The Rise of the White Huns
- Thread starter Practical Lobster
- Start date
Commerce and Christ
Commerce and Christ
With the rise of the Khardi, the ports of southern Mesopotamia grew once more, and trade began to flow in volumes not seen since the Eftal golden age. Some of the greatest beneficiaries would be the pearl divers of the Bahrain and the merchants of Mezun and the rapidly expanding city-state of Hatta. However, increased wealth bred sectarian conflict. Much of the trade in Hatta was run by foreign guilds, Indians from Sindh and Bharukaccha. However, the pearl-diving and artisanal communities were largely Nestorian, with large Christian congregations in cities such as Al-Dair and Muharraq.
The Nestorian population in Bahrain had survived and indeed grown despite the relative decline of their faith in many parts of the world. While the Eftal persecuted Christians viciously in the aftermath of their own collapse, this had been but a foretaste of the violence done by radical elements of the Nowbahar cult. Christians were god-worshippers of the highest order, denying the dharma entirely, and for that many radical lay preachers turned angry mobs against the ancient churches of the Nestorian faith, whose communities had survived countless upheavals and regime changes. Many Nestorians with the means to do so fled to the southern coast of the Persian gulf, which, as the Eftal regime declined, became a safe harbor for them. Muharraq itself became a seat of the Church of the East, becoming the seat of the Ecclesiastical Province of Dilmun.
These newcomers arrived with few prospects and quickly overcrowded the region. Furthermore, they blamed the Buddhist Indians who they encountered for their hardships, often refusing to see the difference between the iconoclastic Nowbahar movement and the spectrum of dharmic religions practiced by Gurjar merchants in Hatta. Yet a third faction existed as well, the traditional rulers of the province – an Iranian-influenced Aramaic-speaking Arab ruling class who felt trapped between the Indian guilds who provided their link to the outside world and the Nestorian faith of the common people and artisans.
In 923, the situation would be escalated with violence for the first time. A mob of Nestorian refugees attacked members of a Bharuchi Sreni and killed several. Retaliation by guild-paid mercenaries, a motley mix of Saihist pagans and Zoroastrians from the interior, was vicious and went far beyond what the Arab rulers could consider proportional. The mercenaries were banished from the city and a fine assessed on the Bharuchi merchant guild, and the matter was considered settled by most. The money raised from the fine went to paying to settle a number of refugees in the prosperous inland oasis town of Haggar.
However, the merchants appealed to the Ayat of Bharukaccha which in turn appealed to the local Chandratreya appointed-viceroy. The guilds offered the state a cut of the profits in perpetuity in exchange for state support. An armed fleet of some twenty warships set sail the following year, on what was otherwise a simple prestige expedition to assert Chandratreya power over the Persian Gulf and the former Hadhramut hegemony. However, they were also tasked with ensuring the safety of the Muharraqi merchant guilds. Word spread rapidly of their advance, and the Muharraq appealed to Hatta, their patron-city, whose rulers felt obligated to come to Hatta’s aid, but were powerless to defeat Bharukaccha’s military forces.
Instead, negotiation would be the order of the day. The Bharuchi fleet wished to avoid an all-out military confrontation so far from home, and in territory that was considered the Aghatsaghid Shahdom’s backyard, and Hatta knew that in a fight the Bharuchi could lay waste to their outlying villages and provinces. While the actual details of the negotiation are lost to history, what is clear is that both sides walked away with their honor somewhat satisfied, but the merchant guilds won an important victory, consolidating their monopoly on the pearl trade and regulating the prices at which pearl divers could sell.
Such conflicts must be viewed in a proto-imperialist lens. Outfitting a fleet of large warships for a prestige cruise around the western Indian Ocean was not, on paper, an economically profitable decision. Muharraq was a wealthy city, but only in pearls and dates, and the incense and spices of Arabia largely moved west, not east. However, the broader message of Chandratreya hegemony allowed them to negotiate from a position of strength and consolidate the position of their merchants relative to other, less naval-focused powers such as the Aghatsaghids, who in their decline were unwilling or unable to challenge the Chandratreya at sea. Despite the logistical difficulties and distances involved, the vassal-cities of a Deccan based dynasty were able to threaten and control the politics of their Arabian counterparts.
Meanwhile, on the shores of another part of the Indian Ocean, the Hawiya were faced with a dilemma. King Nefekabe presided over a declining state. Agricultural changes and erosion had seen the agricultural production of his state decline immensely. Ethiopia, once a breadbasket, was wracked by routine famine and old Aksum itself was left as nothing more than a ruin. The great plantation estates which made up the backbone of the Hawiyan hydraulic despotism were gutted and their cities shrunk. Patronage for the arts and philosophy began to dry up – however, Hawiyan contributions to these fields would not be forgotten. Cities such as Zela were entrepots, and even if the civilization which spawned them was declining, they remained relevant and allowed the diffusion of Hawiyan thought – bold philosophies that mixed Jainist and Christian teachings, and saw the birth of Hawiyan Jewish mysticism in the texts of Simon of Harar.
Like many of their neighbors, it was tempting to drift into the Egyptian sphere of influence, and indeed there were few alternatives. The Savahila cities were individually wealthy but many of them were distant and in general they were preoccupied with the politics of the interior and their own petty squabbles. India was far away and the Hadhrami were a shadow of their former selves. Tiravazi, one of the northernmost Savahila states, was viewed as a fierce rival in any case – Tiravasi had escaped much of the environmental degradation and was ascendant even as the Hawiya struggled.
King Nefekabe’s son, Semakabe, would see the loss of the city of Adulis to rebellion. While he was distracted with the rising power of the Ouds clan in the south, Adulis broke away and despite negotiations retained a large degree of autonomy. Under a local clan leader, Geveryi Elmidua, Adulis was able to claim independence and provide an alternative to the standardized Hawiya customs system. Local Egyptian potentates in Berenike and Iotabe were quick to provide monetary support to Elmidua, who converted to Christianity in 912, hoping to gain broader Egyptian support. He adopted the Coptic language as his courtly language and gave preferential treatment to Egyptian merchant vessels, undermining the Hawiyan attempts to remain independent.
Hawiya still did not, however, collapse entirely. The monarchy was reduced to a rump state around the city of Gidaya. Semakabe would be assassinated in 927, and his brother, Cawil, would take power. The Kingdom of Gidaya, as this new, diminished Hawiya Empire became known, was militarily weak and bound to the coast. Without control over the interior, tribalism reigned. The decline of the Hawiya would also become an era of increased sectarianism – the Hawiya policy of avoiding religious favoritism was abandoned as their subject tribes were frequently swayed away from paganism and towards Christianity or Judaism.
To the north, the warlike Zanafij tribe exploited the division in Adulis and her Hawiya overlords, coming into confederal rulership over the hinterlands between Makuria and the Hawiya. The Zanafij were a pastoralist people, like many of the tribes under the Hawiya yoke, and their rise merely exacerbated the already unstable ecological situation. Meanwhile, in the southeast, a warlord by the name of Giram rose to power, claiming descent from Solomon. While he was of Ouds extraction, through this and a general assimilation into Ethiopian culture he became Negus of Shoa. A strong promoter of Christianity, Giram used the role of the Ethiopian church to gain the loyalty and devotion of his subjects, campaigning against the pagan Hawiya and Somali tribes to the south and the Jewish Zanafij to the north.
With the fall of the pagan Hawiya, Egypt rose to fill the vacuum. With Saihism on the decline as well, Christian missionaries made new headway in gaining the conversion of local potentates. However, this new dominance was perhaps not the coup it might have appeared to be on paper – the very climatological shifts that allowed Egypt to come to dominate the Red Sea also ensured that its former competitors had far less to offer than they had in past centuries. Across Ethiopia, urban sites contracted or declined to fractions of their previous size. A Jainist missionary visiting the region in 943, described the landscape as “a great wasteland” dotted with religious communities and semipastoralist tribal groups. Despite the rise of the Giramid Kingdom in the south and other isolated resurgences of sedentary agriculture later in the century, the center of power on the East Coast would continue its inexorable shift southwards.
With the rise of the Khardi, the ports of southern Mesopotamia grew once more, and trade began to flow in volumes not seen since the Eftal golden age. Some of the greatest beneficiaries would be the pearl divers of the Bahrain and the merchants of Mezun and the rapidly expanding city-state of Hatta. However, increased wealth bred sectarian conflict. Much of the trade in Hatta was run by foreign guilds, Indians from Sindh and Bharukaccha. However, the pearl-diving and artisanal communities were largely Nestorian, with large Christian congregations in cities such as Al-Dair and Muharraq.
The Nestorian population in Bahrain had survived and indeed grown despite the relative decline of their faith in many parts of the world. While the Eftal persecuted Christians viciously in the aftermath of their own collapse, this had been but a foretaste of the violence done by radical elements of the Nowbahar cult. Christians were god-worshippers of the highest order, denying the dharma entirely, and for that many radical lay preachers turned angry mobs against the ancient churches of the Nestorian faith, whose communities had survived countless upheavals and regime changes. Many Nestorians with the means to do so fled to the southern coast of the Persian gulf, which, as the Eftal regime declined, became a safe harbor for them. Muharraq itself became a seat of the Church of the East, becoming the seat of the Ecclesiastical Province of Dilmun.
These newcomers arrived with few prospects and quickly overcrowded the region. Furthermore, they blamed the Buddhist Indians who they encountered for their hardships, often refusing to see the difference between the iconoclastic Nowbahar movement and the spectrum of dharmic religions practiced by Gurjar merchants in Hatta. Yet a third faction existed as well, the traditional rulers of the province – an Iranian-influenced Aramaic-speaking Arab ruling class who felt trapped between the Indian guilds who provided their link to the outside world and the Nestorian faith of the common people and artisans.
In 923, the situation would be escalated with violence for the first time. A mob of Nestorian refugees attacked members of a Bharuchi Sreni and killed several. Retaliation by guild-paid mercenaries, a motley mix of Saihist pagans and Zoroastrians from the interior, was vicious and went far beyond what the Arab rulers could consider proportional. The mercenaries were banished from the city and a fine assessed on the Bharuchi merchant guild, and the matter was considered settled by most. The money raised from the fine went to paying to settle a number of refugees in the prosperous inland oasis town of Haggar.
However, the merchants appealed to the Ayat of Bharukaccha which in turn appealed to the local Chandratreya appointed-viceroy. The guilds offered the state a cut of the profits in perpetuity in exchange for state support. An armed fleet of some twenty warships set sail the following year, on what was otherwise a simple prestige expedition to assert Chandratreya power over the Persian Gulf and the former Hadhramut hegemony. However, they were also tasked with ensuring the safety of the Muharraqi merchant guilds. Word spread rapidly of their advance, and the Muharraq appealed to Hatta, their patron-city, whose rulers felt obligated to come to Hatta’s aid, but were powerless to defeat Bharukaccha’s military forces.
Instead, negotiation would be the order of the day. The Bharuchi fleet wished to avoid an all-out military confrontation so far from home, and in territory that was considered the Aghatsaghid Shahdom’s backyard, and Hatta knew that in a fight the Bharuchi could lay waste to their outlying villages and provinces. While the actual details of the negotiation are lost to history, what is clear is that both sides walked away with their honor somewhat satisfied, but the merchant guilds won an important victory, consolidating their monopoly on the pearl trade and regulating the prices at which pearl divers could sell.
Such conflicts must be viewed in a proto-imperialist lens. Outfitting a fleet of large warships for a prestige cruise around the western Indian Ocean was not, on paper, an economically profitable decision. Muharraq was a wealthy city, but only in pearls and dates, and the incense and spices of Arabia largely moved west, not east. However, the broader message of Chandratreya hegemony allowed them to negotiate from a position of strength and consolidate the position of their merchants relative to other, less naval-focused powers such as the Aghatsaghids, who in their decline were unwilling or unable to challenge the Chandratreya at sea. Despite the logistical difficulties and distances involved, the vassal-cities of a Deccan based dynasty were able to threaten and control the politics of their Arabian counterparts.
Meanwhile, on the shores of another part of the Indian Ocean, the Hawiya were faced with a dilemma. King Nefekabe presided over a declining state. Agricultural changes and erosion had seen the agricultural production of his state decline immensely. Ethiopia, once a breadbasket, was wracked by routine famine and old Aksum itself was left as nothing more than a ruin. The great plantation estates which made up the backbone of the Hawiyan hydraulic despotism were gutted and their cities shrunk. Patronage for the arts and philosophy began to dry up – however, Hawiyan contributions to these fields would not be forgotten. Cities such as Zela were entrepots, and even if the civilization which spawned them was declining, they remained relevant and allowed the diffusion of Hawiyan thought – bold philosophies that mixed Jainist and Christian teachings, and saw the birth of Hawiyan Jewish mysticism in the texts of Simon of Harar.
Like many of their neighbors, it was tempting to drift into the Egyptian sphere of influence, and indeed there were few alternatives. The Savahila cities were individually wealthy but many of them were distant and in general they were preoccupied with the politics of the interior and their own petty squabbles. India was far away and the Hadhrami were a shadow of their former selves. Tiravazi, one of the northernmost Savahila states, was viewed as a fierce rival in any case – Tiravasi had escaped much of the environmental degradation and was ascendant even as the Hawiya struggled.
King Nefekabe’s son, Semakabe, would see the loss of the city of Adulis to rebellion. While he was distracted with the rising power of the Ouds clan in the south, Adulis broke away and despite negotiations retained a large degree of autonomy. Under a local clan leader, Geveryi Elmidua, Adulis was able to claim independence and provide an alternative to the standardized Hawiya customs system. Local Egyptian potentates in Berenike and Iotabe were quick to provide monetary support to Elmidua, who converted to Christianity in 912, hoping to gain broader Egyptian support. He adopted the Coptic language as his courtly language and gave preferential treatment to Egyptian merchant vessels, undermining the Hawiyan attempts to remain independent.
Hawiya still did not, however, collapse entirely. The monarchy was reduced to a rump state around the city of Gidaya. Semakabe would be assassinated in 927, and his brother, Cawil, would take power. The Kingdom of Gidaya, as this new, diminished Hawiya Empire became known, was militarily weak and bound to the coast. Without control over the interior, tribalism reigned. The decline of the Hawiya would also become an era of increased sectarianism – the Hawiya policy of avoiding religious favoritism was abandoned as their subject tribes were frequently swayed away from paganism and towards Christianity or Judaism.
To the north, the warlike Zanafij tribe exploited the division in Adulis and her Hawiya overlords, coming into confederal rulership over the hinterlands between Makuria and the Hawiya. The Zanafij were a pastoralist people, like many of the tribes under the Hawiya yoke, and their rise merely exacerbated the already unstable ecological situation. Meanwhile, in the southeast, a warlord by the name of Giram rose to power, claiming descent from Solomon. While he was of Ouds extraction, through this and a general assimilation into Ethiopian culture he became Negus of Shoa. A strong promoter of Christianity, Giram used the role of the Ethiopian church to gain the loyalty and devotion of his subjects, campaigning against the pagan Hawiya and Somali tribes to the south and the Jewish Zanafij to the north.
With the fall of the pagan Hawiya, Egypt rose to fill the vacuum. With Saihism on the decline as well, Christian missionaries made new headway in gaining the conversion of local potentates. However, this new dominance was perhaps not the coup it might have appeared to be on paper – the very climatological shifts that allowed Egypt to come to dominate the Red Sea also ensured that its former competitors had far less to offer than they had in past centuries. Across Ethiopia, urban sites contracted or declined to fractions of their previous size. A Jainist missionary visiting the region in 943, described the landscape as “a great wasteland” dotted with religious communities and semipastoralist tribal groups. Despite the rise of the Giramid Kingdom in the south and other isolated resurgences of sedentary agriculture later in the century, the center of power on the East Coast would continue its inexorable shift southwards.
The climate changes are OTL. However, in this case as in others, human actions play a part. Here, the Hawiya drag a much larger part of Ethiopia down with them than in our timeline, where the pastoralist clans never gained control of the highlands (there's some more detail in prior posts). In turn things get even worse as the Hawiya collapse.
It's sort of the opposite of North Africa in this timeline, which is more agriculturally prosperous than OTL because of somewhat mitigated ecological factors.
I really love your talent both for portraying the subtle changes that pretell Indian imperialism, and for encompassing the great complexity of the changes going on in Ethiopia.
Nothing much to ask here, either. Keep it up!
Nothing much to ask here, either. Keep it up!
High Round
The High Round and the Great Lakes
At the center of Tsaibwean political and social life was the High Round, an immense roughstone citadel which went through several periods of expansion, most notably between 910 and 920. Like most of its contemporaries, it was built on a mound consisting of centuries of deposits from prior settlements – attesting to a truly ancient pattern of habitation on the same site. However, it dwarfed its contemporaries – thick walls perhaps eight meters in height and two meters in width at their base.
Containing brick granaries and a large palace capable of sheltering many retainers and servants, the High Round represented a growing trend of wealth consolidation among the cattle-herding Bantu of Tsaibwe. Rich village headsmen grew richer, and began to aggregate additional herds under their control. Almost from the first, the Tsaibwe people had a clear notion of property rights and strict penalties for their violation, and their culture quickly deviated from the broader Bantu civilization. The agricultural package they utilized was fundamentally different, and had more in common with the temperate agriculture of the Watya cape. Cattle herding as well was marginal at best in many parts of the Bantu world, but was of critical importance to the Tsaibwe culture – as emphasized by Tsaibwean epics such as “The Raid of Ganhataundi” and their primordial religion, where carven cattle-totems played a significant role.
The accumulation of cattle as a tangible asset was quickly augmented by the accumulation of other more symbolic forms of wealth – glassware from as far away as Syria, gold jewelry, precious gems, and spices. While small private retainer-armies could be raised with the promise of food, a roof, and some training in arms, ceremonial treasures and cattle began encouraging many to seek the protection of local potentates and allowed the establishment of a quasi-feudal system where local chiefs functioned not merely as traditional arbitrators of justice and inter-clan disputes but now also as petty kings not unlike the “ring-givers” of Anglo-Dansk tradition.
At the top of this elaborate totem pole of loyalty stood the Chief of Tsaibwe, (the first of whom was the legendary Chivarwa Nzhou) who by right of conquest dominated a truly vast territory in a loose and decentralized union. One of the few things which enforced the great sprawl of the Tsaibwe empire, which otherwise might have easily succumb to rebellion, was that the Nzhou dynasty were one of the first to make widespread use of cavalry. In both monolithic reliefs and stele dated to the late eleventh century, the victories of horse-mounted warriors are celebrated in highly stylized graven images. Ritual images of the hunt are particularly popular as well in these depictions, and archeological evidence suggests that even the royal cattle-herdsmen were by the end of the century outfitted at least in part with horses.
Horse-mounted caravans tracked northwest from Tangasirabh, a coastal city state populated by a motley mix of Izaoriakan, Tamil, and Arab merchants. Enjoying de facto independence from its motherland, Tangasirabh grew rapidly under a policy of benign neglect and cooperation with the local coastal tribes, with whom it organized mutually beneficial trade deals. Most of the coastal peoples, despite being in large part cattle herders themselves, lacked quality sources of metal that the inland Tsaibwe peoples enjoyed.
The Tsaibwe did a great trade in imported luxuries, and in return added fuel to the fire of the gold trade, supplying vast quantities of the metal. To meet foreign demand for gold (as well as copper, iron, and pelts) certain lords among the Tsaibwe peoples posed to take advantage of this demand instituted a sort of corvee system. However, this should not be considered to be a radical overhaul of the Tsaibwe society, and labor-taxation (and taxation in general) did not become major facets of Tsaibwe society. The basic pattern of life in Iron-Age Tsaibwe was that of the subsistence farmer who, with his extended family, worked cultivated land directly owned by him and kept a small herd of cattle and other assorted livestock. The development of larger urban centers sustained by sharecroppers and defended by mounted retainers was a development which did not impact the lifestyle of the average rural agriculturalist and, due to the laissez faire attitude of his notional rulers, would not for some time. And yet it would be foolish to ignore the development of centralized rule and the first halting steps towards urbanization as anything less than a paradigm shift.
The tenth century is known primarily for the Indianization of the Savahila peoples, and also marks the beginning of the development of regional identities. The newcomers from Bharukaccha and Kannada called in their own language the whole of the Savahila country words which ultimately were corrupted in the Savahila tongue into “Kapudesa” or “Pazudesada” – meaning black and west country respectively. These terms stuck, and Savahila, a corruption of the Arab word for coast, began to fall out of favor. While historians still referred to the “Savahila cities” it became an increasing anachronism as the cities began to assert their own distinctive cultures, shaped by the varying immigrant communities and local tribes which comprised their populations.
The “Kapudesa era” is characterized by the spread of the guild system and its increasing interconnectedness with the Sreni of India. Despite the large travel times and associated risks, links and alliances were nevertheless popular, and the politics of India came to exert a large impact on the Savahila. Trade continued to grow, and although the availability of gold, particularly in the hands of the Sakalava monarchy and aristocracy, was driving a curious and never-before-seen trade imbalance and a dangerous inflationary trend, for foreign guild merchants this was nothing but a boon whose long-term economic consequences were difficult to predict.
The Kw’adza, a Cushitic people who dominated the highlands and the Wembere river region were forming increasingly complex polities, absorbing fellow tribes such as the Sirikwa into their hegemony. Advanced irrigation and cultivation techniques, learned from the Savahila, allowed for a population boom and the displacement of hunter-gatherers and the previously advancing Bantu tribes such as the Takama. Their tribal leaders, known as Sahs, (perhaps a corruption of the Iranian Shah) were first unified by a semi-legendary king, Jirata, sometime in the late ninth century. The extent of this unification is difficult to determine, and unlike the Tsaibwe, the Cushitic peoples did not build large fortified palaces to the same scale, nor did their rulers leave impressive monuments. Most records of the reign of Jirata conflict – perhaps implying the existence of several kings named Jirata across the tenth century.
Jirata, like some of his predecessors, waged war against their neighbors who also traded with the Mzishima, bringing the Ma’a and the Ruvu into his sphere of influence as tributaries – but it seems that he had little ambition to attack the city of Mzishima or its more coastal allies. The Mzishima forts seem to have gone unmolested – there are no records or evidence of any major attacks against them. Jirata and his successors were clever. The easterners were wealthy and numerous, even if they did cling to the coastlines. Jirata and his people did not make great use of horses – the tsetse fly was too great a threat in many parts of their hegemony. Rather, their warriors were generally equipped with throwing spears and hand axes, and their nobility went into battle in leather and scale armor. This armor, along with innovative tactics and large-scale population growth, particularly along the rivers, changed the power dynamic.
At once concerned and fascinated by this new possible threat, Mzishima entered into a tight league of alliance with her neighbors, laying the foundation for the later Kapudesa Equal-Kingdom. However, the Savahilans did not come to blows with the Kw’adza. Rather, a “Sah Jirata” sometime around 950, according to Savahilan history, ‘accepted the great god Ishvara as the manifestation of truth.’ Hinduism among the Mzishima, as with the rest of Savahila, was deeply influenced by both the ecstatic and meditative form of the religion practiced among the Izaoriaka and also a variety of devotional sects which had largely fallen out of favor on the Hindu mainland.
Emphasizing a personal relationship with a single deity often called Ishvara, the devotional movements had come into conflict with pluralistic and nondualistic philosophies dominant on the subcontinent, with their dizzyingly vast pantheons and Buddhist-inspired teachings. Accordingly, they had fled to the Western Country, where they found many eager converts and sympathizers among the Zoroastrians and Arabian pagans as well as their own countrymen – and eventually the peoples of the interior.
Devotionalism was a profoundly appealing religion to a ruler seeking to unify a people under a single monarch. Just as the old gods were revealed to be aspects of the new, so were old chiefs revealed to be aspects of the new king. While it is impossible to measure the spread of the new religion, many of its practitioners left the comfort of the coastal cities and journeyed inland. For the Kw’adza, it was an era of religious fervor and social upheaval.
Meanwhile, further inland and to the north, the Ganda Kingdom simultaneously had its own mythic king (or Abakama) Murindwa, about whom even less is known. From the Bakopi clan, he failed to establish a dynasty before being overthrown by his advisor, a commoner named Iasaza, but he established the capital of Kakiziba on the shores of Lake Nyanza, and, according to oral tradition, many other cities, of which little actual evidence exists. The urban settlements of the Ganda kingdom were large compared to their neighbors, but numbered at most in the thousands. Traditionally, local extended families linked themselves to other extended families through ceremonial brothership, creating larger clans with leaders chosen by the patriarchs of constituent families. These clans defined the lands in which they lived – literally, with the territory of Busiita run by the Basiita family and so on. Urbanization had changed that notion. City-dwelling Kings amassed power to themselves independently of these antique structures.
That Iasaza, a commoner with no particular patrimony, was able to become King is a perfect example. He was known to the soldiers and clan leaders whose support he depended upon, and the institution of kingship was able to transcend clan affiliation. However, this does not mean that it transcended politics – the clan leaders on Iasaza’s death were able to choose an heir from among his children, ignoring his interests. Still, despite migrations by the Maa people [not to be confused with the Ma’a] and the Takama, the peoples of Nyanza were able to see off these invaders and retain their culture, which blended some Cushitic elements with the Bantu majority of the region. The Ganda culture was a resilient one, and by late tenth century that they began imitating the irrigation systems of their southern neighbors. Sizable stone buildings emerged, large meeting-halls and princely palaces, along with granaries and marketplaces.
Religious buildings, however, were absent. Religion was a matter of tradition and ancestor-worship, and unlike the Kw’adza, the Ganda repudiated the Devotionalist missionaries who braved disease and hardship to reach their interior country. Ruhanga, their supreme god, was an absent figure who was not due direct worship. The Buddhist monks who they occasionally encountered in their travels presented a more compelling set of ideas, and one which integrated to a greater degree with their existing faith. However, unlike in Eurasia, the Buddhist missionaries, primarily Arab, found Ganda a more inhospitable place to remain and preach, and accordingly were few and far between. The highlands to the south were a more ideal climate, but there monotheism already had a foothold and the Buddhists won few disciples.
At the center of Tsaibwean political and social life was the High Round, an immense roughstone citadel which went through several periods of expansion, most notably between 910 and 920. Like most of its contemporaries, it was built on a mound consisting of centuries of deposits from prior settlements – attesting to a truly ancient pattern of habitation on the same site. However, it dwarfed its contemporaries – thick walls perhaps eight meters in height and two meters in width at their base.
Containing brick granaries and a large palace capable of sheltering many retainers and servants, the High Round represented a growing trend of wealth consolidation among the cattle-herding Bantu of Tsaibwe. Rich village headsmen grew richer, and began to aggregate additional herds under their control. Almost from the first, the Tsaibwe people had a clear notion of property rights and strict penalties for their violation, and their culture quickly deviated from the broader Bantu civilization. The agricultural package they utilized was fundamentally different, and had more in common with the temperate agriculture of the Watya cape. Cattle herding as well was marginal at best in many parts of the Bantu world, but was of critical importance to the Tsaibwe culture – as emphasized by Tsaibwean epics such as “The Raid of Ganhataundi” and their primordial religion, where carven cattle-totems played a significant role.
The accumulation of cattle as a tangible asset was quickly augmented by the accumulation of other more symbolic forms of wealth – glassware from as far away as Syria, gold jewelry, precious gems, and spices. While small private retainer-armies could be raised with the promise of food, a roof, and some training in arms, ceremonial treasures and cattle began encouraging many to seek the protection of local potentates and allowed the establishment of a quasi-feudal system where local chiefs functioned not merely as traditional arbitrators of justice and inter-clan disputes but now also as petty kings not unlike the “ring-givers” of Anglo-Dansk tradition.
At the top of this elaborate totem pole of loyalty stood the Chief of Tsaibwe, (the first of whom was the legendary Chivarwa Nzhou) who by right of conquest dominated a truly vast territory in a loose and decentralized union. One of the few things which enforced the great sprawl of the Tsaibwe empire, which otherwise might have easily succumb to rebellion, was that the Nzhou dynasty were one of the first to make widespread use of cavalry. In both monolithic reliefs and stele dated to the late eleventh century, the victories of horse-mounted warriors are celebrated in highly stylized graven images. Ritual images of the hunt are particularly popular as well in these depictions, and archeological evidence suggests that even the royal cattle-herdsmen were by the end of the century outfitted at least in part with horses.
Horse-mounted caravans tracked northwest from Tangasirabh, a coastal city state populated by a motley mix of Izaoriakan, Tamil, and Arab merchants. Enjoying de facto independence from its motherland, Tangasirabh grew rapidly under a policy of benign neglect and cooperation with the local coastal tribes, with whom it organized mutually beneficial trade deals. Most of the coastal peoples, despite being in large part cattle herders themselves, lacked quality sources of metal that the inland Tsaibwe peoples enjoyed.
The Tsaibwe did a great trade in imported luxuries, and in return added fuel to the fire of the gold trade, supplying vast quantities of the metal. To meet foreign demand for gold (as well as copper, iron, and pelts) certain lords among the Tsaibwe peoples posed to take advantage of this demand instituted a sort of corvee system. However, this should not be considered to be a radical overhaul of the Tsaibwe society, and labor-taxation (and taxation in general) did not become major facets of Tsaibwe society. The basic pattern of life in Iron-Age Tsaibwe was that of the subsistence farmer who, with his extended family, worked cultivated land directly owned by him and kept a small herd of cattle and other assorted livestock. The development of larger urban centers sustained by sharecroppers and defended by mounted retainers was a development which did not impact the lifestyle of the average rural agriculturalist and, due to the laissez faire attitude of his notional rulers, would not for some time. And yet it would be foolish to ignore the development of centralized rule and the first halting steps towards urbanization as anything less than a paradigm shift.
The tenth century is known primarily for the Indianization of the Savahila peoples, and also marks the beginning of the development of regional identities. The newcomers from Bharukaccha and Kannada called in their own language the whole of the Savahila country words which ultimately were corrupted in the Savahila tongue into “Kapudesa” or “Pazudesada” – meaning black and west country respectively. These terms stuck, and Savahila, a corruption of the Arab word for coast, began to fall out of favor. While historians still referred to the “Savahila cities” it became an increasing anachronism as the cities began to assert their own distinctive cultures, shaped by the varying immigrant communities and local tribes which comprised their populations.
The “Kapudesa era” is characterized by the spread of the guild system and its increasing interconnectedness with the Sreni of India. Despite the large travel times and associated risks, links and alliances were nevertheless popular, and the politics of India came to exert a large impact on the Savahila. Trade continued to grow, and although the availability of gold, particularly in the hands of the Sakalava monarchy and aristocracy, was driving a curious and never-before-seen trade imbalance and a dangerous inflationary trend, for foreign guild merchants this was nothing but a boon whose long-term economic consequences were difficult to predict.
The Kw’adza, a Cushitic people who dominated the highlands and the Wembere river region were forming increasingly complex polities, absorbing fellow tribes such as the Sirikwa into their hegemony. Advanced irrigation and cultivation techniques, learned from the Savahila, allowed for a population boom and the displacement of hunter-gatherers and the previously advancing Bantu tribes such as the Takama. Their tribal leaders, known as Sahs, (perhaps a corruption of the Iranian Shah) were first unified by a semi-legendary king, Jirata, sometime in the late ninth century. The extent of this unification is difficult to determine, and unlike the Tsaibwe, the Cushitic peoples did not build large fortified palaces to the same scale, nor did their rulers leave impressive monuments. Most records of the reign of Jirata conflict – perhaps implying the existence of several kings named Jirata across the tenth century.
Jirata, like some of his predecessors, waged war against their neighbors who also traded with the Mzishima, bringing the Ma’a and the Ruvu into his sphere of influence as tributaries – but it seems that he had little ambition to attack the city of Mzishima or its more coastal allies. The Mzishima forts seem to have gone unmolested – there are no records or evidence of any major attacks against them. Jirata and his successors were clever. The easterners were wealthy and numerous, even if they did cling to the coastlines. Jirata and his people did not make great use of horses – the tsetse fly was too great a threat in many parts of their hegemony. Rather, their warriors were generally equipped with throwing spears and hand axes, and their nobility went into battle in leather and scale armor. This armor, along with innovative tactics and large-scale population growth, particularly along the rivers, changed the power dynamic.
At once concerned and fascinated by this new possible threat, Mzishima entered into a tight league of alliance with her neighbors, laying the foundation for the later Kapudesa Equal-Kingdom. However, the Savahilans did not come to blows with the Kw’adza. Rather, a “Sah Jirata” sometime around 950, according to Savahilan history, ‘accepted the great god Ishvara as the manifestation of truth.’ Hinduism among the Mzishima, as with the rest of Savahila, was deeply influenced by both the ecstatic and meditative form of the religion practiced among the Izaoriaka and also a variety of devotional sects which had largely fallen out of favor on the Hindu mainland.
Emphasizing a personal relationship with a single deity often called Ishvara, the devotional movements had come into conflict with pluralistic and nondualistic philosophies dominant on the subcontinent, with their dizzyingly vast pantheons and Buddhist-inspired teachings. Accordingly, they had fled to the Western Country, where they found many eager converts and sympathizers among the Zoroastrians and Arabian pagans as well as their own countrymen – and eventually the peoples of the interior.
Devotionalism was a profoundly appealing religion to a ruler seeking to unify a people under a single monarch. Just as the old gods were revealed to be aspects of the new, so were old chiefs revealed to be aspects of the new king. While it is impossible to measure the spread of the new religion, many of its practitioners left the comfort of the coastal cities and journeyed inland. For the Kw’adza, it was an era of religious fervor and social upheaval.
Meanwhile, further inland and to the north, the Ganda Kingdom simultaneously had its own mythic king (or Abakama) Murindwa, about whom even less is known. From the Bakopi clan, he failed to establish a dynasty before being overthrown by his advisor, a commoner named Iasaza, but he established the capital of Kakiziba on the shores of Lake Nyanza, and, according to oral tradition, many other cities, of which little actual evidence exists. The urban settlements of the Ganda kingdom were large compared to their neighbors, but numbered at most in the thousands. Traditionally, local extended families linked themselves to other extended families through ceremonial brothership, creating larger clans with leaders chosen by the patriarchs of constituent families. These clans defined the lands in which they lived – literally, with the territory of Busiita run by the Basiita family and so on. Urbanization had changed that notion. City-dwelling Kings amassed power to themselves independently of these antique structures.
That Iasaza, a commoner with no particular patrimony, was able to become King is a perfect example. He was known to the soldiers and clan leaders whose support he depended upon, and the institution of kingship was able to transcend clan affiliation. However, this does not mean that it transcended politics – the clan leaders on Iasaza’s death were able to choose an heir from among his children, ignoring his interests. Still, despite migrations by the Maa people [not to be confused with the Ma’a] and the Takama, the peoples of Nyanza were able to see off these invaders and retain their culture, which blended some Cushitic elements with the Bantu majority of the region. The Ganda culture was a resilient one, and by late tenth century that they began imitating the irrigation systems of their southern neighbors. Sizable stone buildings emerged, large meeting-halls and princely palaces, along with granaries and marketplaces.
Religious buildings, however, were absent. Religion was a matter of tradition and ancestor-worship, and unlike the Kw’adza, the Ganda repudiated the Devotionalist missionaries who braved disease and hardship to reach their interior country. Ruhanga, their supreme god, was an absent figure who was not due direct worship. The Buddhist monks who they occasionally encountered in their travels presented a more compelling set of ideas, and one which integrated to a greater degree with their existing faith. However, unlike in Eurasia, the Buddhist missionaries, primarily Arab, found Ganda a more inhospitable place to remain and preach, and accordingly were few and far between. The highlands to the south were a more ideal climate, but there monotheism already had a foothold and the Buddhists won few disciples.
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I´ve read this update twice - firstly, because these Hindu/Bantu syncretisms and domestic developments are such a great read. And secondly, because I still can`t exactly figure out who lives where in the vicinity of whom. Could you perhaps post a new map of Eastern Africa?
This map is still largely accurate, at least when it comes to East Africa. I apologize for not posting it with the update - I realize now how many relatively obscure groups are referenced in my post.
Also as ever I welcome questions and whatnot if people want to know more about specific groups, regions, cultures, etc. I understand that this post is somewhat bare-bones compared to how long I could go on about the subject.
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Given the deterioration of Ethiopia I have to wonder if the proto-Oromo will start going on a migration a bit early. They did it in the 17th century and their legends say they migrated to their original area to begin with. The South is unspoiled... The people leaving the cities have to be going somewhere...
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I agree - although I'm not sure how prominent the Oromo are in this time period.
Can we see more of Europe sometime soon? And when will the butterflies be reaching the Americas? Could it be possible for a desperate Chinese explorer to make an expedition to discover the continent?
concerning our poor author, I think we can spare him the extra effort for the Moment. From a Reader's perspective, I think we're getting a lot of cool contact with natives, which is what America would look like, too. From a Content perspective, I think the discovery of the Americas may well take place later than OTL.
I confess I'm not really sure what the point of desperate Chinese explorer going to America would be at this juncture, nor why a desperate Chinese person would become an explorer in the first place - certainly there's no shortage of desperate people of Chinese origin in this timeline, but mostly they turn to migration, brigandage, or accept relative serfdom in a bid for safety. Those who flee further afield find safe havens in Korea, Japan, and the Philippines, or possibly among the Srivijaya.
The money and resources for adventuring across the Pacific Ocean simply doesn't exist yet. That said, as Salvador hinted, I'm holding the Americas in a semi-permeable butterfly net until their discovery. Which will happen when it feels logical and not before.
We'll see Europe when I get to Europe.
There are major developments happening around the world and in many cases they impact Europe only tangentially at this stage in the game. I want to do an India in the midst of social and technological revolution justice. That said I know that there's a lot to cover in Europe as well! Expect upcoming updates on the Berbers and the Buddhist Norse. Also a lot more updates on India.
The money and resources for adventuring across the Pacific Ocean simply doesn't exist yet. That said, as Salvador hinted, I'm holding the Americas in a semi-permeable butterfly net until their discovery. Which will happen when it feels logical and not before.
We'll see Europe when I get to Europe.
There are major developments happening around the world and in many cases they impact Europe only tangentially at this stage in the game. I want to do an India in the midst of social and technological revolution justice. That said I know that there's a lot to cover in Europe as well! Expect upcoming updates on the Berbers and the Buddhist Norse. Also a lot more updates on India. Fair enough. Here's hoping we can see how the influx of Chinese people affects the surrounding peoples. We all know that Tibet is sitting pretty, but I haven't seen anything (or remember seeing anything) regarding Japan. Here's hoping it sets the stage for a powerful Empire of Nihon. Looking forward to your next post, regardless of the subject matter.
Tibet is actually on the decline. Japan has not yet come up, but they will benefit from the new Chinese 'diaspora'.
Guestpost
With Practical Lobster's blessing, I present a guest post on language and writing on the Savahila Coast!
The Mzishima Script
With the blossoming of the trading cities of the African coast, there was also a blossoming of the city-dwelling classes. The first of these was the merchants. Early contact with Persian and Arab merchants led to the fragmentary use of Semitic numerals in record-keeping along with a variety of native-derived tally systems. However, with the rise of the merchant guilds of India, which settled large numbers of farmers and artisans on the Eastern Coast, native merchants would have more developed examples of record-keeping systems closer at hand, and would soon be competing, and often out-competing, the foreign merchants by adopting their organizational methods.
One of these was the Pachima Script [1]. This script was a variant of the scripts prevailing in Kannada and Telugu cities at the time, which were themselves ultimately derived from the Brahmi script of northern India. This script, like all Indian scripts, was an abugida, where vowels (except for the implied default "a" vowel) were marked on consonants with diacritics to form syllabic symbols. Learning this script allowed easy communication and drawing of agreements with Indian merchants in their own languages, and soon inheritance records and state annals too would be kept in this script. However, this script's letter inventory was not a perfect fit for the Savahila tongue, lacking in particular symbols to distinguish nasalized consonants (mza vs za, for example).
The Savahila tongue was itself a peculiar beast. The majority of the cities' populations were descended from Cushitic and Bantu peoples, while successive waves of first Arab, then Perso-Indian immigrants made up a large minority and most of the ruling classes. A dialect of Kannada was the standard for communication among most of these cities for some time. However, this melting pot of very distinct languages (Kannada relies exclusively on suffixes for grammar while Bantu languages rely on prefixes, just for one example) eventually produced a more-widely spoken vernacular, which would come to be regarded as the Savahila tongue. The conflicting inflectional systems of each language caused a sort of simplification of the grammar - word meaning became extremely dependent on word order and most aspects of grammatical case, noun class, and gender were lost. The vocabulary for many basic words for daily life was a mix of Bantu and Cushitic, combined with heavy admixtures of loanwords from Kannada, and to a lesser degree, Arabic. This creole's character could vary a bit from city to city; northern cities like Vayabuta tended toward Cushitic/Arabic flavored dialects, while southern cities like Mzishima favored more Bantu/Kannada influence; but a standardized word order and key common words kept the language intelligible between most regions. As Mzishima was far and away the largest trading city, its tongue became standard for traders all along the Savahila Coast and would itself be the tongue dubbed "Savahila" or "Kapudesigaru" in foreign accounts.
However, the language of daily life was not the language of official communication. With proselytizing Hindu missionaries and priests sent to the foreign quarters of Savahila cities, Sanskrit came along for the ride. As the ancient language of India, it was widely used as a liturgical language but was simultaneously written in a variety of local scripts; in the Black Lands, imported books in the Grantha[2] script of Southern India predominated in this period. With the rise of a native Savahilan priestly and intellectual class, they too would learn Sanskrit and with it, its associated script.
For a time, the correspondence between the Savahila cities would be conducted solely in Sanskrit, though written in the commonly understood Pachima script [3]. The ancient tongue had been meticulously studied and analyzed by Hindu scholars and was widely considered in the Indian influenced sphere to be the most perfect and expressive language in the world, which lent its users some prestige. However, with the rise of the Ishvara school of Hinduism, the shine of Sanskrit was somewhat tarnished, as it was associated with subcontinetal schools simultaneously perceived as "too conservative" and "too permissive". The Savahila creole was increasingly used along with Sanskrit to compose devotional poetry to Ishvara, whose verbose, rhapsodizing style became a popular literary form at this time and would frequently be recited during ecstatic dances. Accordingly, the limitations of the Pachima script were increasingly recognized.
As the coastal cities came under increasing threat from the inland empires, savvy rulers sought to build stronger ties among them. Accordingly, the King of Mzishima, Paramashvara [4], commissioned the then-unknown scholar Fahamo to create a rational script for the Savahila tongue. The resultant Mzishima script was adapted from the stylized variant of the Pachima script that had become dominant at the time, but incorporated additional letters to represent sounds that were not present in Indian tongues, such as the "f" and "o" sounds in Fahamo's own name. The resulting script, with innovations such as underscoring to link consonant clusters, became standard for all official correspondence and private business in the Mzishiman League and Fahamo would immediately a develop a reputation that would only be the start of a famous career to come...[5]
His less famous patron would, however, help guarantee Fahamo would have a legacy across the Black Lands; the occasion was used by Paramashvara to codify the city's unwritten constitution into a formalized written one (which just so happened to place his extended family in a better standing in certain major office inheritance issues), engraved in the new script on an obelisk in the city center. The script was soon adopted in the second-largest city, Vayabuta, as the more Arabic-influenced population there had never had quite as much appreciation for Indian culture, and would see increasing use in the remaining Savahila cities as well. As the script was also well-suited to other languages of the Coast, a variant known as Lekavao ("new writing") soon became popular among the Izaorika as well. Adoption was much slower among the inland peoples, however. Not only were the inland polities less developed overall and therefore less in need of a script generally, but their languages were also predominantly tonal Bantu languages, and the Mzishima script was itself imperfect for representing this. The scripts which would later become common in the interior would correct for this with an extensive set of diacritics, but this would be a development that would come much later... The predecessing Pachima script, however, would not actually die out, but would continue to see use for centuries in increasingly stylized forms as Sanskrit's liturgical script in the Black Lands.
And, some pictures of the full script and selected words written in it. Starred characters are invented ones not present in the original old Kannada.
[1] Derived from the Kannada word for "West".
[2] A real script, commonly used among the people of South India in liturgy.
[3] As was common elsewhere in the Indianized sphere, like SE Asia.
[4] Sanskrit for "Great Ishvara".
[5] I envision Fahamo as something of a polymath Archimedes-type, this culture's first.
The Mzishima Script
With the blossoming of the trading cities of the African coast, there was also a blossoming of the city-dwelling classes. The first of these was the merchants. Early contact with Persian and Arab merchants led to the fragmentary use of Semitic numerals in record-keeping along with a variety of native-derived tally systems. However, with the rise of the merchant guilds of India, which settled large numbers of farmers and artisans on the Eastern Coast, native merchants would have more developed examples of record-keeping systems closer at hand, and would soon be competing, and often out-competing, the foreign merchants by adopting their organizational methods.
One of these was the Pachima Script [1]. This script was a variant of the scripts prevailing in Kannada and Telugu cities at the time, which were themselves ultimately derived from the Brahmi script of northern India. This script, like all Indian scripts, was an abugida, where vowels (except for the implied default "a" vowel) were marked on consonants with diacritics to form syllabic symbols. Learning this script allowed easy communication and drawing of agreements with Indian merchants in their own languages, and soon inheritance records and state annals too would be kept in this script. However, this script's letter inventory was not a perfect fit for the Savahila tongue, lacking in particular symbols to distinguish nasalized consonants (mza vs za, for example).
The Savahila tongue was itself a peculiar beast. The majority of the cities' populations were descended from Cushitic and Bantu peoples, while successive waves of first Arab, then Perso-Indian immigrants made up a large minority and most of the ruling classes. A dialect of Kannada was the standard for communication among most of these cities for some time. However, this melting pot of very distinct languages (Kannada relies exclusively on suffixes for grammar while Bantu languages rely on prefixes, just for one example) eventually produced a more-widely spoken vernacular, which would come to be regarded as the Savahila tongue. The conflicting inflectional systems of each language caused a sort of simplification of the grammar - word meaning became extremely dependent on word order and most aspects of grammatical case, noun class, and gender were lost. The vocabulary for many basic words for daily life was a mix of Bantu and Cushitic, combined with heavy admixtures of loanwords from Kannada, and to a lesser degree, Arabic. This creole's character could vary a bit from city to city; northern cities like Vayabuta tended toward Cushitic/Arabic flavored dialects, while southern cities like Mzishima favored more Bantu/Kannada influence; but a standardized word order and key common words kept the language intelligible between most regions. As Mzishima was far and away the largest trading city, its tongue became standard for traders all along the Savahila Coast and would itself be the tongue dubbed "Savahila" or "Kapudesigaru" in foreign accounts.
However, the language of daily life was not the language of official communication. With proselytizing Hindu missionaries and priests sent to the foreign quarters of Savahila cities, Sanskrit came along for the ride. As the ancient language of India, it was widely used as a liturgical language but was simultaneously written in a variety of local scripts; in the Black Lands, imported books in the Grantha[2] script of Southern India predominated in this period. With the rise of a native Savahilan priestly and intellectual class, they too would learn Sanskrit and with it, its associated script.
For a time, the correspondence between the Savahila cities would be conducted solely in Sanskrit, though written in the commonly understood Pachima script [3]. The ancient tongue had been meticulously studied and analyzed by Hindu scholars and was widely considered in the Indian influenced sphere to be the most perfect and expressive language in the world, which lent its users some prestige. However, with the rise of the Ishvara school of Hinduism, the shine of Sanskrit was somewhat tarnished, as it was associated with subcontinetal schools simultaneously perceived as "too conservative" and "too permissive". The Savahila creole was increasingly used along with Sanskrit to compose devotional poetry to Ishvara, whose verbose, rhapsodizing style became a popular literary form at this time and would frequently be recited during ecstatic dances. Accordingly, the limitations of the Pachima script were increasingly recognized.
As the coastal cities came under increasing threat from the inland empires, savvy rulers sought to build stronger ties among them. Accordingly, the King of Mzishima, Paramashvara [4], commissioned the then-unknown scholar Fahamo to create a rational script for the Savahila tongue. The resultant Mzishima script was adapted from the stylized variant of the Pachima script that had become dominant at the time, but incorporated additional letters to represent sounds that were not present in Indian tongues, such as the "f" and "o" sounds in Fahamo's own name. The resulting script, with innovations such as underscoring to link consonant clusters, became standard for all official correspondence and private business in the Mzishiman League and Fahamo would immediately a develop a reputation that would only be the start of a famous career to come...[5]
His less famous patron would, however, help guarantee Fahamo would have a legacy across the Black Lands; the occasion was used by Paramashvara to codify the city's unwritten constitution into a formalized written one (which just so happened to place his extended family in a better standing in certain major office inheritance issues), engraved in the new script on an obelisk in the city center. The script was soon adopted in the second-largest city, Vayabuta, as the more Arabic-influenced population there had never had quite as much appreciation for Indian culture, and would see increasing use in the remaining Savahila cities as well. As the script was also well-suited to other languages of the Coast, a variant known as Lekavao ("new writing") soon became popular among the Izaorika as well. Adoption was much slower among the inland peoples, however. Not only were the inland polities less developed overall and therefore less in need of a script generally, but their languages were also predominantly tonal Bantu languages, and the Mzishima script was itself imperfect for representing this. The scripts which would later become common in the interior would correct for this with an extensive set of diacritics, but this would be a development that would come much later... The predecessing Pachima script, however, would not actually die out, but would continue to see use for centuries in increasingly stylized forms as Sanskrit's liturgical script in the Black Lands.
And, some pictures of the full script and selected words written in it. Starred characters are invented ones not present in the original old Kannada.
[1] Derived from the Kannada word for "West".
[2] A real script, commonly used among the people of South India in liturgy.
[3] As was common elsewhere in the Indianized sphere, like SE Asia.
[4] Sanskrit for "Great Ishvara".
[5] I envision Fahamo as something of a polymath Archimedes-type, this culture's first.
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Savahila creole must be a beautiful Frankenstein's monster of a language, too.
Bantu languages can have up to 23 noun classes. Kannada has an extensive system of changing words to inflect grammatical case. Arabic has its habit of changing vowels to derive related words. Cushitic languages have their own seperate agglutinative case system. There's probably some Tamil and Izaorika in there, too. The only analogous language situation I can think of from OTL is the formation of slave creoles in the Caribbean. But here each language group is on a more even footing in the power dynamic, even if Kannada-speakers are still elite. I think all the colliding grammatical systems will collapse like a neutron star. In many ways it will be sui generis. I picture a very diverse phoneme inventory with a strict word order and any surviving inflection markers turned into particles like in Mandarin.
Bantu languages can have up to 23 noun classes. Kannada has an extensive system of changing words to inflect grammatical case. Arabic has its habit of changing vowels to derive related words. Cushitic languages have their own seperate agglutinative case system. There's probably some Tamil and Izaorika in there, too. The only analogous language situation I can think of from OTL is the formation of slave creoles in the Caribbean. But here each language group is on a more even footing in the power dynamic, even if Kannada-speakers are still elite. I think all the colliding grammatical systems will collapse like a neutron star. In many ways it will be sui generis. I picture a very diverse phoneme inventory with a strict word order and any surviving inflection markers turned into particles like in Mandarin.
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