OOC: Just to get us back on topic
Ah, Calicut. Gem of Dravidia.
It had been so since the beginning of time, but it was fully flowering by the 1100s BCE. A vast city sprawled along the shoreline, a large harbor encompassed almost entirely within it. The buildings lined the shoreline, piers of rock and wood extending far into the harbor, hundreds of boats tied up alongside it, galleys and even the newer caravels were in abundance.
The inner city was dominated by the structure of the massive palace, a structure that sprawled in stone grandeur with a single tower rising above it, and the large, unfinished temple that lay directly opposite it. Already, even though the building was not yet a quarter finished, you could tell that the future buildings of this complex would be awe inspiring, their arches, even supported by their scaffolds, dwarfed men and cranes alike.
Around these buildings was a large paved road, circular in shape, and from this central circle the rest of the inner city radiated outward. The inner city, at the least, was starting to see a predominance of tiled roofs as opposed to the thatch that dominated the poorer districts. The inner city was lined along its entire circumference with a high stone wall, the old stone wall that had held Calicut against all who might challenge it for centuries.
Beyond this inner wall was the middle city, a large mass of buildings, most of them thatch roofed, centered around a few streets still in the radial pattern, but most of them actually faced small winding sides streets that branched off of the main pattern, a thorough mess of accretion. The middle city, too, was ringed with a wall, newer but about the same height.
The outer city, one could call it the slums, ringed all of it, a mass of buildings which seemed not to be so much built around the roads as parted by them.
The whole city from above would have been a grand sight, a regular geometry relieved by the occasional tower rising from the lower portions of the buildings, a whitish color predominating, thatched rooftops with a few tile intermingled.
All in all, estimates put its population at anywhere from 10,000 to 50,000, but regardless of absolute numbers, it was doubtless one of the largest five cities in Dravidia, if not the world.
Calicut, though, was just one piece in the massive mosaic that was India, and those shall be explored in further such works as this.
