say an army of horsemen, others
Say foot soldiers, still others, a fleet;
Is the fairest thing on the dark earth
I say it is whatever one loves.
Sappho, Fragment 16, trans. Diane Raynor.
"The storm that came to be -- its lamentation hangs heavy on me. Raging about because of the storm, I am the woman for whom the storm came to be. The storm that came to be -- its lamentation hangs heavy on me. The bitter storm having come to be for me during the day, I trembled on account of that day but I did not flee before the day's violence. Because of this wretched storm I could not see a good day for my rule, not one good day for my rule.
The bitter lament having come to be for me during the night, I trembled on account of that night but I did not flee before the night's violence. The awesomeness of this storm, destructive of cities, truly hangs heavy on me. Because of its existence, in my nightly sleeping place, even in my nightly sleeping place truly there was no peace for me. Nor, because of this wretched storm, was the quiet of my sleeping place, not even the quiet of my sleeping place, allowed to me.”
Excerpt from the Lamentation for Urim
Near East:
Sumeria experienced a period of consolidation under the rule of Ur. Ur, the largest urban settlement on earth, soon established itself at the heart of an empire under the rule of King Sukud. Sukud was not himself a priest and most of his early reign was concerned with breaking priestly opposition to his rule. Sukud made common cause with the smaller temples, cancelled debts which were mostly owed to the largest temples, and placed his own candidates in charge just to make sure.
With his domestic situation sorted, Sukud embarked on a programme of conquest which saw him subdue most of the Sumerian and Gwonsheld cities. Sukud died but his regime proved stable and his dynasty ran to a further three kings. The success to the Sukudian dynasty owes much to their mastery over their home city, but the real wisdom of Sukud can be found in his insistence on leaving reliable partners in the cities he conquered.
Sometimes the old rulers were left in place, but more often than not disaffected elements of the elite were placed on the throne and the old rulers deported to Ur. This served to neutralise opposition and the uncertain position of the new rulers, who often relied on Sukidan spears to remain in power, helped to strengthen the bonds of mutual dependence which held the Empire together.
Lagash, which surrendered before it was conquered was allowed to retain its old rulers and with their base secure Lagash’s kings could politick against the Sukidians. Under the rule of the fourth Sukidian King, Lagash rebelled and in the largest pitched battle in history recorded thus far defeated Ur.
The new Lagash kings were in time replaced with a dynasty from their great enemy Kish. The Kishites were replaced by another dynasty from Ur who were replaced in-turn by a dynasty from Uruk. The Sumerian world order had a certain stability to it. A well observed norm was a certain grace towards the losers. This was wise policy because the dynasties power rested on the might of a single city-state and even the strongest of these could not go it alone.
The Gwonsheld were bit players in this drama but their power increased over the period as more of them settled and their numbers swelled. A number of other cities were founded to accommodate this growth. Gwonsheld also became the language of most inhabitants of Suhldrep and Amohandrep. The Semitic influence having waned with time. Politically the Gwonsheld continued to follow Sumerian norms with their Kings overpowering the priests in their struggles for power. The growing urbanisation and the end of nomadism meant that the old Gwonsheld religion became extinct. Some small rituals and other ephemera were retained but in religious practice, at least, it was hard to tell what was Gwonsheld and Sumerian.
The Haltafi came increasingly into the Sumerian orbit around this time. Following Sukud’s unification, demand for mercenaries increased with the dynasties increasingly coming to rely on them. The Gwonsheld proved unable to service this demand and so their barbaric cousins began to fill the niche. Before long Haltafi mercenaries became a common sight in the region. For the Haltafi service in Sumeria became a means of amassing wealth in youth before retiring home in old age. Some did not however return home and so permanent Haltafi communities sprung up.
Uruk at this point was the greatest city on earth. Fat on the fruits of its empire, large beyond compare and master of the known world for two centuries. The death blow for her empire and what turned out to be the end of an era and the start of a new one came from a most unexpected quarter. The Haltafi were united by the charisma of the King-Prophet Boir, who began life as a shepherd and would finish life as the lord of the known world.
Sumerian accounts of Boir speak of ecstatic visions he had at the hands of the demons Migwon, Eridu and Dephadir as the reason for his success. This seems as plausible as any a reason for why the Haltafi unified. With a large army behind him and the dynasty of Uruk in dissary following a succesison struggle, there was little to stop Boir speaking in. He burned Uruk to the ground along with its temples and the just like that the jewel of the world was gone and for a time there was nothing to replace it.
The resulting Shekemat, which was what Boir called his empire, was unstable. Boir’s hosts had been lucky but luck could not make up for their lack of numbers or the undying hatred of the people they occupied. The latter having been achieved by Boir deciding to profane and demolish the temples in order to raise up his own in their place. The old elites were left in place, a move that most knew to be folly but with their numbers so few what other choice did the Haltafi have. These old elites soon began to plot and plan.
They did not have to wait long. Boir’s death followed soon after the foundation of the empire and hot on its heels was a succession crisis which never had a chance to resolve itself. The empire’s subjects rose up almost as one and ejected their occupiers. This occured even in the Haltafi heartlands, which were mostly Semitic in any case, and resentful of the levies and taxes needed to sustain an empire that gave them no benefit.
The Haltafi were no more fortunate than their empire and ceased to exist as a people. The proximate cause of this might have something to do with the Sumerians commemorating the fall of the Shekemat with poems which recorded dashing babies heads against walls and turning the twin rivers red with blood. The Gwonsheld were no less vengeful and the experience seems to have seen them abandon almost all that remained of their ancestors religion and culture. Perhaps because it was tainted by association with Boir.
Along the banks of the Nile, the Nehethoten also underwent a period of unification. King Manetho II whose finances were flush with a wealth of gold and copper, launched a war of conquest which saw Upper Egypt brought to heel. This was not the first such unification, but it survived. Manetho I held his kingdom together with a mix of carrot and stick. Those who resisted he murdered and those who surrendered he reward. He was also wise to adopt an able successor who ruled as Manetho II. His own children were murdered but his regime survived and that is what secured his immortality as the father of Egypt.
Manetho II was not quite as able a man as his adopted father. For all the disunity in Lower Egypt, he struggled for his entire life to subdue it even with the wealth and power of the entirety of Lower Egypt behind him. Succeeding only in the twilight of his life, he nominated his most component son, the product of a marriage to a northerner, on the throne. Manetho III tidied up the question of dynastic succession by murdering his male siblings and marrying his sisters. Manetho III hardened by wars fought under his father was no fool when it came to maintaining power.
He was however a fool for all things astrological. Manetho III’s court was full of astrologer-priests and priest-astrologers (there being a rather important distinction between the two). Manetho’s astrological regime became fixated on not just interpreting what the stars told him but also in capturing their essence for his own purposes. To do this Manetho III raised up great monoliths which he used to capture the spirits of the stars. On his deathbed, Manetho III posed the following question: “Would it be possible to catch my spirit in stone too?” The answer was a resounding yes from his astrologer-priests and priest-astrologers and his dynasty and the dynasties that followed continued the practice of raising up monoliths in their own image in a bid to live forever.
The unity and durability under Manetho III and his successors proved a boon for trade. Under Egypt’s eyes, the Sisselthoten in Palestine founded their first real cities in the region. The largest of these were to be found in areas where water was plentiful, for this was still a dry land. These inland settlements were the most influenced by the Nehethoten being the oldest settlements in Palestine. Most were sited with defense in mind, being built on hills and surrounded by mud bricks, but growing prosperity and security saw the growth of new cities on the plains.
A smaller number of cities also began to grow on the coast. Traditionally trade with Egypt had passed overland. But with peace reigning in Egypt, sea trade increased. The Egyptians proved to be mediocre traders in their own right with much of the commerce was captured by the wily Sisselthoten. Trade soon flourished with ships sourcing copper from Cyprus mined from the Troodos Mountains. Occasional journeys were also made further afield along the coast of Asia Minor which held little of interest except as a means of reaching Crete. Crete soon became an important trading link because of the sophistication and elegance of its statutory and pottery.
The Cretans lived in small cities, which tended to be at some distance from the coast. These were settlements lacked walls but had large palace complexes in which statutory and pottery was made by the leading clan. Other lesser clans lived in smaller dwellings which ringed around the main palace. As trade grew, these palaces also increased in size at the expense of smaller clans who soon came to live within the walls as servants and a significant number of new palace complexes were founded.
The Murhelod appear have been driven from the rich agricultural hinterlands in Cilicia and to have been forced to live on the coast. This proved a fateful choice because the coast was far less valuable and much more difficult to extract a surplus from. In these circumstances, the Muhrelod declined in power and were soon placed under the dominion of the native Taepabani who capitalised on the agricultural wealth of the hinterlands.
The Taepabani soon had Cilicia under their thumb and the collapse of the Shekemat allowed them to grab control of the Semitic Aleppo plateau too. The establishment of the Taepabani Empire proved a great help to the Muhrelod who were kept relevant acting as intermediaries in the robust trade that soon developed between the Taepabani and the Nehethoten. A smaller overland trade from Sumeria also soon passed through Murhelod territories too on the way to the imperial capital Felasaf on the Anatolian Plateau.
India:
The Sindhi underwent a great expansion as cities continued to found daughter cities. These cities grew in time and founded still more cities. Before long the Indus Valley which had cradled the Sindhi since time immemorial was full and the new foundations began to be made further abreast.
The greatest of these new cities was Srinigar which was founded on the coast. Its growth was underpinned by its access to a bewilderingly large number of exotic trade wares. These wares were sent overland to the palaces of the old elites back in the heartland.
The wealth generated from trade allowed Srinigar to found numerous colonies. These were placed at strategic sites to secure resources or claim good harbours. The city itself also raised up a truly impressive new temple to the Goddess herself. Built on top of a hill it shone as the beaten copper it was clad in reflected the sun onto the city below.
However, the most unusual feature of the city was the preeminent role merchants played in its governance. In all other cities it was the priests who mattered. But Srinigar’s wealth came from trade and the merchants decided to rule themselves. The connivance of the priests in this bold departure from Sindhi norms was secured through lavish gifts.
In the west, the Sindhi cities on the frontier were founded as military encampments and never lost that feel. Ruled by military governors, rajyapala, appointed by the high priests back in the metropole, they never developed a civil culture. Temples were rudimentary, the merchant class weak and the rajyapala despotic.
Unsurprisingly, a position as a rajyapala became a sure-fire means to advancement in life. Nigh unlimited autonomy and substantial military resources proved irresistible to anyone with the sense to make use of that freedom. One such figure was the warrior king Asav, who began life as a military governor, used his army to make himself high priest in his home city and then still not satisfied set about conquering everything in sight.
His preferred method to break the major cities was by picking off their smaller allied cities and starve them into submission. This proved to be economical in terms of effort and his management of dissent was much the same. Those who objected to his regime he exiled east to the Gangetic Plains with promises of support to build a new life. Those who declined at his generous offer lost their heads.
To further secure his power he co-opted the religious establishment and married the goddess Sindhi in what is called a symbolic marriage but one which he nonetheless fulfilled his husbandly duties through the spilling of his seed into the Goddesses waters. He also had an epic poem commissioned which recorded his life. However, Asav’s empire proved ephemeral, he had made no provision for his own death, and collapsed with his death.
Asav’s model proved inspiring and empire building became something of a rajyapala specialty. Most never lasted and eventually the high priests - some of whom were rajyapala come good - fought back by placing the frontiers more firmly under their control, rather a lot simply relocated themselves there, and by building larger political units that proved much more difficult for any single rajyapala to take over.
East Asia:
The wars between the Yu intensified with a cataclysmic effect which spurred radical change. Some of this conflict was between settlements, but the relatively fluid nature of Yu leadership meant that most conflict was internal. To manage the risk of being overthrown, the Yu Kings demoted in importance their nobility and raised up instead a class of slave servitors. These servitors were usually hereditary servants of the Kings, but many foreigners also found ‘employ’ in their service.
Jin Wu Zi a Tian by birth, perhaps, was one such figure. Jin Wu was a gift from a Ma chief to the Yu King Yao Ming Wang. There is some confusion as to whether Jin Wu was gifted as a courtesan or courtier. The characters for the two words being one and the same. Whatever the case, Jin Wu became first known as a poet of some skill. Later he was given control of an army which he led to success. When Yao ming died, Jin Wu usurped the throne and ruled in his place.
What followed was a bloody war of consolidation as Jin Wu destroyed the other Yu kingdoms and bought the Ma to heel. Some have detected in this a Tian mindset of control which is placed in opposition to a Yu mindset emphasising superiority. If we accept Jin Wu was a Tian, for which there is little evidence, and if we moreover accept his historicity itself an unproven claim, then we are left with the picture of a figure who was quite unlike figures found in either cultures.
Jin Wu’s regime survived his son but with no male heir the dynasty ended to the relief of many. The regime was too radical a break with the past and too many remembered the time before him. But it left in its wake an indelible memory of a powerful King who united what was the largest empire then seen on earth. Some of his works proved quixotic. Attempts to transplant Tian towers failed, although around this time mound building fell out of favour, leaving in their wake a much diminished architectural heritage. However, his new capital built on a grid with large walls proved to have a lasting impact.
Though we have no direct evidence of Jin Wu, we do have evidence of second emperor on one piece of pottery. The work depicts River God Hu We as a long serpentine dragon coloured a brilliant jade green while the second shows him as a falcon with sharp talons and beak picked out in magnificent yellow. The glazes remain clear and bright with little signs of cracking and the pots are of exquisite manufacture and the Emperor’s seal is still visible.
Another set of pots from somewhat later are copies of this work. These pots which were found in a Ma settlement are stamped with the seals of the third and fourth Yang Emperors. It has been suggested that this is evidence of tribute being paid from the Yang to the powerful Di Confederacy which had, following the fall of the Jin, become the preeminent power in the region.
The Yang were an indigenous dynasty who replaced the Jin. The first Yang Emperor was a member of the second Jin Emperor’s Court. A favoured servator slave he attempted to seize the entire empire for himself following his masters death. The old nobility, led by the Duke of Yin, raised their own forces though they were defeated after a decade of hard fighting. Yet the war had made the Yang a mere shadow of the Jin. The Ma had slipped the noose and coalesced into the Di Confederation named for its first King Di Jie. The Ma now with their own cities and towns, established as garrisons by the Jin, proved to be the stronger party and as the evidence discussed earlier suggests extracted tribute from the Yang.
The Yang practiced meritocracy during the reign first and second Emperor. Subsequent Emperors however forget their origins as servators and in a state of constant crisis instead came to rely on the nobility to stabilise the empire. This came at the cost of a weaker state at the worst possible time as the Di Confederation’s power increased. The subjugation of the Yang proved indifferent, the Di Confederation being too weak to do more than extract tribute from their southern neighbours. But the great inheritance of the Di was to be found in the Quan Ji which was a text, purportedly written by Jin Wu, that set out a set of principles for governance.
The Di Confederacy was an ethnically diverse state that welded together the Ma, themselves a polyglot group, with a range of other groups who were conquered or joined the confederation. The Qiang and Jie being the two most notable groups. The Ma spoke a language that was recognizable to the Yu but the Jie spoke a language that was alien to all other ears and were nomads who had migrated from the north. This was perhaps caused by the effects of the Li migration further north. The Jie were defeated by the Di after a long struggle but were allowed to settle provided they furnished the Di with soldiers. The Qiang were a group of Li who fled south and found sanctuary with the Di.
The Di Kings faced with a large state, comprised largely of non-Ma, there also being numerous agricultural people’s under the Di’s control, found the Quan Ji useful. It helped that the tribal politics of the Ma were meritocratic to begin with, with an emphasis on success expressed through martial success on the field. This aligned well with the values in the Quan Ji and provided the Di with ideological cover to add Qiang and Jie into their inner circle. This meritocratic approach to awarding office was paired with the aggressive use of marriage to bind the new ruling class together. Further reforms consistent with the Quan Ji, created a bureaucracy apparatus that answered to the King alone. The Di were soon the most fervent disciples of the Jin.
To the north the demands of fighting the Li drove the creation of the first Tian confederation in the West under the Shaman King Kai Ren. Kai Ren proved a conqueror every bit as skilled as Jin Wu. With force and threat he united most of the Tian, establishing the Zhu kingdom, but his death saw rebellions which drastically diminished the Zhu’s power and birthed new confederations, the Shan and Wu to the east and the Yang to the north, who stood opposed to the Zhu but fell out among themselves before long when the threat of Zhu reconquest had diminished.
The confederations were headed by a council of shaman kings drawn from the heads of each of the member cities. Regular conclaves were held and it was these that imparted the leagues durability. City elites who had hitherto only cooperated out of need soon began to cultivate marriage links between cities, building on existing practice, and developed their own league identities. This did not represent a sharp break in Tian culture: palace building on a monumental scale with large halls and inner gardens built at the base of the typical, but increasingly large, Tian towers occured all across the Yellow River basin.
The Zhu having recovered from their setbacks proved the most powerful of the confederations. In a series of wars over a hundred period, they broke the Li and seized for themselves vast territories along the Yellow River. These land was offered free of charge to Tian who wished to settle it. Sparsely populated at first, these lands soon filled up to their carrying capacity which drove a massive increase in Zhu revenue. While not rulers of the largest state on earth, the Zhu Kings are perhaps the wealthiest.
The only thing stopping the Zhu using their huge advantage in population to good effect was a lack of willingness to do so. The Tian had become averse to serious violence which has been suggested was as a result of a deeply held cultural memory of the dark time before the Zhu rose. War became increasingly ritualised with most conflict focused inwards in tests of marital skill between elites. Subsequent generations would find this faintly ridiculous and it has since been much remarked upon. War is not a game.
The Li who fled the Zhu and went west established petty kingdoms of their own. These were no match for the Zhu, but proved difficult to conquer with Zhu armies struggling against Li settlements that were built with defense in mind. Palisades of the earlier period were supplemented with walls of rammed earth, sometimes faced with stone, and punctuated with towers. The Zhu armies lacking the logistics to sustain a siege and deprived of the loot which motivated their spirits would soon tire and returned home.
Under influence from the Tian, the Li Kingdoms grew increasingly sophisticated over the period. Palace complexes were built and large-scale bronze working workshops were established. These workshops made bronze goods, mixing Tian and indigenous artistic motifs, were of a quality equal to the Tian. Agriculture techniques found among the Tian soon diffused across the porous frontier, which opened up huge tracts of land to agriculture spurring a sustained rise in population.
This rise in population was never sufficient given the amount of land available and unlike the Zhu, the Li had no hinterland to draw population from. Instead, the Li raided. What had been a normal Li practice soon became an institutionalised affair. Annual forays became a favoured method of securing labour, slaves, to bring into cultivation their abundant land. Most of these slaves were Tian, but increasing numbers came from other groups like the Jie whose flight south caused the Di Confederacy problems. On the back of this slaving the Li grew greatly in size and power to the to the great detriment of the Zhu.
The America’s:
The Aapo saw significant growth in their population during the period. This occurred in three stages. The first stage came about as companion planting of maize, beans and squash took off. Companion planting allowed for greater yields and reduced the amount of time that land had to be left fallow. The growth form this provided the labour needed to sustain the intermediate period which saw vast tracts of hitherto vacant land opened up for cultivation. Yields in these new lands were poorer. But this was remedied in the final stage which saw the construction of extensive irrigation networks to make up the deficit in water in the new lands.
The provinces which formed the backbone of Aapo society proved too small for this change in circumstances. Increasingly, supra-provincial groupings became the norm as the demands of massive irrigation projects outstripped the capabilities of any single province to supply the labour required. Specialisation also favoured scale with dedicated workshops becoming standard for the production of pottery and tools. Finally, the genteel violence of the previous era intended only to prove one’s manliness soon ceased and was replaced by endemic raiding undertaken by a warrior class keen to prove themselves through the taking of slaves.
Curiously, the Aapo’s did not develop cities. The lattice nature of their settlement pattern, with lots of small centres, and the ability to mobilise labour horizontally between settlements without the need for a central authority, except mutual consent, mitigated against their formation. Specialists however tended to congregate in dedicated villages which grew in importance over the period. Increasingly many of these were refounded on hills and surrounded with walls. A potter having become worth rather more as a slave than a farmer.
These fortified specialists villages soon became a world unto themselves. Having an effective monopoly on the production of most goods, they were in a good position to extract substantial rents from the farmer villages. The tradition of itinerant storytellers and calendrical experts continued but increasingly the real expertise was to be found in the specialist villages. It was the specialists who had the resources to support them and the leisure time and knowledge to appreciate their calendrical endeavours and stories. This appreciation took numerous forms. The most significant innovation however was the creation of pots which were fired black and incised with intricate calendrical calculations which were so well ahead of what everyone was doing they might as well have come from aliens.
The Karaiwasiq nobility continued to grow in strength over the period and the competition which had come to characterise their society increased. The most obvious manifestation of the growing power was the construction of ever taller temple mounds. The size of the mound became a shorthand for the power of the family itself. The labour demands of these temple mounds were immense and if the labour should stop the mound would soon begin to wash away.
Overtime these mounds began to take on a stepped appearance. Partly this was out of necessity, steps helped protect the temple from erosion. But an artistic purpose is also discernible stepped pyramids looked rather different to natural hills. These pyramids soon became the largest man made structures on earth. The largest such pyramid, the Llaqta Atik Pyramid, rose 50 meters above its surrounding plain and had a square base that was half a kilometer in width.
Llaqta Atik was a scion of one of the oldest and most powerful nobles in Llaqtawa and became the preeminent political figure of his era. A visionary he managed to subvert the clunky council structure that had hitherto governed Karaiwasiq society by the simple expedient of bribing the minor nobility who, in theory if not usually fact, had an equal vote to the most powerful. There are indications that this effort was soon met with opposition with Atik put down with violence. A number of large mounds appear to have been abandoned in Llaqtawa around this time the victims of a political trailblazer.
With a powerful voting bloc behind him, Atik proceeded to effect radical change. He gave himself almost dictatorial powers and set about reorganising the fabric of society. His first act was to create a new artisan caste. His second was to reserve for himself the sole production of culturally significant articles like regalia and devotional objects. This helped cement his position at the centre of life in Llaqtawa. His third act was to redistribute the remaining artisans to those he favoured. At the same time he abrogated himself the power to redistribute these artisans as he saw fit.
These changes created a sense of unity that allowed Atik to bring all of Karaiwasiq society under his control. He held it all together with gift giving and the redistribution of artisans. It also helped that the Llaqta Atik Pyramid which he increased in size massively during his life dwarfed everything else. His final act and perhaps his most significant was to create himself a new title of Rimaqpaq.
Atik’s dynasty did not long survive its charismatic founders lifetime. There were only so many artisans who could be redistributed without using violence and the Kawaiwasiq were, as yet, not particularly. Nevertheless, Atik had established a means by which Karaiwasiq elites could exercise control over the entirety of Kawaiwasiq society.
Rimaqpaq were unusual but they did arise with enough frequency to create a sense of a unified Karaiwasiq people. This was largely the result of the redistribution of artisans all around the Karaiwasiq world whenever a new Rimaqpaq managed to raise himself up to the throne. Later Rimaqpaq would even redistribute peasants and nobles to suit their political interests. This also helped to smooth over dialectal and cultural variations which would have otherwise arisen.
Eurasian Steppe:
A cooling climate on the steppes proved the death knell of the Sydevity culture. The black earth froze and the Mezhevity ceased to visit preferring warmer latitudes. The survivors split into two groups. The Vodyaki turned to the rivers for sustenance but continued to farm, remained living in villages surrounded by earth mounds and retained the material culture of their ancestors.
Some Sydevity not near rivers were forced to turn to the forests which were less productive. This caused a collapse in population and a simplification of material culture. Hunting also proved less reliable than fishing which made hunger and starvation constant companions. When food ran short, which it often did, the Dremuchi would become fierce raiders. Entire villages would attack each other in a desperate bid for survival with the losers encouraged to commit ritual suicide to honour Marena mother of famine and winter and Shatun god of hunger and war.
The Mezheivty adjusted their migration routes as the temperature fell extending their range south. In doing so they became fully nomadic. The material cultural of the Mezheivty blossomed. This came in the form of leather belts which were decorated with pieces of bone and their seams held together with threads of dyed wool. Felt which adorned the squat tents of the Mezheivty was of exceptional quality, with the Mezheivty favouring abstract images of great vibrancy.
These abstract images were used as prompts for the epic poems that the Mezheivty told around the fire. Each piece of felt would contain an image that contained details of the story. A meeting might be symbolised by two horses facing each other. A parting by the same two horses looking away. In this way complex poems could be remembered and presented to the appreciate audience in the right order.
The tale of Volodaya the Old is one such legend. A female chieftain, Volodaya, the story goes, formed the first steppe empire united by her charm and sexual appeal. As her youth and beauty faded, she relied on her smarts. She used riddles to humiliate the young chiefs who would seek to take her throne. Cows being the favoured subject material.
Volodaya’s empire did not survive her death, as legend would have it, it melted away the night of her death after a 70 year reign. The underlying truth of the story seems unlikely, the length of her reign alone supports that contention, but if one instead looks at it as a post-hoc explanation of the Mezheivty matriarchical structure it starts to make more sense.
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I'll apportion points and give you all a spiel about what the next age is tomorrow.
Expect a map sometime this week.
P.S. I hate drawing maps.
Near East
Sumerians (Sumerians 3)
Gwonsheld (Thomas 2 / Sumerians 1)
Nehehthoten (Seon 3)
Sisselthoten (Sisselthoten 2 / Seon 1)
Murhelod (Thomas 2)
Cypriots (Cyprus 2)
Cretans (Cretans 3)
Taepabani (Taepabani 2 / Thomas 1)
Semetic Syrian Kingdoms (SSKs 2)
East Asia
Sindhi (Jackel 4)
Yu/Yang (Crezth 3)
Ma/Di (Ma 2 / Crezth 2)
Tian (Johanna 3)
Li (Li 2 / Johanna 1)
Americas:
Karaiwasiq (MarcherJovian 3)
Aapo (Shadowbound 3)
Eurasian Steppe:
Vodyaki (Ahigin 2)
Mezhevity (Ahigin 2)
Dremuchi (Ahigin 2)
I’m awarding one point each to Jackel and Crezth. Asav was a cool figure. Jackel’s story sealed the deal. Crezth because I liked his narrative and the courtesan/courtier mixup was amusing. Honourable mentions to Shadowbound, whose story I decided to date later, Thomas and Ahigin. Thomas’ Boir will likely feature as a demon for some time to come.
This coming turn will be the Age of Wonders. Everyone will get an extra point to describe some kind of wonder. It could be a written work, it could be built, it could be musical, it could be a volcanic vent where you can make bulk sacrifices to the Gods, it could be discovering a new God. I’m not fussed. But please be creative.
The next turn will run from 3000BC to 2500BC.
Expect a map sometime this week.
P.S. I hate drawing maps.
Near East
Sumerians (Sumerians 3)
Gwonsheld (Thomas 2 / Sumerians 1)
Nehehthoten (Seon 3)
Sisselthoten (Sisselthoten 2 / Seon 1)
Murhelod (Thomas 2)
Cypriots (Cyprus 2)
Cretans (Cretans 3)
Taepabani (Taepabani 2 / Thomas 1)
Semetic Syrian Kingdoms (SSKs 2)
East Asia
Sindhi (Jackel 4)
Yu/Yang (Crezth 3)
Ma/Di (Ma 2 / Crezth 2)
Tian (Johanna 3)
Li (Li 2 / Johanna 1)
Americas:
Karaiwasiq (MarcherJovian 3)
Aapo (Shadowbound 3)
Eurasian Steppe:
Vodyaki (Ahigin 2)
Mezhevity (Ahigin 2)
Dremuchi (Ahigin 2)
I’m awarding one point each to Jackel and Crezth. Asav was a cool figure. Jackel’s story sealed the deal. Crezth because I liked his narrative and the courtesan/courtier mixup was amusing. Honourable mentions to Shadowbound, whose story I decided to date later, Thomas and Ahigin. Thomas’ Boir will likely feature as a demon for some time to come.
This coming turn will be the Age of Wonders. Everyone will get an extra point to describe some kind of wonder. It could be a written work, it could be built, it could be musical, it could be a volcanic vent where you can make bulk sacrifices to the Gods, it could be discovering a new God. I’m not fussed. But please be creative.
The next turn will run from 3000BC to 2500BC.
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jackelgull
An aberration of nature
Excerpt from Asav
believed to have been added later by admiring rajypala
On the day of his appointed passing, Death sent plague upon Asav. For seven days and seven nights he held out against fever.
Knowing plague would not break the warrior, Death sent mosquitos to suck the blood from his body. For seven days and seven nights Asav held strong against the mosquitos, holding on to life even as he became without blood.
Knowing the mosquitos would not break Asav, Death then sent poisonos serpents from the mythical lands of Aegypt.For seven days and seven nights their poisons tormented him, but Asav did not die.
Finally Death herself came to him and said, "Close your eyes brave warrior. I will treat you as a king treats another king.
And so Asav closed his eyes going from a corruptible kingdom on Earth to an incorruptible kingdom in the Land of the Gods
Strategy and tactics
Upon hearing of his war with the Lutti Confederation, his commanders were dismayed.
"The Lutti have as many men as a field of grain has wheat. We will surely perish" they cried.
To them Asav spoke "It matters not if they has as many men as the stars in the sky, for we will outnumber them in the decisive engagements"
Asav on Concentration of Force
An army that does not utilize quartermasters is an army that cannot conquer. There should be one quartermaster for every ghataka (smallest unit of Asav's forces, around 40-60 men) to tally the men's needs so that a campaign can occur.
Asav on logistics
The Conqueror's Challenge
From the East to the West I have conquered the lands of known world
Brought low the mightiest warriors and humbled the proud Srinigar
I am Asav, favored of the great goddess Sindhi and heir to the ages.
Oh Rulers and Warriors unborn heed my words.
The works of man are fleeting, all will perish.
But the conqueror lives forever in his glory.
This work stands as my testament for the ages
the witness of my empire.
To those who would claim the same glory after me
this is the conqueror's challenge
believed to have been added later by admiring rajypala
On the day of his appointed passing, Death sent plague upon Asav. For seven days and seven nights he held out against fever.
Knowing plague would not break the warrior, Death sent mosquitos to suck the blood from his body. For seven days and seven nights Asav held strong against the mosquitos, holding on to life even as he became without blood.
Knowing the mosquitos would not break Asav, Death then sent poisonos serpents from the mythical lands of Aegypt.For seven days and seven nights their poisons tormented him, but Asav did not die.
Finally Death herself came to him and said, "Close your eyes brave warrior. I will treat you as a king treats another king.
And so Asav closed his eyes going from a corruptible kingdom on Earth to an incorruptible kingdom in the Land of the Gods
Strategy and tactics
Upon hearing of his war with the Lutti Confederation, his commanders were dismayed.
"The Lutti have as many men as a field of grain has wheat. We will surely perish" they cried.
To them Asav spoke "It matters not if they has as many men as the stars in the sky, for we will outnumber them in the decisive engagements"
Asav on Concentration of Force
An army that does not utilize quartermasters is an army that cannot conquer. There should be one quartermaster for every ghataka (smallest unit of Asav's forces, around 40-60 men) to tally the men's needs so that a campaign can occur.
Asav on logistics
The Conqueror's Challenge
From the East to the West I have conquered the lands of known world
Brought low the mightiest warriors and humbled the proud Srinigar
I am Asav, favored of the great goddess Sindhi and heir to the ages.
Oh Rulers and Warriors unborn heed my words.
The works of man are fleeting, all will perish.
But the conqueror lives forever in his glory.
This work stands as my testament for the ages
the witness of my empire.
To those who would claim the same glory after me
this is the conqueror's challenge
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jackelgull
An aberration of nature
Turn 3 orders
short form
long form
short form
Spoiler :
long form
Spoiler :
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thomas.berubeg
Wandering the World
Spoiler Short Form Orders: :
Spoiler Long Form Orders :
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Shadowbound
Incorrugible
- Joined
- Mar 4, 2007
- Messages
- 4,078
The Aapo Classical Era
Spoiler Short Form :
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jackelgull
An aberration of nature
The Pala Civilization
When exactly did the Sindhi colonies in Iran cease to be Sindhi is a contentious question. Most experts date the change to around 2700 BC when the language of the Iranian Sindhi became more or less unintelligible with the mainland, having too many Semitic influences. Some experts however, date the change to earlier, using the mythological space the West occupies in Sindhi myths to track when exactly the frontier was seen as alien, but this work is highly controversial.
Language: Sindhi with heavy Semitic influences
Important institutions:
The rajypala: A holdover from the Pala’s origins as Sindhi defensive encampments, the rajypala never disappeared from the power structure, rather instead, changing from an appointed position to a dynastic one as cultural notions of dynastic kingship filtered in from its neighbors the Hurran Confederacy, a confederacy of several Semitic speaking tribes.
The Asav: The Sindhi colonies in Iran confederated in increasingly larger numbers as the population of other ethnic groups in the area grew. The leaders of these confederacies were known as Asav’s owing to the fact that a united Sindhi world was associated with Asav in the West. Before him, the Sindhi colonies in Iran associated themselves closely with their home metropolis. After him and the spate of empire building rajypala after him, the notion that the Sindhi colonies in iran belonged together became common wisdom, and Asav was associated with strength and leadership.
There is evidence that this position began as a first among equal deal among rajypalas where succession was based on accumulated prestige and wealth, until one rajypala managed to, through strategic use of dynastic marriages, the spending of lots of wealth and the accumulation of lots of prestige, establish the Marashtra dynasty. In order to further boost their legitimacy, the Marashtra claimed to be descended from Asav.
Warrior Societies of Asav: After Asav’s death, a project to deify him emerged in the wider Sindhi world. This was in part due to his epic which acted as an effective tool of propaganda. Nowhere was this stronger than in the Iranian colonies from which Asav came. One of the enduring Pala institutions to come out of this project were the warrior societies of Asav, which worshipped Asav as the warrior ideal. Each one had its own code of conduct and rites of initiation but memorization of Asav’s epic was one constant requirement, and it is from these societies that the epic was kept alive.
The most prestigious one was the society that the Marashtra princes belonged to, and this society often consisted of the creme of the elite, acting as a binding glue for all the important players in the Marashtra court and a way for the Marashtra prince to establish his position among his peers.
Kaver: The Pala were not temple builders as such - the “proper” Sindhi who first came to settle Iran did not need it - they were assured that the high priest of the metropolis could still tend to their spiritual needs, and instead small personal shrines to various deities cropped up instead. As time went on, and some barbarians adopted the culture of the Sindhi, they too did not see the need for temples - it was not important in their cultures, and it was not important to the Iranian Sindhi. As time went on, and contact from the metropolis became more irregular, the importance of organized religion only decreased. The final blow however, were the attempts of high priests to control the frontiers.
Instead what came up was a system of Kaver (wandering ministrels) who would travel the land, and for a small gift, sing to the gods, offering prayers in beauteous voices. These kaver were well regarded, and there are many myths in Pala culture entreating men to open their hearth and homes to the kaver. The Kaver were also not limited to the cities were the Pala dominated, they were fixation in the surrounding farmlands (which were mostly worked by non-Pala) and to the North, indicating that they are a cultural import from the Houthni, a people native to the area.
Kaver were oft coveted by rajypala - their training in the arts of epic poetry and song may have had religious significance, but their art could be put to use creating epics for the rajypala, thus increasing their prestige and granting them immortality in glory.
Military: During the formation of the Pala, the Sindhi were moving towards the Bronze Age - the copper mines in Jharkand were beginning to output enough copper for city states to make their armor and weapons from bronze, and bronze armor and weapons became the norm for Sindhi heavy infantry. The same did not happen for the Pala - what copper did exist in the area was in the hands of the Houthni to the North, and the Pala did not have enough riches to trade for significant amounts of bronze. Instead the Pala developed lightly armored spear infantry with large wooden shields. These shields were large and thick and when locked together they form a solid wall. With proper signalling a frontline could create an impenetrable barrier and keep the enemy from causing any casualties. These formations however, were very vulnerable to being flanked.
Taxation: Taxes were not a formalized affair like in the mainland. Rather than priests calculating yields and determining an annual amount to be paid to the city state, the rajypala levied taxes depending on need. If the rajypala needed extra provision for a campaign, he would ride out in force to extract the material. Material culture shows that in times of weaknes such as after a great defeat, the rajypala would trade for these taxes in the form of pottery.
These taxes were greatly resented by the surrounding Houthni farming villages and one of the sharpest points of contestation between the two cultures, however, as these Houthni farming villages were disorganized, the rajypala could usually handle the discontent. The flow of agricultural product to the rajypala's city would become a source of legitimacy - as the frontier became more isolated from the metropolis, the flow of tribute from the countryside became the method of sustaining the Sindhi in Iran.
Hostage: The first use of hostages by the Pala was around 2800 BC when the Hurran Confederacy's chieftain traded his eldest born son with the Asav of that time, ensuring a tenuous peace between the two nations. This method would spread, and would become how the rajypala would secure peace with individual tribes in the Hurran Confederacy and with difficult to deal with Houthni villages. When the Marashtra dynasty was consolidating power, hostage taking was one of their preferred methods of ensuring obedience - every rajypala was expected to send their children to the Marashtra court to be educated, which was understood as an advanced form of hostage taking.
When exactly did the Sindhi colonies in Iran cease to be Sindhi is a contentious question. Most experts date the change to around 2700 BC when the language of the Iranian Sindhi became more or less unintelligible with the mainland, having too many Semitic influences. Some experts however, date the change to earlier, using the mythological space the West occupies in Sindhi myths to track when exactly the frontier was seen as alien, but this work is highly controversial.
Language: Sindhi with heavy Semitic influences
Important institutions:
The rajypala: A holdover from the Pala’s origins as Sindhi defensive encampments, the rajypala never disappeared from the power structure, rather instead, changing from an appointed position to a dynastic one as cultural notions of dynastic kingship filtered in from its neighbors the Hurran Confederacy, a confederacy of several Semitic speaking tribes.
The Asav: The Sindhi colonies in Iran confederated in increasingly larger numbers as the population of other ethnic groups in the area grew. The leaders of these confederacies were known as Asav’s owing to the fact that a united Sindhi world was associated with Asav in the West. Before him, the Sindhi colonies in Iran associated themselves closely with their home metropolis. After him and the spate of empire building rajypala after him, the notion that the Sindhi colonies in iran belonged together became common wisdom, and Asav was associated with strength and leadership.
There is evidence that this position began as a first among equal deal among rajypalas where succession was based on accumulated prestige and wealth, until one rajypala managed to, through strategic use of dynastic marriages, the spending of lots of wealth and the accumulation of lots of prestige, establish the Marashtra dynasty. In order to further boost their legitimacy, the Marashtra claimed to be descended from Asav.
Warrior Societies of Asav: After Asav’s death, a project to deify him emerged in the wider Sindhi world. This was in part due to his epic which acted as an effective tool of propaganda. Nowhere was this stronger than in the Iranian colonies from which Asav came. One of the enduring Pala institutions to come out of this project were the warrior societies of Asav, which worshipped Asav as the warrior ideal. Each one had its own code of conduct and rites of initiation but memorization of Asav’s epic was one constant requirement, and it is from these societies that the epic was kept alive.
The most prestigious one was the society that the Marashtra princes belonged to, and this society often consisted of the creme of the elite, acting as a binding glue for all the important players in the Marashtra court and a way for the Marashtra prince to establish his position among his peers.
Kaver: The Pala were not temple builders as such - the “proper” Sindhi who first came to settle Iran did not need it - they were assured that the high priest of the metropolis could still tend to their spiritual needs, and instead small personal shrines to various deities cropped up instead. As time went on, and some barbarians adopted the culture of the Sindhi, they too did not see the need for temples - it was not important in their cultures, and it was not important to the Iranian Sindhi. As time went on, and contact from the metropolis became more irregular, the importance of organized religion only decreased. The final blow however, were the attempts of high priests to control the frontiers.
Instead what came up was a system of Kaver (wandering ministrels) who would travel the land, and for a small gift, sing to the gods, offering prayers in beauteous voices. These kaver were well regarded, and there are many myths in Pala culture entreating men to open their hearth and homes to the kaver. The Kaver were also not limited to the cities were the Pala dominated, they were fixation in the surrounding farmlands (which were mostly worked by non-Pala) and to the North, indicating that they are a cultural import from the Houthni, a people native to the area.
Kaver were oft coveted by rajypala - their training in the arts of epic poetry and song may have had religious significance, but their art could be put to use creating epics for the rajypala, thus increasing their prestige and granting them immortality in glory.
Military: During the formation of the Pala, the Sindhi were moving towards the Bronze Age - the copper mines in Jharkand were beginning to output enough copper for city states to make their armor and weapons from bronze, and bronze armor and weapons became the norm for Sindhi heavy infantry. The same did not happen for the Pala - what copper did exist in the area was in the hands of the Houthni to the North, and the Pala did not have enough riches to trade for significant amounts of bronze. Instead the Pala developed lightly armored spear infantry with large wooden shields. These shields were large and thick and when locked together they form a solid wall. With proper signalling a frontline could create an impenetrable barrier and keep the enemy from causing any casualties. These formations however, were very vulnerable to being flanked.
Taxation: Taxes were not a formalized affair like in the mainland. Rather than priests calculating yields and determining an annual amount to be paid to the city state, the rajypala levied taxes depending on need. If the rajypala needed extra provision for a campaign, he would ride out in force to extract the material. Material culture shows that in times of weaknes such as after a great defeat, the rajypala would trade for these taxes in the form of pottery.
These taxes were greatly resented by the surrounding Houthni farming villages and one of the sharpest points of contestation between the two cultures, however, as these Houthni farming villages were disorganized, the rajypala could usually handle the discontent. The flow of agricultural product to the rajypala's city would become a source of legitimacy - as the frontier became more isolated from the metropolis, the flow of tribute from the countryside became the method of sustaining the Sindhi in Iran.
Hostage: The first use of hostages by the Pala was around 2800 BC when the Hurran Confederacy's chieftain traded his eldest born son with the Asav of that time, ensuring a tenuous peace between the two nations. This method would spread, and would become how the rajypala would secure peace with individual tribes in the Hurran Confederacy and with difficult to deal with Houthni villages. When the Marashtra dynasty was consolidating power, hostage taking was one of their preferred methods of ensuring obedience - every rajypala was expected to send their children to the Marashtra court to be educated, which was understood as an advanced form of hostage taking.
Last edited:
Seon
Not An Evil Liar
Summaries:
1 Effort: The Vault of the Nehethoten. (Burial practices of the Nehethoten)
1 Effort: The Curse of Kings (the extremely centralized nature of the Egyptian government leads to regular civil wars and revolts by influencers within the Empire. Dynasties rise and fall through the millennia. Refugees from the conflict occasionally flee to the islands of Mediterranean or to the Sisselthoten.
1 Effort: Development of mathematical traditions: Despite the occasional massive civil wars, peace is the norm in the new Kingdom of Egypt. Flourishing of Mediterranean trade by Sisselthoten traders allow for increasingly complicated mathematical traditions to emerge amidst the scribes of the Nehethoten.
..............................................................................................................................................
Sisselthoten
1 Effort: The trade in tin. The lack of tin in Egypt is pounced upon by Sisselthoten traders, whose ships ply the waters of Mediterranean looking for the valuable metal to fuel the great works of Egypt.
...............................................................................................................................................
Age of Wonders (wonder point + burial customs)
Already, great obelisks and pillars inscribed with the names of stars and dead men litter the Egyptian desert. King Amasis of the 16th Dynasty, however, believes that mere inscriptions and image half-carved into stone pillars is insufficient to entrap his soul. After all, is he not the greatest of all emperors, whose temporal powers dwarf all others who came before? The priests enthusiastically agree, and the peasants of Egypt rush to fulfill the latest of the Kingdom's insane architectural works.
A great vault is constructed, halfway carved into a valley. Great murals, statues embued with the spirits of the Sun and Moon, and sculptures of yet unknowable-guardians line the walls and the great cliff-faces of the Vault's exterior. At the very center is the statue of the Emperor himself, resplendent in his glory. The Emperor is an old man by the time of the vault's completion, and he smiles knowing that he shall now live forever. In a gesture of magnanimity, he orders hundreds more statues be made. For the first time in history, it will not only be the priesthood and the royalty who live eternally entombed in stone. He shall take with him his scribes, his servants, and his soldier-nobles too. The vault thus filled with hundreds, if not thousands, of sculptures of men, the doors are sealed, never to be opened again.
The effects of this decision by the late emperor is incredible. Many Emperors that follow attempt to copy, or even surpass, the works of King Amasis, creating resplendent Vault-Palaces in Memphis or even burying them deep in hidden locations amidst the deserts out of fear of robbery. Down among the common folks, a new business arise. Small statuettes--phylacteries--are made by Egyptian artisan-priests for sale to ordinary Egyptians. Their function is to entrap their soul on Earth upon their death and ensure their entry to the afterlife. Many statuettes are buried in sand, while the bodies are generally cremated or buried at sea, or given to the beasts to ensure the soul leaves the body properly.
Phylacteries are found predominantly buried in the sands of Egypt in the future--others either lost or destroyed. Occasionally, they are even found long outside the borders of the kingdom, taken with them by refugees, traders, or adventurers from the old kingdom.
...............................................................................................................................................................................................................................
The Curse of Kings
The original King Manetho's hope for a peaceful Empire does not last long. Within ten generations, his dynasty is lost. Others constantly rise and fall throughout history. The power of kingship and all the glory and prestige it means drives men (and a few women) mad with lust. Murders between brothers and plots between mothers are common, and civil strife usually follows when poison and knives cannot resolve a dispute.
Throughout history, many Egyptian nobles, peasants, royalties, and others flee the Kingdom, intermingling with the people from beyond its borders in Greece and the Isles. In general, they assimilate into the lives of locals in time, but they bring with them their mathematical traditions, systems of writing, and certain religious beliefs and ideas, including their rather particular beliefs regarding the afterlife and the necessity of phylacteries.
................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
Mathematical Traditions
The ever-increasing volume of harvest, trade with the various peoples of the Mediterranean, and increasingly complicated afterlife schemes of emperors necessitate ever-increasingly complicated systems of mathematics to not only chart the movements of stars and the rising of rivers, but also to track the movement of goods, warriors, and people.
Mathematics gradually evolve from somewhat complex form of notch-marks and artistry into something more symbolic--much more approachable for merchants and peddlers haggling on the streets to learn. System of numbers soon become a common sight on Nehethoten streets, appearing in various signs and clay tablets to denote the price for the day of various goods and items.
.................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
Trade in Tin
The Sisselthoten merchants--ever eager to earn a profit, jumps at the opportunity to become the middlemen in increasingly complex Mediterranean trade, ensuring the valuable tin flows into Egyptian harbor in exchange for its gold and, more importantly, it's seemingly limitless supply of various foodstuff for the greater Mediterranean community.
1 Effort: The Vault of the Nehethoten. (Burial practices of the Nehethoten)
1 Effort: The Curse of Kings (the extremely centralized nature of the Egyptian government leads to regular civil wars and revolts by influencers within the Empire. Dynasties rise and fall through the millennia. Refugees from the conflict occasionally flee to the islands of Mediterranean or to the Sisselthoten.
1 Effort: Development of mathematical traditions: Despite the occasional massive civil wars, peace is the norm in the new Kingdom of Egypt. Flourishing of Mediterranean trade by Sisselthoten traders allow for increasingly complicated mathematical traditions to emerge amidst the scribes of the Nehethoten.
..............................................................................................................................................
Sisselthoten
1 Effort: The trade in tin. The lack of tin in Egypt is pounced upon by Sisselthoten traders, whose ships ply the waters of Mediterranean looking for the valuable metal to fuel the great works of Egypt.
...............................................................................................................................................
Age of Wonders (wonder point + burial customs)
Already, great obelisks and pillars inscribed with the names of stars and dead men litter the Egyptian desert. King Amasis of the 16th Dynasty, however, believes that mere inscriptions and image half-carved into stone pillars is insufficient to entrap his soul. After all, is he not the greatest of all emperors, whose temporal powers dwarf all others who came before? The priests enthusiastically agree, and the peasants of Egypt rush to fulfill the latest of the Kingdom's insane architectural works.
A great vault is constructed, halfway carved into a valley. Great murals, statues embued with the spirits of the Sun and Moon, and sculptures of yet unknowable-guardians line the walls and the great cliff-faces of the Vault's exterior. At the very center is the statue of the Emperor himself, resplendent in his glory. The Emperor is an old man by the time of the vault's completion, and he smiles knowing that he shall now live forever. In a gesture of magnanimity, he orders hundreds more statues be made. For the first time in history, it will not only be the priesthood and the royalty who live eternally entombed in stone. He shall take with him his scribes, his servants, and his soldier-nobles too. The vault thus filled with hundreds, if not thousands, of sculptures of men, the doors are sealed, never to be opened again.
The effects of this decision by the late emperor is incredible. Many Emperors that follow attempt to copy, or even surpass, the works of King Amasis, creating resplendent Vault-Palaces in Memphis or even burying them deep in hidden locations amidst the deserts out of fear of robbery. Down among the common folks, a new business arise. Small statuettes--phylacteries--are made by Egyptian artisan-priests for sale to ordinary Egyptians. Their function is to entrap their soul on Earth upon their death and ensure their entry to the afterlife. Many statuettes are buried in sand, while the bodies are generally cremated or buried at sea, or given to the beasts to ensure the soul leaves the body properly.
Phylacteries are found predominantly buried in the sands of Egypt in the future--others either lost or destroyed. Occasionally, they are even found long outside the borders of the kingdom, taken with them by refugees, traders, or adventurers from the old kingdom.
...............................................................................................................................................................................................................................
The Curse of Kings
The original King Manetho's hope for a peaceful Empire does not last long. Within ten generations, his dynasty is lost. Others constantly rise and fall throughout history. The power of kingship and all the glory and prestige it means drives men (and a few women) mad with lust. Murders between brothers and plots between mothers are common, and civil strife usually follows when poison and knives cannot resolve a dispute.
Throughout history, many Egyptian nobles, peasants, royalties, and others flee the Kingdom, intermingling with the people from beyond its borders in Greece and the Isles. In general, they assimilate into the lives of locals in time, but they bring with them their mathematical traditions, systems of writing, and certain religious beliefs and ideas, including their rather particular beliefs regarding the afterlife and the necessity of phylacteries.
................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
Mathematical Traditions
The ever-increasing volume of harvest, trade with the various peoples of the Mediterranean, and increasingly complicated afterlife schemes of emperors necessitate ever-increasingly complicated systems of mathematics to not only chart the movements of stars and the rising of rivers, but also to track the movement of goods, warriors, and people.
Mathematics gradually evolve from somewhat complex form of notch-marks and artistry into something more symbolic--much more approachable for merchants and peddlers haggling on the streets to learn. System of numbers soon become a common sight on Nehethoten streets, appearing in various signs and clay tablets to denote the price for the day of various goods and items.
.................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
Trade in Tin
The Sisselthoten merchants--ever eager to earn a profit, jumps at the opportunity to become the middlemen in increasingly complex Mediterranean trade, ensuring the valuable tin flows into Egyptian harbor in exchange for its gold and, more importantly, it's seemingly limitless supply of various foodstuff for the greater Mediterranean community.
Last edited:
Marcher Jovian
Emperor
- Joined
- Jul 12, 2013
- Messages
- 1,242
Introduction of llamas and alpacas
Llamas and Alpacas have steadily diffused into the valleys of the Karaiwasiq. Care of herds is generally the responsibility and privilege of a noble house, though in large settlements, multiple houses may play a part. The llama is used as a beast of burden, a food source, a source of fertilizer, and as a source of fleece. In contrast, the alpaca is more specialized, being raised principally for the sake of its fine wool
Textile artistry
With the introduction of camelids, textiles have grown increasingly complex and artistic. Large, intricately designed rugs serve as an important status signal. Basic rugs might stick to geometric patterns, or show a simple scene. Well-crafted rugs can tell an entire story, with crafty weavers strongly leaning on symbolic positioning and coloring of elements to convey as much as possible in the limited area of a rug.
Establish luxury trade
Noble houses begin to sponsor yearly trading expeditions into Ecuador. The goods traded are mostly luxuries, carried with the aid of llamas. Gold and gold working, which had originated a ways to the North, are now spreading into the lands of the Karaiwasiq. Shells of the Spondylus oysters also begin to appear in Karaiwasiq artwork at this time.
Wonder - The Workshop of Puru Chillu
Puru Chillu was one of the most powerful Rimaqpaq of the age. Upon solidifying his rule, he ordered a great structure built - long and flat, the building was large enough to hold the many artisans he ruled. Weaver worked alongside weaver, gold-worker worked alongside gold-worker. Toiling together, the artisans of Puru Chillu would produce the finest works of art in the all the lands of the Karaiwasiq. In such high regard were these works held that, even many generations later, a family that owned some of these works would be recognized as a one of the most respectable houses in the land. Eventually, Puru Chillu died. Artisans were moved away, divisions placed with the great hall, and thus the workshop was fractured and divided, no longer reaching the peaks of quality as under Puru Chillu.
Llamas and Alpacas have steadily diffused into the valleys of the Karaiwasiq. Care of herds is generally the responsibility and privilege of a noble house, though in large settlements, multiple houses may play a part. The llama is used as a beast of burden, a food source, a source of fertilizer, and as a source of fleece. In contrast, the alpaca is more specialized, being raised principally for the sake of its fine wool
Textile artistry
With the introduction of camelids, textiles have grown increasingly complex and artistic. Large, intricately designed rugs serve as an important status signal. Basic rugs might stick to geometric patterns, or show a simple scene. Well-crafted rugs can tell an entire story, with crafty weavers strongly leaning on symbolic positioning and coloring of elements to convey as much as possible in the limited area of a rug.
Establish luxury trade
Noble houses begin to sponsor yearly trading expeditions into Ecuador. The goods traded are mostly luxuries, carried with the aid of llamas. Gold and gold working, which had originated a ways to the North, are now spreading into the lands of the Karaiwasiq. Shells of the Spondylus oysters also begin to appear in Karaiwasiq artwork at this time.
Wonder - The Workshop of Puru Chillu
Puru Chillu was one of the most powerful Rimaqpaq of the age. Upon solidifying his rule, he ordered a great structure built - long and flat, the building was large enough to hold the many artisans he ruled. Weaver worked alongside weaver, gold-worker worked alongside gold-worker. Toiling together, the artisans of Puru Chillu would produce the finest works of art in the all the lands of the Karaiwasiq. In such high regard were these works held that, even many generations later, a family that owned some of these works would be recognized as a one of the most respectable houses in the land. Eventually, Puru Chillu died. Artisans were moved away, divisions placed with the great hall, and thus the workshop was fractured and divided, no longer reaching the peaks of quality as under Puru Chillu.
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