Sharrukin's Palace

Having finished the “historical atlas” series for the Great Lands, now I’m starting to focus on maps that will help me keep track of the environment in which my characters will be moving around. This is a map of the territory inhabited by Krava’s home culture and the surrounding region.

The Tremara inhabit the region between the Blue Mountains in the west, the Black River valley in the east, the great pine forests of the Northmen, and the Lake Country to the south. It’s an area of roughly 200,000 square miles, supporting a total population of about 2.4 million. The Tremara are at an early Iron Age level of development – mostly peasant villages, ruled by a warrior aristocracy who fight from chariots with bow and spear. They have some contact with Korsanari and Sea Kingdom merchants who bring in luxury goods and new ideas – these mostly come up the rivers from the Lake Country, or across the Blue Mountains at the Trader’s Pass.

This map is a reasonably finished project, although I expect I’ll continue to tweak and add to it in the future as I develop more details of the setting.

Next project will be to focus on a small area of this map, producing a local map that should cover all the territory that plays a part in The Curse of Steel. Once that’s done, I’m probably going to have everything I need to sit down and produce a second draft of the novel.

Technical Notes: My continent-wide map was put in an orthographic projection and narrowed down to this region using GProjector (Windows version 2.1.8). An image from there was imported as a tracing overlay, and the basic map here was produced, using Wonderdraft (version 1.1) with standard symbol libraries. The final Wonderdraft product was imported into Adobe Photoshop CC, where I added the latitude-longitude grid and all the place names. I have another overlay (not visible here) with national and tribal names.

As the Iron Age matures throughout the Great Lands, societies everywhere have begun to transform themselves. This will not be an era of tiny tribal states, leavened with the occasional “Great Kingdom” that is still small in territorial extent. New military technologies and social organizations are clearly giving rise to an age of empire.

The superpower of the day is the Anshan Empire, the largest and most populous single state in world history up to this point. The Anshani have conquered the entire core of the Kurani zone, along with most of the old Nesali heartland and all of the upper Mereti lands. By Krava’s time they are pressing down on the Korsanari city-states of the coast, and are in a constant state of low-level war with the resurgent Mereti Kingdom in the far east. No one is quite sure what further ambitions the Anshani hold, but their kings and their jealous god show no sign of slowing down.

With the Tukhari homeland under Anshani rule, many of the colonies in the east have banded together for mutual support and defense. The core of the alliance is the city of Tukhar Nakh (“New Tukhar”), which has grown to significant size on the basis of its prosperous trade links. The allies are nominally independent of Anshani rule, and would fight Anshan if the Empire ever forced them to it. In the meantime, their interests align with Anshan more often than not, especially when it comes to holding the other great sea-faring powers at bay.

The Sea Kingdom remains relatively peaceful in strategy and intent . . . although in recent generations it has developed a truly formidable capacity for self-defense against the various “barbarians” it finds across the world. Sea Kingdom ships go wherever they choose and trade with whoever is willing, and not even Anshan has quite mustered the courage to try to oppose them. As a result, the lords of Dar-ul-Hakum have become fabulously wealthy, trading in all the luxury goods of the world. With wealth comes great power, which the Sea Kingdom has not yet decided how to use . . .

One unique facet of the Sea Kingdom’s holdings is the appearance of the Island-folk, finally reunited with all their distant cousins after tens of thousands of years. The Island-folk embraced the arrival of the Sea-Kingdom’s first ships in their distant homeland, and enthusiastically volunteered to serve aboard Sea-Kingdom ships. Over the last few generations, they have set up small communities in almost every port town in the world. Their clever minds and nimble hands make them valuable in a variety of professions: sailors, craftsmen, messengers and thieves.

The third of the great sea-faring powers is the Korsanari city-states. Like a shadow of the ancient Kavrian Matriarchy, the Korsanari have begun to build a sophisticated urban civilization of their own. The Korsanari are not venturesome sailors like the Tukhari or the Sea-Kingdom, rarely willing to sail out of sight of land. Even so, they have set up their own trade networks throughout the Sailor’s Sea and beyond. These networks are supported by a plethora of small colonies, established wherever a decent harbor and a sheltered hinterland can be found, and the local barbarians are not too hostile.

The Korsanari have also begun to trade well inland on the northern continent, seeking markets where the Tukhari and even the Sea Kingdom do not bother to go. Korsanari merchants have penetrated as far as the Lake Country and beyond, bringing the Tremara and even some of the skatoi tribes into their trade network.

As for the Tremara, Krava’s people? They are thoroughly established between the Blue Mountains and the skatoi lands across the Black River, with the pale Mervirai tribes to the north and the prosperous Lake Country to the south. Compared to the vibrant cultures around the Sailor’s Sea, they are certainly barbarians – but sophisticated barbarians, with superb visual art, even better poetry and music, and the beginnings of a literary tradition. Most of the peoples of the Great Lands know little about them and care less, but (in the persons of Krava the Swift and her friends) they are about to shake the world . . .

Late in the Bronze Age, iron-working technology appeared in two wide-separated places. The growing Sea-Kingdom was the first to mass-produce iron for tools and weapons, guided by the occasional instruction of the Elder Folk. The late Nesali Empire developed the new technology as well, with input from the Smith-folk enclave in their territory. The chaos of the Bronze Age collapse spread the new technique far and wide.

By the time the völkerwanderung faded, the world had changed. Almost all of the Great Kingdoms at the core of the civilized region had collapsed. The Mereti Kingdom had fallen down to a small rump state, due not to foreign invasion, but to internal decadence and anarchy. The Empire of Shuppar was gone, only its capital city remaining behind to testify to faded glory. The Nesali Empire had vanished entirely from history, leaving behind a patchwork of petty kingdoms and tribal states.

Yet new powers were also on the rise.

The Kingdom of Anshan applied iron weaponry and innovative tactical systems to place most of Shuppar’s old territory under heavy tribute. The Anshani people were soon cordially hated by all of their subjects and neighbors . . . but their armies and ruthless administration made them the new imperial power.

Meanwhile, mercantile power was making its appearance for the first time. To be sure, the high Bronze Age had boasted extensive trade networks, but these mostly involved traffic among kings and aristocrats in luxury goods. Now the Kurani city-states of the coast, most notably the towns of Buradh and Tukhar, began to trade far out across the Sailor’s Sea. The Tukhari, in particular, established trading posts and small colonies along both shores of the sea, reaching as far as the open Sunset Ocean. In part, this movement was driven by Anshani pressure; the coastal towns needed to raise great wealth to hold off imperial armies. Yet it was noteworthy that these trading ventures were led and manned by commoners, men and women of no noble blood.

And as the Tukhari venturers reached the Sunset Ocean, they encountered the men of the Sea Kingdom coming the other way.

After a thousand years of isolated development, the Sea Kingdom was ready to explore the whole world. Huge ocean-worthy ships returned to the Great Lands, establishing trading posts all up and down the western coasts, some of them venturing as far as the Mereti coast in the far east. From these outposts, wild tales came of strange lands no other man had ever seen, on the far side of the Sunset Ocean and even on the other side of the world.

The Sea Kingdom was peaceful to a fault in this era, refusing to use force to compete for trade or territory. But then, their arts and sciences were far enough beyond those of the Great Lands that they had no need to use force. No one, not even the most ruthless Anshani prince or Tukhari merchant, dared lift a hand against them. And where the sailors of the Sea Kingdom went, iron-working and the arts of civilization followed. Even the Muri cultures of the deep south came into the world community at last, picking up advanced technology and social systems from visiting Sea Kingdom ships. Several Muri tribal confederations became full kingdoms in this era, and a Muri dynasty established itself in the new Ka realm that had arisen as a rival to the Mereti.

In the north, the skatoi had settled down in what was once Rudanai territory, splitting the Maras cultures almost in half. They proved poor neighbors, although the Maras soon found that they spent as much time fighting one another as raiding outsiders.

The eastern Maras peoples established a stable status quo. The Haleari even built a network of city-states, reminiscent of the Tamiri civilization that had fallen in the same area a thousand years before. In the west, the Chariot People continued to expand, taking over the remaining Zari lands east of the Blue Mountains. One branch of the northern Kardanai were destined for special significance. These were the Tremara (Classical Korsanai trenāras, the “Mighty Folk”) – Krava’s own people, out on the historical stage at last.

Just as in our own world, the end of the Bronze Age came amid chaos.

The first act took place in the west, where the Targut Horde of the skatoi sought to move south into warmer and more fertile lands. At first they tried to invade the fringes of Zari territory, near the Standing Stones. An alliance of Zari villagers, Maras charioteers from the south, and the Elder Folk turned back this invasion at the famous Battle of the Plain. This turned the Targut aside, forcing them to stick to the eastern side of the Black River.

About a generation later, a civil war among the far-northern Akyat Horde caused about two-thirds of that people to move southward, pushing aside the Marut Horde. The Marut responded by allying themselves with the Targut, mounting a great war-migration into the Maras lands north and east of the Great Lakes. The Rudanai tribes who dwelt there soon found that they no longer had a military advantage over the skatoi, who had tamed horses and built war-chariots of their own.

While this was going on, the Korsanari of the south fell into a trap of their own. Using divine blessings and the power of a mighty Smith-folk-forged sword, one of the palace-lords unified most of the Korsanari for the first time in history. Unfortunately, his arrogance led to a war against the very Smith-folk who had aided him in his youth. This led to his downfall under a curse, and the collapse of his High Kingdom. After his death, his vassals turned against one another, fighting over the scraps until there was little left. His sword vanished from history, only to fall into the hands of Krava the Swift centuries later.

Like the fall of a cascade of dominoes, the migrations continued southward. Attracted by the chaos in Korsanari lands, the Rudanai moved southward, sacking palace after palace as they went. Some of them surged out across the narrows of the sea, capturing islands and carving big chunks out of the Nesali Empire. After a generation of this, the Nesali themselves collapsed, setting off a further wave of migration that rushed into Kurani lands.

The Second Empire of Shuppar had managed to hang on until this point, although much of its old territory had already fallen away by the time the wave of Rudanai and Nesali migrants arrived. Now the empire collapsed entirely, although the city of Shuppar itself survived the wave of destruction. The only beneficiary of this chaos was the kingdom of Anshan, which broke violently away from Shuppar early in the chaos, and managed to hold the Maras migrations at bay. Driven by their blood-thirsty god and a massive sense of racial superiority, the Anshani suddenly saw their own chance for empire . . .

By about 1,100 years before Krava’s time, the ancient Maras – now the warlike Chariot People – were making their presence felt all across the Great Lands.

Their expansion was aided and abetted by natural disaster. Climate change, leading to poor harvests and the spread of epidemic diseases, had already undermined several of the older civilizations. At about the time of this map, the active tectonic zone beneath the Sailor’s Sea gave rise to a series of volcanic eruptions, one of them cataclysmic in extent. That disaster wrecked the Kavrian Matriarchy entirely, and placed further stress on urban societies everywhere.

The Chariot People took advantage, sending small armies of chariot-driving warriors to fan out far and wide from their old homelands. These warrior bands “took over” existing societies, demanding tribute and imposing their own customs, but providing armed protection and stability in exchange.

In the west, the Kardanai branch of the Maras continued to make inroads on ancient Zari territory on both sides of the White Mountains. In the south, the Korsanari surged out across the Sailor’s Sea, taking up residence across the islands once ruled by the Matriarchy. The Elder-folk city that once supported the Matriarchs had been abandoned by this time; the Maras raiders who finally reduced it to ruins found none of its people left behind for ransom.

On the southern continent, the Nesali New Kingdom proved to be the military superpower of the era. The Nesali reduced the Darusi petty-kings and the Kurri state to vassal status, and even sacked the town of Shuppar at one point.

After the sack, the Second Empire of Shuppar recovered, although its ruling elite now spoke a Maras language among themselves, even while they used Kurani languages and customs in public. Shuppar itself had become the largest urban settlement in the world, with over 20,000 inhabitants inside its massive walls. It was the first true city the Common-folk had ever built, but it would not be the last.

The greatest advance of the Maras was in the east. Climate stress had driven the old Tamiri city-states and the Nandu Kingdom into anarchy, opening a power vacuum that the Artai tribes could exploit. Many of them came down the Eagle’s Pass into the coastal plains, taking over city after city, imposing Maras rule wherever they went. In the end, the Artai migrants took up many Tamiri customs and religious ideas, but they completely transformed the local language and society.

The only major civilization untouched by the Maras surge was the Mereti. After a period of anarchy, the Mereti had established a New Kingdom under their Thirteenth and Fourteenth Dynasties. Along the way, they had finally adopted bronze-working, and some of the military technologies that made the Maras so formidable. Filled with xenophobic confidence, they felt ready to stand off any foreign invasion.

The Chariot People seemed poised to dominate the Great Lands once and for all. However, in the far north the skatoi, former servants of the Renounced Gods, were stirring. Even without divine guidance, they had acquired many of the military technologies their Common-folk enemies had used to defeat them in the past. Now their numbers had grown, to the point that they needed new lands to support them . . . and they had begun to look southward for the solution to that problem.

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Personal Note: You’ll probably deduce that I’ve finished revising older maps in this series, and am now at the point of creating the last few new ones. I’ve revised some of the text associated with these maps as well. If you’re interested in seeing the finished product – a complete “historical atlas” of the Great Lands, with all of the revised text and a sheaf of new material to boot, please consider signing up as one of my patrons (link to Patreon in the left sidebar).

After the fall of the Renounced Gods, some of the Elder Folk – perhaps a quarter of the total population – remained behind in the Great Lands, out of love for the wide country and the people who dwelt there. The rest set sail across the Sunset Sea, returning to the other worlds where they had lived for many thousands of years.

During this evacuation, the Elder Folk offered many thousands of humans the chance to migrate across the sea in their train. The Common-folk were not permitted to sail the oceans of heaven, but the Elders could guide them to a new homeland in the midst of the sea, a gentle and hospitable place where they could grow strong and wise in peace.

Most of the people who accepted this opportunity were Zari-speakers, former clients of the Elder-folk domains of the western coast-lands. Since the Elder-folk did not teach their own tongue to outsiders, and the Zari languages they spoke had diverged considerably over the centuries, these settlers at first had little speech in common. However, the largest single contingent – and the one carrying the most administrative skill – came from the Kurani city-states of the coast of the Sailor’s Sea. As a result, the new settlement eventually settled on a common dialect that was largely of Kurani origin and structure, although with many Zari loan-words. From this humble beginning would grow the great and glorious Sea-Kingdom of later centuries.

Back in the Great Lands, many of the realms of the early Bronze Age underwent upheaval and change.

In the far north, the legacy of the Renounced Gods remained. Their former servants, the Homo ferox warriors who had filled out their armies, now divided into many clans and tribes. Every band was fiercely independent, constantly competing with its neighbors for the best hunting and grazing land. Tribal alliances formed and shattered with every turn of fortune. Three major “hordes” were fairly stable over the decades: the Akyat, the Marut, and the Targut. One day these people would strike out to make the other folk of the Great Lands tremble once more, but for now they had more than enough to keep themselves busy.

In the Kurani homeland, a new wave of migration from the margins of the southern desert – the Umirru tribes – brought down the Empire of Shuppar, reverting the region to a patchwork of independent city-states. Only in the eastern highlands did one realm, the Kingdom of Anshan, manage to keep the Umirru at bay. Other Kurani peoples migrated east, contributing to the collapse of the unified Mereti Kingdom.

Perhaps the most significant change came among the Mahra peoples. The Mahra had taken the brunt of the assault of the Renounced Gods for centuries, and their armies had been the spear-head of the counter-attack which eventually brought down the renegade deities. The experience had rendered them tough, stubborn, and warlike . . . and with the benefit of their own ingenuity and Elder-folk guidance, they had developed the most effective military technologies in the world.

Now, with bronze weapons and armor, powerful composite bows, fast war chariots, and sophisticated tactical systems, they were ready to transform the face of the Great Lands. The ancient Mahra had become the Chariot People of legend, pressing into new lands, taking over existing cities and kingdoms, imposing their own form of warrior-aristocracy wherever they went.

On the southern continent, Mahra charioteers set up the Nesali Old Kingdom, and strengthened several petty states in contact with the Kavrian matriarchs along the coast. Others swept down to the south and east, setting up the Karri realm that would be a major player in Kurani politics for centuries.

On the northern continent, the Athani tribes finished their migration down to the coast of the Sailor’s Sea, taking over the Zari villages of the region, and also coming into frequent contact with the Kavrian Matriarchy. The experience tempered them. They remained patriarchal and aggressive, but the Kavrian influence gave them some civilized polish, and an appreciation for independent-minded women who could serve as partners in rule.

Other western Mahra crossed the Cataracts for the first time, settling at the foot of the mountains and along the southern shore of the Great Lakes. Some of these were Krava’s remote ancestors, who would eventually settle all along the eastern slopes of the Blue Mountains.

Yet another Mahra migration set out a very long distance, passing by the remains of the Desolation to settle by the shores of the Northern Sea. These people were the Merwehri (“North Men”) group – small in number, great in influence. As a result of this migration, the pale-skinned people of the far north would one day speak a Mahra language and share many elements of Mahra culture.

Ironically, even with the departure of the Elder-folk and the increasing pressure from Mahra conquest, this era was probably the zenith of Zari culture in the far west. For all that the western Zari had no cities, their mathematics and astronomy were possibly more advanced than any in the world. Their love of megalithic architecture reached its height in this period, culminating in the construction of the Standing Stones on the central plains. Centuries later, Krava’s folk would marvel at this magnificent stone circle, and hold high religious ceremonies there at the spring and fall equinoxes. They would wonder what glorious people could have erected such a structure . . . never realizing that the peasants in their own farming villages were descended from the very Zari-speaking tribes who had performed the feat.

Here’s a link to the DeviantArt page for this map.