I made that comment because I wasn't sure at first whether Ars Lande meant joints or "segments".
The Middle Seas -- Historical Atlas -- 500 T.E to 1000 T.E
Re: The Middle Seas -- Historical Atlas -- Year Zero
Re: The Middle Seas -- Historical Atlas -- Year Zero
You're quite right. I think I'll just say that my system is the basis for numeral glyphs, but yours is the way they actually count.
Re: The Middle Seas -- Historical Atlas -- Year Zero
Re: The Middle Seas -- Historical Atlas - 500 to 1000 T.E.
This installment will cover the centuries from 500 T.E to 1000 T.E.
The period is somewhat annoying in that we begin to have extensive data on the Tarandim civilization, and not much on other cultures, which had underwent important development -- but didn't have the good sense to invent writing yet.
So I will cut this in two parts, the first one covering Tarandim civilization.
The map accordingly focuses on the Kandu valley and surrounding areas:
500 to 1000
The city of T'elemma
In the Kandu valley, proto-cities, with population growth, grew increasingly complex and stratified social structures. That was the time of the first city states.
Perhaps the first city-state was T'elemma, a coastal city in the delta, and the cultural model for the entire period.
T'elemma was ruled by its mɔwɛh, 'the great man', that is 'the king'. The first king of T'elemma was, according to legend, T'ɛt'amɛh tɔsu Toḫiŋge , Toḫiŋge son of T'ɛt'amɛh, also called Qenim We, 'the black lord'.
Without written records, the question of King Toḫiŋge's existence can't be satisfactorily answered, but the Toḫiŋgend dynasty would rule T'elemma for several centuries.
T'elemma was a city of traders, farmers and fishermen: it was one end of a trading network across the Serene Sea; it launched great fishing campaigns in the high sea as the natural resources of the delta were no longer sufficient. The marshy area in which the early fishing village had been build could be great agricultural land, once drained and maintained.
The first great waterworks in the Kandu area were not designed for irrigation, but rather from keeping water out. In addition to the Kandu staple crops, new imports were cultivated: tomatoes, tomatillas, peppers, eggplants.
Society was organized around the clan (qɛm), which could be matrilinear or patrilinear, always headed by an elder men. The heads of qem were recognized as we, 'lord', a position of some prestige but little actual powers. T'elemma was firmly monarchic and autocratic.
Another organizaton was the sešind, the commune -- a village or city ward working collectively on communally owned land or gardens, a grouping that also served as a basis for ship crews, religious brotherhoods, corvée labor and military duty. It was headed by a sese.
The Kandu valley culture was a man's man's world. Though in T'elemma the fact that men were often away on trading, fishing or military expeditions lent a bit of power to women. There were a few female queens, and the odd female lord or community elder.
The city was surrounded by extended earthworks, that served both to contain and dry sea and salt marshes, and as defensive fortification. T'elemma was pretty much constantly in conflict with neighbourhing city states and communities.
How do you get everyone to cooperate on massive public projects, and have them give up most of the harvest, or convince fishermen to give up most of their catch?
The kings of T'elemma had figured out the answer: claim that it's God's will and you're very special people.
People in the Kandu valley believed in the spirit world, and paired gods, usually combining aspects of a supernatural king (personified as male) and of a force of nature (personified as female), a prefiguration of the later binitarian religion.
The particulars varied by city state, in T'elemma, the paired gods were the cyclops Peššuqɔŋas and a personification of the sea, Sargei Wekahuo. The kings modestly claimed descent from their legendary son, T'ɛt'amɛh who in legend saved the local fishermen by bestowing them with his divine gift of agriculture. The kings had a particular relationship as chief priests and intermediaries between the spirit realm and the world. They also organized religious festivals, which required sacrifices in kind: bear, animals, grain, wine.
A man alone can't service the oracular and sacrificial needs of a large city, even with divine superpowers, so a professional priesthood developed and took over several religious duties of the king.
The daily working of the city required a fair bit of travel to the spirit world. This was achieved by sensory deprivation, and massive quantities of tobacco which brought shaman-priests in a state of religious trance. Divine will was revealed by visual images, which the priests dutily recorded by painting them with ochre -- paintings strongly reminiscent of the cave painting of the mountainous regions upriver. Visions were codified in standard glyphs: abstract shapes, animal, human or monstrous figures.
The pursuit of religious ritual, organizing ceremonies and frequent excursions to the spirit world occupied priests full-time, and so the king granted them priestly estates; and while they were at it, priests were also given the task of administering the royal estates. That task required a fair bit of accounting; soon they were keeping ad-hoc records with, you guessed it, pictorial drawings using ochre.
They had no qualms with mixing secular and religious symbols: it was all god's work anyway. In any case, the answers they sought from the spirit world were surprisingly practical; they were most interested in the outcome of war, the harvest, the weather, the state of the waterworks.
They took to recording treaties, royal proclamations, religious hymns. By the year 1000 the system had evolved into a full-fledged writing system.
I've used Old Hieratic to represent T'elemman concepts for convenience: but that's an anachronism. T'elemma spoke an archaic Tarandic dialects, with heavy substratum influence from an unknown language, dubbed Old T'elemman. It seems that the Tarandic language spread to T'elemma with agricultural, perhaps from the southern delta, perhaps from upriver, and replaced the native Old T'elemman. T'elemma, the product of Tarandic cultural expansion, would in turn spread its culture to the entire valley.
All of these development allowed for spectacular economic and demographic growth. T'elemma's population was around 80,000 in 1000; the entire valley's population perhaps reached a million. The kings of T'elemma never could translate this numeric advantage into political domination. Their culture and political organization would spread, however to the whole valley -- and recognizaby T'elemman institutions would endure for millenia. New city-states that were growing along the Kandu: Kunguameng, Sorasa, Mora all had kings (often related to each other and to the T'elemman dynasty by marriage), qem, sešend, and paired Gods.
We will refer to this world of squabbling city states, writing with ochre as the Tarandim.
The Twelve Cities.
In the late 10th century, the strongest city states formed an alliance: the Monand Send, 'the twelve cities'. The Twelve Cities were ostensibly allied for self-defense. What they actually did was beat up smaller city-states into submission. Once a city had been sufficient humbled, the Twelve Cities demanded tribute, but little else. Local kings and elite were left in place, and were even brought into the aristocratic networks of intermarriage.
The arrangement was most beneficial to T'elemma, the largest city, which kept the alliance treasury. A few leaders of rival cities in the Alliance thought to protest. They were deposed, sacrificed to the cyclopean Peššuqɔŋas, and replaced with more pliable relatives. Naturally, this tended to make rival kings thing about blocked career paths, and the T'elemman kings were aware of this. The oracles made prophecies about the upcoming fall of T'elemma, and helpfully noted that the inevitable disaster could be averted for a while by human sacrifice -- which, not coincidentally, was a very effective terror tactic.
Pastoralists, the Gaeh.
The Tarandim way of life was restricted to fertile areas in the Mediterranean climatic zone, those areas that could support high population densities. There Gaeh-Tarandic relatives living in the surrounding mountainous and arid areas followed a more pastoralist lifestyle, herding llamas, dinomys and the newly imported mountain goats.
We divide these, somewhat arbitrarily into the Maʕʕey in the Hengode desert to the south, the Gaeh in the Waterwon and the Joah, the Nebarei and the Kanjei to the North.
The first Gaeh kingdom was established in Hoembeg, perhaps following the Tarandim model. Their chief crops were amaranth and potatoes, first domesticated by the Nebarei.
The period is somewhat annoying in that we begin to have extensive data on the Tarandim civilization, and not much on other cultures, which had underwent important development -- but didn't have the good sense to invent writing yet.
So I will cut this in two parts, the first one covering Tarandim civilization.
The map accordingly focuses on the Kandu valley and surrounding areas:
- year1000.png (91.88 KiB) Viewed 3414 times
The city of T'elemma
In the Kandu valley, proto-cities, with population growth, grew increasingly complex and stratified social structures. That was the time of the first city states.
Perhaps the first city-state was T'elemma, a coastal city in the delta, and the cultural model for the entire period.
T'elemma was ruled by its mɔwɛh, 'the great man', that is 'the king'. The first king of T'elemma was, according to legend, T'ɛt'amɛh tɔsu Toḫiŋge , Toḫiŋge son of T'ɛt'amɛh, also called Qenim We, 'the black lord'.
Without written records, the question of King Toḫiŋge's existence can't be satisfactorily answered, but the Toḫiŋgend dynasty would rule T'elemma for several centuries.
T'elemma was a city of traders, farmers and fishermen: it was one end of a trading network across the Serene Sea; it launched great fishing campaigns in the high sea as the natural resources of the delta were no longer sufficient. The marshy area in which the early fishing village had been build could be great agricultural land, once drained and maintained.
The first great waterworks in the Kandu area were not designed for irrigation, but rather from keeping water out. In addition to the Kandu staple crops, new imports were cultivated: tomatoes, tomatillas, peppers, eggplants.
Society was organized around the clan (qɛm), which could be matrilinear or patrilinear, always headed by an elder men. The heads of qem were recognized as we, 'lord', a position of some prestige but little actual powers. T'elemma was firmly monarchic and autocratic.
Another organizaton was the sešind, the commune -- a village or city ward working collectively on communally owned land or gardens, a grouping that also served as a basis for ship crews, religious brotherhoods, corvée labor and military duty. It was headed by a sese.
The Kandu valley culture was a man's man's world. Though in T'elemma the fact that men were often away on trading, fishing or military expeditions lent a bit of power to women. There were a few female queens, and the odd female lord or community elder.
The city was surrounded by extended earthworks, that served both to contain and dry sea and salt marshes, and as defensive fortification. T'elemma was pretty much constantly in conflict with neighbourhing city states and communities.
How do you get everyone to cooperate on massive public projects, and have them give up most of the harvest, or convince fishermen to give up most of their catch?
The kings of T'elemma had figured out the answer: claim that it's God's will and you're very special people.
People in the Kandu valley believed in the spirit world, and paired gods, usually combining aspects of a supernatural king (personified as male) and of a force of nature (personified as female), a prefiguration of the later binitarian religion.
The particulars varied by city state, in T'elemma, the paired gods were the cyclops Peššuqɔŋas and a personification of the sea, Sargei Wekahuo. The kings modestly claimed descent from their legendary son, T'ɛt'amɛh who in legend saved the local fishermen by bestowing them with his divine gift of agriculture. The kings had a particular relationship as chief priests and intermediaries between the spirit realm and the world. They also organized religious festivals, which required sacrifices in kind: bear, animals, grain, wine.
A man alone can't service the oracular and sacrificial needs of a large city, even with divine superpowers, so a professional priesthood developed and took over several religious duties of the king.
The daily working of the city required a fair bit of travel to the spirit world. This was achieved by sensory deprivation, and massive quantities of tobacco which brought shaman-priests in a state of religious trance. Divine will was revealed by visual images, which the priests dutily recorded by painting them with ochre -- paintings strongly reminiscent of the cave painting of the mountainous regions upriver. Visions were codified in standard glyphs: abstract shapes, animal, human or monstrous figures.
The pursuit of religious ritual, organizing ceremonies and frequent excursions to the spirit world occupied priests full-time, and so the king granted them priestly estates; and while they were at it, priests were also given the task of administering the royal estates. That task required a fair bit of accounting; soon they were keeping ad-hoc records with, you guessed it, pictorial drawings using ochre.
They had no qualms with mixing secular and religious symbols: it was all god's work anyway. In any case, the answers they sought from the spirit world were surprisingly practical; they were most interested in the outcome of war, the harvest, the weather, the state of the waterworks.
They took to recording treaties, royal proclamations, religious hymns. By the year 1000 the system had evolved into a full-fledged writing system.
I've used Old Hieratic to represent T'elemman concepts for convenience: but that's an anachronism. T'elemma spoke an archaic Tarandic dialects, with heavy substratum influence from an unknown language, dubbed Old T'elemman. It seems that the Tarandic language spread to T'elemma with agricultural, perhaps from the southern delta, perhaps from upriver, and replaced the native Old T'elemman. T'elemma, the product of Tarandic cultural expansion, would in turn spread its culture to the entire valley.
All of these development allowed for spectacular economic and demographic growth. T'elemma's population was around 80,000 in 1000; the entire valley's population perhaps reached a million. The kings of T'elemma never could translate this numeric advantage into political domination. Their culture and political organization would spread, however to the whole valley -- and recognizaby T'elemman institutions would endure for millenia. New city-states that were growing along the Kandu: Kunguameng, Sorasa, Mora all had kings (often related to each other and to the T'elemman dynasty by marriage), qem, sešend, and paired Gods.
We will refer to this world of squabbling city states, writing with ochre as the Tarandim.
The Twelve Cities.
- twelve cities.png (189.05 KiB) Viewed 3412 times
The arrangement was most beneficial to T'elemma, the largest city, which kept the alliance treasury. A few leaders of rival cities in the Alliance thought to protest. They were deposed, sacrificed to the cyclopean Peššuqɔŋas, and replaced with more pliable relatives. Naturally, this tended to make rival kings thing about blocked career paths, and the T'elemman kings were aware of this. The oracles made prophecies about the upcoming fall of T'elemma, and helpfully noted that the inevitable disaster could be averted for a while by human sacrifice -- which, not coincidentally, was a very effective terror tactic.
Pastoralists, the Gaeh.
The Tarandim way of life was restricted to fertile areas in the Mediterranean climatic zone, those areas that could support high population densities. There Gaeh-Tarandic relatives living in the surrounding mountainous and arid areas followed a more pastoralist lifestyle, herding llamas, dinomys and the newly imported mountain goats.
We divide these, somewhat arbitrarily into the Maʕʕey in the Hengode desert to the south, the Gaeh in the Waterwon and the Joah, the Nebarei and the Kanjei to the North.
The first Gaeh kingdom was established in Hoembeg, perhaps following the Tarandim model. Their chief crops were amaranth and potatoes, first domesticated by the Nebarei.
Last edited by Ares Land on Tue Jun 23, 2020 7:07 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Re: The Middle Seas -- Historical Atlas -- 500 T.E to 1000 T.E
On Tarandim writing
Early Tarandim logograms or hieroglyphs (it was, after all, priestly writing) were drawn on cloth (usually cotton, or linen, using cuts of low quality) with pigments made from clay earths.
The 144 Cartouche is one of the earliest known pieces of true writing (as apposed to accounting tokens and oracular mnemonics), probably from H'eliqen and tentatively dated to the ninth century:
(The colors have been enhanced so the glyphs can actually be read; they're so faded away that they're almost indistinguishable from the fabric.)
The actual writing is surrounded by a cartouche, the rest is covered with doodles: possibly drawn while deep in oracular trance. (The hieroglyphs are actually written on top of oracular signs, though these mostly faded).
So how do you read these? Signs are read right to left, top to bottom.
Numerals are, well, numerals: 12. Italics are class markers: head, all caps means the character is phono-semantic: DINOMYS, SACRIFICE, the rest are read phonetically.
So this reads: 12 12 head / DINOMYS head / wed SACRIFICE tunic head.
12 12 is 144 (or 100 duodecimal, the '12' sign would later be modified to serve as zero).
Old Hieratic, like all Tarandim languages, has noun classes, which somehow alleviate the need for radicals / determiners. head represents both the HEAD noun class marker t'os (phonemic) and informs us that we're talking about farm animals (semantic).
Phono-semantic glyphs are the simples, DINOMYS is read memɓar, 'dinomys', SACRIFICE is read quɔŋer 'to sacrifice'.
'tunic' is purely phonemic, the text has nothing to do with clothing; but it's pronounced ha (same as the perfective marker).
'wed' written in purple is more complicated. It's a phonemic glyph; the thing is, it's actually read we/wa which is nowhere like the Old Hieratic word for 'to wed', sises.
What's going on? Well, the sign is one of the 60 conventional oracular signs, here repurposed for a verbal prefix. The pronunciation we is borrowed for Old T'elemman. Which, by the way, goes to show the extent of T'elemma cultural influence: H'eliqen is in the Nebari highlands, about 1,500 kilometers from T'elemma.
So, this reads teŋha-t'os membar-t'os we-quɔner-ha-t'os.
That's comprehensible, but doesn't take into account assimilation or vowel changes for the plural.
In good Old Hieratic, the 144 Cartouche reads:
teŋhat'os memɓeros waquɔnerat'os
He sacrificed 144 dinomys.
Early Tarandim logograms or hieroglyphs (it was, after all, priestly writing) were drawn on cloth (usually cotton, or linen, using cuts of low quality) with pigments made from clay earths.
The 144 Cartouche is one of the earliest known pieces of true writing (as apposed to accounting tokens and oracular mnemonics), probably from H'eliqen and tentatively dated to the ninth century:
- wet'ah.png (107.08 KiB) Viewed 3407 times
The actual writing is surrounded by a cartouche, the rest is covered with doodles: possibly drawn while deep in oracular trance. (The hieroglyphs are actually written on top of oracular signs, though these mostly faded).
- translation.png (98.98 KiB) Viewed 3407 times
Numerals are, well, numerals: 12. Italics are class markers: head, all caps means the character is phono-semantic: DINOMYS, SACRIFICE, the rest are read phonetically.
So this reads: 12 12 head / DINOMYS head / wed SACRIFICE tunic head.
12 12 is 144 (or 100 duodecimal, the '12' sign would later be modified to serve as zero).
Old Hieratic, like all Tarandim languages, has noun classes, which somehow alleviate the need for radicals / determiners. head represents both the HEAD noun class marker t'os (phonemic) and informs us that we're talking about farm animals (semantic).
Phono-semantic glyphs are the simples, DINOMYS is read memɓar, 'dinomys', SACRIFICE is read quɔŋer 'to sacrifice'.
'tunic' is purely phonemic, the text has nothing to do with clothing; but it's pronounced ha (same as the perfective marker).
'wed' written in purple is more complicated. It's a phonemic glyph; the thing is, it's actually read we/wa which is nowhere like the Old Hieratic word for 'to wed', sises.
What's going on? Well, the sign is one of the 60 conventional oracular signs, here repurposed for a verbal prefix. The pronunciation we is borrowed for Old T'elemman. Which, by the way, goes to show the extent of T'elemma cultural influence: H'eliqen is in the Nebari highlands, about 1,500 kilometers from T'elemma.
So, this reads teŋha-t'os membar-t'os we-quɔner-ha-t'os.
That's comprehensible, but doesn't take into account assimilation or vowel changes for the plural.
In good Old Hieratic, the 144 Cartouche reads:
teŋhat'os memɓeros waquɔnerat'os
- teŋha-t'os member-os wa-quɔner-a-t'os
- 144-HEAD dinomys<PL>-HEAD 3s-sacrifice-PERF-HEAD
He sacrificed 144 dinomys.
Re: The Middle Seas -- Historical Atlas -- 500 T.E to 1000 T.E
I should probably have posted this a while earlier - I think it's really neat how you actually made an archeological artifact!
