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Thread: A New World - The (Third) Worldbuilding IH

  1. #1
    Barry Goldwater's Avatar Mr. Conservative
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    Default A New World - The (Third) Worldbuilding IH

    “This tremendous world I have inside of me. How to free myself, and this world, without tearing myself to pieces. And rather tear myself to a thousand pieces than be buried with this world within me.”
    -Franz Kafka

    Hey, readers. A month ago, you may have gotten a PM from me talking about my plans for another IH coming this May: a worldbuilding exercise in the vein of BaW - one where we can all contribute to building up a world whenever we feel like it, without the pressure of meeting deadlines or declaring the whole thing dead if nobody makes a new post within an arbitrary time limit (usually 1-3 weeks). I've always felt these sorts of IHs got our creative juices flowing even more readily than the political RP-IHs, and so it should be perfect considering our depleted manpower these days. Now I understand we're all busy folks with our own lives apart from TWC these days, hence why as I have just explained, this isn't a game nor is it meant to pave the way for one like BaW did; think of it as more of a collaborative writing project, one that you can contribute to on your own schedule. If you're too busy to write anything for one week or one month or what have you, no problem! Just make a quick post saying something like 'sorry guys, I'll be gone for X amount of time b/c *insert reasons here*' and come back whenever you're ready, no pressure.

    Keeping that non-gameyness in mind and as with all worldbuilding projects, I don't plan on imposing too many rules here, outside of the usual map stuff & basic structures to lend some order to the process of creating cultures/nations/religions. Those rules will be jotted down in the posts below, and new rules can be added on an as-needed basis - once again, this isn't a game so an in-depth ruleset and 'win'/'lose' conditions are unnecessary, and while having some rules is necessary to lend structure to the writing process so we don't get people writing about the glory of their winged elf civilization before we even have a map or whatever, I find that having too many can stifle one's creativity.

    We'll officially start in May, when Dan's free to build our map, but this thread exists as of now because 1) we're only three days away from May 1st and 2) it won't kill us to be able to start at least some discussion on how the map should look like or other fundamentals like 'is there magic in this world and if so, how much of it is there', I'm sure - especially since there hasn't been anything going on in this forum since last summer

    I'll keep a list of people who have replied to me with interest, either here or on Skype/Discord, here and add to it as it grows:
    Barry Goldwater (obviously...)
    Dan the Man
    jacb547
    Xion
    Agamemnon
    Pericles
    Dirty Chai
    Lucius Malfoy
    'Gunny
    Gandalf
    Chesser
    Amaz
    Narf

    Oh, and speaking of Discord - seriously, if you guys don't already have it, you should get it ASAP. Like, yesterday. It's waaay better than Skype for facilitating large group conversations and, as an added bonus, comes with zero ads (and thus virtually never triggers your antivirus). It has admittedly had some security issues in the past where it did trigger Malwarebytes on my machine every two seconds, but those days are long gone and Discord now runs as smoothly as butter for me with zero problems. BF will set us up with a Discord chatroom soon enough.
    Last edited by Barry Goldwater; June 12, 2017 at 12:31 PM.

  2. #2
    Barry Goldwater's Avatar Mr. Conservative
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    Default Re: A New World - The (Third) Worldbuilding IH

    Blank world map

    Continental map


    Continents yet to be named:
    -That large island chain in the southeast where Chesser's Iwatoans are
    -Large island between Muataria/Midija and Hyperaustralis

    Pre-Bronze Age-killing 'Great Cooling' map - praise be to Dan


    KEY:
    Green - Temperate forest
    Orange - Mediterranean scrub/chapparal
    Light green - Tropical grassland
    Beige - Desert
    Dark green - Tropical rainforest

    Post-'Global Cooling' map - credit to Dan again


    KEY:
    Light gray - Tundra
    Teal - Taiga
    Blue - Temperate Rainforest (like PNW)
    Green: Temperate forest
    Yellow: Temperate grassland
    Beige: Desert
    Orange: Mediterranean scrub/chaparral
    Light green: Tropical grassland/Savannah

    Currents map (credit to Xion)


    This is the updated version with the wind currents completed in a initial form.


    Purple Lines : Polar Jet Stream. Northern one is wetter than the Southern one, should produce more rain but as iirc storms are low pressure, perhaps the southern one creates severe storms to allow for monsoons.
    Green Line : Intertropical Convergence Zone, where the Tradewinds of the north and south meet. Should be usually warmer climates where it is wet, and temperate/warm where dry.
    Beige Lines : Horse Latitudes for Earth's air currents, but for ours perhaps they are another jet stream.


    Winds :
    Blue in the Poles : Polar Easterlies. Cold and Wet in the North, Cold and Dry in the south.
    Light Blue : Westerlies. Vary depending on the area.
    Gold : Tradewinds, should be warm and wet unless if near a desert, then likely warm and dry.

    Gyres map (also credited to Xion)


    Muataric Bay Gyre (orange): Compared to the currents of the main oceanic gyres, the bay/sea's gyre consists of mild water(a mixture of colder and saltier deep ocean water brought to the surface and merged with the warmer water on the surface) brought into the bay from the south by an offshoot of the Western Southern Sea gyre at a slow moving pace due to the water coming from a eastern boundary current, then circling around the bay, with some leaving back the way it came, or merging with the eastern boundary current of the Altanic Sea gyre. The storms created here tend to be relatively mild and short lasting due to tradewinds being the predominant form of wind present overhead, but this also means the storms will likely be fast moving and full of moisture.

    Muataric Strait Gyre (pink): A quick moving current of warming water from the Hyperborean sea gyre circling the island, mixing with the Muataria Bay gyre's western currents as they travel south, then cools as it merges back into the Hyperborean Sea gyre, providing some of the moisture for the not-jet stream section of it. A weaker current continues to circle the island to where it merges with the water going into the bay.

    Storm Gyre (purple): Could be referred as the 'Storm' gyre for it's slower moving eastern currents that allow for Antarctic air to build moisture into powerful monsoons to strike at the islands and southern parts of Muataria in it's path, before it's warmer than average tradewinds and westerlies carry some moisture southwards and merge with the polar easterlies off Antarctica to begin the cycle anew. The western currents are fast moving and usually colder than the average ocean around it due to deep ocean water.

    Hyperborean Sea Gyre (blue): The currents of the Hyperborean sea are evenly divided between warm and cold, with the Western Muataric current carrying cold air and large amounts of moisture to Muataria, followed by the second current of the gyre merging with some of the deep water brought up by the exiting waters of the Muataria bay currents as it travels south, then turns westward, merging with warmer waters of the (red) gyre along with gathering moisture. The Altanic current could be compared to the Gulf Steam of Earth until it reaches Hyperborea, where, having depositied much of it's moisture, deposits the last bit by the volcano of Hyperborea before merging with the cold winds to gather more on it's journey towards the Muataric Bay.

    Leviathan's Gyre and Eastern Borealic Gyre (gray): It circles back around, but some water with moisture carried over travels eastward and cools, then merges with water from the northern Altanic Sea gyre and circles back, with more moisture that the winds carry to the plains.

    Ometic Gyre (dark green): Mostly warm, besides the current going up against the not-Hispania section of Muataria, that will be cold and dry due to deep ocean water brought up where the three gyres meet. The other two will be warm and wet, with weaker monsoons than the light green or the powerful ones of the "storm gyre"/purple.

    Midijan Gyre (light olive-green): Cold and dry for it's southern part, but warm and wet in the north as it picks up the leftover moisture from the purple one along with gathering moisture on it's way north to bring rains and monsoons to southern not-India. These will be medium-strength monsoons at best, with the occasional strong one if the purple gyre's storms are rather powerful that year and bring a surplus of moisture over to the light green gyre.

    N. Altanic Sea Gyre (yellow): Beginning in the west of the continent of the Altanic people in the north near Hyperborea, where a bit of it's warm waters seep eastward with some moisture to merge with the Gulf Stream near the center of Hyperborea, but the majority of the moisture is dumped on the northern part of the Altanic continent as it passes, with the water warming as it travels south, gathering more moisture as it turns towards the eastern coast of Muataria. The two currents that pass through Muataria are quite similar to the currents of the Purple Gyre, slower moving and have the potential for frequent major storms in the southern part.

    S. Altanic Sea Gyre (dark red): Besides where it's currents meet those of the Purple gyre, the Southern Altanic sea's currents could be said to be the calmest of all the oceans. The eastern edge of the gyre brings additional moisture to the already moisture-filled purple gyre, although the storms caused by the S.Altanic gyre generally tend to be large rainstorms over typhoons, but the rare typhoons that do form have historically been reported to be the worst encountered by humans. The rest of the gyre is dry and calm, although the currents are quite quick moving.

    Australo-Altanic Gyre (gold): A peaceful and calm doldrum, whose calmest periods lack any wind whatsoever and can potentially strand ships for days or weeks.

    Hyperaustralic Sea Gyre (red): Starting off the western coast of Hyperaustralis, the cold winds and water generally warm up as they move northward, gathering moisture as they do, then the current splits into two, one heading to be the Muataric Bay gyre, the other continuing westward, stirring up some Deep Ocean water as it goes along that cools the water of it and the southern edge of the Hyperborean gyre. The gathered moisture is dropped on the southern coast of the Altanic continent, then the waters go back to Antarctica.

    Magical/otherworldly minerals map


    Orange: Meteor mineral. ('meteoric iron')
    Dark Red: Dangerous Not-Lyrium
    Blue: Not Lyrium.

    Note: All minerals still need to be named.
    Last edited by Barry Goldwater; June 16, 2017 at 10:13 PM.

  3. #3
    Barry Goldwater's Avatar Mr. Conservative
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    Default Re: A New World - The (Third) Worldbuilding IH

    Language/Culture/Nation building
    I'd like to roll with a multi-tiered approach to the creation of cultures and factions. Since historically language was more important than bloodlines as a marker for human cultures, unless we change that for some reason as we begin world-building I think it'd make the most sense to base these 'tiers' on languages.

    The first and largest tier is the language family. That is to say, a group of languages that share a single common ancestor and thus, a shared root for at least a few of their words: for example, the Indo-European *reg- (to rule) which was the root for the Latin rex, Sanskrit raja, Germanic reiks and Celtic rix. A language family can be huge and diverse, perhaps so much so that it isn't controlled by a single player - for example, what do Portuguese, Danish, Serbian and Hindi all have in common? They're all Indo-European languages. All a language family really needs, besides languages, are an urheimat or homeland (for example, Indo-European likely originated in what is now the North Caucasus/eastern Ukraine/southern Russia) and arrows on a map showing where it spreads.

    The second linguistic tier is the language sub-family. This refers to a group of more closely related languages within the larger language family. Again, this doesn't have to be something controlled by a single player, and in fact that may be a bad idea due to how gigantic some linguistic sub-families can be. For another example, the Germanic sub-family consists of three smaller 'branches': North Germanic (Scandinavian), West Germanic (incl. English and Dutch) and East Germanic (Gothic, Burgundian, etc.), and the countries that speak these languages weren't exactly a united monolith either today or in the past. Language sub-families may be a good base for the very basics of a broader culture group, but not for the finer details and certainly not for individual factions (there's a world of difference between the cultures of the Franks and the Norse, for example).

    The third tier is the language branch. This refers to a group of even more closely related languages, sharing multiple similarities in words/pronunciations and likely being mutually intelligible with at least some of the other languages in the branch. Again, the Northern/Western/Eastern branches of the Germanic languages are my go-to example here. Now we're getting somewhere manageable for a single player: language branches may still be too large to serve as the effective basis for individual factions, but they can serve as one for a regional culture quite handily.

    Finally, you obviously have the individual languages themselves. These should be a cornerstone to the construction of your individual cultures and factions, in turn: bit hard to have functioning laws, traditions, myths etc. if you have no way to share and understand them, after all. Not to say your factions can't or shouldn't be multilingual - as early as the Bronze Age you had nations like the Mitanni where the ruling elite spoke a different language than their native subjects, until eventually the former embraced the language of the latter - but if you're going to be building empires, it'd make sense to have one language as a lingua franca that everyone within that empire who expects to get anywhere in life should be expected to know.

    Finally, there is the possibility for languages-isolate. That is to say, languages which apparently aren't related to any of their neighbors, and in fact have precious little in common with any other languages: real-life examples include the Basque and Ainu languages. Not to say these can't exist in our conworld, but they should be pretty rare. Realistically, most languages should be part of at least a broad Tier 1 family and be influenced by their neighbors (very, very few cultures in history got to develop in a total vacuum where they are completely isolated from others, even Amazonian tribes would interact with one another), not to mention that isolating every culture and nation into its own bubble kinda defeats the point of a collaborative world-building exercise

    Religion
    One thing I noticed in BaW was that we didn't really have much in the way of guidelines for constructing a religion. Well, here I am to change that and lend structure to that process! One model of religion-building that I really liked was Lux Invicta's (a CK2 mod) SELIN system. Here's my take on it, modified for IH:

    Religious family: The first step in writing a religion should be in devising or finding a broader religious family (united by shared belief in at least a few core tenets, legal traditions, a common holy scripture, etc.) for it to fit into because, again, most religions didn't evolve in a vacuum where they were completely isolated from every other faith in the neighborhood. Religious families can again be so big and diverse that they probably shouldn't be solely controlled by a single player. For example, Pentecostals and the Eastern Orthodox are both Christians, but they can't really be said to have very much in common beyond a few basic tenets such as 'Christ is the Son of God and the savior of mankind' - and they are far from the only religions that'd be classed under the Christian 'religious family' within this system as there are many, many Christian denominations.

    Now, on to the aspects of the structure or 'matrix' of the individual religions:

    Doctrinal status: How is the religion's doctrines viewed by the religious family's official leadership (if any exists) and the mass of believers?
    --Mainstream: This religion's teachings are widely considered to be legitimate and popularly accepted by many believers. An example would be Trinitarian Christianity.
    --Local: This religion's teachings aren't very distinct from the Mainstream doctrines, but are definitely interpreted in line with the cultural beliefs, purposes and not-necessarily-religious superstitions held by the denizens of a significantly sized region and/or its government. An example would be Celtic Christianity.
    --Heretical: This religion explicitly challenges established doctrines and religious leaders, and may not hesitate about following up these challenges with violence. Examples include the Waldensians & Fraticelli of Medieval Catholic Europe and the early Protestants.

    Soul: What is the nature of the religion's core tenets? What is important to the believer?
    --Clerical: This religion is heavily centered on the rules and rites laid out by its established clergy, who enjoy great autonomy from - or perhaps even dominance over - secular rulers. Catholicism is an obvious example.
    --Statist: This religion emphasizes loyalty and subordination to the secular state, and may go so far as to deify the secular ruler. The actual contents of the doctrine are less important than reinforcing believers' faith in the state. Examples include the ancient Egyptian worship of their Pharaohs and the Roman imperial cult.
    --Martial: This religion emphasizes the importance of heroic deeds on the battlefield, and may even sanctify violence itself. Norse paganism or Asatru is one example.
    --Scholarly: This religion encourages critical study and interpretation of its scriptures, and is open to debate over key doctrinal tenets as opposed to simply slamming doubters as heretical blasphemers. Such religions may not even be classified as proper religions, but rather philosophical systems. An example would be Neoplatonism.
    --Messianic: This religion teaches that the state of the world is hopelessly flawed, but that a savior will emerge to deliver believers from the cursed earth and usher in paradise. Zealous belief in a savior (especially if one already exists and is identified) is very rarely sustained over a lengthy period of time though, and usually this religion's soul eventually changes into one of the others. An example would be the early Christianity of the Apostolic Age.
    --Populist: This religion is centered on achieving socioeconomic equality, and challenges established power structures and formalized doctrines in the name of society's marginalized. An example would be the Fraticelli heresy in the Middle Ages.
    --Traditional: This religion is more like the collective sum of the originating culture's ancient rites, traditions and superstitions than it is a formal and centralized entity. It may not even have any strictly defined spiritual leaders outside of elders to teach the old ways to the next generation. Examples include Hinduism & Shinto.

    Note: Religions don't, and arguably shouldn't, just have one 'soul'. For example, while Catholicism is Clerical, it hasn't lost a Messianic belief in the Second Coming and has expressed Populist (Pope Francis, the Jesuit missions in Paraguay, liberation theology etc.) and Scholarly (scholasticism, monastic literature, the first universities) tendencies. The 'soul' you pick for your religion should describe just the nature of its dominant aspects.

    Mentality: Does the religion focus on introspection and isolation or active proselytization?
    --Ancestral: This religion is primarily concerned with the perpetuation of its traditions among the faithful, not proselytizing to those who have yet to see its light. It is amenable to being absorbed by new faiths so long as the most important of its old tenets can be preserved.
    --Bastion of the Faith: This religion is not only concerned with the perpetuation of its traditions, but it is also extremely hostile towards change and the influence of outsiders.
    --Proselyte: This religion is concerned with expanding the number of believers under its wing, and engages in missionary activity to accomplish that.

    As an example, under this system, Catholicism could be classed as a Mainstream religion of Clerical soul with a Proselyte mentality.

    Magic rules
    We don't have strict and hard magic rules, but we did decide on a loose basic framework for magic:

    1. Magic in this world is largely passive in nature, not active. It just is, instead of being something that must be consciously acted on and manifested. Magical qualities inherent to phenomena (natural or otherwise), creatures and humans are OK, and some limited forms of active magic are fine too (eg. healing hands, walking on water, etc.) Active and powerfully destructive magic, of the 'flinging fireballs and lightning bolts' variety, is right out. To sum it up in the best comparison I can think of: more LoTR or ASOIAF, less Elder Scrolls.

    2. As an addendum to 1), magic is generally an inherited, passive quality. You are born with magical talent, and if you don't have it, you can't learn magic no matter how hard you try. You can't artificially develop it either, except through a few very specific and dangerous ways (see below). Magic is also rare: every other person in your civilization or culture should not have access to it. Heck, one in ten being magically endowed

    3. There are exactly two ways to gain magical powers if you weren't born a mage, or to enhance your existing magical powers if you were. The first is to kill a great (community-made) beast, something like the Titanoise or Feathered/Azure Dragon, and eat its heart: you won't gain the full power of the natural monster you just killed so there's no chance of you putting 15+ tons of force behind every swing of your sword after eating a Feathered Dragon, but you will certainly gain a shadow of that power and some of the animal's characteristics, such as the fighting instincts and heightened sense of smell of a Feathered Dragon in this case. The second is to consume or otherwise come into contact with the rare magical mineral [to be named], which also carries a risk of killing, incapacitating or driving to insanity the person who tries this method. [To be named] comes in two varieties: its even rarer variety, [also to be named], can impart greater powers at greater risk of death, insanity or permanent coma.

    Within this framework, anything goes. You can come up with whatever magic you want for your people within the above constraints, just run it by the rest of the community either here or on our Discord server first as usual.
    Last edited by Barry Goldwater; June 16, 2017 at 10:07 PM.

  4. #4
    Barry Goldwater's Avatar Mr. Conservative
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    Default Re: A New World - The (Third) Worldbuilding IH

    Wrote up some rules for the construction of languages/cultures/nations and religions. Thoughts?

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    Pericles of Athens's Avatar Vicarius Provinciae
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    Default Re: A New World - The (Third) Worldbuilding IH

    I assume this will be a world with a single form of sentient life(i.e.: everyone is a human). To keep things simple.


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    Barry Goldwater's Avatar Mr. Conservative
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    Default Re: A New World - The (Third) Worldbuilding IH

    That's still up in the air since we're starting over with a new world rather than recycling BaW's, but yeah, it is quite likely. I suppose we could have something like a surviving neanderthal scenario (non-Homo Sapiens human subspecies, whether they be Gigantopithecus types or basically non-magical elves or what have you, still hanging around instead of going extinct) to add a bit of spice without going the whole high fantasy hog and chucking in orcs, dwarves, lizardmen etc. though.

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    Dirty Chai's Avatar Dux Limitis
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    Default Re: A New World - The (Third) Worldbuilding IH

    I think allowing some more pronounced physical variations would be reasonable though (like these people have pointed ears but are otherwise exactly the same, etc).

    ------

    I'm more however concerned with environment details: such as climate change events (as in natural heating events and cooling events) that actually propel populations to migrate away from desiccated regions (once the Sahara was a lush place with plenty of food for hunters) to regions with water and wildlife (the Nile, Mesopotamia, etc).

    No seriously, I think our understanding of our planet's (if we want to call it that) environment and structure is the first key to understanding everything else.

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    Barry Goldwater's Avatar Mr. Conservative
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    Default Re: A New World - The (Third) Worldbuilding IH

    Alright everyone, BF has created a Discord chatroom (for which I'd rep him, but TWC's Communist rep system won't allow it ). Post in this thread (or contact me on Skype, that works too) and I'll PM you the link.

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    Default Re: A New World - The (Third) Worldbuilding IH

    Barry the great my friend .I have been waiting to join for years .IH is like a dream come true .Of course I wanna join too.Gimme discord invite too.
    100% mobile poster so pls forgive grammer

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    Dirty Chai's Avatar Dux Limitis
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    Default Re: A New World - The (Third) Worldbuilding IH

    Before I forget, an interesting facet to language groups and history of populations that would be pretty helpful...

    Areas with the most diversity of languages within a language group or family are generally often considered to be a homeland or at least a place where the linguistic progenitors lingered for a long time. Example: this for Indo-Iranians is the Pamir mountains where there are small tribal communities and nearly everyone had their own language and there's even a few different groups IIRC. Meanwhile, one language with some variants to it covers most of Iran. The difference indicates a natural habitat vs migratory expansion and linguistic imposition.

    Here's a map for this example:

    Last edited by Dirty Chai; April 29, 2017 at 11:44 AM.

  11. #11
    Barry Goldwater's Avatar Mr. Conservative
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    Default Re: A New World - The (Third) Worldbuilding IH

    Quote Originally Posted by Dirty Chai View Post
    I think allowing some more pronounced physical variations would be reasonable though (like these people have pointed ears but are otherwise exactly the same, etc).

    ------

    I'm more however concerned with environment details: such as climate change events (as in natural heating events and cooling events) that actually propel populations to migrate away from desiccated regions (once the Sahara was a lush place with plenty of food for hunters) to regions with water and wildlife (the Nile, Mesopotamia, etc).

    No seriously, I think our understanding of our planet's (if we want to call it that) environment and structure is the first key to understanding everything else.
    1. No arguments here. See my post right above yours.

    2. Yeah, I raised this point with you over a private convo on Discord some time ago (before the IH chatroom was set up). I think it'd be cool to have parts of the map start out with one climate/terrain type, and then change (ex. from tropical rainforest or fertile plains to desert) down the road due to climate change, which was basically what happened with the Sahara several thousand years ago. I think our north & south poles should be included as two of these climate-change-affected regions, with their eventual freezing being the catalysts for the mass post-Stone Age migration of their formerly-prosperous inhabitants in an equivalent to the Indo-European migrations of history - a 'formerly green Arctic and Antarctica' scenario, if you will.

    Another thing I'd like the map to have is more closely packed and/or connected continents, to facilitate greater intercultural links. Not saying the entire world's landmass should just be one giant Pangaea, or that we can't have large island archipelagos, but I'd like to see more continents sharing a landmass (even if they're connected by very thin landbridges) or at least being within sailing distance of one another like Europe/Africa/Asia. One thing I didn't like about the previous BaWs was that we didn't have enough of that & so cultures and nations grew with little to no connection to other players' stuff (and plans for greater intercultural connections got scuppered by both games dying), whereas in history almost no cultures actually developed in a vacuum independent of outside influence.

    @Mad Orc Welcome! I've explained the Discord thing to you by VM.

  12. #12
    chesser2538's Avatar Senator
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    Default Re: A New World - The (Third) Worldbuilding IH

    Would this be an example of what you are describing for a map?
    Map


    For this world building thread to work, and not have us hitting the wall, there are a few areas I can thing of that shold be addressed.

    Universe/Planet
    • Properties - Density, Gravity, Atmosphere, structure of solar system, Visible astronomical events; constellations, rings, etc., tilt and orbit of the planet (this effects seasons and how long the year is).
    • Climate - Winds, Tides, Weather patterns, temperature

    Geography/Mineralogy
    • Location of land in relation to the planets equator (This will have a major impact on agricultural), The actual physical layout of the continents and there geographic formations and climates.
    • Location and abundance of mineral deposits and strategic resources, land to water ratio and the location and availability of drinkable water.

    Climate and Biomes
    • General understanding of the major climate zones and how they will be separated, general and notable weather phenomenon for particular areas.

    Animals/Flora/Fauna

    These are just a few that I can think of, I'm sure you guys have an idea of what we need. The main point I'm stressing is that if we get the major aspects planned out it will be a lot easier to flush out this world later on.


    Under the Patronage of the venerable General Brewster

  13. #13
    Barry Goldwater's Avatar Mr. Conservative
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    Default Re: A New World - The (Third) Worldbuilding IH

    Hey Chesser!

    We've discussed the map a bit on the Discord chat (though not nearly as much as we have fantastical fauna & flora ) and there were some major points raised there:

    1. We should probably start by figuring out tectonic plates. One idea proposed by BF, which I'm down with, is that Dan would draw some randomized featureless plates and then we as a community would decide which are high and low, so we know which are above sea level & which aren't as well as where they move. Once that's done and we've ironed out our continents, then we can start doing the terrain, climate and the placement of mineral deposits.

    2. I suggested having the poles be habitable, at least for the first few centuries or millennia of our timeline. This can be achieved by having the circumpolar winds carry warmth and moisture from outside further inland (as opposed to the IRL Antarctic circumpolar wind, which is a cold current that blocks moisture) and would result in the poles having well-watered coastal regions with temperatures comparable to...let's say southern Canada/New England/Scotland at least, drier inland territories and the area immediately surrounding the poles themselves being basically the same as the IRL Arctic/Antarctic. Summers and winters can last six months each, and 24-hour days & nights wouldn't be uncommon either. Eventually, say after 15-2000 years, global cooling and ice-rafting will turn these poles less habitable and force major migrations (equivalent in scale to the Indo-European migrations, for example) to other continents, much as major climate change intervals often did IRL. Warmer poles would mean a warmer Earth in general, as well, and these major climate change events can affect other parts of the planet outside the pole (for another example, the Sahara used to be green until about 3000-2500 BC).

    3. We're pretty much all in agreement that most if not all continents should be closer to each other this time around by directly sharing landmasses like the Europe-Africa-Asia ('Eufricasia') landmass and/or by being within the sailing distance of ancient boats to one another: ideally, a mix of both. This will hopefully induce people's creations to interact a whole lot more with each other. One problem I think we can all agree on in the last BaWs was that there wasn't a whole lot of cross-cultural interaction and influencing going on, which is whack since realistically very few cultures have ever developed in an isolated vacuum and it kinda defeats the point of this being a collaborative writing project in the first place.

    4. We've agreed on humans and human subspecies as the only sentient, sapient races on this planet for the sake of simplicity. So there'll be no talking lizardmen or telepathic land jellyfish or what have you, but Perry, Xion and BF have all come up with some interesting ideas as far as those subspecies go over on Discord.

    In terms of the physical and celestial super-basics of the planet like its gravity, magnetic poles, orbit etc. I think the majority opinion was to go with 'basically the same as Earth', which is a lot simpler than the alternative and means we need to spend less time building a planet up from its core before getting to the good stuff - creating critters, plants and of course civilizations. On Discord though, BF has come up with an idea for a fictional mineral found in meteors that struck this earth, about as strong as or stronger than steel but much rarer (and thus set to play the role that bronze did to iron at the end of the Bronze Age when steelmaking becomes a big thing). I'm not opposed to having additions that aren't so extreme as to render the planet utterly fantastical & incomparable to Earth like two moons (as an example, that would have a significant effect on tides, but it also wouldn't result in the planet becoming inhabitable only by silicon-based lifeforms) either.

    I'd have told Dan all of this, but his status on Skype has been set to Away for a while now lol, and in any case he can just catch up once he gets on Discord. I'll send you a Discord link as well, the IH chatroom has positively exploded with messages over this last week and it's a much more convenient place to hammer out a plan going forward for stuff like maps or even to just bounce ideas around IMO - in fact it's why this thread is so short on replies atm, all the talking has been happening over in the Discord chatroom.
    Last edited by Barry Goldwater; May 06, 2017 at 03:08 PM.

  14. #14
    Dan the Man's Avatar S A M U R A I F O O L
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    Default Re: A New World - The (Third) Worldbuilding IH

    Hey folks, I just got moved out of my dorm room this weekend so things are still a little up in the air. I'm taking a week off work to hang out with family before moving into my summer housing. I can probably get started on mapping stuff Sunday or Monday this week though. I'll be installing Discord ASAP too.
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  15. #15
    Dan the Man's Avatar S A M U R A I F O O L
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    Default Re: A New World - The (Third) Worldbuilding IH

    I'm on Discord now. The link I was given to join our chat appears to be for the RPG forums in general though. Is that correct?

    Also what exactly do you guys want for a map? I've heard things about tectonic plates being tossed around but I've never done that kind of thing before. I can try it but it might be difficult.
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  16. #16
    Barry Goldwater's Avatar Mr. Conservative
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    Default Re: A New World - The (Third) Worldbuilding IH

    Amidst all the posting on Discord last night (as lulzy as it may have been ), Dan has given us our base map:

    Le map

    Now it's on to figuring out mountains based on tectonic plates, rivers and lakes, and any extra details like additional islands. If you're reading this and are already in the IH Discord, hop on ASAP. If you don't have Discord, get it and then let me know so I can give you the invite link, because this project is officially and concretely rolling forward (and of course, the continents themselves are still open to suggestion, so if you want to shift something around or shrink/widen a continent, just propose it - I did just that last night, which wound up derailing the discussion at hand for over an hour lol. But such things are done most conveniently over Discord)

  17. #17
    Barry Goldwater's Avatar Mr. Conservative
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    Default Re: A New World - The (Third) Worldbuilding IH

    Well, to get the culture ball rolling, here's my shot at a super broad Arctic language family/culture group:

    The Hyperborealic Peoples
    The 'Hyperborealic' language family refers to speakers of the Hyperborealic languages, descended from the first Homo sapiens specimens to migrate to the northern polar continent (referred to as 'Hyperborea' for convenience, no doubt everyone has their own name for it). The first humans crossed into Hyperborea over a landbridge that has since largely sunk around 12,000 BA (Before Agriculture), and were forced to deal with not only the deadly fauna and unusual weather/day-night cycle but also the hostility of Homo palladius, a cave-dwelling human subspecies. Amidst the great forests, 24-hour days and nights and the impossibility of living in caves, they developed an extremely warlike culture, something which did not change even as they shifted from hunting & gathering to farming. Prehistoric Hyperborealic culture exhibits evidence of being organized into nomadic, rigidly patriarchal warbands where the men were hunters, fighters and animal handlers while women sewed, cleaned and cooked, and children were taught to hunt and fight from a young age. The domesticated Arctic Wolfhound would prove to be invaluably faithful and persistent companions of these early nomads, and remained with their descendants even after they became less nomadic. These early nomads shared a basic common language, referred to by modern scientists as 'Proto-Hyperborealic', and would roam the length of Hyperborea, grazing their herds of sheep and cattle wherever they could and coming to blows with each other over pasture lands as well as H. palladius, near cave entrances.

    Modern speech Proto-Hyperborealic
    Man, men Ghuz, ghuze
    Woman, women Aghuz, aghuzay
    Spear Sewo
    Fire Pehzun
    Grain Gruzet

    Early Hyperborealic clansman, circa 6,000 BA

    The domestication of cereals and the dawn of agriculture revolutionized Hyperborealic society, just as it did everywhere else there were humans. The Hyperboreans shifted from a small-scale, nomadic society to one of settled, agrarian kingdoms along the coasts of Hyperborea where the circumpolar winds regularly brought warmth and rain, with nomadic families percolating into clans and tribes ruled by kings and enjoying a population explosion. These 'kings' (really, more like chieftains) appear to have generally been elected from the ranks of each tribal kingdom's finest warriors, as evidence supports the idea that many tribal coronation rituals involved the other warriors raising their chosen king on shields and shamans bathing the new monarch in the blood of an animal sacrifice. The patriarchal undercurrent of proto-Hyperborealic society remained: women and children were still expected to be seen and not heard, save the occasional female shaman, and it was always the men who fought and led.

    Modern diorama of a pair of post-agricultural revolution Hyperborealic herders with goats & young Arctic Wolfhound, c. 200-2,000 AA

    Hyperboreans made hard bread from rye and brewed beer from barley, raised great herds of cattle and sheep and horses, and cut down trees for firewood, housing and the construction of palisades around their villages of turf-houses - not just to keep out large predators and H. palladius, but each other too. Those men who didn't farm, hunt or rule - not just free men, but also slaves taken in the tribal kingdoms' wars - mined iron veins under the stern gaze and stinging whips of overseers, braving the 'cave-elves' to do so. The heads of their foes, human or otherwise, adorned the entrances to their walled settlements. Hyperboreans had no coinage, and instead taxes appear to have been collected in kind by ad-hoc 'officials' (thugs with clubs in the local king's employ). Some tribes buried their dead in graves with cairns laid atop them, while others cremated theirs and scattered the ashes into the sea.

    The Hyperboreans appear to have been an austere people who enjoyed little in the way of luxury, though this may just be due to the harsh and relatively poor environment they lived in. What remains of their clay pottery is simple in design & function, their jewelry quite rare, and their clothes typically drab and utilitarian. Rugs were made out of fur and, again, lacking much in the way of artsy ornamentation. As mentioned above, they lived in simple homes made of turf and logs: a king's palace just happened to be a larger turf-house than the ones around it. The gold and silver these tribal kingdoms did manage to get their hands on appear to have mostly gone into their religious artifacts, or more rarely a king's symbols of wealth and authority.

    The interior of a reconstructed Hyperborealic turf-house, built out of sod and wood

    The Hyperboreans also developed boats, at first for fishing in the continent's shallow shores and rivers - little more than canoes resembling hollowed-out logs. However, as time went on and kings saw the advantage of being able to sail around enemy defenses, sturdier boats for war and the transportation of warriors were constructed. By the end of the Bronze Age, the Hyperboreans had taken advantage of their forested homeland to construct simple single-banked galleys with no proper deck (though, lacking rams, these were little more than transport ships and fighting platforms), which would prove rather helpful for obvious reasons when climate change forced their Great Migration out of the Arctic.

    Reconstruction of a simple Late (Bronze Age, c. 85-9,000 AA) Hyperborealic galley

    Over time, the Proto-Hyperborealic language started to divide as each of these settled tribal kingdoms' regional dialects evolved into languages of their own. These languages include the ancestors of [blank]

    Hyperborealic warfare grew increasingly complex over the course of the Copper and Bronze Ages. Unlike on Muataria, copper and tin were rather scarce on Hyperborea, but iron veins were abundant. As a result, the Hyperboreans had to learn ironworking faster and on a larger scale than the happily bronze-wielding peoples of Muataria, and fought with brittle iron spears and blades (of such poor quality at first, that there is evidence to suggest warriors had to straighten their iron swords after accidentally bending them with overly-forceful blows in the middle of battles) while those to the south of them battled with bronze. Those who had any armor at all mostly wore gear made of leather, animal bone or boar's tusks, while simple iron armor (usually just a helmet and breastplate) was much rarer and seems to have been the exclusive property of kings until near the end of the Bronze Age, when small square-shaped iron breastplates to protect the heart became more numerous. The usage of horses in warfare remained limited, due to much of Hyperborea still being forested, but evidence supports the theory that by the time of the Great Migration most horses were directly ridden by the Hyperboreans instead of being used to pull chariots (which, like iron armor, appears to have been exclusive to kings).

    A Late Hyperborealic warrior of middling rank, equipped with iron sword; shield; and helmet but no other armor, c. 9,300 AA

    Combat appears to have been largely 'heroic' in nature, with the warring armies first sending out a champion or two to meet in duels before charging at one another with little in the way of discipline. By the end of the Bronze Age, the average Hyperborealic army could be expected to comprise of a majority of unarmored skirmishers fighting with bows & iron arrows, slings and iron javelins; a number of better-equipped infantry, paid retainers or lesser nobles of some sort, who fought with iron spears and blades and wore boar's tusk or iron helms with the occasional leather corselets or square iron heart-plates; mounted scouts and skirmishers; and the king and his entourage, who rode atop chariots and dressed in heavier iron armor.

    Much of Hyperborealic civilization came to a crashing halt when the climes cooled, which was bad news for the Hyperboreans: the crops that fueled their population explosion were suddenly impossible to grow, at least in large enough quantities to sustain their numbers. Facing starvation amidst much cooler summers than they were used to, most Hyperboreans migrated to other continents on fleets of galleys and smaller boats, bringing with them their iron weapons, distinct languages and the fires of war. Their stories are told elsewhere...

    Maximum extent of Hyperborealic languages and settlements just before the Great Migration, circa 9,000-10,000 AA

    Thoughts?
    Last edited by Barry Goldwater; June 12, 2017 at 11:39 AM.

  18. #18
    Dan the Man's Avatar S A M U R A I F O O L
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    Default Re: A New World - The (Third) Worldbuilding IH

    The Tawarë Peoples
    The Tawarë [taɾeː] languages, now mostly extinct, are descendants of the ancestral language of [High Cyrodiil]. The name comes from their own terminology for the continent, which they call Miz-tawar [t͡s-taɾ]. All but eliminated with the Hyperborean migration, the Tawarë languages survive in a few refugia, mostly on islands or tucked into the Tauran mountains which still bear their namesake.



    The modern archaeological and anthropological community has concluded, based on linguistic, archaeological, and genetic evidence, that the Tawarë languages once dominated the entire continent of [High Cyrodiil]. Material culture of the Tawarë type, consisting mostly of stone-knapped tools, sculptures, pottery, and other implements carved from bone or formed with clay, date back to about 15,000 BA (before agriculture). Early settlementswith homes and other buildings constructed from stone, with precious few wood dwellings surviving, appear around 2,000 BA, mostly nestled into mountain valleys, along riversides, or on lakeshores. Many of these sites also house very early ritual sites, including altars and what appear to be ceremonial stelae, dedicated to gods or spirits which are now unknown to history. Animal bones belonging to goats, sheep, and pigs have also been unearthed at these sites, suggesting that the Tawarë peoples owed their sedentary lifestyle to early herding techniques.



    Agricultural techniques would have begun to creep northward from the [Levantine coast] civilization along primitive trade routes starting about 1,000 AA (after agriculture). It is around this period that we discover the first evidence of farming implements, including what appear to be stone sickles and rudimentary plows. The plows would have been most likely either pushed by hand, or perhaps with the aid of oxen, as the Tawarë people do not appear to have learned to domesticate horses before the coming of the Hyperboreans. While the earliest implements have been formed fromstone, later farming tools would have used copper or bronze.



    The Tawarë appear to be a mostly peaceful people, though some evidence of feuding between rival clans and villages does exist. Evidence of walled settlements and bronze weaponry appear in concurrence with the appearance of material culture of the Hyperborean type. This Hyperborean invasion, not a single moment in history but a series of wars and migratory events over centuries of time, is what eventually establishes the Hyperborean language family in a place of supremacy in [High Cyrodiil] and what pushes the Tawarë family to near extinction.
    Last edited by Dan the Man; May 11, 2017 at 09:12 PM.
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  19. #19
    Barry Goldwater's Avatar Mr. Conservative
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    Default Re: A New World - The (Third) Worldbuilding IH

    The 'Awali Peoples
    The fertile riverlands lying between the Muataric Sea and the Great Sand Sea were home to one of the earliest human civilizations on the planet, and may even be a candidate for the cradle of agriculture. The many rivers flowing down from the mountains, combined with the warm and wet currents blowing over the region, made it tremendously fertile when the first nomads began to settle down into a sedentary lifestyle and grow deepwater rice close to the mouths of these rivers. Closer to the coast, the more salt-resistant barley was cultivated over rice. Peas, lentils, watercress and water spinach soon joined rice and barley as staple crops in the region. In due time, the populations of these first settled villages exploded and began to urbanize, congregating into city-states protected by palisades or mud walls & surrounded by rice paddies and/or barley fields & smaller herds of domesticated animals from sheep, to chickens, to cattle. Flax too was cultivated, as linen became the go-to fabric for clothing material in the region: its coolness and water-absorbent qualities made it quite handy for working in the hot and humid environment.

    A group of Awali peasants harvesting a rice paddy, c. 2000 AA

    The first people of this area called themselves the 'Awali, or simply 'The First' in their tongue. 'Awali, therefore, is the name of that language as well, which used a hieroglyphic writing system. Their culture was characterized by decreasing social egalitarianism and mounting stratification as they grew in numbers and urbanized: tribal chieftains and elders evolved into a hereditary upper class lording over a majority of common farmers and herders, with a tiny middle class of specialized urban artisans in between, over the first few thousand years after the advent of agriculture. The upper class dwelt in houses with stone foundations and walls of mud-brick, while artisans appeared to live in wooden homes and the peasantry had to make do with reed huts that mostly lay outside of any given settlement's walls. Furthermore, the tombs of wealthy citizens have been found to contain numerous luxury items, from ornamented mirrors to jewelry to golden or silver cups & vessels, while the masses seemed to have to make do with small, simple clay pots. The organization of early 'Awali armies, too, show a clear gulf between the budding nobility and the commons: in war steles, the former were depicted riding onager-drawn chariots and wearing helmets, while the latter were universally depicted as unarmored mobs fighting with clubs, spears and slings.

    Modern wargaming figurine depicting a Chacolithic 'Awali king, c. 4-5000 AA

    Speaking of steles, this form of art appears to have been used by the 'Awali to record their city-state's great achievements. The 'Victory Stele' of the city-state of Isiniqul depicted the victory of its king Munu-etteh over a rival called Meshuniqul, whose king Nukku-bah was shown having his head struck off by the victors. Wars between the 'Awali appear to have been brief and generally inconsequential affairs where the combatants chose a field of battle, clashed, and then went home with the losers ceding small amounts of turf or paying tribute (in precious metals, cattle and/or slaves) to the winners: total wars where one kingdom completely destroyed another were unheard of among the 'Awali. Other steles depicted events decreed to be of import by their makers, from royal weddings to animal sacrifices to the 'Awali gods and natural disasters (usually, riverine flooding).

    Stele depicting a sacrifice to Uruvenneh, the avian 'Awali god of the winds, c. 5850 AA

    As metallurgy advanced with the emergence of bronze (as both copper/arsenic and copper/tin alloys) and the decline in the popularity of pure copper tools, one 'Awali city-state in particular - an 'Ubeizan' - emerged as a major force in the region, breaking the 'Awali tradition of simple low-cost and low-consequence wars to actively conquer several of its neighbors and vassalize those neighbors' neighbors. But that story is best left for another day...

    Map of the extent of the 'Awali language family by the dawn of the Bronze Age (~6000 AA?)

    Location of Ubeizan, at the same time as the above

    The 'Awali religion
    The ancient 'Awali faith can be defined as a Mainstream religion of Statist soul with an Ancestral mentality. It was polytheistic, recognizing hundreds and eventually thousands of deities who were essentially anthropomorphic personifications of cosmic and terrestrial forces from rain to soil to lightning, and revered local kings as unquestionable avatars of their respective cities' most favored deity: while the 'Awali recognized and worshiped the same gods, one or two gods were prioritized above the rest as a patron deity by each city-state. Religious services were carried out in temple complexes, originally simply consecrated one-room structures which gradually developed into grander terraced buildings reflecting attributes of their city's patron god (for example, temples of the water god Zabu-Zabu had a sacred well and a pool of blessed water, while those of the wind god Uruvunneh had no roof), by priests with kings leading especially important religious celebrations. To preserve their divine essence, kings frequently married their sisters and first cousins.

    Figurine depicting an 'Awali worshiper, late Copper or early Bronze Age

    According to the 'Awali, the world was once a huge primordial sea. Šabu, the lonely god of the seas, created a mate for himself by slicing himself open and draining some of his blood (salt) to give rise to Murya, goddess of freshwater bodies: their joyous and frequent coupling spawned the fish, marine reptiles and in general everything that dwells in water. High above, Šaridu - the eternal sun - grew envious of the love he was witnessing but could never be part of, and turned his baleful rays to scorch and boil away huge swathes of water so as to wound Šabu & Murya. Desperate to save at least some of their children, the water deities advised the smallest of them who had lungs to learn how to breathe out of the water (giving rise to the first amphibians) while also reaching out to Šaridu's estranged son Uruvunneh to blow cooling winds all over the world by beating his great wings constantly, a task which Uruvunneh agreed to on two conditions: 1) that Murya should lie with him for one night, and 2) that Šabu create beasts in his image to accompany him in the skies. The former resulted in Murya birthing Habu the rain god, who Uruvunneh took up into the skies to protect him from Šabu's fury and who later married his aunt the cloud goddess Urašena, while the latter was how birds and airborne insects were born, formed of clay and water heated in the sun and with life breathed into them from Uruvunneh's beak.

    Clay tablet depicting Šaridu's searing rays killing the first children of Šabu & Murya, dated to c. 3,500 AA

    Eventually the water creatures that migrated to the land, first becoming amphibians and then purely land-dwelling creatures, called out to their parents for a god of their own. Šabu and Murya could not provide what they asked for, but Uruvunneh could: by lying with a female eagle and pelican, he fathered Mušu and Dunah, the first terrestrial deities. Mušu took both his half-sister and a daughter of Šabu and Murya, Abanah of the rivers, as his wives, and fathered deities of the land (including coasts and rivers) with them. Ages later one of his daughters with Abanah, Kurin, took pity on a monkey desperately grabbing at a fruit hanging from a great tree in the riverine garden of her half-sister Ianilah and fed the creature, which - thanks to the power of the divine fruit - promptly turned into the first man: Izdubar. Kurin was instantly enamored with her accidental creation, and the two eloped. With Kurin, Izdubar would father the human race.

    Stele depicting the children of Mušu and Dunah tending to animals, dated to 4,500 AA

    But the young lovers' elopement infuriated Kurin's parents, who moved to reclaim their daughter from this mortal who they thought did not deserve her. After their first sons and daughters were swallowed by fissures in the earth or killed by conveniently felled trees, Kurin advised her husband to forge weapons of unliving stone and metal to wound her living parents. Thus did Izdubar arm himself with a sling, stones and a copper sword, and mar the flawless countenances of Mušu and Dunah when he caught them stalking his pregnant wife in preparation to kill her unborn child as soon as it entered this world. The elder earth deities relented, but cursed Kurin with mortality and stripped her of the godly powers she had inherited from them. Thus, Kurin could only ever give birth to regular humans with no divine powers until she died at the age of 108, on the same day as Izdubar - who, fortunately for the both of them, had founded the first city of Ubeizan and made peace with the gods by then, so that Kurin's grandparents would prove willing to raise the two from the dead and into godhood.

    Izdubar battling Mušu as recorded on a clay cylinder found in Ubeizan, dating back to approx. 5200 AA

    Among the deities revered by the 'Awali, these were the most prominent, revered by the largest and best-preserved of their ancient cities:

    • Šabu, primodial god of the seas, patron of sailors and those who fish in saltwater bodies. Ruins remaining of the largest temple dedicated to him has been unearthed in Anzibul, a coastal city built on the delta of the Muryurir (southern) River named after his consort Murya.
    • Murya, primordial goddess of lakes and other freshwater bodies, patron of agriculture and fishing. Her largest temple was found much further inland from that of her husband, near the mouth of the Muryurir River in the ruined city of Unballa.
    • Šaridu, the wrathful sun from whom the celestial deities descend and who taught men how to use fire. His temples featured many windows to let the sunlight in and sacred fires which were tended to by priests, under strict orders to never let them go out.
    • Uruvunneh, god of the winds and son of Šaridu who saved creation from his father's hateful light with the beating of his vast wings. His temples lacked roofs and were typically built on hills, with the largest being found in the hill-city of Purabira.
    • Habu, son of Uruvunneh and Murya and god of rain. He was prayed to by farmers to water their fields, but not so much so that in his eagerness he causes a flood and kills those who asked for his help in the first place.
    • Mušu, god of the earth and son of Uruvunneh and an eagle. He was especially revered by hunters and soldiers, and the sacrifice of enemy captives in his name appears to have been practiced by his priests: burnt, broken and ritually buried human bones have been found at his vast temple complex in the city of Tubal.
    • Dunah, another earth goddess and the first consort of Mušu. She was a patroness of farmers and mothers, and her temples included chambers for the keeping of oil jars to ease childbirth. The largest of these temples was found at Morah, a ways downriver from Ubeizan.
    • Abanah, a river goddess who was the daughter of Šabu and Murya & the second consort of Mušu. She was another goddess of farmers and fishermen, and river floods were thought to be manifestations of her rage. Her biggest temple was found at Umatil, a city sitting at the delta of the Abanarir (northern) River that carries her name.
    • Ianilah, daughter of Mušu and Abanah. She was a goddess of fruit and vegetables, and accepted animal sacrifices as evidenced by the lamb and goat bones found at her best-preserved temple in Girbal.
    • Izdubar and Kurin, father and mother of the human race, who both died as mortals and were resurrected as gods by the latter's divine grandparents. As the forger of the first weapons and founder of the first city, Izdubar was the patron of kings and warriors, while Kurin was considered a goddess of love for having defied her parents and witnessed the murder of her first children at their hands just to remain by Izdubar's side. They were the joint patrons of Ubeizan, which went on to found the first empire in the ['Levantine'] Riverlands.


    First of the First: The Ubeizani Empire
    Six thousand years after the Agricultural Revolution transformed human societies around the globe, tools and weapons made from the copper-tin and copper-arsenic alloys known as bronze were quickly surging in popularity. The new metal was stronger than its base components, and dovetailed quite nicely with the developments in social stratification, a hieroglyphic writing system and city-states with coherent borders & administrative systems in the fertile 'Awali Riverlands. But none of these fledgling statelets took quicker and better to the new metal on the block than Ubeizan, an 'Awali city (by Izdubar, father and patron of humanity in 'Awali mythology, or so their story goes) built around the fork of two rivers known to the 'Awali as Muryurir in the south and Abanarir in the north: 'Murya's River' and 'Abanah's River', after two of their water goddesses. Thanks to the twin rivers and constant rainfall, the land Ubeizan built on was extremely fertile even by 'Awali standards, and its population exploded until by 6000 BA it was one of the largest cities on the planet with a population of 5,500. Its kings traded shares of their plentiful crops to the upriver cities for copper and tin, which its artisans used to make bronze in larger and larger quantities, and it was not long before the aforementioned rulers felt they may as well put their large population and bronze-filled armories to good use in subjugating the other 'Awali living outside of their borders.

    The Ubeizani king Shurubar laid down the cornerstone of his people's empire with his conquest of the neighboring city-state of Morah, downriver on Muryurir from Ubeizan, around 6020 AA. Following 'Awali etiquette, Shurubar sent a formal declaration of war to Morah's king Patigurri, and the two monarchs settled on a predetermined site for their armies' clash. Outside of a riverbank hamlet called Uppak, Shurubar and Patigurri met in a battle immortalized in an 'Awali poem known to modern readers simply as the Epic of Shurubar. The first of the clay tablets it was written on goes as such:
    Quote Originally Posted by The Epic of Shurubar, first clay tablet out of ten
    Who was he that forged the first blade?
    Of heavenly iron* his soul was made.
    Popiburi was the name his parents gave him,
    but Shurubar was what he was called in these days.
    Izdubar's blood coursed violently in his veins,
    and called for the blood of Izdubar's other spawn.

    *'Heavenly iron' probably refers to star-metal from the east.
    The poem speaks of Patigurri's army numbering 'eight hundred thousand warriors and six thousand chariots' and Shurubar's being twice as numerous, which is considered a ridiculous exaggeration by all modern scholars. However, the Ubeizani force is accepted as being larger than its Morahite counterpart, and Ubeizan's victory in the battle is not in doubt. Patigurri was felled by an Ubeizani chariot archer and his army put to flight, but instead of halting and offering terms like the 'Awali were accustomed to, Shurubar pursued the Morahites to their gates and laid siege to their town. After a month and a half, he stormed Morah's walls with ladders & a battering ram, sacked the city-state and forced the survivors to swear allegiance to him as their king on pain of death by dismemberment. This total conquest was unheard of among the 'Awali, who were used to wars being decided by a single battle with terms not including annexation being dictated by the winner immediately afterwards, and Shurubar's heirs would continue his conquests down the Muryurir and Abanarir rivers until his grandson Adahabat reigned over the river deltas nearly a century later. Thus was the Ubeizani Empire, one of the first proper empires in human history, born.

    An alabaster sculpture of Shurubar with lapis-lazuli eyes, dated to 6037 AA

    Map of the Ubeizani Empire at its height, 6200 AA


    The maroon circle = the location of Ubeizan itself.

    Ubeizani society
    Ubeizani society was little different from those of the rest of the 'Awal Riverlands. It was a highly stratified society where the king reigned at the top as an avatar of the city's patron deity (in Ubeizan's case, the mortal-turned-god Izdubar), a class of priests and nobles bound to the ruler's clan with oaths of fealty and marriage supported his rule with words & spears, and an underclass of urban artisans, rural peasants (the majority of the free population) and slaves taken in wars sat at the bottom rungs. It was taught that the King of Ubeizan was a physical manifestation of Izdubar himself, and so to defy his will was to commit sacrilege - a capital offense, made doubly worse by the fact that it was also treason, for it was said that the King was Ubeizan too.

    Relief depicting a governor coming to pay obeisance and tribute to King Mulku, son and successor of Shurubar (reigned approx. 6044-6060 BA)

    Ubeizan's labor surplus (due to its large population) meant that its rulers were able to build a grander dwelling for themselves and their gods than ever before: thus, on a small island sitting at the fork of the Muryurir and Abanarir, a great step-pyramid or ziggurat was constructed to serve as a combined temple-palace complex and finished around 6100 AA, a natural evolution of the previous designs of terraced temples adopted by the 'Awali in the late Chalcolithic and early Bronze Age. Hieroglyphic reliefs depicting the creation of the world and the deeds of Ubeizan's monarchs were carved into the ziggurat's inner walls. At the peak of the ziggurat was a shrine to Izdubar and the palatial chambers of Ubeizani royalty, while the city's priests lived and the other 'Awali gods were worshiped in only slightly less luxurious rooms below. The ziggurat was further surrounded by the brick homes of the Ubeizani aristocracy, descendants of the younger brothers and cousins of past kings.

    The ziggurat of Ubeizan

    Outside of this ziggurat, soldiers and commoners lived on the banks of the rivers around the King's Island. With its resources Ubeizan was able to maintain a higher number of professional soldiers, mostly chariot drivers and archers, than many other 'Awali cities, which was an obvious advantage in its wars. The urban population of Ubeizan were artisans and traders who lived in wooden and mud-brick homes with stone foundations, the former forging tools of copper or bronze and sculpting figurines of bone, clay and occasionally marble in their workshops while the latter peddled their goods and crops or fruits from outside the city in the marketplace. Finally, outside of Ubeizan's walls - made of stone blocks, a rarity even among advanced 'Awali city-states - the peasants continued to farm deepwater rice paddies and tend to herds of oxen, pigs and goats around their reed huts, as their ancestors had done for millennia before them and their descendants will continue to long after they've turned to dust and bones. Slaves taken in wars lived with their masters, tending to their needs whether it be helping out in the paddies or entertaining them behind closed doors, and could expect their children to grow up in slavery as well. Farmers and the unemployed were seasonally drafted to work alongside slaves in maintaining irrigation ditches, dikes and simple mud roads.

    Artist's imagining of the city of Ubeizan, c. 6300 AA

    The cities subdued by Ubeizan had a governor appointed to rule over them for life by the King in Ubeizan. Typically, these governors were Ubeizani nobles rather than locals, and were expected to live with their new subjects rather than reigning as absentee landlords from Ubeizan itself. Aside from that detail, these cities' societies greatly resembled the capital's own. Shrines to Izdubar would be built if one didn't already exist in each conquered city, so that their governors may worship their capital's patron deity too. These governors of course were expected to collect taxes in the usual Ubeizani fashion, and to send some of their subjects to Ubeizan as slaves to compensate for any shortfall in material taxes.

    Steles, clay tablets and relief-carvings were still used by the Ubeizani to depict myths and victories. However, Ubeizani kings never recorded their own defeats so as to appear to be invincible and constantly victorious. Military losses were spun into victories or simply ignored altogether, forcing modern historians to figure out that the Ubeizani had actually suffered some defeats from the steles of other 'Awali kingdoms that recorded their own triumphs over Shurubar and his descendants. Clay tablets were also used to keep accounts and record a census of the people of Ubeizan & nearby villages.

    As Ubeizan had no coinage, taxes were collected in kind by tax-farmers drawn from the noble and warrior classes, who were entitled to keep a tenth of everything they took. Ubeizani taxes appear to have been generally flat in nature, with everyone from the highest noble to the lowest peasant being expected to pay the exact same amount of crops or goods, and those who couldn't cough up an exact amount of rice (as an example) could expect to have some of their other possessions seized to make up the difference. Generally, it was expected that a farmer could reap 40-50 grains of rice for every one sown in the fertile and rainy conditions of the riverlands, and lose a fifth to a third of that in taxes. These taxes went into the king's building projects and feeding & maintaining Ubeizan's army. Those who had nothing to give, or too little, could be placed in temporary debt slavery to work off their taxes (which was an arbitrarily defined period of time, and could last from a week to a decade).

    Trade was done with other 'Awali city-states, the peoples of and beyond the mountains to the northeast, and nomads from the south and east. Ubeizani kings permitted nomads to seasonally graze their herds on their kingdom's territory in exchange for a tax on wool, meat, milk and cheese, while other Ubeizani traders brought crops and fruits to exchange for precious metals in the mountains. Again, as Ubeizan had no coinage, all trade was done via bartering.

    The Ubeizani military
    The Ubeizani army was much like any other 'Awali force in the region, differentiated only by its size and one new innovation: it comprised an elite regiment of elite nobles riding in wagon-like chariots (ever supporting only two men at most, the actual warrior and a driver) with four wooden wheels and pulled by four donkeys, a body of professional infantrymen trusted to form the front and center of the army (which is said innovation), and a mob of unarmored lower-class draftees who made up a majority of its ranks. Donkey-riding scouts existed, but singularly functioned as observers and did not fight on ass-back. Ubeizani tactics involved drawing the enemy into close-quarters battle with their infantry while the chariots circled to their flanks and wore them down with a constant barrage of missiles before running them down, at which point the foe would hopefully be put to flight. The Ubeizani army was apparently organized into hundred-strong regiments, with each regiment comprising a hundred footmen directed by one chariot-riding aristocrat (with the nobles closest to the king commanding regiments of professional footmen rather than the drafted commoners), who in turn obviously answered to the king or another noble he has appointed as his chief representative on the battlefield.

    Ubeizani chariot with crew and foot attendant

    Bows with bronze arrows and bronze-headed javelins were the ranged weapons of choice of the elite, who also carried bronze spears for close defense & protected themselves with bronze helmets and in the later Ubeizani period, vests of bone/copper/bronze lamellar. The professional infantry who formed the center and front lines of an Ubeizani formation wore copper or bronze helmets for protection and fought with bronze spears, axes or blades & wooden or wicker shields. The mobs who formed the Ubeizani and 'Awali infantry were equipped with whatever arms they could afford, typically just farming implements or wooden clubs and perhaps a better-forged weapon of copper/bronze for the artisans, and rarely if ever wore armor of any kind.

    Artist's recreation of the Battle of Uppak between Ubeizan and Morah & the wooden carvings that inspired it

    When laying siege to an enemy settlement, the Ubeizani modus operandi was simply to loot and plunder the outlying farms, divert or otherwise lock down water supplies with temporary dikes, and wait for the defenders to starve. Assaults like Shurubar's storming of Morah were rare and only done when the besieging army itself started to run out of supplies or scouts have reported reinforcements on the way. In that case, ladders and a battering ram (really just a wooden log carried by a few unfortunate peasants, who now found themselves working the most dangerous job in the army) would be quickly constructed out of any nearby wood supplies and the Ubeizani would throw themselves at the town walls until either they had been taken and the city overrun, or they had incurred too many casualties and were forced to retreat.

    Aside from its strong army, Ubeizan also dedicated significant resources to a riverine fleet to more effectively control the Muryurir and Abanarir. This fleet was initially made up entirely of boats unsuited for fighting, instead simply serving as transports for their soldiers. Later boats were wider and sturdier, and carried archers who would remain on the boat to provide fire support in addition to the rowers and transported troops themselves.

    At the apparent height of its power around 6200 AA, the Ubeizani Empire suddenly collapsed. The empire was caught in a two-front conflict where several cities along the banks of the Abanarir revolted and lynched or threw out their Ubeizani governors in protest against King Meleh's harsh taxation, while to the south, tribal nomads from the mountains sought to graze their herds much closer to the paddies than previously agreed between Meleh and their chieftains and so entered conflict with Ubeizani farmers. While Meleh led the Ubeizani army against the rebels in the north, he did summon the nomad chiefs to his ziggurat to explain themselves, only for them to be seized and put to death by his councilors (ruling the city in his stead while he was away fighting the rebels) for breaking the terms of their initial agreement. It is believed they were counting on their king to defeat the northern rebels, then turn around and destroy the nomads before they could rampage through their empire's southern half. Unfortunately for these councilors and Ubeizan in general, the Ubeizani army was defeated and Meleh himself killed by the allied rebel cities at the Battle of Evkek late that summer, and the nomads were free to swarm up the Muryurir with little effective opposition.

    The subject cities of Anzibul, Purabira, Tubal, and Girbal were plundered and many of their residents killed or carried off as slaves before the nomads came to Ubeizan itself, which they also besieged. After three months, a failed sally allowed the besiegers to pursue the Ubeizani defenders before they could close the gates and take the city at last, at which point they plundered everything they could from it, set the central ziggurat on fire to eliminate its remaining defenders and Meleh's immediate family (as well as the councilors whose executions of their elders started their rampage in the first place), and carried off thousands into slavery. Ubeizani rule disintegrated elsewhere as the other vassal cities, inspired by the example of the northern rebels and knowing that they had a great opportunity with the sack of Ubeizan, shook off their chains. Thus did the Riverlands have their first large-scale hostile contact with that group of people known to later generations as the Qormats.

    Quote Originally Posted by Words transcribed from the records of an Ubeizani aristocrat, c. 6215 AA
    Savages from the south came with fire and wood and copper...they were taller than I, and some had skin the color of mud, others black as coal...taking advantage of our weakness they pillaged and burned up Murya's River, and laid waste to our subjects, and finally laid low great Ubeizan, center of the world. I dare not speak of the myriad atrocities they visited upon our people.
    The nomads did not stay long in the Riverlands. They were 'smash-and-grab' looters, not conquerors, who were unfamiliar with agriculture. Soon after sacking Ubeizan, they made their way home to their mountains with much plunder and slaves in tow, leaving little in the way of lasting physical impact in the Riverlands. Life went on as usual in the cities that broke away from the empire, though now at least they paid their taxes to local sovereigns once more rather than a more distant king in Ubeizan. And as for Ubeizan itself, it would be rebuilt under a new dynasty, raised up to replace the slain heirs of Shurubar by the surviving priests - though it remained only a shadow of its former glory. Still, the example they had set as warlords and conquerors would remain etched into the minds of every Riverlander who knew their touch, and inspire the growth of new empires down the road.

    Artist's imagining of the Qormat sack of Ubeizan, ~6200 AA

    The Second Wind: Umatil
    After the sudden and ignominious downfall of the Ubeizani Empire, the 'Awali Riverlands reverted to being a fractious collection of bickering city-kingdoms for 500 years before a worthy successor emerged: Umatil, a major city-kingdom sitting on the delta of the Abanarir (northern) river. Its location made it a natural entrepot where crops, salt and precious metals flowed west in exchange for olive oil, wine, copper and tin (the former two goods were especially favored imports from the Allawaurë), making the kingdom fabulously wealthy. Around 6700 AA, the Umatili king Iddisham realized that he could put his riches to use in conquering his neighbors, and promptly did just that. At this point in history, both the domesticated horse & the spoked wheel had been introduced to the 'Awali through contact with the Suffulk & Mutu'mani, and when combined they created lighter, more maneuverable horse-drawn chariots that proved far more popular than the older onager-drawn solid-wheeled variety: but Umatil, by virtue of its wealth, was able to field far a far larger chariot corps than its nearest rivals. With these chariots and the numerous & varied mercenaries his treasury could afford, Iddisham rapidly overran his neighbors, and by the time of his death in 6722 had conquered as far as Ubeizan itself.

    The Umatili Empire proved less river-bound than the Ubeizani, and expanded both southward to the Muryurir and northward to the banks of the Ubu-Ravir or 'River of the World's End' (so called because the 'Awali, in their pride, believed their cultural sphere to be the only part of the world that mattered). They were more conciliatory towards those they had conquered than the Ubeizani, allowing defeated kings to continue ruling their native city-states in return for a hefty tribute (as opposed to throwing them out entirely and replacing them with handpicked governors) so long as said kings did not try to fight to the last man against their armies. The Umatili monarchs styled themselves 'Over-King of the First', and were more 'first-among-equals' figures heading a confederation of highly autonomous vassals rather than an absolute sovereign imposing their will on subjugated populations in a centralized empire.

    Map of Umatil

    Umatili society
    Umatili society itself was little different from that of the Ubeizani or 'Awali in general. The only significant differences were that 1) their patron deity was the sea god Šabu and 2) as mentioned earlier, their empire was less centralized and native monarchs were allowed to retain their thrones beneath the Over-King's rule so long as they pledged loyalty, paid tribute on time and contributed soldiers to their overlord's wars on demand. For more information, see those entries.

    Bronze figure of a servitor of Šabu, found in the ruins of Umatil and dated to 6868 AA

    Umatili army
    Unlike its conservative society, which stuck to 'Awali traditions and had changed not a jot since the time of Ubeizan, the Umatili army represented a significant departure from the Ubeizani military structure - and indeed, its innovations were the reason it managed to build the second great 'Awali empire. The Umatili army was less reliant on levied mobs than other 'Awali kingdoms, instead counting on its own great wealth to recruit thousands of professional mercenaries to form the majority of its ranks (along with a core of more traditional, also professional elite troops - mainly charioteers - raised from the upper strata of its society). These mercenaries came from all over the place: many were fellow 'Awali veterans, but some were Allawaurë or other Tawaurë, Suufulk, Qormats from the south, Munu'mati camel riders, even the rare Golga. As these sellswords were organized into units formed of their own kind (save the Golga, who were typically employed on an individual basis and thus almost never had any fellow Golga in the Umatili tanks to interact with), they retained their own traditional fighting styles and wielded their own equipment, giving the Umatili military tremendous flexibility.

    Artist's impression of a Qormat mercenary in Umatili employ, c. 7000 AA

    The pride of the Umatili, however, were their nobles' chariots. These vehicles were carried on spoked wheels and pulled by horses instead of onagers, making them far lighter & more maneuverable than the older stocky-wheeled design. Most chariots were pulled by two horses and carried two men (a driver and armored noble archer with a hacking sword for close combat), but those of the Over-King and his close relatives were larger, pulled by three horses and carried a three-man crew (driver, noble, and armored spearman). They proved to be absolutely devastating on the field of battle against the older onager-chariots with solid wheels fielded by their 'Awali rivals, to the point of rendering that design obsolete by 7000 AA. These chariots also proved instrumental in repelling Qormat invasions, crushing the same people who had laid the Ubeizani Empire low before them.

    An Umatili horse-drawn, spoke-wheeled chariot, c. 7050 AA

    Fittingly, the Umatili whose empire was born through their economic strength, also fell when that economic strength erupted. In 7062 AA, an upriver border war between the Munu'mati tribe of Enezi and a league of 'Awali kingdoms near the source of the Abanarir disrupted trade long enough to significantly damage Umatil's economy. King Dumuz-a-bil was thus unable to pay his mercenaries that year, and when a minor mutiny erupted on the streets of Umatil, he invited their captains to his ziggurat to negotiate terms. Once there, these negotiations did not go well: the captains insisted on being paid in full, on time, even as their contractor stressed that what they were asking for was impossible. When a Qormat skirmisher captain threatened to plunder Umatil for compensation he retaliated by ordering the palace guards to bar the doors and slaughter the mercenary commanders, after which directions were issued to the rest of the native Umatili soldiers to attack the sellswords' barracks, in which they were joined by several angry mobs. However, the king's strategy backfired when the mercenaries rallied and fought back more effectively than expected, routing his men and promptly running amok throughout Umatil. Dumuz-a-bil and his family were besieged in the central ziggurat, where they and several hundred civilians lucky enough to reach the palace when the street battles turned sour were heroically defended by Umatil's remaining soldiers until the mercenaries gave up and went home, having plundered the rest of the city and killed or enslaved thousands of other residents.

    Artist's reimagining of Allawaurë and Qormat sellswords attempting an assault on the walls of Umatil's ziggurat, 7062 AA

    Although Dumuz-a-bil had survived the night's events, his empire did not. Without the mercenaries, all that was left of the Umatili army was in no shape to continue asserting control over his tributaries, and the thousands of newly unemployed sellswords rampaging up the Abanarir & Muryurir weren't making things any easier. Some of the Umatili vassal city-kingdoms were sacked by the mercenaries as they made their way home, others paid the newly-made bandits to leave them alone and still a few others were lucky or determined enough to resist their sieges, but virtually all threw off any notion of fealty to Umatil. Those emissaries of the Umatili crown who were dispatched to demand these wayward vassals return to Dumuz-a-bil's overlordship were laughed out, or chased out, of the cities they visited. By the time the trade routes were reopened and wealth started flowing back into Umatil's treasury, Dumuz-a-bil had died of old age and the central 'Awali Riverlands had just finished recovering from his forsaken mercenaries' fury, the Umatili Empire having already been reduced to little more than a fading memory. Still, their charioteering innovations and their service as an abject lesson on why any power shouldn't rely on mercenaries overmuch would help the third, greatest and last of the Bronze Age 'Awali empires blaze its own trail into the history books a millennium after their time...

    Last but not least: Zaba-Tutul
    The last and greatest of the old 'Awali empires was that of Zaba-Tutul, founded a little over a thousand years after the downfall of the Umatili Empire and centered on a city that was relatively young by 'Awali standards; Zaba-Tutul had been founded around 6200 AA, ironically starting out as a colony of Umatil, and was among the many tributary states to have broken free of its mother-city's control when the Umatili lost control of their mercenaries. In late 7062 AA, a troop of mostly Qormat and Mun'umati deserters from the Umatili army harassed the outskirts of Zaba-Tutul and threatened to besiege the city if they were not paid a sufficient ransom; the Zaba-Tutuli king Yur-eni-bil, a distant relation of the ill-fated Umatili monarch Dumuz-a-bil, elected to meet them in battle and actually won the resulting battle, to the surprise of everyone but himself. Thus Zaba-Tutul managed to avoid the economic devastation that either being sacked or paying a heavy ransom to the deserters brought upon many of its neighbors, and Yur-eni-bil & his descendants used their position of relative strength to bring said neighbors under their rule. By 7562 AA, Zaba-Tutul had conquered its former overlord Umatil and was master of the lands between the Abanarir & Muryurir rivers. The only serious opposition they had left among the 'Awali was a league of the three next greatest city-kingdoms: Ilenga, Dagan, and ancient Ubeizan itself, the latter of which led the league.

    Yet even the combined strength of these three kingdoms, minor empires in their own right, was not sufficient to bring down Zaba-Tutul's star. At the great Battle of Igigi Plain in 7567 AA, King Tiqip of Zaba-Tutul led his army to meet the gathered hosts of his three rivals and prevailed utterly, having detached a unit of engineers to destroy several major dikes south of the battlefield and flood the larger army of the Ubeizani League's positions (mostly, for much of the Zaba-Tutuli vanguard was washed away as collateral damage too). The kings of Dagan and Ubeizan were among the drowned, while King Dun-he-nuna of Ilenga survived but had little choice beyond bending his knee soon after the battle. By the end of the year, Tiqip was able to march his forces into Dagan and Ubeizan with little effective opposition and proclaimed himself Paramount King of the 'Awali in the ziggurat of the latter. No other still-independent kingdom among the First had the strength to contest his claim, and one by one (or in batches of up to a dozen, on the occasion that they formed a coalition in a desperate bid to stop the Zaba-Tutuli) they were swallowed up by Tiqip and his heirs until by 8080 AA, the entirety of the 'Awali Riverlands knew a single master for the first time in history. It is for this reason that the Zaba-Tutuli Empire is also sometimes referred to as the 'Awali Empire by historians.

    But dominance over 'just' their fellow 'Awali would not be enough to sate the hunger for power and conquests that had by now possessed the descendants of Yurlabil, oh no. Zaba-Tutuli armies began to assail a diverse crop of new foes, ranging from the indigenous marsh-people of the north to Mun'umati tribes at the edge of the Riverlands and the Great Sand Sea to the east to Qormat mountain men & Saurii colonists in the south, in an effort to plant the Zaba-Tutuli flag in new lands and bring more slaves, material resources and trade routes into the fold of the Paramount Kings. With their vast arsenal of acceptable-to-high-quality bronze equipment and chariots, professional soldiery and sophisticated administrative/logistical apparatus (all made possible in large part by their massive slave economy), the Zaba-Tutuli found few equals capable of slowing or halting their relentless wars of expansion out of their native riverlands.

    The Zaba-Tutuli empire shortly after the Battle of Igigi Plain, 7,567 AA


    Legend:
    Red - Zaba-Tutul
    Green - Ubeizan
    Cyan - Ilenga
    Burgundy - Dagan

    Society & government
    The Zaba-Tutuli empire followed in the footsteps of Ubeizan rather than its founder and former master, Umatil, in that it had a centralized governing structure. Native kings and chiefs who were subdued by its armies were turfed out of their seats, their subjects instead being placed under the rule of a governor appointed by the Paramount King in Zaba-Tutul. As governors had no fixed term limits and were appointed & replaced at said Paramount King's pleasure, these governors could reign for life so long as they did not offend their patron, which could be most easily accomplished by maintaining a careful balance between sending sufficient tax revenue and slaves home & preventing their subjects from revolting against Zaba-Tutul's overlordship. These governors were supported by a population of Zaba-Tutuli colonists, originally a category comprised of the soldiers assigned to a given city's garrison and their families but soon expanding to include administrators, judges and clerics sent from home; although the native aristocracy and elder statesmen were still involved at the lower echelons of Zaba-Tutuli local government as accountants, bookkeepers, tax-collectors and interpreters, all decision-making power rested with the governor and his cabal (and above them, the royal court in Zaba-Tutul's ziggurat), which was required by law to be made up entirely of Zaba-Tutuli immigrants and their patrilineal descendants. Above these governors and the traditional nobility, per 'Awali custom, the Paramount King was considered an avatar of Zaba-Tutul's patron god Mušu and thus considered sacrosanct, while the priests of Mušu enjoyed similar status on account of being thought of as their god's lesser mouthpieces on Earth.

    Cylinder seal impression of the Zaba-Tutuli king Etaqip appointing a governor, c. 8,800 AA

    Despite this greater centralism, the Zaba-Tutuli were aware that if they didn't integrate conquered natives into their system more effectively, they could easily fall as the Ubeizani did. Thus, after one to three generations, a city that had not revolted against Zaba-Tutuli rulership would be given the status of Ebiti Zaba-Tutul (literally 'Like Zaba-Tutul'), which amounts to Zaba-Tutuli citizenship. The upper echelons of the existing native nobility were allowed entry into highest echelons of local governance and even parts of the central government in Zaba-Tutul itself, while a significant number of the local slaves were manumitted and drafted into the Zaba-Tutuli army, to be replaced with the foreign slaves these new soldiers were expected to bring in. Their families would be freed along with them as well, and for all intents and purposes, this population of freedmen could be thought of as new Zaba-Tutuli citizens in their own right. Within a generation, even if they still speak their own dialect of 'Awali at home, they could serve as officers and bureaucrats in the halls of Zaba-Tutuli power just like men born in Zaba-Tutul itself.

    Now all that said, being a low-ranking cog in the engine of lower-end governance was one of the best possible outcomes for the first and second generations of peoples placed under the Zaba-Tutuli yoke. Their empire's economy was much more heavily reliant on slaves than Ubeizan's and Umatil's, as free men were overwhelmingly required for the army or civil service and consequently someone else needed to do their work. Every time the Zaba-Tutuli army conquered a town or tribe, unless otherwise agreed upon in prior peace negotiations - which Zaba-Tutul famously always adhered to unless betrayed first, not necessarily because their kings were paragons of honor but because they knew that if they broke such agreements first nobody would ever trust their word and surrender instead of forcing a bloody last stand - anywhere between half to three-quarters of the subjugated men, women and children would be enslaved. While there exists many a lurid tale about a decadent Zaba-Tutuli king or aristocrat's harem of nubile foreign women, the truth is that the vast bulk of newly enslaved peoples were sent to do decidedly un-romantic manual labor in the farms, mines and workshops, freeing their former occupants to go join the Zaba-Tutuli army and bring back even more slaves in the future. Slaves could not marry non-slaves and any children a slave woman gave birth to was automatically made a slave; while they could be manumitted by their master, this did not appear to occur frequently, and freedmen were almost always immediately drafted into the Zaba-Tutuli army. In case they suspect a rebellion might be in the works, masters were encouraged to put on a show of force by randomly killing several of their strongest slaves to scare the rest back into line; this was no great loss, as Zaba-Tutul's constant wars meant a constant stream of replacements for them to pick out of too.

    Relief depicting Zaba-tutuli overseers and Qormat slaves, c. 8,100 AA

    As for the free men of society's lower orders...well, squeezed between the surfeit of slaves capable of doing their work for free and nobles & priests above of them whose positions in society were guaranteed, they had little choice but to join the army or civil service (mostly the former, for the latter required basic literacy & numeracy), or else starve. Thus the majority of the Zaba-Tutuli army's vaunted professional soldiers were formerly free peasants and artisans, retrained to march and kill at the command of their superiors after losing their jobs to slaves. Assuming they survive their minimum decade-long service, they would receive a severance package in the form of a plot of land and anywhere between three to a dozen slaves carved out from the territories they had helped to conquer, the size and quality of both being determined by their rank at the time of their dismissal from the army. Veterans could, of course, re-enlist and serve at a higher paygrade, and their second severance package included having their family name added to the rolls of the nobility. While men and boys were slated for the military or civil service, women and girls did what little civilian work that wasn't already being done by slaves; home-making, sewing, working pottery and so on.

    Some free men became merchants and led caravans or trading convoys westward into the cities and ports of the Allawaurë and Saurii (at least when their Paramount King wasn't at war with their destinations) to turn a profit, selling off cargoes of everything that could be found wherever the Paramount King had power from rice to gold to salt and buying whatever the 'Awali did not grow or mine themselves. Unfortunately for them, the occupation of trader - one who did not create goods, but only moved around goods created or harvested by others - had never commanded much respect in the martial/agricultural society of the 'Awali and Zaba-Tutul was not about to buck that trend, and so even merchants who grew wealthier than the traditional Zaba-Tutuli aristocracy had next to no official influence in the empire. In times of great need or extravagance, Paramount Kings and their lords were also known to seize merchants' goods without compensation to fuel their armies or wild parties, turning away even more of those who were considering taking up trade for a living.

    Artist's imagining of a Zaba-Tutuli farm, worked entirely by slaves while the owner's wife chats with a neighbor

    Outside of the 'Awali Riverlands proper, Zaba-Tutuli administration was less rigorously centralized. In the Great Sand Sea, up to a dozen Mun'umati tribes (most prominently the Enezi​ or 'Forlorn' and 'Ilmi or 'Righteous') were subjugated by the force of Zaba-Tutuli arms by 9000 AA, but as they were nomads with little to no knowledge of farming & whose homeland mostly consisted of nothing more than worthless desert, it was decided that trying to forcibly settle them and setting up an extensive administrative apparatus as had been done in the conquered cities of the Riverlands were not feasible options to deal with them. Instead, the Paramount Kings pragmatically permitted their eastern subjects to continue living their nomadic lifestyle and watering their horses at government-controlled oases in exchange for annual oaths of fealty and tributes of cheese, milk, meat and slaves (usually gathered in raids on the independent Mun'umati tribes even further out east), and to meet quotas of cavalrymen and skirmishers for the Zaba-Tutuli army in times of war. A single Zaba-Tutuli permanent envoy was attached to each tribe's chief to keep tabs on them, but beyond that, the central government more or less left the Mun'umati to their own devices, and they were not remotely assimilated into the broader 'Awali culture or governing structure. This same deal was cut with the handful of Suuvulk tribes brought to heel in the empire's extreme northeastern reaches, as well.

    A similar arrangement cropped up in the south, with subdued Qormat tribes being allowed to retain their traditional lifestyle so long as they exclusively focused on raiding the enemies of Zaba-Tutul, turned over a share of their spoils and provided soldiers to the royal army in wartime. The only Zaba-Tutuli settlements in the Great Sand Sea sprang up around oases and mines (particularly salt mines), and these were all respectively slave plantations crossed with waystations for trading caravans or slave-staffed mining operations with their only free inhabitants being the Zaba-Tutuli overseers, garrisons and merchants catering to the former. Meanwhile, in the Green-and-Grey Mountains of the south, the physical footprint of the Zaba-Tutuli Empire was limited to just mining towns, where slaves extracted tin, copper and precious metals & stones under the whips of overseers & the spear-butts of soldiers assigned to them.

    Entrance to an ancient Zaba-Tutuli salt mine in the Great Sand Sea

    How do modern historians know all of the above, one might wonder? Well, the Zaba-Tutuli had the good manners to leave behind one of the best-preserved law codes of this time period, and excellently preserved records in general. The Law of Etaqi is a great basalt stele covered in hieroglyphs laying out the laws and customs of the Zaba-Tutuli Empire circa 7,800 AA, and may in fact be the oldest preserved legal document in human history. The laws were organized in groups, with the laws judging nobility inscribed into the top parts of the stele and those for commoners and slaves further below, and transparently discriminated against the lower orders of society: for example, it decreed that should a common man or slave murder a noble he was to be executed by dismemberment via oxen, but a noble who murdered a commoner or someone else's slave would only have to pay restitution equal to the commoner's salary to his family or the slave's price to his master, and there was no punishment for killing one's own slave. People were judged by both a judge (obviously) and a jury comprised of the higher-status party's peers. The code further specified that 'all are considered guilty until they prove their own innocence', so that though both the plaintiff and defendant could present their evidence before the court, said court operated from a presumption of guilt to begin with. Aside from Etaqi's Stele, Zaba-Tutuli officials were quite thorough when it came to keeping records, and significant quantities of clay tablets and papyrus scrolls on which annual censuses (recording the age, gender, ethnicity, patron deity, job and length-of-residency of every one of the respective city's permanent residents), tax records, imports and exports, monthly visitors to a given city, the number of travelers passing through the city & ships docked in its harbor, and other bureaucratic minutiae have been discovered in the archives of ruined Zaba-Tutuli ziggurats.

    Etaqi's Stele, now preserved in a museum

    The Zaba-Tutuli military
    While the Zaba-Tutuli administration was instrumental to holding their empire together, to achieve any conquests in the first place they needed an army. Fortunately for the Paramount Kings, their heavy usage of slave labor in virtually every sector of the imperial economy meant that they had a ready supply of free but unemployed men and boys with little to no economic prospects but to join the military! Thus Zaba-Tutul was able to raise a large and professional army, composed entirely of free citizens who signed on for a duration of ten years at minimum. Just as crucially was the degree of meritocracy employed in the army's lower and middle ranks: while aristocrats still monopolized the topmost echelons of the military, enlisted veterans were promoted to ranks up to Ene-bali ('leader of many', translating to command of up to 500 soldiers) based solely on their personal fighting prowess and command ability, and virtually all Zaba-Tutuli drill sergeants (who were expected to train fresh recruits for a period of three to nine months, depending on their role) were enlisted commoners themselves.

    Relief depicting a Zaba-Tutuli infantry recruits marching in formation, dated to 8,428 AA

    Now, as to the composition of the Zaba-Tutuli army: that was decidedly less innovative than the previous 'Awali empires. As expected from an 'Awali fighting force, the majority of their soldiers were archers or infantrymen, who despite being more professionally trained and better-equipped than the men in their predecessors' armies were still too poor to afford horses and chariots. The bowmen fought entirely unarmored and formed the first ranks of the average Zaba-Tutuli force, always exchanging projectiles with the enemy's own missile troops or peppering the front ranks of their army with arrows before retiring to allow the infantry to advance. Most of the footmen were armed with bronze or copper-headed spears, tall square-shaped tower shields made of wicker, and a knife or club for close combat, while senior units were outfitted with one-handed bronze axes or maces used in conjunction with a solid wooden shield and appear to have served as shock troops. If the steles depicting soldiers are to be believed, all Zaba-Tutuli infantrymen were outfitted with a copper or bronze conical helm worn over a soft cap, with the elite shock troopers and officers also wearing a circular bronze disc-shaped protector held over their hearts with leather straps. These soldiers did not have to buy their own gear: in a sign of Zaba-Tutul's martial professionalism, they were equipped at state expense with weapons and armor produced in state-run foundries by slaves directly owned by the government.

    Zaba-Tutuli spearmen in tabletop wargame miniature form

    Zaba-Tutuli infantry tactics appear to have been nothing special, only distinguished from the armies of older powers by their superior discipline. Spearmen were organized into phalanxes, typically eight men wide and six ranks deep, and invariably formed the center of a Zaba-Tutuli battle line. Most of the time they would advance to meet the enemy head-on, presenting a wall of wicker shields bristling with spears, and lock the opposing center into a push-of-spear contest while the ax- and mace-armed shock troops mustered behind them would split into two groups and advance from behind the phalanx in a bid to flank the opposition. In other cases, the shock troops formed the front ranks of the infantry and rushed forward to engage the enemy first, with the spearmen following up to add numbers & force to their push. As mentioned above, the real advantage held by the Zaba-Tutuli infantry over their rival counterparts was in discipline: their regiments advanced in a more orderly fashion than most contemporaries of this period (with soldiers rarely marching out of step), were less likely than their adversaries to break and rout under the pressure of a prolonged melee engagement, and even their spear phalanx was able to turn to face a threat on their flank with surprising speed (the lightness of their equipment probably helped in that regard).

    The main killing arm of the Zaba-Tutuli army remained its aristocrat-manned chariotry, as with all the other 'Awali states. The most popular design in the Zaba-Tutuli ranks was a spoked-wheel chariot supporting a crew of three: a helmeted driver, a shield-bearer of low birth (usually a trusted servant of the nobleman in charge), and a heavily armored nobleman. The shield-bearer was usually unarmored and naturally carried a shield with which to protect the chariot crew (hence his job's title), and also wielded a spear for close defense and to assist his lord in charges. The nobleman was armed with a bow and bronze arrows for ranged combat, a 3-4 m pike for the charge (its length giving them a greater reach than the conventional spear, which made for a lethal combination when put together with the speed of an onrushing chariot) and a khopesh (a bronze sickle-bladed hacking sword that appears to have evolved out of the socketed battle-axe design) for close defense, and further wore a bronze helmet, a circular chest-protector and an armored cloak of small pointed discs & flakes sewn onto thin leather for protection. These chariots were heavier than the 'Awali standard popularized by the Umatili Empire a thousand years prior to Zaba-Tutul's own rise and sacrificed speed for stability, shocking power & fighting 'elbow room', making them just as brutally effective in headlong frontal charges as they were in flanking maneuvers. The Paramount Kings and their corps of 100 bodyguards rode on three-horse chariots made of gilded copper or bronze, and uniquely wore coats of bronze scales sewn onto to a linen backing.

    A regiment of Zaba-Tutuli chariots prepares to charge at full gallop, c. 9,000 AA

    Zaba-Tutul had learned not to rely overmuch on foreign mercenaries and auxiliaries after witnessing the downfall of its former patron Umatil, but that didn't mean its army was totally bereft of foreigners. As mentioned under the 'society' section above, the Paramount Kings required tributary Qormat and Mun'umati tribes to send auxiliaries to join the royal army in wartime. Qormat auxiliaries were typically light infantry, unarmored skirmishers who fought with javelins and axes or clubs and were deployed alongside the archers at the frontmost ranks of a Zaba-Tutuli army; the Mun'umati auxiliaries in highest demand, on the other hand, were horsemen and camel-riders who chiefly functioned as outriders and mounted archers, for the existence of only very simple saddles (a wide fringed pad secured onto the rider's mount with a breastcollar, cinch and cruppers) and a lack of stirrups & specially-bred large warhorses made mounted melee combat difficult and riding while wearing any more armor than a simple helmet impossible. Various mercenaries from around the Muataric Sea and further inland to the east - Allawaurë, Saurii, Suuvulk, Golga and even the occasional Omete - were also employed, but their numbers (combined with those of the subject auxiliaries) were never allowed to exceed a quarter of the Zaba-Tutuli army in total and they were closely watched by Zaba-Tutuli liaison officers.

    An Enezi dromedary auxiliary in Zaba-Tutuli service, c. 9,000 AA

    Unlike the sudden and unexpected downfalls of the preceding Ubeizani and Umatili empires, Zaba-Tutul's fall was more protracted, and there were some definite warning signs along the way. Starting around 9,000 AA, the global climate shifted for the worse - snow fell for the first time in the empire's northern reaches that year - and worldwide cooling increasingly hurt crop output. In the east, expanding desertification chewed up the previously arable lands at the old border between the Riverlands and the Great Sand Sea, while many of the oases within Zaba-Tutul's zone of control in the western parts of said Sand Sea shrank or dried up with no replacement to be found; adding oil to the fire, the Zaba-Tutuli government imposed heavier taxes in slaves and horses on their subject Mun'umati tribes in exchange for permitting continued access to those few oases they still controlled, obviously aggravating said Mun'umati who now found themselves increasingly forced to choose between getting water & food and selling their own children into slavery in order to meet the price for oasis access. Zaba-Tutul's wars of expansion ground to a halt as soldiers were sent back to the home front to suppress increasingly frequent food riots & slave revolts and to help collect taxes at spearpoint, as the masses were not in the least inclined to give up even a fraction of their meager crops under the dire circumstances.

    In 9,730 AA the major towns of Zaibali, Henematil and Quya-Qumil along the Muryurir threw out or lynched their Zaba-Tutuli governors and launched the Revolt of the Three Cities. This uprising, the largest in Zaba-Tutuli history at that point in time, took eleven years to suppress and ended with the three cities destroyed utterly - but not before the rebels devastated the Riverlands' southern irrigation networks, further worsening the food situation. Matters were not helped by the growth in numbers and rapidity of revolts and desertions among the still-enormous slave population, who sensed a shot at freedom as their masters' chains rusted, and Zaba-Tutul's Qormat and Mun'umat tributaries, who were upset that their patrons were doing little to nothing to alleviate their own climate-related suffering and sensed opportunities to break free amidst Zaba-Tutul's decline.

    Still, the empire lumbered on with increasing frailty for nearly three hundred more years after the Revolt of the Three Cities. It was only around 10,000 AA that the beginning of the end finally arrived at their doors: two of the most powerful tribes of the Great Sand Sea, the Shamshi and Taibani, had buried their millennia-old hatchet to form an alliance out of climate change-induced desperation and were now riding west at the head of a vast confederacy of fellow Mun'umati tribes, united by a desire to escape their searing desert homeland where most of the last few oases known to them had dried up. The nearly all-cavalry armies of these desert nomads, including a previously unseen innovation in the form of camel-mounted lancers, proved to be quite a challenge for the infantry-and-chariot model of the 'Awali. Taking advantage of Zaba-Tutul's preoccupation with putting down yet another uprising among its northern cities at the time and aided by rebellious slaves and entire tributary tribes of their fellow Mun'umati who were defecting to their side in record numbers (indeed the 'Ilmi tribe was the first to defect, and not a man among them remained loyal to Zaba-Tutul when their chief & elders announced their decision), the Mun'umati invaders rapidly overwhelmed Zaba-Tutul's eastern defenses, wiping out the badly undermanned forces of local governors and sacking city after city: by the time Paramount King Muš-eni-bal was prepared to march south to finally deal with them, they were nearly at the gates of Ubeizan.

    Fortunately for Muš-eni-bal, he had succeeded in keeping the Enezi tribe on his side by taking their chieftain Daydan bul-Wazzah al-Dhadh's son hostage at the same time that some of the Mun'umati confederates had grown too confident from their triumphs & peeled away from the main confederate army to settle down in their conquests, allowing him to inflict a string of significant defeats on the disjointed and victory-drunk confederacy as a whole starting with the Battle of Ubeizan in 10,003 AA. The Mun'umati had speed, numbers and a barbaric ferocity compounded by the knowledge that they and their families would surely die if they were forced back into their desolate homeland, but the superior discipline and equipment of the Zaba-Tutuli allowed them to carry the day in most of the post-Ubeizan engagements of the war. Within two years, Muš-eni-bal had succeeded in expelling the invaders from all Zaba-Tutuli territory save for the western edges of the Great Sand Sea. Feeling he needed to complete his victory, recover his empire's pre-invasion borders in full and utterly break the power of the Sandmen rather than give them any breathing room to recover and menace his lands in the future, the Paramount King made the fateful decision to continue his counteroffensive into that great eastern desert on the eve of summer, 10,005 AA: the first domino in a chain of events known to modern historians simply as his Desert Campaign.

    Artist's imagining of Muš-eni-bal and his shield-bearer outside of Ubeizan after saving the city from the Mun'umati, early autumn of 10,003 AA

    Critical to the outcome of this desert campaign was a feast thrown by Muš-eni-bal a week before its official beginning, where he and his nobles celebrated their latest victory over the Mun'umati in the smaller Battle of Tuntubalit. The Paramount King's only son Ulath-eni-bal, a dissolute and spoiled gentleman, guzzled far too much rice-wine for his own good and raped the Enezi chief Daydan's daughter, having first beaten her unconscious when she tried to fight back. Muš-eni-bal was unwilling to punish his heir for this crime and instead tried to browbeat Daydan into falling back in line by reminding him that his son was still a hostage in Zaba-Tutuli hands, further enraging his only remaining Mun'umati ally; the only concession he would make was ordering Ulath-bal to stay home while he campaigned in the east, and he gave that partly out of the fear that the Enezi would try to murder the debauched young man in revenge. The Paramount King's fears turned out to be fully justified, as it didn't take long for Daydan to initiate secret communications with Harith bar Hassur al-Medya and Murrinat buth Makarib ul-Athir - the supreme leaders of the Shami and Taibani, respectively - and agree to betray his overlord to the Mun'umati league. He and his Enezi guided the Zaba-Tutuli deep into the Great Sand Sea, carefully directing Muš-eni-bal away from any known oasis and arranging for the Mun'umati to throw small easily-defeated detachments their way to maintain the illusion that he was leading them to victory, until finally the entire tribe up & deserted (pun intended) under the cover of a late-night sandstorm two months into the campaign. Muš-eni-bal woke up to find all his guides and cavalrymen had vanished, and the guards he'd assigned to keep an eye on Daydan's son had had their throats slit and their charge similarly disappeared.

    Realizing the danger they were in, the Paramount King's officers advised him to turn back, which he agreed to. But they were stranded in an unfamiliar desert with no idea of where exactly they were, no tracks with which they could retrace their steps (those had been buried by the night's sandstorm) and an unforgiving sun constantly beating down on them. On the flipside, the Enezi who had just abandoned them knew this desert like the backs of their hands, and were gladly giving that knowledge over to their new allies. The Zaba-Tutuli army had to wait for the sun to set again before they knew which direction was west, and exhausted their remaining water supplies - which they had failed to replenish on account of having been subtly steered away from any oasis by the Enezi for the past two months - within two days, suffering constant harassment by Mun'umati raiding parties almost every hour as they marched. Finally, the day after the Zaba-Tutuli had run out of water, the Mun'umati descended upon their exhausted and dehydrated ranks as they limped between two great sand dunes: the Shamshi emerged to block their westward progress, the Enezi and 'Ilmi came down from the north with most of the lesser Mun'umati tribes behind them, and the Taibani closed the trap from the south. Retreat into the east, back the way they had just came, promised certain death for any of the 'Awali who tried it. Modern estimates peg the number of Mun'umati present at as high as 35,000, of whom 20,000 are thought to have been cavalry or dromedary fighters.

    The ensuing Battle of the Dunes was lost by the Zaba-Tutuli before it had even begun. Their soldiers and horses alike had experienced significant attrition and were thirsty, tired & demoralized, but even worse they had no time to reform from a marching column into actual battle ranks before mounted Mun'umati warriors began to pour down the slopes to their north and south. The Mun'umati foot followed behind their few chariots and far more numerous cavalry/camelry while their archers, slingers and javelineers hung back to rain death on the surprised and weary Zaba-Tutuli from all sides. Muš-eni-bal managed to arrange about half of his chariots into a wedge and led them in a desperate effort to break through to the west, but the Shamshi were too numerous and too ready for this gambit to work, while his own men and horses were too tired and too thirsty to effectively execute his strategem. Within a little under two hours, the once-proud host of Zaba-Tutul - estimated to have numbered around 25,000 at the onset of the desert campaign, and including up to two-and-a-half-thousand chariots manned by the cream of the 'Awali nobility - had completely disintegrated, their famous discipline having been worn down by betrayal and weariness and thirst before finally collapsing in the face of the three-pronged Mun'umati assault.

    The bulk of the Zaba-Tutuli infantry, 'Awali and Qormat and mercenary alike, routed and fled east in disarray after putting up only token resistance in many cases, with several of the regiments on the extreme edges of the marching column breaking and fleeing even before the Mun'umati made contact; but, overwhelmed by thirst and the stinging arrows of Mun'umati archers, nearly all were killed by their pursuers throughout the day while the rest presumably died, alone and dehydrated, deep in the shifting sands, as evidenced by the discovery of skeletons with preserved 'Awali-style armor and weapons in the area. The chariots that weren't taken out early on were annihilated over the course of a dozen frantic and poorly-coordinated attempts at breaking out in every direction, along with the two Golga mercenaries brought along for this doomed campaign. Muš-eni-bal himself had died very early in the battle, felled by Harith bar Hassur (in what was probably a premonition of the decline of the chariot in favor of proper cavalry, the Shamshi warlord was fighting from atop a stallion when he struck down the chariot-riding Paramount King), and the entirety of his heavily-armored guard had been overwhelmed and destroyed with him. Not a soul of his army would return home, save as skulls on Mun'umati spears, while the Mun'umati themselves experienced comparatively light casualties. The destruction of Zaba-Tutul's largest field army at the Dunes all but ensured the eventual destruction of their empire and with it, the 'Awali people.

    (Of course, this battle was not recorded by Zaba-Tutuli chroniclers, who followed 'Awali tradition in not recording any defeats for propaganda purposes. As far as Zaba-Tutuli records were concerned, Muš-eni-bal and his entire army simply fell off the face of the planet one day. All information on the Battle of the Dunes was pieced back from the oral and recorded histories of Mun'umati elders, wise-women and chroniclers from the early Iron Age onward, though the complete collapse of the Zaba-Tutuli Empire soon after the battle's purported date does indicate that the Mun'umati were telling the truth about it)

    Mun'umati warriors swarming the 'Awali chariots as they attempt to break out of the Dunes, summer of 10,005 AA

    Ulath-eni-bal formally succeeded his father as Paramount King of Zaba-Tutul and its dominions after word had reached the capital of what had transpired in the Dunes, but by then the Mun'umati had retaken almost all of the territories previously recovered by Muš-eni-bal and were gearing up to march on Ubeizan for a second time. As Ulath-eni-bal was hardly the picture of a capable or even interested war leader himself, the task of rebuilding the 'Awali army and stopping the invaders fell to his uncle Marad-ani-nud, who was the true power behind the throne on account of his nephew's preference to waste time in debauched parties over actually ruling. Marad-ani-nud achieved a few small victories and one major triumph, routing the Mun'umati vanguard and avenging his brother by slaying Daydan of the Enezi in the Battle of Chunanibi in early 10,006 AA, but the Sandmen just kept on coming. Even Chunanibi only won the Zaba-Tutuli Empire a year's respite before Harith & Murrinat returned to decisively defeat Marad-ani-nud at the Battle of Hawarnibi, and soon after that Ubeizan - the key to the western 'Awali Riverlands - fell. Further worsening matters, in Marad-ani-nud's absence a faction of Ulath-eni-bal's courtiers convinced him that his uncle was plotting a coup against him and cared more about seizing the throne than protecting the empire, resulting in the Paramount King putting a hit out on his own uncle. Thus did the 'Awali lost their best remaining commander to a bout of petty palace intrigue at the worst possible time, with the Mun'umati exultant and on the verge of overrunning the rest of the 'Awali Riverlands.

    And overrun the Riverlands, they did! Marad-ani-nud's army, with which he had been planning to counterattack before an assassin relieved him of his head at his own nephew's orders, promptly disintegrated with the loss of their leader; the majority of the host simply went home with their weapons, but some nobles and common soldiers alike were so disgusted at Ulath-eni-bal's treachery and the corruption within the royal court that they actually defected to the Mun'umati. Indeed, entire cities laid down their arms and threw open their gates to the Mun'umati advance rather than fight, both out of disillusionment with their overlord's evident inability to defend them or delegate to those who were willing to defend them and out of fear that they could not stop the Mun'umati themselves. More armies were levied out of the 'Awali populace that had remained loyal, but demoralized, hastily trained and poorly-led by the newly dominant court faction's toadies, these forces were but a shadow of the army that Muš-eni-bal had led to the Dunes. One by one, these patchwork collections of feuding nobles, embittered veterans and ill-prepared commoners were crushed by the ever-advancing Mun'umati until their army was at the gates of Zaba-Tutul itself, which they began to besiege to in the fall of 10,011 AA. The desperation of the 'Awali cities caught in the path of the Sandmen must have been palpable, as evidenced by this recovered letter from the governor of Andunanit, a city that fell to their advance in 10,009 AA:
    Quote Originally Posted by Zebbab, Governor of Andunanit
    My lord and my god, Mušu-made-flesh,

    The sand-skinned and salt-blooded barbarians from the east have come. When Ahayen-Pulu went forth to confront them, he was crushed and his skull mounted on a stake along with those of his officers. The barbarians did evil things in the countryside: they murdered old men and young boys alike with impunity, tore infants from their mothers' arms, built a ziggurat out of the heads of priests and defiled priestesses, and [illegible] and furthermore they drove thousands behind Andunanit's walls, far more than we could hope to feed. I have directed the men to break out three times and three times, but [illegible]

    Today the worst has come to pass, despite our prayers and [illegible, probably 'sacrifices']. The [illegible] scaled a section of the wall we lacked the strength to sufficiently garrison before the dawn, when nobody was able to spot them. They have killed the sentries and thrown Andunanit's gates open. They are storming through the streets on their filthy horses and camels, cutting down warrior and citizen alike with no mercy, and some of them have made it here. I can hear them downstairs and they sound like rabid dogs the size of a mighty thunder-beast, shouting and fighting with fury. I write this to you now not to beg you for your aid, for we are lost, but to beseech you to send reinforcements to Bensi and Inabi before t

    *Note: Bensi and Inabi were the 'Awali towns nearest to Andunanit. Both sites exhibit signs of having been sacked soon after Andunanit. As this increasingly frantically-written letter was unfinished and partly stained with dried blood, modern historians can safely assume that Mun'umati warriors broke into the solar where the tablet was discovered and killed or wounded Governor Zebbab before he could complete it.
    In early 10,012 AA Ulath-eni-bal sobered up enough to attempt to negotiate a peace treaty, and managed to buy off the Mun'umati with the total cession of the eastern & northern Riverlands to the tribes making up the Mun'umati alliance; a quantity of gold and silver so vast he had to strip his ziggurat's temple's decorations to contribute to it; and a thousand of the fairest boys and girls of good birth in Zaba-Tutul. For three years these terms sated the Mun'umati and gave Zaba-Tutul a respite, but tensions within the Sandman coalition resulted in its breakdown and the Taibani breaching the peace to conquer what was left of the 'Awali nation - an eventuality for which the typically decadent Ulath-eni-bal had failed to undertake adequate preparations. The Taibani and their allies annihilated a smaller 'Awali army thrown out to stop them in the Battle of Abermammu, laid siege to Zaba-Tutul near the end of summer and took the city after discovering a negligently-unlocked gate in the winter, all before any reinforcements from the remaining southern provinces of the empire could reach them. Ulath-eni-bal was killed along with all his sons, brothers and officials, his capital was plundered and razed to the ground, and those among his people who survived the sack (including most of his sister-wives, concubines and daughters) were carried off in chains. Without Zaba-Tutul, the remaining 'Awali cities of the western and southern Riverlands were left leaderless and adrift in the face of continued Mun'umati aggression. Thus did the Zaba-Tutuli Empire come to a miserable end shortly before the end of 10,015 AA, marking the dawn of a fundamental shift in the demographic makeup and geopolitics of the eastern Muataric Sea in the process.

    Artist's imagining of Zaba-Tutuli soldiers preparing for their last stand at Abermammu, c. 10,015 AA

    Zaba-Tutul immediately before the great Mun'umati invasion, c. 10,000 AA


    Red - Zaba-Tutul
    Brown lines - Loosely controlled territories (inhabited by tributary Mun'umati chiefs, few if any permanent settlements)
    Dark circles - Territories frequently contested with regional rivals (incl. the Allawauric kingdoms and Saurii leagues)

    A gasp from beyond the grave: Chelanibibi
    Despite the collapse of the Zaba-Tutuli Empire in 10,015 AA, some remnants of the power that they once were lingered for a while longer like angry shades. One of the most mysterious of these remnants (on account of there being so few records of anything, from daily life to taxes, written by their hands surviving the passage of time) was the so-called 'Realm of Chelanibibi', situated in the Spring of Three Rivers on the former empire's old northeastern borders with the Suuvulk grasslands and centered on the eponymous market-town of Chelanibibi in the shadow of a mountain the 'Awali called Nunirai. This area was secured by Zaba-Tutuli armies in the late 8000s as one of their last conquests, and owing to the greater fertility of this 'mini-riverland' relative to the endless stretches of desert and grassland making up the rest of the 'Awali Empire's eastern frontier, it attracted a not-insignificant number of settlers from the overpopulated cities of the hinterland who joined the garrison in making Chelanibibi and its environs a more properly 'Awali land. Of course, this meant that the Suuvulk who already lived there had to be forced away from the choice lands at the banks of the rivers the 'Awali called the Three Little Sisters: Menarir, Chelarir and Ilunirir from north to south, respectively. These natives were either punted out into the eastern grasslands entirely, or allowed to linger within the borders of the Chelanibibi Governorate under the same terms as their kin and the Mun'umati nomads also living in nominal Zaba-Tutuli territory - they could seasonally water their herds at the rivers now surrounded by 'Awali farms in return for a tribute of animal products and slaves.

    Throughout the 8000s and 9000s, the 'Awali fiefdom centered on Chelanibibi skated by mostly unharmed by the disasters wreaking the rest of the empire. The people there had learned very early on to grow wheat over rice in the cooler, drier climate of the region, and so while the rest of the empire was increasingly wracked with food shortages and the resulting riots, Chelanibibi remained a net food exporter. The mountains overlooking the 'Awali settlements here were a good source of coal, which was the locals' primary way of keeping warm on account of a lack of trees and, therefore, firewood in the grassland. The spears and chariots of the garrison & newly established local nobility kept the Suuvulk in line or at bay, depending on whether they were being tolerated within the governorate's borders or lived outside of said borders respectively. And the Three Little Sisters, besides being excellent conduits for transportation and trade when they weren't frozen over, also functioned as natural defenses to reinforce the walls and towers built to protect the 'Awali towns dotting their banks.

    Artist's imagining of a Chelanibibite riverside farming complex

    After the 9000s, as anyone who has cracked open a history book today knows, the Zaba-Tutuli Empire's lengthy fall finally concluded with it slamming into the ground and splattering, courtesy of a massive Mun'umati migratory invasion from the Great Sand Sea. After some early successes in holding back the tide, the Zaba-Tutuli army was lured into a trap and annihilated in the searing sands of the western desert, followed by the Mun'umati overrunning the eastern half of their empire and then gobbling the rest up a few years later after a farcical peace treaty. The Battle of the Dunes isolated Chelanibibi from the rest of the 'Awali, not that this was noticeable at first - the province's remoteness and the disasters plaguing the empire for the past millennium had allowed its governors to exercise significant independent authority and even make their position de-facto hereditary. Still, the first post-Dunes Governor of Chelanibibi, Tizip, was apparently a man of enough honor to remain nominally loyal to the distant and feckless Paramount King Ulath-eni-bal. It was not until 10,020 AA, when news that Zaba-Tutul itself had fallen and the empire was finally undone in full reached their little corner of the planet (five years after the fact), that Tizip and the Chelanibibites declared themselves an independent kingdom.

    The Kingdom of Chelanibibi immediately after its proclamation by Tizip, c. 10,015 AA


    Red - Chelanibibi

    For about sixty years this rump Kingdom of Chelanibibi held on to existence for dear life, battling increasingly aggressive and numerous Suuvulk migrants to the east (driven in part by the migration of the even more barbaric Yahg) and emboldened Mun'umati forces to the south and west. The abundance of 'Awali artifacts found to have dated to the early 10,000s in this area and references to 'the First Men living beyond the mountains' in the much scarcer Mun'umati records of this time period indicate that they were a staunchly traditional kingdom which did their damndest to preserve 'Awali culture, and beyond doubt saw themselves as a direct continuation of the civilization of the First. From what can be gathered of the ruins in and around its purported site, the city of Chelanibibi would have looked like a fossil of better times for the 'Awali: that's to say, a riverside walled city of reed and mud-brick houses centered around a palatial ziggurat like virtually every other major settlement in the empire's halcyon days. There is no evidence to suggest that their society was reformed to be any less hierarchical or slave-reliant than that of the Zaba-Tutuli Empire they grew out of, either. The depiction of Chelanibibite warriors on recovered pottery fragments and reliefs also indicate that they fought in exactly the same way and with the exact same equipment as their predecessors. They did appear to alternate between hostile and peaceful - though mostly hostile - relations with the new Mun'umati kingdoms emerging in the Riverlands, from engaging in skirmishes with their forces in the mountains to trading wheat, millet and fruits with them so as to keep Chelanibibi's economy afloat.

    Rare preserved relief depicting Chelanibibite warriors marching off to battle (note the equipment, identical to 'Awali battledress of the Zaba-Tutuli period)

    Around 10,075 AA, the Kingdom of Chelanibibi faded into the mists of history. Their precise fate was not exactly a mystery that couldn't be solved by anyone with enough brain cells to put two-and-two together - after 10,075, all mention of the 'Awali there disappeared from history and the Three Little Sisters were re-inhabited by Suuvulk nomads - but for millennia the only actual, physical evidence that to support this conclusion existed were two brief missives from a frontier commander to his overlord, written in Shamshic cuneiform:
    Quote Originally Posted by Munashar bar Abassur al-Ra'jul, Shamshic military commander
    My lord and my sun,

    May Al-Hazi'-Shams, the unconquered sun, impart one thousand and one thousand blessings unto thee, His shadow on earth, and to we, His and thine humble people. All has been done as thou commanded: one thousand archers, five hundred spearmen and two hundred riders of asses and horses arrived here from Qalat al-Bomal this morning to reinforce our existing outposts in the mountains against the troublesome First Men who live beyond the mountains. If Al-Hakm-Shams, the mighty and judging sun, wills it, we will repulse those infidel curs when they try to retake their homeland which the merciful Sun has already seen fit to give us. Scouts and spies report that they have as many as six thousand warriors under arms in that ramshackle collection of huts and towers they call Chelanibibi, though I am further told that they can afford to pull together such a number if they strip away their eastern defenses against the Giant-Friends of the steppe and our cousins who remained behind in the Great Sand Sea. I am fully confident of our success, Luminous King, for even setting aside the roughness of these mountains and the courage of thine stalwarts and the preparations we have undertaken in these holdfasts, no force under heaven can undo the judgments of our Lord-in-the-Sky.

    Thine humble servant who is illuminated by thine light,
    Munashar bar Abassur al-Ra'jul
    Quote Originally Posted by The same guy, nine months after the apparent fall of Chelanibibi
    My lord and my sun,

    May Al-Lahad-Shams, the one and indivisible Sun, impart one thousand and one thousand blessings unto thee, His shadow on earth, and to we, His and thine humble people. I write in this missive only the best of news: there is no longer need for any of us to be in the slightest bit concerned about the First Men who lived beyond the mountains. It is my humblest recommendation that thou recall the reinforcements from Qalat al-Bomal and Qabat al-Kharat, for thou wilst certainly find them to be of more use in the war with the treacherous Taibani madmen to the south than in these quiet mountain passes. I am quite confident that the standing garrisons here will be sufficient to deal with thine new neighbors, lest they attempt to attack thine lands.

    Thine humble servant who is illuminated by thine light,
    Munashar bar Abassur al-Ra'jul
    It was not until recently that archaeologists uncovered a few fragmentary ruins of Chelanibibi's ziggurat (all bearing marks of manmade damage), mass graves and troves of damaged 'Awali military equipment that the fate of Chelanibibi could be conclusively determined. It appears that in the eleventh year of the reign of Meš-uni-qip, Tizip's grandson, a massive wave of Suuvulk emerged out of the blue to obliterate the rump kingdom with thunderclap suddenness, and that Chelanibibi fell so quickly that not only was there no time for its inhabitants to record their sentiments or defensive efforts as there was with the Riverlander 'Awali, but its Shamshi neighbor to the west - which had been preparing to fight a war with the Chelanibibites - was completely unaware of what had happened until almost a full year after the fact. What is now clear is that Chelanibibi was violently razed and that numerous 'Awali were killed regardless of sex, age or fighting ability, and most of the records they did have were destroyed with their capital (which would explain why almost everything modern historians know of Chelanibibi was written by their contemporary neighbors or said neighbors' descendants, as opposed to the Chelanibibites themselves). It is considered unlikely that many, or even any, of the Chelanibibites survived, including the royal family. Ultimately, even this last fragment of the once-glorious and expansive 'Awali civilization was snuffed out in the chaotic and violent upheaval that marked the 'dark age' transition between the Bronze and Iron Ages.

    Artist's recreation of Chelanibibi before its fall, c. 10,070 AA
    Last edited by Barry Goldwater; September 10, 2017 at 07:12 AM.

  20. #20
    Dirty Chai's Avatar Dux Limitis
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    Default Re: A New World - The (Third) Worldbuilding IH

    Archaic Period in Altania (up to 9,000 AA in some areas)

    As no written records (some primitive annotation does exist but is currently not decipherable) appear in the Altanian continent until c.9,000 AA, the cultures before then are applied anachronistic names which do not at all reflect what languages these cultures may have been speaking. What we do know about them is almost entirely archaeological. There is much evidence of cultural ancestry in behavior however in these cultures, with remains indicating common or similar practices and rituals throughout the continent, similar to later, historical civilization.

    Agriculture is dated to around 3,000 AA, meaning that it developed on Altania much later than it did in other parts of the world. Starting with that rough era, domestication of gourds, beans, peanuts, cacao, and eventually foxtail millet led to a transition from hunter-gatherer tribal clans to more complex and more populated tribes which cluttered the plateaus. The jungles and tropical grasslands remained unsuitable for such lifestyle so remained sparse in human life before the climate events of c.10,000 AA. These populations however practiced slash and burn in great numbers, moving from spot to spot and burning wide swathes landscape to use it for seasons of subsistence.

    The staple, however, of Altanian populations is the Hunggu bean, which was first domesticated around 4,000 AA from a wild seed-bearing grass which covered the northern plateau around the Shar complex. The Hunggu bean became larger and larger over the millennia through selection and the domesticated grain plant (technically a legume) came to give off multiple beans per season, numbering anywhere from 5 to 30 each plant, with the plant growing best in lowland environments. The Hunggu bean contains both antioxidants and high protein and as such is more important any other agricultural product in Altania.

    Every single archaeological culture present has a few things in common beyond this semi-nomadic agrarian life: a prevalent hunter culture centered around the skins of rhinoceros and the ivory found in elephantine species; evidence of canine domestication is rampant, and these early stone age companions seem to have been bred into specific tasks already by 6,000 AA; sericulture (the cultivation and production of silk) appears definitively around 4,000 AA because of the vast populations of silkworms present; and lastly pits in every region which contain bones and shells of animals and turtles and ivory tusk fragments that have been inscribed with symbols and then burnt, most likely for divination purposes.

    Map of different archaeological zones during Archaic period


    For linguistic work in this time period, see here, post #27, about Proto-Maryannam.
    Last edited by Dirty Chai; May 13, 2017 at 04:43 PM.

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