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Thread: [ANW - Language Family & Civilizations] The Hyperaustralians and minor Hyperaustralic civilizations

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    Barry Goldwater's Avatar Mr. Conservative
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    Default [ANW - Language Family & Civilizations] The Hyperaustralians and minor Hyperaustralic civilizations

    The Hyperaustralic Peoples
    Mirroring its Arctic counterpartt's name of Hyperborea, the Antarctic continent of this world can be thought of as 'Hyperaustralis', and its native inhabitants are correspondingly termed 'Hyperaustralians'. Hyperaustralis was the original homeland of Homo sapiens sapiens, and so the descendants of those early humans who stayed there when most of their kin migrated to populate the rest of the planet are of the 'purest' human stock in terms of genetics. Their origins near the South Pole and the long, scorching summers of Hyperaustralis before the Great Cooling of 10,000 AA have left the Hyperaustralic peoples with the darkest possible human skin tones. The tendency for life in the searingly hot-yet-humid and densely forested continent, with its own share of deadly fauna and flora, further forced these dark-skinned peoples to embrace the darker and more ruthless elements of their human nature as ways of life to survive their earliest days when men had yet to become the apex predators in their own homeland, a brutality which was reflected to some extent in their language: 'Proto-Hyperaustralic', theorized by some modern anthropologists and linguists to have been the original, common human tongue.

    Modern speech Proto-Hyperaustralic
    Man, men Gach, gach'e
    Woman, women S'gach, s'gachei
    King Gaši
    Murder Gi'bax
    Food Vibi

    Artist's depiction of an ancient Hyperaustralic man, c. 25,000 BA

    The first Hyperaustralians lived as nomadic hunter-gatherers like any other human on the planet, constantly roaming in search of fruits/herbs and animals to hunt with arrows or spears of bone & flint under the shadow of the land's massive trees. When agriculture was invented independently about 3,000 years after its advent elsewhere, it failed to get much traction outside of river basins. Those Hyperaustralians living around rivers settled down to chop down trees & use them to build villages (which they quickly started walling for reasons that will be made apparent shortly); grow wheat, the cabbage-esque 'kadvish' and snake beans; herd pigs and cattle; and organize into kingdoms where kingship appears to have been exclusively held by mages (hence why Hyperaustralic monarchs are referred to as 'witch-kings' by outsiders) and decided in feats of strength: any free man of magical ability in the kingdom could challenge their overlord to a duel to the death at any time, with the winner taking or keeping the throne, and only when nobody stepped up to challenge a prince would he be allowed to succeed his predecessor peacefully. Besides leading men into battle and overseeing the distribution of resources, witch-kings were thought to be able to commune with spirits of nature and the dead. These kingdoms did appear to be quite flexible socially, beyond even the notion of any random schmuck being able to become king if he's strong or ruthless or lucky enough - any man, no matter how poor, who sufficiently impressed their king could be made into a professional warrior, and warriors were the de facto aristocracy of these ancient Hyperaustralic kingdoms - unless, of course, you were a woman, slave, or worst of all a slave woman, for all three categories were to be seen and not heard. Deformed infants were abandoned to die, for not even the comparatively civilized Hyperaustralians of the riverlands gladly suffered weakness. The settled Hyperaustralic peoples developed unique tattoos with which to distinguish themselves from other kingdoms' citizens, and were marked with their kingdom's tattoo when they reached adulthood.

    Settled Hyperaustralic laborers farming under the searing polar sun, c. 6,500 AA

    The Hyperaustralians who remained nomadic scarcely altered their lifestyle, even as the Bronze Age wore on and - much like the similarly copper-and-tin-strapped Hyperboreans on the other side of the planet - they and their settled neighbors increasingly adopted iron weapons and armor. They congregated into clans and then tribes, bound together by matrilineal blood ties. These tribes' chiefs won their positions the same way the settled witch-kings won theirs: the mightiest and bravest warriors of each clan would fight each other upon a chief's death for the right to succeed him, for it seemed all Hyperaustralians in general considered strength to be the greatest of all virtues, whether they are farmers or hunter-gatherers. One thing they did have in common with the settled Hyperaustralians was that they considered women to be domestic workers and baby-makers; however, if their tree-carvings and cave-paintings are any indication, they had no problem with engaging in homosexual intercourse, for apparently few things were manlier than two manly men bumping uglies to the Hyperaustralians. Unlike the settled Hyperaustralians, nomads marked themselves with far more than just one tattoo - warriors used red ink, non-warrior men used blue, women used yellow and slaves were tattooed with black ink - and their warriors wore jewelry fashioned from the bones & teeth of their kills. Also unlike their more civilized cousins, when the going got especially tough, the Hyperaustralic nomads had no compunctions about eating their slaves or the dead, though they at least refrained from eating living fellow members of the tribe.

    Hyperaustralic nomads sheltering in a cave and carving up their lunch, c. 4,000 AA

    As can be gleaned from the above information, the Hyperaustralians' concept of morality did not extend beyond ruthless utilitarianism and 'might makes right'. Anything that facilitates survival is good, anything that doesn't contains its own judgment, and if you have the power to take something - well, that's all the justification you need. It was considered shameful to trade for anything from crops, to pottery, to slaves with anyone who wasn't a member of your own kingdom or tribe; taking what you wanted by force, though, was always appropriate. The victors of wars could do anything they wished to the vanquished, whether it is 'simply' dragging them off in chains or raping, murdering and eating them all (usually in that order). Legal issues were usually not dealt with by juries or the arbitration of the ruler, but by a duel between the accuser and accused; to the death unless the witch-king or tribal chief of their people believes one or both parties are indispensable to the kingdom/tribe, in which case they would mandate a duel to first blood instead. Bride kidnapping was noted to occur with some frequency among even the settled peoples, though of course the unwilling bride could be taken back by her family as long as they tore her abductor to shreds first. Some tribes and kingdoms proudly told tales of how they were once slaves, but revolted and thrashed their masters so soundly that said masters determined they deserved to be free. A modern scholar summed up the morality, or lack thereof, of the early Hyperaustralians thusly: "They are, for better or worse, the manifestation of humanity's ancient collective id, distilled to its purest and most barbaric essence and set loose in mankind's original - perhaps even natural - habitat."

    One curious development in Hyperaustralic history was their encounter with, and subsequent enslavement of, the Dzlieri. After the invasions of Dzlieri colonies that marked first contact, more enterprising Hyperaustralians resolved to make something more than short-term food supplies and decorative skulls out of these diminutive distant cousins of modern humanity. Thus these short, primitive hominids were (after being beaten into submission, as was the Hyperaustralic way) typically used to supplement human slave labor out in the fields and forests. When iron mining and smithing became popular, the smaller Dzlieri were sent to mine narrower shafts that their taller masters couldn't fit into. Some could even be taught to help Hyperaustralic smiths in forging tools and weapons out of the stuff their peers mined. Prettier, less hirsute females warmed the beds of their masters. Even more resourceful slave-masters would designate special 'observatory zones' where the Dzlieri were given the illusion of freedom, so that they might breed and till the land in peace until 'harvesting season' where the 'observers' mounted fresh slave raids on the 'observed'. Should a Dzlieri colony try to break their chains and fail, they were dealt with the same way rebellious human slaves were dealt with: extermination, followed by more raids to find replacement Dzlieri.

    Recreated bust of a less hairy Dzlieri female, probably a Hyperaustralic warlord's bedwarmer

    Like the Hyperboreans, come the Bronze Age the Hyperaustralians suffered from having significantly smaller reserves of copper and tin on their continent relative to Muataria and Altania. This forced them to engage in iron-mining and working on a large scale well ahead of those peoples who did have greater access to bronze, and it shows in the proliferation of iron weapons, iron-framed shields covered in cowhide and iron armor found to date back to 6-10,000 AA. As their ironworking techniques were still rather primitive, most of the weapon artifacts appear to have been of poor quality in their time - bent blades that had been hastily re-straightened in mid-combat, repaired spearheads that show signs of having chipped or broken in the past, boomerangs with cracked and dulled iron tips, and so on - but they seem to have served their wielders well enough, and in any case, it wasn't like there were any alternatives nearby. Kingdoms waged wars with one another over resources, territory and matters of honor as they did the world over, but their wars were typically settled with set-piece battles fought on grounds chosen ahead of time by both sides, not a series of raids and smaller pitched engagements; this was done to preserve as many resources and slaves for the prospective winner as possible. The nomadic tribes, unlike their settled cousins who preferred to fight pitched battles, routinely engaged in raids on both their own kind and the settled peoples to supplement their supplies and gather slaves.

    A Hyperaustralic witch-king's iron armor, dated to 9,500 AA

    In both cases, witch-kings and chieftains were expected to lead their men from the front, clad in iron helms and armor made of large iron plates linked to one another with hemp cords; the personal retainers of a witch-king may go about in iron chest-pieces and combat skirts in addition to helmets, while elite nomadic warriors were less well-equipped, and the bulk of every army was composed of totally unarmored or merely helmeted warriors who otherwise wore only a loincloth or their birthday suits in summer, to deal with the sweltering heat of pre-Great Cooling Hyperaustralis, or coats of coarse fur in winter. After both sides had sent forth a champion to fight each other in a ceremonial duel, Hyperaustralic armies overwhelmingly fought on foot in simple formations, with skirmishers exchanging javelins, iron-tipped boomerangs and sling or bow fire before retiring so that the infantry may advance in shield walls and smash at one another until one side broke ranks and fled. Sometimes, skirmishers would re-enter the fight to outflank and further pressure the opposing infantry, which typically led to either their side's victory or their own encirclement by the opposition's skirmishers in turn. The chariot entered Hyperaustralic warfare much later than in most other civilizations, around 9,000 AA, which seems to have been due to the predictable difficulties of chariot warfare in the rugged and heavily forested terrain of Hyperaustralis; still, at least one Hyperaustralic witch-king was found to have been buried with his chariot and horses under a cairn dated to 9,200 AA, indicating that they did consider chariots and steeds to be valuable despite their rarity and impracticality in Hyperaustralic terrain.

    Common Hyperaustralian warrior, c. 8000 AA

    The civilization of the Hyperaustralians, brutish and bloody as it might have been, came to an unexpected halt when the Great Cooling of 10,000 AA struck. Temperatures had been slowly but surely dropping over the last millennium, but 10,000 AA was when conditions became unbearable for the overwhelming majority of Hyperaustralians. Coal mining spiked, but even the securing of vaster quantities of the black rock than the Hyperaustralians had ever gathered before wasn't enough to warm their homes and light their paths in the darkest winter nights. Devastating winters, much colder and lasting far longer than anyone (save the peoples living closest to the intimidating glaciers of the South Pole) was used to, blanketed towns in choking snow and killed many tens of thousands by causing crop failure. Kingdoms desperately battered each other over shrinking tracts of farmland and grazing turf, while nomads were turning to cannibalism and raiding on a scale unheard of in their history. From 10,000 AA onward, Hyperaustralians began to pack their things and head to the coasts, where witch-kings and nomad chiefs buried their hatchets and formed confederations with one another (even bitter old rivals) with one mission: get off their dying homeland and search for greener pastures. Fishing boats were commandeered while trees living & dead alike were chopped down for shipbuilding, and scarcely a century later the first great Hyperaustralic fleets had begun to sail north in search of a new, less frigid homeland. Only a few Hyperaustralian communities remained behind, those who lived closest to the South Pole and thus had at least some idea how to deal with the vicious cold, while the majority of their people were now sailing straight for the great island north of them and beyond that, the subcontinent known as Midija - taking with them their iron equipment, strange diminutive slaves, and barbarous traditions...

    A Hyperaustralic witch-king at the time of the Great Cooling and his people's migration to Midija, post-10,000 AA

    Extent of the settled Hyperaustralic kingdoms by 10,000 AA, on the eve of the Great Cooling


    Note: The Hyperaustralic nomads are not shown on this map, but their migratory paths crisscrossed the entirety of the continent outside (and sometimes trespassing into) the settled kingdoms' lands - some even came close to the great glaciers surrounding the South Pole at the continent's very heart.

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    Barry Goldwater's Avatar Mr. Conservative
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    Default Re: [ANW - Language Family & Civilizations] The Hyperaustralians and minor Hyperaustralic civilizations

    Hyperaustralians: Those Who Stayed Behind
    While many Hyperaustralians migrated off their suddenly-frozen homeland in the decades and centuries following the dawn of the Great Cooling, more remained home. And if outsiders thought the migrants were savage...well! Those who remained behind were, if anything, even more psychotic than their cousins who had the sense to leave Hyperaustralis, having been driven well into insanity and out the other end by mass starvation and the depletion of nearly all natural resources (from trees to food to fresh water) save iron - which, of course, they mostly found good only for making weapons and armor, and what point is there to having military equipment if you don't use it? What little strands of civilization existed on Hyperaustralis by the end of the Bronze Age appear to have rapidly disintegrated into an anarchic sea of perpetual small-to-medium-scale warfare, cannibalism, human sacrifice and other atrocities as the Hyperaustralians battled one another over increasingly scarce resources and attempted to beseech their dark gods to preserve what little they had left.

    Little is directly known about this five-hundred-year dark age in Hyperaustralic history due to an almost complete lack of information, and the slight issue that not one bunch of contemporary Hyperaustralians (it would be a stretch to call any of the ramshackle societies they managed to scrap together in these times 'civilizations') had developed a writing system until the very end around 10,500 AA. The myriad mass graves, troves of battered and bloodied iron weapons and armor, burnt-out stone settlements and legends passed down from one generation of Hyperaustralic elders and other lore-keepers to the next tell enough on their own, anyway. The following are the early post-Cooling Hyperaustralians about whom anything at all is known:

    Man-eaters: The Gyarl
    The oldest post-Cooling Hyperaustralic tribe about whom anything is known, the Gyarl were said to have embraced cannibalism in order to survive. They were nomadic savages, wandering from one ice plain to another in the shadow of Hyperaustralis' lone volcano, and their men wielded iron-studded clubs with which to beat their victims senseless as opposed to killing them outright...so that they could be dragged back to a hide tent to be carved up by the Gyarl women with iron and obsidian knives, of course. Quite unlike other Hyperaustralians, they had no Dzlieri slaves, having devoured theirs shortly after the onset of the Great Cooling, and were also said to eat their own children when especially hungry and unable to locate any 'new meat' quickly enough. The Vanarassi tribe, one of several which survived months of harassment by the Gyarl, described the Gyarl tribe as:
    Quote Originally Posted by Vanarassi legend
    ...a pack of howling men covered from head to toe in thick black and white furs, so that no part of them could be seen but their faces, which they paint with the blood of beasts and their human victims. They try to strike at night, descending on our camps with no torches and only iron clubs and spears in their hands, approaching as silently as they could on their bellies until they reach sprinting distance. It is then that they rise from the snow and burst forward with their shrill war-cries, to club and drag away anyone who looks like they're worth eating and to put the ill, the old, the sickly and those who fight back too fiercely to the spear.
    Reconstruction of Gyarl warriors looking over their latest catch, c. 10,085 AA

    Eventually, the Gyarl fell victim to a disease that was then known as the 'Curse of Khaza' after the cannibalized elder who supposedly struck them with it, which sapped them of their strength and vitality, made them prone to fits of uncontrollable laughter and wild mood swings, and eventually rendering them incapable of swallowing anything (much less human meat). Many Gyarl died thanks to this mysterious plague around 10,100 AA, and the survivors were finished off soon after by a coalition of the many rival tribes they'd antagonized in the past. However, the Gyarl survived in legend as the Ya-Garl, demonic horrors that were once Gyarl who'd met a violent end (including, but not limited to, being eaten by their own tribesmen) that appeared during snowstorms to maul and devour unwary travelers. While there is no visual proof of any Ya-Garl, there have always been mysterious disappearances of people who wander around at night during blizzards on the Gyarl's former hunting grounds, disappearances which could probably be explained in various other ways but which Hyperaustralian superstition maintains are the work of the Ya-Garl.

    Estimated range of the Gyarl by 10,100 AA

    Artist's rendition of a Himadassi legend: their champion Karathu about to beat a Ya-Garl to death with his fists

    The blood-drunk: The Himadassi
    While virtually all of the Hyperaustralic tribes that survived the Great Cooling (and many of those that didn't) had numerous atrocities to their name, they at least committed their grievous crimes out of desperation; even the Gyarl would not have turned to cannibalism if they had other food supplies readily available, after all. Not so with the Himadassi, who were quite possibly the most bloodthirsty of the early Hyperaustralians, which is really saying something. They were a tribe that would attack any other tribe or individual who passed by their way, not out of xenophobic hostility or a need to feed (either on the victim's supplies or the victim him/herself), but simply for fun. When the tribe's witch-king decreed that it was time to make war upon a tribe, no Himadassi would think to question him, not because they viewed him as a god but because an opportunity to shed blood was never something to be passed up on. The Himadassi were also known to spare the children of their enemies after slaughtering the parents before them, not out of pity or kindness, but to ensure that they'd grow up to hate them in turn and to want to fight them - in essence, ensuring that they'd grow up to perpetuate a cycle of the violence the Himadassi liked so much. In the words of the Himadassi champion Karathu, who also went by pleasant nicknames such as 'Breaker of Skulls', 'Red Plague', 'Bringer of Grief' and 'Bane of the Ya-Garl', when questioned as to why he fought by the wise men of a rival tribe...
    Quote Originally Posted by Karathu
    Do you also ask a fire why it burns? Battle is not only what we do, it is what we are.
    Upon achieving victory, it is the Himadassi way to humiliate whatever foes they didn't kill by forcing them to pass beneath a 'yoke' of their iron spears, formally marking their newfound servitude to the Himadassi. The Himadassi consequently built a small empire of sorts around 10,250 AA, assigning their slaves to do all the menial work like gathering and preparing food, building shelters and making or cleaning their masters' clothes while they themselves focused entirely on two things: waging war, and forging the equipment to do so. The Himadassi were also known to murder their slaves at random (save for especially strong and rebellious ones, who they targeted) on every solstice, not just to sate their bloodlust but also in a bid to intimidate the rest into falling in line.

    A Himadassi warrior bids farewell to his family as he marches off to war, c. 10,200 AA

    Spread of the Himadassi by 10,290 AA

    Despite their extremely warlike nature and success at expansion, the Himadassi did stall and stagnate shortly after they began to really take off. Legend blames this on the greed and power-lust of Karathu's grandson, the witch-king Pasathu who tracked down and slew a feathered dragon (with the help of half the tribe, quite a few of whom died trying to bring the beast down with javelins and slings) so that he could eat its heart and gain its strength. It worked - at the cost of driving him insane and sending him on a berserk rampage against his own people, starting with the exhausted and bloodied survivors of the hunt around him. Although he was eventually put down, Pasathu (still a young man at the time of his death) left no biological heir, and his massacre of many of the Himadassi's best and brightest before his own death left no obvious candidate among the people to assume the mantle of leadership. The Himadassi continued to survive for some decades, disorganized and rudderless, but in their weakened state they were little match for a bigger, badder and better-organized & led force. One such force, the rising power that was the Inissi, finally did them in around 10,300 AA, and the only Himadassi who survived their onslaught would ironically live on as the slaves of this greater power.

    Iron Age rivals to the Inissi
    The Inissi may have been the most powerful and organized force on Hyperaustralis as of 10,500 AA, but they were far from being unchallenged. In fact, Inissi myth, chronicles (though it often gets difficult to tell the two apart...) and historical artifacts show that they were quite literally surrounded by rivals who could have torn them apart if only they'd been better organized and capable of coordinating attacks on the Inissi empire with one another.

    Map of other major tribes/confederations around the Inissi, c. 10,500 AA

    The Daivai - By far the largest and most formidable threat to Inissi hegemony, the Daivai were a theocratic confederation of warlike tribes living beyond the former's eastern borders. They were led by a council of tribal shamans who were apparently sufficiently powerful & respected to boss around even the chieftains of their own tribes. The Daivai followed a Heretical variation of the Red Pantheon that had an almost monotheistic reverence for the Dread King above all the other gods & didn't seem to believe the gods would lower themselves to mating with humans to sire demigods, and gloried in bloodshed as the only true way to entertain and impress said Dread King: like the Hamidassi, they had a strange tendency to let the children of rival tribes they destroyed live, with the expectation that they'd grow up and want to avenge their parents - for no reason beyond guaranteeing an endless cycle of battles with these opposing peoples in the future. On account of these unusually (even by ancient Hyperaustralic standards) bloodthirsty tendencies and their shared worship of the Dread King, some historians speculate that the Daivai were an offshoot of either the Hamidassi or Inissi who diverged from their parent tribe at some unknown point in the murky 'dark age' of 10,000-500 AA, but so far none of these speculators have managed to find hard evidence to support their hypothesis.

    The Tigassi - Another confederacy of rival tribes, this time living along the Inissi's western flank. They were reputedly expert spearmen and poison-makers, and naturally combined these talents by smearing the tips of their spears and arrows with a poison made from jellyfish venom before entering battle. As animists, they had shamans who communed with the spirits of nature on behalf of their tribesmen, and also erected totem poles which served to both chronicle each tribe's experiences in times of peace & war and to attract more spirits like moths to a flame.

    The Oborai - An especially large tribe living southwest of the Inissi kingdom. They were said to have been expert dog-tamers and handlers, and the first Hyperaustralians to effectively use dogsleds as a tool of war. When an Obor's most prized dog perished, tradition demanded he wear its pelt so as to keep the beast with him in spirit. Though the Inissi were known to dismiss the Oborai as unsophisticated 'dog-lords' (indeed Oborai literally means 'dog-men' in Inissi), evidence suggests that the Oborai taught them how to train dogs to pull their sleds in the first place, and upon being repaid with constant warfare they were able to keep the larger and better-organized Inissi armies off-balance with mobile warbands of sled-riding marauders.

    The Ras-gaksi - Literally 'the antler-men', the Ras-gaksi were a violently insular tribe that lived southeast of the Inissi and gained their name from their use of antler headdresses. They were said to have foregone even simple wooden huts in favor of living in felt tents, and to consider nature so sacred that they ate no plants, instead subsisting on an entirely carnivorous diet; they'd also apparently learned from the mistakes of the Gyarl however, and didn't consume human meat so as to not contract the same plague that ultimately did them in - they did kill any outsider who stepped foot on their territory, but contrary to Inissi propaganda, simply left the corpses impaled on stakes or bound to trees to scare off other potential trespassers rather than cannibalizing them. Some anthropologists speculate that they were descended from a splinter tribe of Gyarl survivors, but as is the case with the Daivai and their tenuous links to the Hamidassi and Inissi, there is no hard evidence supporting a firm 'yes' or 'no' answer to end the speculation.
    Last edited by Barry Goldwater; May 13, 2018 at 09:08 PM.

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