The Historical Atlas.
From now on, I will
steal shamelessly plagiarize take inspiration from zompist's historical atas concept. For my defense, maps and fantasy go hand to hand.
(Although Jean-Philippe Jaworski, who publishes his novels without maps, commented that in pre-modern times, maps were rare objects, and travellers would do without...)
Our base map.
Defining the Middle Seas geographically is about as perilous an exercise as defining the Middle East. Still, we will have a base map, with quite a zoom from the previous one; but both continents are as large as Africa: we need to make choices.
I believe it important that readers get an idea of scale early on. So the first appearance of the base map will be superimposed with a map of Europe, Asia and Africa at similar latitudes:
- comparison.png (93 KiB) Viewed 7849 times
As you can see, that's a respectable area to cover -- and at the same time, it misses quite a bit: Middle Sea cultures interacted with both entire continents. The base map is an acceptable middle ground, which means it's both too big and too small. No matter: I'll simply feel free to move around, or zoom in as needed.
Year Zero
Our work picking a starting is already done: the calendar that we use (know as the
Tarandim calendar) conveniently begins with a year 0, and that year 0 is far enough into ancient epochs that we can use it as our starting point.
So, without further ado, here's our map for
Year 0, a time of small farming communities and incipient states.
- year0.png (168.42 KiB) Viewed 7849 times
Human species
Several human species coexist on Massotis, and three of them inhabit areas within our map. Human settlement proceeded in at least three stages.
Hominins first reached the continents about 2 or 3 million years ago -- and their descendant still survive in southern Sarugond.
But in the Northern Hemisphere, they were supplanted by an unknown species -- most certainly in the genus
Homo -- that reached Uttani and Sarugond about 500,000 BP.
These archaic
Homo were the ancestors of present day Moon People and Sea People. Moon People likely evolved on the Uttani and Northern Sarugond mainlands during a long glacial period, as they are better suited to cold climates.
The Sea People were probably stranded on an island in the Serene Sea during the same period -- their smal l size suggests they were subject to insular dwarfism at some point, and they do prefer island habitats to this day.
The last wave was in 40,000, when
Homo sapiens reached Uttani, and spread across both continents during an interglacial. For convenience, we'll refer to them as
sapiens.
The Kandu valley
The people of the Kandu valley had a long experience of agriculture by year 0. The Kandu delta, rich with birds ,seafood and grain was very well-suited to a sedentary hunter-gatherer lifestly, and would have supported high population densitites; the upper Kandu and its tributaries were rich with drought-adapted grasses, whose grains could be conveniently stored.
By year 0, the area was occupied by
sapiens farmers.
The chief crops were a variety of
amaranth and
brome, a grass closely related to wheat, barley and rye. Terrestrial bromes are fodder, or invasive weeds, but Kandu valley brome is comparable to wheat in nutritional content and productivity -- and of course, selective breeding helped with that. They also grew peanuts, beans, tomatoes and desert olives (technically a species in the genus
forestiera with bluish, olive-like fruit).
Domesticated animals included the familiar llama, the stranger
megamys, a Rodent Of Unusual Size (similar to a cow-sized capybara), and the donkey-like
hippidion.
Permanent gatherings were growing into farming villages, some of which were big enough to count as proto-cities. Among them
Kunguameng and
Sorasa reached a population of 4,000.
The people of the Kandu valley had long used natural pigments to paint in caves or on stones. On early painted stones, we see the first representation of the Dual Deity (a common figure among later Tarandim people), and abstract symbols, certainly reminiscent of later Hieratic writing.
It's usually assumed, with good reason, that the Kandu valley was the homeland of
proto-Gaeh-Tarandim speakers. Other languages were spoken but barely left a few traces: Old Hieratic logograms have alternate readings that are difficult to explain without at least one other language using the same system, several place names have a
T'a-T'e prefix otherwise absent from Gaeh-Tarandim languages, and the PGT language, as reconstructed is somewhat reminiscent of creoles. Possibly pre-PGT was a pidgin used by early agricultural communities with different languages.
The Sea people
The Sea people traditionally live from fishing; at some time they had moved out of the small island where they evolved and reached the island Embis, which would remain their main homeland ever since, although they colonized several islands and part of the Sea of Anger - Serene Sea littoral. They shared these islands with
sapiens populations (although a few times they chased them off, especially in Embis).
Sea people shared the Kandu agricultural package; they were probably the first to domesticate grapes and to produce wine.(2)
(2) Middle Seas wine is an acquired taste. It's somewhat more acid, with a strong flavor of blackcurrant, quite different from our own wines.
The Metsiɬfaraz valley
The ancestors of the Metsiɬfarazian had lived by the rythms of the great river's floods. They had learned that
squash,
maygrass,
zizania (wild grass) grew fast in the fertie wetland after the huge flood receded.
By year 0, they had domesticated all of these, in addition to
sunflower,
little barley, grapes and various varieties of nuts.
Large cities such as
Novtominseki and
Mehakkhits reached 4,000 to 8,000 permanent residents. Around this time, we see traces of the Early Metsiɬfarazian Death Cult: the Metsiɬfarazian build huge barrow tombs in elevated areas. The material of choice were earth and wood, which were used for ceremonial centers, and to build dikes and levees, early attempts at controlling the flood.
The Metsiɬfarazians had no writing, and we have little idea of what language they spoke, although it was possibly Sakean, but it was, at the time, the most rapidly growing of Sapiens culture. Population density was very high, comparable with that of modern agricultural people.
We believe that early states were forming around Mehacchits and Novtominseki, and they are called, tentatively
Death Theocracies. We base this belief on the ever-present representation of skulls, bones, and even careful engraving of the sick and the dead What the Metsiɬfaraz king-priests believed in is unclear, but it was undoubtedly quite dark. Bones of numerous human sacrifices can be found in the soils of the upper Metsiɬfaraz; retainers were buried alive with their masters in the barrow-tombs; war captives were ritually drowned in the waters of the river.
Worship seems to have focused on ceremonial drug use: among these are very potent forms of tobacco (3), wild horry leaves and berries (rich in caffeine) and most importantly ergot, a parastic fungi growing on zizania.
The Moon People
The Moon People are very traditional in outlook, and exhibit strong neophobic tendencies. They did adopt some sapiens innovations: metal tools, domesticated dog, but kept their very low density, hunter-gatherer lifestyle. And yet, they offer us the best insights into ancient epochs and
sapiens prehistory. They maintain chronicles and records, the
Bone Lore. There is little doubt that Bone Lore is true writing, etched on durable materials and carefully handed down over generations, obsessively curated and maintained. Moon People culture is static to the extreme, to the point that the language and writing system have barely changed in the interval between year 0 and the present day.
The trouble is, of course, no sapiens could ever hope to acquire any item of Bone Lore, and only a very select few were ever allowed to get a good look. We can still manage to have some account of the centuries around year 0 in contemporary voices. The problem is, these voices are very alien to us.
Moon People eat a great deal more meat than we do, an adaptation to a very demanding environment and lifestyle. An agricultural lifestyle would be too poor in animal protein for them; and in any case they're not very tolerant of high population densities.
That doesn't mean that they exerted no control over their environment. Quite the contrary: they did shape the forests and prairies with fire, protected game animals from rival predators and even planted grasses to attract game near specific areas. They helped spread chestnut and hickory. Despite their very low numbers, much of the upper latitudes were shaped by Moon people hands. Of course, the effect over a generation was quite limited, given their small population, but they had been at it for generations: neophobia gave them the advantage of perseverance and a very long term view.
Moon People are, however, very unpolitical animals. They made no notes of wars, kings and battles, concepts alien to them, but they took careful note of game behavior, rare stones, strange fossils, and other subjects quite infuriating to historians.
They could not fail to notice, though, the spread of agriculture. When both sapiens and Moon People where hunter-gatherers, a kind of equilibrium had been found, where moon people mostly occupied the higher latitudes (north of 40 or 45°N), and leaving subtropical and tropical areas to sapiens. Though in year 0 that equilibrium was still in place, agriculture and the associated growth in sapiens population, was upsetting the balance.
That was particularly true of the Metsiɬfaraz civilization. It was the largest, and the fastest growing sapiens community, and right there in Moon People territory. Moon People are hospitable and helpful to stranger, and seem almost devoid of xenophobia (again, an adaptation to their low-density lifestyle, as it encouraged contact, cooperation and gene exchange with groups they sometimes wouldn't meet for years, and always threatened by consanguinity and cultural isolation) and contact with humans was then generally most friendly. There was plenty of intermarraige in the middle latittudes. The Metsiɬfaraz rulers were often hybrids, and when they were not, practiced cranial deformation so that the skulls of their children would bear the characteristic marks of moon ancestry.
The Moon People, though, can be inhumanely practical. As soon as sapiens populations reached level high enough to threaten game animals, they ruthlessly tracked and kill the intruders, as they do with all concurrent predators. They have no problem whatsoever with eating human meat, anyway,
sapiens or Moon (many Moon groups ceremonially eat their own dead.)
They couldn't do anything about sapiens in the floodplains: they were already too many. But in the surrounding forests, they had the advantage: adapted for ambush killings, mostly nocturnal and physically stronger, they would make short work of stray hunters. So the Metsiɬarazians were contained, for a time, in somewhat restricted areas by the threat of man-eating monsters.
The low level conflict was important enough to the Moon People to warrant inclusion in Bonelore, giving us a few precious clues to Metsiɬarazian civilization.
The Ixatsowa valley
We known almost nothing about early Ixatsowan farmers. They never developped writing, either, and they were never mentioned in Bonelore, being so far from Moon People hunting grounds. Yet, their heritage would live on and durably change Middle-Seas civilizations, because of their greatest invention. Over generations they domesticated the unpromising
gamagrass. The domesticated result,
gamacorn is extremely productive -- and quite similar to maize, to which it is closely related.
Other domesticated crops included varieties of
pepper,
squash and the
coffee tree (different, but related to coffee, which additional produces a deep blue dye.)
I think I like the wormhole idea more, myself.