The Great Lands: Historical Atlas (2500 BP)
By about 2,500 years before Krava’s time, metal-workers on both sides of the narrows of the Sailor’s Sea had developed the technique of alloying copper to produce bronze. Reflecting this, the limits of Neolithic and Chalcolithic technology have been dropped on this map. The Neolithic lifestyle has finally expanded to the far corners of the world, and even copper tools are becoming commonplace. Now, bronze-working is the critical technology that distinguishes leading-edge cultures from their less sophisticated neighbors.
The new technology spread slowly at first. The tin necessary to produce high-quality bronze could only be found at the extreme edges of the trade networks of the time. Still, tools and weapons of the new material soon became a prestige item, and warriors and traders alike began to traffic in it. The new metallurgy was one of several factors that gave rise to the first urban civilizations in the world.
The first true cities appeared in the daharim region, a dozen or so settlements with extensive fortifications, large palace and temple complexes, and populations of 3,000 to 6,000 each. These towns formed the nuclei for city-states, each ruled by a hereditary royal dynasty, all competing for the best farmland and trade routes.
To the east, the Ka-Meret peoples gave rise to their own first civilization, the Mereti Kingdom. So far, this was still a chalcolithic culture, but the Mereti god-kings developed very sophisticated techniques to organize agricultural labor and trade. The Mereti kingdom was not at all urban – even the god-king’s palace was surrounded by mere farming villages – but in terms of territorial extent it was the largest unified human realm at the time.
Out in the islands, the Kavrian Matriarchy appeared. The Kavrians were the greatest sea-farers of their time, a critical link in the trade networks that crossed the narrows of the sea and made the Bronze Age possible in the first place. Led by an alliance of priestess-queens and daring sea-captains, the Matriarchy was also not yet an urban state, but its halls and palaces played host to visual arts, dance, and music unmatched in the world.
Most of the language groups of the Great Lands had changed little over the past thousand years. In the north, the Mahra peoples were an exception.
A division between Western and Eastern Mahra languages was becoming more clear with each passing century, the dividing line placed roughly at the boundary between the woodlands of the Lake Country and the central steppes. The western Mahra benefited from the new trade in bronze, and were more sedentary and peaceful. The eastern Mahra had committed themselves to the horse-nomad’s lifestyle, and had become fierce and tenacious warriors despite their relative lack of bronze weaponry.
The eastern Mahra move toward a warrior culture was, in part, driven by a new danger out of the white north.
The ancient “demons” who had once taken refuge around Mount Akyat had regained their strength, building an army of “fierce men” and modified beasts. Now they emerged from their refuge, carrying war across wide ranges of the northern continent. Once they had been gentle gods of peace, fertility and good harvests. Now they had become the Renounced Gods – terrible deities of war, pestilence, famine, bitter cold, and death. Where they went, the peoples of the north submitted or died.
The first campaigns of the Renounced Gods were against the Smith-folk of the far north, especially the reactionaries who had fled the Neolithic wave thousands of years before. Now their fears had come true. The armies of the Renounced Ones attacked three of the old Smith-folk enclaves, “liberating” the spirits bound there and slaughtering the people.
Some of these campaigns crossed eastern Mahra land, and the horse-nomads soon learned the bitter necessity of resistance. Under pressure, the eastern Mahra quickly developed the horse-nomad’s way of warfare: superb mounted archery, capable of fast, mobile strikes followed by quick retreats. Strengthened by their own divine patrons, the Mahra were able to survive the onslaught. Some of the oldest hero-tales in later Chariot People mythology referred back to these early wars against the Renounced Ones, across the sea of grass.
Not all of the eastern Mahra were able to stand and fight. Retreating before the generations-long attack, some of them sought refuge in distant lands. One group (the Kusi tribes) migrated into the far east, onto the cold steppes north of the Eagle Mountains.
Another group (the Nesali tribes) made the fateful decision to migrate south, and even to cross the narrows of the Sailor’s Sea. They settled among the Zari peoples of the region that would one day be called Navenia. There, new bronze weapons combined with their existing mounted archery to give them complete military superiority. They soon took over the region, setting up several petty kingdoms ruled by Mahra warrior-aristocrats. It was a pattern that was to be repeated many times across the Great Lands in the following centuries.