Not My Heifer: What Really Happened Part II, and the Fallout
So a cow got sick and died, and there was some finger pointing… so what? Well, the question of the bride price was a question of honor, of course. You might think that’s silly, but take a moment and think about what your honor means to you. You might be inclined to say that you “don’t give a fuck”, and maybe the lyrics to some inexplicably popular songs might come to mind. “I back it up, cause I don’t give a fuck”, or perhaps, “I don’t give a fuck, I don’t, I don’t, I don’t give a fuck!” It’s a stupid and childish fantasy really, the idea that you don’t care what other people think of your character. Of course you care. You know that the best way to encourage others to be honest with you is to be honest with them, and you need them to be honest with you, because your well-being often depends on it. The people who truly don’t care normally end up in jail, because their lack of conscience and forsight lands them there when they do things that are perceived by society as being unacceptable. The rules are important, as much as you might like to brag that they don’t matter to you, the fact that you have retained your freedom speaks louder than your words. You care, and everyone does. Some of the rules are perceived as being more trivial than others, but that’s not something that’s really even up to you, because the only rules you’re willing to break are the ones that won’t cost you your relationships - be they social or professional - or your freedom.
Miley Cyrus sings about standing on a couch in a club and drinking from the bottle rather than pouring herself a glass, but I’m sure if the lyrics of that same song had alluded to her turning a blind eye to sexual harassment in Hollywood and “not giving a fuck” because the only thing she cared about was furthering career…well, the song might not have been so popular on the radio in its time. Why? Because her honor would be in question, then. No one really cares if a drunken brat stands on a couch in a club and drinks out of the bottle that everyone else was drinking from, but they certainly care if she knew about the predatory nature of people in the music or film industry and said nothing. Now, I’m not saying Ms. Cyrus stands on the couch or that she turns a blind eye to anything, I’m merely pointing out that she follows a certain set of rules, rules she of course didn’t make, and neither did you or I or any one person, but we all follow them, don’t we?
Some rules can be broken, but others can’t be, because to break them threatens the social order, and the same was the case in terms of the ensuing feud between the Wṛnókoes and the Dháwokoes, the one that gave rise to the Ríxavaka, because the effects of this feud would ripple throug history. The Dháwokoes had gifted the Wṛnókoes a beautiful, and fertile white heifer as the price for a beautiful and fertile young girl, and if Wṛnóŵṇgus was to be believed, the heifer had been bewitched because of the actions of that very same young girl, likely because she had attempted to steal a sacrifice from the storm-god Perkwunos. Wṛnóŵṇgus had much more to lose than to gain from telling the truth, while Skandriχ arguably had more to gain from the lie. But the way that the Wṛnókoes saw it, Skandriχ had saved them from the potential fall out of insulting the storm-god with a bewitched sacrifice, and her younger sister was jealous and didn’t understand the greater workings of the world. Skandriχ had withheld the information because she feared the consequences she might suffer at the hands of her parents, which was innocent enough. The cow was bewitched before she had been released onto the steppe, not after, and it was the Dháwokoes who refused to accept that it was someone from within their own ranks who had brought about the misfortune on everyone’s heads. Both sides saw each other as dishonest, willing to throw the other to the birds for their own benefit, and such behavior could not go unpunished.
Now, when the Wṛnókoes took to rustling the Dháwokian cattle, they weren’t stupid enough to do it themselves. Instead, a certain Χleksχṇ́rēs, had the idea of hiring the “Ghweróŵkwes” to rustle the cattle for them. It was a questionable plan to be sure, as it defied the logic of rustling the cattle in the first place. The Dháwokoes had provided a bewitched heifer for a bride price, one whose curse had spread to the other Wṛnókian cattle, and their insult had to be repaid. However, there were many who understood the consequences of being caught rustling the cattle, and were wary of doing so. Thus, employing someone else to do it was every bit as sneaky and treacherous as what the Dháwokoes had done… except the “Ghweróŵkwes” weren’t just anyone. No, they were the hunter-gatherers of the steppe, who some hypothesized either to be spirits of nature or descendants of such. You couldn’t see them unless they wanted you to, and even after you had they could disappear at a moment’s notice, even carrying cargo. Generally, they kept out of the affairs of the nomadic pastoralists and only engaged them for commercial transactions here and there, but they were known to occasionally rustle livestock, although no one had ever been able to bring them to justice for doing so. If they were even to be seen by the Dháwokoes, they would never be caught, and the Dháwokoes would likely know better than to pursue them.
Later accounts of the story would remember the Ghweróŵkwes, a phrase that literally means “wild eyes” as the god Tanχus Kirχanas, the god that - if you remember - had scouted out the hero Χaghrevaulkas for the other gods to find Máktanas, the son of the storm god, and had subsequently been betrayed by the hero who took a seventh heifer for himself. The fact that in a miraculous feat, a young Ghweróŵkwian man had been shot with an arrow and tortured into admitting the nature of his employment was an ugly detail that wasn’t worth recounting. But when the Dháwokoes got wind of the fact that their cattle had been rustled in such a dishonorable fashion by their opponents, they took to rustling them back properly, and in the midst of the fighting, Terkwóχtres, Skandriχ’s older brother, was killed. Even though they weren’t able to get all of the cattle back, the boy’s death meant that it wasn’t just about the damn cattle anymore, but blood.
Naturally, the Wṛnókoes sought to repay the favor in kind, but the law stipulated that the Dháwokoes had more than one option at their disposal. According to the Wṛnókoes’ perspective, they owed them the life of a man and six heads of cattle for the cattle that had died from the curse of the bewitched heifer, but while the Dháwokoes were willing to admit that they owed the life of a man, it was their point of view that they owed absolutely nothing in terms of cattle, and in fact were entitled to compensation for the heifer they had lost as the price for a rebuked bride. Neither side agreed, nor could they even get close to each other without the possibility of violent confrontation, and so again the Ghweróŵkwes were consulted to mediate the conflict. The Dháwokoes sought the aid of a man who was so old and feeble that he could not see, thinking his age and experience and his lack of sight would make him more objective. The stories would recant this man’s name variously, but the most common renderings of it can all be reconstructed to the form Kuntiyopélos, whose etymology has been suggested to be Kuntjapála, which itself can be traced to a group of languages we might call “Uralic”. It was the opinion of Kuntjapála that the best way to solve the matter was for representatives of each family - not tribe - to fight to the death, and that which party owed what would be decided by the victor.
However Tṇtī́los’s father, Ħuruwáχdhwṛ, had lost four fingers on his right hand many years back, and was therefore not an adequate opponet for Wḷ́kwogéngos, the father of young Skandriχ. Thus it was decided that Tṇtī́los would fight on his father’s behalf, against the behest of his mother, Χṇrēmémneχ, who thought that one of her brother-in-laws should go instead. All versions of the story (as well as the objective truth of the matter) agree that she laced her son’s bronze knife with poison, but they do not agree as to whether Wḷ́kwogéngos died during or after the duel was over. The truth was that he died beforehand, and so the matter was settled - the Wṛnókoes would reimburse the Dháwokoes their bride price, and everyone would leave it at that. The stories also agree however, on the fact that it was obvious to Tṇtī́los’ that he had won unjustly, and that, despite having sustained mortal wounds, he rode to the camp of the Wṛnókoes and begged the girl to whom he had been betrothed to kill him. Everyone agrees that the two made love, and they did, and quite a few versions state that she killed him, but whether or not she felt remorse in doing so isn’t agreed upon. Some make her out to be a hateful seductress, who only made love to him for pleasure and then cut his throat without a second thought, as her heart had already burned black with her desire for revenge against his family. Others paint a more emotional picture, stating that the two made love and that she immediately fell pregnant before tearfully plunging the dagger into her lover’s heart, understanding that he had won the fight against her father unfairly and therefore had cheated fate, and that such was the only way to set things right. Another version of the story, one which cedes the love-making, states that her mother, Singoŵókwiħ, killed him with three arrows - one to the throat, two to the heart - after the two had sired a son.
The truth of the matter was closer to the last account in terms of cause of death - he did indeed die by an arrow to the throat and two more to the heart, but Skandriχ’s mother wasn’t the culprit, but rather his younger brother, Moħrotáwros, who had followed him with their uncles. All versions of the story agree on what happened next - Skandriχ was raped, and a second son was sired via superfecundation. They agree on that point because she was actually raped, but the twins she sired that night were twins by Tṇtī́los, not by his brother. That didn’t make for the same story when making eponymous ancestors of different ethnic groups out of these two however, and so the bit about superfecundation was added… for dramatic effect.
Such dishonor warranted that revenge be taken on the life of the one responsible, but as no single Dháwokos would take responsibility, Χleksχṇ́rēs, in an effort to regain his own honor volunteered to fight every one of their warriors in single combat. Χleksχṇ́rēs was indeed an impressive warrior, and he killed so many of the Dháwokoes that they sought a warrior from an allied tribe whom it was said that no one could beat, whom Χleksχṇ́rēs also killed, which expanded the scope of the feud. When this other tribe, the Ŵérones, got involved in the conflict, they accused Χleksχṇ́rēs of consulting with demons and arranged for him to be killed while he slept. Thus, the Wṛnókoes called in their own allies, the Kwékwloes, and so on, and so forth. The war that erupted was the first one of its scale in history, at its peak involving some 40 different tribes, and it lasted about 60 years, and for quite awhile, people said that the tribes had long forgotten what they were even fighting over by the time the dust had settled. Skandriχ and Tṇtī́los were dead, and so were more some thousands other men and women who died in the process of protecting their own.
It was the opinion of many of the tribes afterward that the gods had left the land. It was increasingly arid anyways, and it was also the place where many bad memories had been soaked up into the grass where a great many bodies had been strewn, and so a large chunk of these people set about wandering to the south to find a new beginning. They didn’t move very far at first, though. For quite awhile they made their home along river that would much later be called the Hafṣko, but which they called the Χep-Srew-Gwéwohom, or the “river of cows”. We know this river as the Manych River, and it isn’t a very far cry south from the bends of the Don and Volga rivers from which they had come, but it was right on the border of the lands of another people who were, at least by the standards of the time, the keepers of a grandiose civilization. We know this civilization as the “Maykop Culture”, and its people are often thought to be speakers of a language our academics call “Proto-Circassian”, but these people had no particular name for themselves, as they didn’t think of themselves as a single entity. The fossilized memories of these people would manifest themselves variously, with the people to whom the Ríxavaka was their great epic, the people of Sírkana (Azerbaijan), remembering them as a single kingdom, but many of the peoples that live north of the mountains we call the Caucasus paint a picture of various fractured tribes, all with very different interests and relationships with the people on the Hafṣko.
Most versions of the Ríxavaka agree that the Virnakais and the Thaukais merged into a single people and migrated south, but they tend to speed up a series of events that took centuries and put them all together neatly in a few generations. These condensed versions, as myths often do, have more truth to them than people like to give them credit for. It is widely agreed for example, that a certain general of the “Χasalkais” (or Χsalks, it depends on what language the story is being told in), Sapsas, led a great campaign against the Virnathaukais and attempted to prevent them from settling along the Hafṣko. He is usually described as a red-bearded giant that wore a helmet with giant horns, wielded a double-bladed axe, and as having worn ornately decorated golden rings on every finger. The real man was no giant of course, but he was a king, or perhaps more accurately a tribal chief, but not a general, and his people would have said his name Śħapc’a. After he is slain, his daughter Psaphī marries one of the twins sired by Xaghregvaulkas and Martáuras, a young fellow named Tanχandras, which is meant to signify the union between the two groups. That didn’t happen, as both of these twins were not only married, but long dead by the time this conflict took place. In reality, this is a neat summary of a long and at times strained relationship between migrating nomadic pastoralists, and relatively more sedentary but still transhumant group of people.
Despite their transhumance, these were a sophisticated, clever, and largely self-sufficient group of people that, although famous to their contemporaries as traders, imported relatively little of the material items they enjoyed. No, they exploited their own mines for their elaborate bronze, silver and gold-working, producing works of art that arguably outweighed anything that contemporary cultures were turning out in terms of their commitment to realism. They also grew the bulk of their own crops on terraces that were so well made that they would be used for thousands of years hence, and they were the first to pioneer the use of the column as a means of actually supporting a ceiling. The exchange started out more or less friendly some 5400 years before present, as the two peoples had got along well enough in the past, and it didn’t seem that there was any reason for conflict when the “Indo-Europeans” migrated southward. The Hafṣko River had long been considered the border between the lands of the northern horsemen and their southerly neighbors, who neither bred nor raised horses, but purchased them at times from the horsemen, preferring the use of their oxen for purposes of draft. This changed drastically with the increased population of horsemen along the northern banks of the river, who seemed to be rather stupidly crazed over different varieties of apple cider that were being brewed in the mountains.
Our man Śħapc’a belonged to a tribe called the Phaḫwǝχa, who used to laugh about how the horsemen were “crazy for cider”, and “willing to give fifty horses for a single jug”, which was only a slight overrestimate, as one prominent chief had indeed given away 25 horses for a single jug of his most prized cider. By now of course, the horsemen had been settled on the Hafṣko for nearly a century, and there had been a great deal of exchange between the two groups, particularly in terms of metallurgy, as the Phaḫwǝχa were as skilled artisans as any of the other tribes that are grouped into the same archaeological culture (both in this time and theirs). The horsemen now had caste bronze swords, axes, daggers, and elaborate gold and silver jewellery, and cider, while the Phaḫwǝχa had horses, which drastically improved their communication and shipping capabilities with other tribes, as it should go without saying that smaller loads could be shipped at greater speeds instead of having to be grouped together with loads large enough to justify such long trips in terms of both distance and time. But, that makes it seem like everyone was happy, and that transactions generally left both parties satisfied, and that’s not really what was going on at all. See, the Phaḫwǝχa and their related tribes controlled all access that the horse-riding “Indo-Europeans” had to just about everything of abstract value - gold, silver, bronze, copper, turquoise, lapis lazuli… all of it, and they weren’t exactly generous all the time about it either. The Phaḫwǝχa often raised the rates on the horsemen, often to extortionary levels, particularly for their prized ciders. That chief didn’t offer 25 horses - it was the price named by the Phaḫwǝ brewer, and needless to say, this relationship was one that couldn’t be sustained long term. It’s not as though every single individual Phaḫwǝ was some sort of an extortionist, but the rates on certain goods were getting high enough that the pot was about to boil over.
Conflict erupted when a Phaḫwǝ trader laughed while drinking that the horsemen were stupid and that his people were playing them for fools. He wasn’t the first one to do this, as a few of them had in the past let slip that they bought cider from the brewers in the mountains for a significantly lesser price, but by now the tensions were so high that it was… well, just the wrong thing to say, even if he was in good company. The horsemen decided to round up their warriors for their next dealing with the Phaḫwǝχa, crossing the river into THEIR land with the offer of 1 horse per 10 jugs of cider. They made sure to look especially intimidating on their expedition, riding in armed to the teeth with bronze spears, swords, daggers, and axes, wooden shields at their backs and their faces painted with feathers in their hair. They didn’t want to be trifled with anymore, and the Phaḫwǝχa got the message and accepted their price. Whatever they whispered into each other’s ears as the horsemen rode into their settlement didn’t really matter to the horsemen, because in the end they got what they wanted.
The second time around though, things went a little differently. A Phaḫwǝ rider met them shortly after they had crossed the river, and told them that they should proceed no further into their lands until a delegation, which was apparently not that far behind, could meet them and discuss the terms of the trade. Śħapc’a himself led the procession of Phaḫwǝχa warriors, who wore all of their respective war time regalia and came armed to the teeth just as the horsemen had done, carrying their jugs with them in a wagon pulled by their tough and stirdy-looking oxen, who were also decorated in gold and silver. The horsemen wanted to continue bartering 10 jugs per horse, but the Phaḫwǝ chief stipulated that the Phaḫwǝχa would only offer 5 jugs per horse, and that this was their final offer. He also made it explicitly clear that the Phaḫwǝχa didn’t need to trade with the horsemen at all, as they had enough horses on their own to breed their own herds and their own horse trainers (who were themselvesof the horsemen, but married to Phaḫwǝ women and living among them). He also asked that organized and armed troops of the horsemen not cross the river in the future, and said that if they agreed to the price, there was no need for further intimidation. The horsemen stated that they knew that the price was being raised an order of magnitude on them for the cider, and they wanted a fair price, and that they could easily take it and make off with it out onto the steppe, and that the Phaḫwǝχa couldn’t stop them, because they didn’t have the cavalry to go after them. They tried to do this when Śħapc’a questioned their honor, but the Phaḫwǝ infantry not only held their own against them, but it chased them away from the entire transaction and back across the river… those that remained, anyways.
If he had left it at that, then perhaps he might have had his deal, but Śħapc’a very stupidly tried to beat the horsemen at their own game, using his people’s own horses to mount a counter-offensive, crossing the river and burning two of the now largely defenseless camps. The epics make the damage done out to be considerably worse, but one has to think of things in their proper context I suppose when imagining the scale of them. These camps were very large by the standards of modern campers, with a hundred or more people, but when measured against the camps of other nomadic pastoralists, they weren’t much. Śħapc’a killed an old and feeble chieftain and took his young wife as his own however, and this was enough to provoke a response that saw himself and the men of his own tribe massacred, and their widows taken as the war prizes of the victors.
This event represented the first encroachment of the horsemen onto the other side of the river, and they ended up staying… on either side. With time, some of the tribes of the horsemen lived permanently on the southern side while others moved back and forth, and others still remained behind. A great many of them found that they liked their new home however, especially the deeper they penetrated into the region. On the south side of the river they had better access to the various semi-permanent settlements of the native inhabitants, which they traded with for better prices, occasionally raided, acted as mediators between in times of conflict, and also were contracted as mercenaries for. Their presence in the region changed the sociopolitical climate considerably, causing many of the indigenous inhabitants to become more sedentary, even resulting in the construction of walled, permanent settlements of considerable size.
It’s perhaps this time that the Ríxavaka harkens back to when it describes the decadent Kingdom of Xasalkī, which is often depicted in art as having had illustrious architecture in fortified cities that allegedly all answered to the supremacy of a single king at the time of the Ákkinai, the twin sons of Sekandrī. But what is especially interesting about this part of the story is how the Xasalkais are depicted, which is as dishonorable cuckolds, who took pleasure in watching their wives being taken by their mercenaries. According to the story, this all began when the king of the Xasalkais, Karṣápalas, brought the Virnathaukais into his service after their defeat of his general Sapsas and the counter-offensive they launched into the kingdom. They were given their own land, and their warriors contracted first as the personal guard of a jealous and tyrannical king, and soon after as a special military force that answered only to him that was used to suppress a rebellion from among his nobles. But what is of note is what happens with the wives of the nobles, including Karṣápalas’ queen, Ƭevambevadī, who are all captivated by the Virnathaukian warriors and, unable to be satisfied by their pathetic husbands, take them to bed. What’s more, this was allowed, and even requested by many of the nobles, who, rather than defend their wives’ virtue, were apparently relieved at the opportunity to get away from them, finding them insatiable, preferring to enjoy each other’s company. The women aren’t depicted in a sympathetic manner however, being described as averaging six men before they were satisfied. The husbands are said to have eventually taken to barely touching their wives, instead at times bedding each other (or each other’s sons), and even preferring to please themselves to the image of other men with their women, while any children sired from these unions were said to be sent away immediately to live with the Virnathaukais. But it wasn’t long before the women grew tired of being separated from their children and asked the Virnathaukian men to kill their impotent husbands.
While this might recall Candaules of the Heraclid dynasty of Lydia, this is yet again, an allegorical memory of real historical interactions. The cuckoldery of the so-called Xasalkais is a metaphor, one that alludes to their disunity, their inability to cooperate with one another in the face of imminent invasion and replacement, and indeed to the replacement that took place. As the horsemen moved into the region, the cider merchants got richer, and before long became the owners of large estates that supported an organized cult,which was sacred to the Xasalkian peoples as a means of entering trance and thus communicating with the spirit world. It was in fact thanks to this increased level of social organization, which was spurred not only by the trade with the horsemen, but their incorporation into the societies as laborers and mercenaries that by far the region’s most famous megalithic structure, or more properly structures, stand today. These are a series of 32 massive stone arches at a place today known as Üdečilan, one that we might know as Svetlograd, with each arch constructed of three 13 by 6 slabs and spaced 10 ft. from one another, marking the procession once undertaken by those in a cider-enduced trance to a large set of of three trapezoidal stone mounds 5 ft. tall a piece, each one smaller than the next and stacked atop each other like a pyramid, atop which more than a hundred large, carved wooden totems were arranged in multiple rectangular layers, with each pole in the next layer being placed between those of the outer layers. Inside of this structure was a clearing, where still stands an ancient rectangular alter bearing the symbol of the eight-pointed sun. The horsemen were a part of the evolving power structure from the start, however within a relatively short amount of time (not quite a century), they had become so integrated as to be inseparable, with many of the indigenous notables having taken wives from among them or adopted them as sons, preferring their company to the company of their own people. This happened despite the fact that the horsemen often conducted themselves as violent extortionists, raiding settlements and enforcing exhorbitant trading contracts on them, or were used as the tools of extortion by powerful tribes. Ultimately, the truth of the demise of the Xasalkais in their own country was not that they were conquered in some sort of mass slaughter of their effeminate, pillow-biting men, but a gradual shift in demographics in which they slowly allowed more and more of the horsemen to live and work among them, to marry their women, becoming increasingly reliant upon them, against their better judgement, all of which resulted in their eventual replacement. By approximately 5200 years before present, the Xasalkais were still present as a material culture, but not as a distinct people with their own language, or at least north of the river we would call the Kuban.
Beginning about 5200 years ago, a new people had taken hold in the country, one that was materially “Xasalkian”, but a mix between their lineage and that of the migrating horsemen. Though there was still a concept of ethnic division between many of the tribes, a common name of the country came to be known, one that would be pronounced by the people of Sírkana as Palapřajaχī, a reflection of Pelħu-Xep-Srówyeχiχ “land of many rivers”, a name which by this time was already exceedingly ancient, and only used in the epics. The people of this country however, were only just beginning to shape the world in which they lived, for their progeny would go on to found a civilization that would not only replace, but improve upon all others that came before them.
. I will also be including updates on the linguistic development of different language groups, as we are starting out waaaaaaaaaaaay back in time, and there will be lots and lots of time for some crazy developments, I think. 
