Land of Sweetness: A Pre-Columbian Timeline

[Every Grass in Java]

From A New History of the World, Volume III:

I. Siki Religion and Ideology​

The imperial Siki cult centered on the Sun god Yoa’pá (“Father Sun”), the Moon goddess Peayán (“Mother Moon”), the dynastic ancestors, and sacred sites scattered across the landscape.

Most Andean peoples worshipped the Sun and Moon as two of the greatest gods. Siki ideology emphasized the unity that underlay the spectrum of solar and lunar worship. Whether called Yoa’pá and Peayán by the Manta, Inti and Mama Killa by the Quechua, or Sué and Chía by the Muisca, the Sun and Moon were the same universal gods. And just as all the world recognized the supremacy of the Sun and the Moon, all the world ought to recognize the supremacy of the sun-associated Land Moiety and the moon-associated Sea Moiety of the Siki Empire. The Siki enterprise was the political manifestation of the cosmic order.

The Sikis believed in their unique responsibility for creating this political microcosm of the universe because of their location on the intercept between the Pacific and the Equator. The Sikis associated the ocean with the Moon and the Equator with the Sun, and of all nations they themselves most reflected this cosmic duality.

“If the world was always night and the Moon shone alone,” Lakekala is said to have said, “Then the Chimú [who lived on the coast] would reign. If the world was always day and the Sun shone alone, then the Quechuas [of the mountains] would reign. But the world is day and night and the Sun and Moon shine both, and it is the Manta [i.e. the Sikis] who reign.”

The Sikis were divinely chosen, then. So was the imperial family that ruled them. Siki tradition held that Hu’akayo was the “self-begotten” son of the moon goddess Peayán. And when Lakekala was conceived, it was said (and the emperor may have believed it himself), his father was possessed by the soul of the sun god Yoa’pá. The Sun and Moon maintained order in the universe, and their descendants maintained it in the human realm.

By Lakekala’s time, Hu’akayo Siki “Pechina’o” (“Son of the Moon”) was worshipped as a god, the divine patron of the Siki state apparatus.

The Siki government maintained three major state temples, and it was natural that the greatest was at Chapipachatun, where the Equator meets the sea. The temple complex of Chapipachatun was divided into two wings, an eastern one where every stone was gilded in honor of the Sun and a western one, open to the Pacific, where every stone was silvered. As the symbol of Siki imperium, the Chapipachatun complex recreated Lakekala’s conquests in architectural form. The western wing included a miniature version of Chan Chan with a life-size reproduction of the Chimú king’s audience hall. The eastern wing featured a miniature northern Andes with two artificial streams (representing the Cauca and the Magdalena) made to look like flowing gold by laying out gold grains on the streambed. At the center of it all was an equatorial altar of solid gold and silver, with the bones of Hu’akayo Siki meticulously laid out on top.

The two other Siki temples were the Moiety Temples on Miruku Island and Mount Picoaza. Other shrines marked major geographical features along the equatorial line (the so-called “equatorial altars”) and the coastline.

Siki religious policy was characteristically tolerant. So long as the supremacy of the Sun and Moon were accepted, which the majority of their conquered subjects already did, all forms of local religious expression were allowed. Siki governors regularly worshipped with their subjects at local holy places, as did the emperor himself on his foreign campaigns. As we have seen, when Lakekala conquered the Muisca, he did not forget to venerate the Muisca ancestors at Lake Iguaque, nor to gild and silver the wooden Muisca Temples of the Sun and Moon.

II. Siki Central Bureaucracy​

The nobility of the early Siki state was divided into the Land and Sea Moieties, each comprising four lineages or “Houses.” It was likely Lakekala and not Hu’akayo (as the traditional histories claim) who reformed the clans and Moieties into a fully-fledged bureaucracy.

Key to this process was Lakekala’s policy of allowing local nobility to join one of the Eight Noble Houses by being adopted as the stepson of a willing patron. The fiction that each House was a single descent group was maintained, even as their ranks were being filled by non-Manta peoples from all over the empire.

Each House was traditionally headed by a chief, the “Lord of the House,” chosen from among the sons of the previous Lord. By the 1370s, Lakekala was personally selecting each new Lord. In 1396, the Lord of the Mars House was killed in the Battle of Sumanique against the Chimú, leaving behind two sons of the blood and an adopted Puruhá son. Lakekala selected the Puruhá as the new Lord over the two Manta candidates. There was little fuss.

By that year, it seems, the Siki nobility had accepted that even if the Eight Houses were still theoretically single family lines united by blood and adoption, they had in reality become mere government ministries to which the emperor could appoint individuals at will. And because the adoption of foreigners into the Eight Houses depended on the emperor’s personal sanction, the new, foreign recruits into the Siki nobility (the kahsanka khahkhila, the “New Men”) were more loyal to the emperor himself than to the House they belonged to.

The Moieties, though, retained a degree of independence. Most members of the four Houses of each Moiety retained a sense of solidarity and pride in their own Moiety and a degree of contempt for the other – and the Sea Moiety’s loyalty to Lakekala (from the Land Moiety) was never a sure thing.

Lakekala never appointed non-Manta candidates to Lordships of Sea Moiety Houses and ensured that foreigners could be “adopted” only into the Moiety of their jurisdiction, so that the Sea Moiety remained a Manta-majority organization still retaining much of the traditional descent-based hierarchies. Even so, when the Sea army of Mirukutsabo, Lord of the Sea-affiliated Venus House, was massacred by the Sicán in 1395, rumors went around that the emperor had conspired with the Sicán to eliminate his rival Moiety’s military force. An assassination attempt was even made against Lakekala in 1402.

And the Sea Moiety had good reasons to complain. The vast majority of Lakekala’s own conquests – even the port city of Chan Chan and the Chimú coastline – was assigned to governors from the emperor’s own Land Moiety. The armies that embarked on conquest were almost always majority-Land, and the Land Moiety naturally received a disproportionate quantity of the prestige and spoils of war.

As great an emperor as Lakekala was, these tensions remained unresolved in 1427 – and led directly to imperial collapse.

III. The Eight Noble Houses​

The most senior of the Four Noble Houses of the Pikihkha, known in English as the Sea Moiety, was the Moon House (Pechi Ya). This House maintained the state cult of Peayán, including the Moiety Temple on Miruku Island and the immense complex of Chapipachatun. Indeed, the high priest of Chapipachatun was the Lord of the Moon House. It remained the sole Noble House to outright forbid non-Manta entry.

The second was the Venus House (Lakekhabochi Ya), which commanded the armies and fleets of the Sea House. The Lord of the Venus House was the Siki army’s field marshal in Lakekala’s early campaigns, presumably to appease the Sea Moiety. But after Mirukutsabo’s disastrous defeat at the Jequetepeque, that privilege went to the Lord of the Mars House instead.

During the last three decades of Lakekala’s reign, the emperor gradually reduced the number of professional soldiers and increased the number of warships under the Venus House’s control, apparently with the goal of streamlining bureaucracy by converting the Venus House into a solely naval office and making the Mars House responsible for both Land and Sea armies. This was not taken well, though Lakekala’s prestige was so great that few dared say so out loud.

The third was the Valley House (Kontichi Ya), whose members were assigned as Civilian Governors to the coastal jurisdiction of the Sea Moiety.

The fourth was the Polon House (Polonchi Ya), the office of maritime merchants, on which more will be said below.

As for the Tokihkha – the Land Moiety – the most senior House was the Sun House (Yochi Ya), which included the emperor, his family, and his personal guards and attendants. The Sun House alone had no Lord, but the emperor doubled as both the leader of the House and the high priest of the Land Moiety Temple at Mount Picoaza. The Sun House also maintained the sacrifices at the equatorial altars and the honors due the remains of Hu’akayo Siki.

The Mars House (Lu’bankhabochi Ya) commanded the armies (and, after 1396, the fleets) of the Land Moiety. Lakekala consistently trusted the Mars House over the Venus House and, as mentioned, envisioned a gradual plan in which even Sea Moiety armies would fall under Mars House command.

The Mountain House (Duchi Ya), like its Valley analogue in the Sea House, was made up of Civilian Governors assigned across the far-ranging jurisdiction of the Land Moiety.

The last of the Eight Houses and least in prestige, but most numerous in number, was the Mindalá House (Mindalachi Ya), the office of overland merchants.​

 

[Every Grass in Java]

Continued from A New History of the World, Volume III:

The Five Governorates of Sea Moiety territories. Compare to Figure 13 [OOC: Entry 13] of the wider Siki Empire.

IV. Siki Provincial Administration
​

The major divide in Siki provincial administration was, of course, between the jurisdictions of the Land and Sea Moieties. All major priests, military and civilian governors, and merchants in Sea Moiety lands reported directly to the Lords of the Moon, Venus, Valley, and Polon Houses respectively, but their counterparts in Land Moiety lands instead reported to the emperor and the Lords of the Mars, Mountain, and Mindalá Houses respectively.

The basic unit of administration was the Governorate, a collection of forty thousand households. Each Governorate had four Myriads, groupings of ten thousand households. The lowest level of government control was the Chiliad, made up of one thousand households. All three levels of central administration featured four officials appointed by the state: the Head Priest, the Military Governor, the Civilian Governor, and the Head Merchant. After 1405, the Land Moiety lands were divided into an even larger unit, the Circuit, composed of five Governorates.

The three-tiered provincial structure was imposed early on throughout the Sea Moiety lands. But Land Moiety territory was both distant and recently conquered, and the Sikis organized most of it into Provinces and Myriads alone. The local hereditary chiefs took the place of the Chiliad officials. Only a few patches here and there were Chiliads established, mainly in chiefdoms and areas that had resisted invasion unusually fiercely, like Caranqui country or the Muisca town of Bogotá.

By 1427, the Siki state stretched across a million square kilometers and ruled perhaps seven million people. But only 7% of the land, and 14% of the people, lived in the five Governorates of the Sea Moiety lands. The remaining six million lived under Land Moiety Rule, in six Circuits and 120 Myriads.

The Head Priests belonged to the Moon and Sun Houses. He and his staff maintained the Sun and Moon Temple in every Province, Myriad, and Chiliad, as well as the coast shrines and equatorial altars if applicable. He also enforced the Morality Laws, regulations of the Sikis ensuring that their subjects would behave in ways pleasing to the gods. These banned incest, bestiality, adultery, murder, human sacrifices at non-state temples, and witchcraft, among other crimes. The Head Priest alone had the Right of Stone and Wood, the privilege to execute criminals. (This was the case even where there were no Chiliads, and local chiefs were supposed to hand over criminals to be executed to the Myriad Head Priest.)

The Military Governor ensured that the local troops were in fighting condition and led them in battle. Although the Lords of the Venus and Mars Houses maintained a few thousand professional troops, the bulk of Siki armies were recruited from healthy married peasant males between twenty and fifty. Lakekala envisioned that each Myriad would be able to raise 500 troops for offensive campaigns at a single day’s notice, 5,000 men if the area was under attack.

The Civilian Governor kept censuses, mediated disputes between local hereditary chiefs where they existed, and ensured that the population continued to labor in state enterprises. He and the Head Merchant both served as means for state extraction of local resources, on which more will be said below.

All Siki officials were appointed from the relevant Noble House, usually following a formal recommendation by the Lord of the House. Officials had a ten-year term and were expected to return to the capital afterwards to wait for another appointment that may or may not come. During Lakekala’s successful reign, the founding of novel official positions in newly conquered land was more than enough to keep up with the natural increase in the population of the Noble Houses. This would not always be the case.

The emperor could never totally trust his officials. Inspectors from the Sun House were periodically sent to every province to see that justice was being done, levies were being trained, censuses were being compiled, and corvée labor and tribute continued to flow in.

V. Siki Corvée and Taxation
​

The two stable sources of state income during Lakekala’s reign were corvée labor and market taxes, though in the 1490s, the plunder taken from Chan Chan was greater than both combined.

Regional corvée labor was handled by the Civilian Governors. The Sikis demanded that all their subject peoples work on state projects for specified periods of time, including in mining, construction, roadwork, artisanry, portage, and agriculture. This was the only form of taxation directly enforced on the vast majority of the population.

The fact that all their subjects worked on state projects was a point of pride for the Siki government. One people deep in the equatorial jungles pleaded to Lakekala that they had nothing but the lice in their hair; the emperor commanded that they bring a basket of live lice every four months, “so that you may learn the virtue of service.”

The products of corvée labor were collected in the Myriad capitals, where the Civil Myriarch (the Myriad Governor) decided how much of what was to be sent where. Most high-value goods were transported directly to the capital, from gold and silver to weapons and coca leaves. There, the emperor and the Lords of the Valley and Mountain Houses redistributed the goods to the provinces or assigned them for central consumption and export. High-bulk low-value goods, like the crops grown by corvée laborers working on state fields on rotating annual assignments, stocked the local storehouses that fed troops and merchants on the road.

Corvée labor was most important in the less economically developed parts of the empire, the southern highlands and the eastern forests, where markets were insufficient means of extraction. In some areas in the highly commercialized Chimú coast, the state demanded only token payments from each household as a sign of submission. The emperor could then be cast as a benefactor, the “helper of the poor” who relieved his newly conquered subjects of their traditional burdens to the Chimú king.

In these areas, the market tax was the primary method of state exaction – and a highly innovative one at that. Corvée labor had been a mainstay of Andean societies for thousands of years, but Lakekala’s system of market exploitation was something truly Siki.

The first step in Siki market exploitation was the conversion of local merchants into official merchants answering directly to the two Merchant Houses (Polon and Mindalá). This was done by enforcing heavy internal toll taxes throughout the empire for “foreign merchants,” that is, any merchant not subject to the Merchant Houses. These could be avoided only by being adopted into the appropriate Merchant House. In return, these “royal merchants” and their families had to live with the rest of Siki officialdom instead of their old villages, pay taxes directly to the Siki government instead of their old chiefs, and obey missives from the Lords of the Merchant Houses.

Soon enough, most merchants in the empire were “royal merchants” and most marketplaces run by the Siki government, even in areas with chiefdoms instead of Chiliads. By 1427, virtually all royal merchants and their families – estimated at slightly less than one hundred thousand people – were fluent in the Manta language (the language of the Siki elite) in addition to any native tongues they might have had.

The Sikis sought to infuse their empire with a wide array of new prestige goods. Most of these immense quantities of imported and manufactured luxuries passed through the imperial capitals of Jocay and Picoaza, for the state limited production methods to artisans living in the center and made sure that no port but Jocay received Mesoamerican trade.

These highly desired goods could only be obtained through the royal merchants, who soon dominated existing markets and established new markets in highland areas where there were traditionally none. But they asked for prices much higher than older prestige goods. A Chimú prince might have owned his own thorny oyster shell earrings, but they were of little value when all the vogue was for oyster shell earrings made à la sikinaise. Markets for luxuries proliferated, and local chiefs regularly intensified production out of their own will. Production of all sorts of goods increased throughout the empire, the royal merchants made ever more profit, and so did the state.

The Sikis also lifted sumptuary restrictions (laws that limited access to prestige goods according to class) throughout the empire, allowing even wealthy commoners to join the market competition for luxuries. The vast majority of the population were too poor to ever afford these goods, but many vassal chiefs and village headsmen could. This raised pressure for paramount chiefs to buy and consume, further increasing demand for the royal merchants’ goods.

Siki merchants often penetrated local societies well before Siki armies ever did. By 1427, royal merchant ships were active across the Pacific coastline of the Americas from Mesoamerica to the Atacama Desert. Further inland, Siki llama caravans went across mountain and vale into the small kingdom of Cusco (ruled by some petty kings who called themselves Incas) and beyond, reaching even Lake Titicaca. Some merchants sailed down the east-flowing rivers on little canoes, hoping to find the “Eastern Chapipachatun” that Lakekala had sought, and returned to report that the rivers grew bigger and bigger the further east you went.

To become a Head Merchant in any administrative level, or even Lord of one of the two Merchant Houses, the merchant had to buy the position by procuring appropriate quantities of necessary resources for the state. This was another important source of government income. And although holding administrative positions was a net loss for the merchant, hundreds still paid the price, for it meant that their children were far more likely to be adopted into a more prestigious Noble House and rise to higher positions in the noble hierarchy.

VI. Siki Infrastructure and Ethnic Resettlement
​

Major Siki roads in the mid-fifteenth century.

Among all the states of early fifteenth-century America, the Sikis had the single most efficient transportation network.

On sea, the Siki government promoted the making of both traditional balsa rafts and Mesoamerican-style canoes. The size and number of both types increased, and by 1427 the Pacific coastline from Tumaco to the Pativilca was an integrated commercial unit knit tightly by thousands of these ships. Siki ships sailed everywhere. To the north, they were regular visitors to the ports of the Tarascans in Mesoamerica. To the south, the royal merchants reached the Huasco River, more than fifteen hundred miles distant from the Siki border at the Pativilca. The Sikis even colonized the Galapagos Islands as a way-stop on their way to Mesoamerica, though they never found any inhabited Pacific isle. The closest one, Easter Island, was still twenty-two hundred miles away.

On land, the Sikis built great networks of roads. Ranging in width from three to twelve feet (one to four meters), the roads included suspension bridges spanning rivers as much as 150 feet (45 meters) apart. Every five miles or so, the Sikis established roadside stations housing professional runners who carried messages. The runners could cover 150 miles in a day, and news of a rebellion on the furthermost periphery of the empire, the fortress of Papi deep in the Amazon rainforest, reached the capital of Jocay in eleven days. (As the crow flies, Papi is further away from Jocay than Paris is from Rome.) Storehouses full of commodities produced by corvée labor also dotted the roads, and the royal merchants who were the main users of the roads bought their daily supplies from there.

The Sikis also promoted the use of the llama. There were small populations of llamas in highland Ecuador which Lakekala had conquered in the 1370s, but large numbers of the camelids were not introduced into the empire until the conquest of the Chimú in the 1390s. Lakekala brought hundreds of thousands of llamas and alpacas north when he returned to Jocay in 1402, and by his death they were quite widespread among all social classes in both lowland and highland Ecuador. Although llamas were not particularly faster than porters, they did not need to be bought food or carry their own and greatly reduced transport costs for merchants.

The final linchpin in Siki administration was ethnic resettlement. Lakekala regularly deported tens of thousands from and into newly conquered areas to break up resistance and to introduce useful skills to wider areas. Thousands of Chimú farmers were resettled both south along the coastline and north into the capital area, for example, to teach the locals advanced methods of irrigation and crafts production, while countless Quechua communities from the southern highlands were brought north with their llama and alpaca herds to introduce animal husbandry throughout the empire.

To minimize local resistance, deported peoples were resettled in areas without strong local communities. The Sikis settled Chimú communities in fertile areas that the locals did not yet farm and used them to intensify local agricultural production, or brought peoples famed for their mining skills into places with many untapped deposits. In the long term, the constant reshuffling of the ethnic map would have eroded local identities and might have created a unitary Siki identity – but the empire fell before that could be.​

 

[Every Grass in Java]

My ideas for the Siki Empire, if you haven’t noticed, is heavily influenced by the OTL Inca. Here’s a brief chart I made in the Word file where this TL is being written:

The biggest difference between the Sikis and the Incas is that the Inca economy was built on what one historian calls “supply on command,” because goods were supplied when the state commanded that they be, while the Sikis use market systems extensively to support their empire. The reason for this comes from the fact that Ecuadorian peoples even IOTL were full participants in a commercial economy, while the Central Andean cultures epitomized by the Incas envisioned a self-sufficient command economy.

In highland Ecuador IOTL, prestige goods were supplied by a dedicated merchant class called the mindalá, who journeyed widely into both the coastal lowlands and western Amazonia to supply low-bulk high-value prestige goods like gold, silver, spices, salt, coca, cloth, and so on. The mindalá were considered outside the traditional class structure, lived in their own separate communities, elected their own representative leader, and paid tribute to local chiefs with small portions of their merchandise instead of corvée labor as did everyone else. The mindalá were always outsiders of a sort in Ecuadorian society, not strongly associated with any one chiefdom, and it was probably fairly easy for Lakekala to co-opt them all.

(For a good overview of them, see Frank Salomon’s 1987 article “A North Andean Status Trader Complex under Inka Rule.”)

The Incas IOTL sought to slowly eliminate the mindalá class and transform the Ecuadorian economy into something rather more Inca, until the mindalá disappear as a class by the fourth or fifth decade of Inca rule. Similarly, the Sikis of TTL seek to slowly commercialize their new highland conquests and transform the Central Andean economy into something rather more Ecuadorian.

What impact will this have on TTL’s Inca Empire?

 

[EnvarKadri]

This is easily one of the best atl I have ever read. It's stagering the amount of research and thought put into this. Specially for a precolumbian timeline! Regarding your last post, I found what you did with the manta fascinating although I am more interested in the incas, simplely becuase how diferent is their economy and the philosophy around it is from any other empire in both the new and old worlds. Not that your sikis arent incredible on their own right! Is just that we have already see the more mercantile aproach to resource distribution, but if the idea is to provide the incas a carthago for their rome than I have no objection.

 

[Every Grass in Java]

A sequel of sorts to Entry 8.

* * *

This story is inspired by Michael E. Smith’s “fictional vignette” in p. 194-196 in The Aztecs: Third Edition.


Dabeiba, the eldest son of the Panamanian chief of Menchaca, has received his first invitation to the state ceremonies in the shining city of Ācuappāntōnco. As he leaves his village, his parents give him dozens of little golden amulets to protect him on his way and impress the countless other nobles who will be with him at the city. They embrace and say goodbye. Dabeiba mounts his litter, heart pounding.

The roads grow wider the further they go, from little country trails that men pass single file to wider paths of sand to big roads paved from part to part. But Dabeiba and his servants know enough to not be fooled; this is not the Ācuappāntōntli, the trans-isthmian royal road that they call the Little Water Bridge. “When you reach the Ācuappāntōntli,” his father had said, “you will know.”

After a few days’ travel, the glimmer of gold beyond the trees comes in sight – “The Ācuappāntōntli,” they mutter as they join the road. The road of the Ācuappāntōntli is really two parallel roads, divided by stone markers with gilded caps, one going north and the other south, both of them so wide that twenty men walk on it in a row shoulder to shoulder. The roads are all paved with flagstones and marvelously straight as far as the horizon goes, a single gray line stretching into the blue of the sky. On the edges of the roads stone pillars reach into the clouds with their gold and silver engravings dazzling, and every few leagues you smell inns and sometimes the temples too, by the smell of food and blood.

Dabeiba and his servants gasp at a few men driving huge herds of giant white deer south, each animal with packs of goods on its back. “Who are you?” They ask. “We are the merchants of Jocay, servants of the Chapipachachi Siki.” “And what do you call these animals?” “Llamas.” Dabeiba suggests they pause a while to watch the animals. The llamas hum as they go, and the servants laugh as they throw them bitty morsels of sweet potato. The Siki merchants smile.

Then come drumbeats and the tune of a flute. A company of soldiers is marching south in full array, the leaders at their lead so covered from head to toe in headdresses and feather tunics that they look like walking hummingbirds more than men. They carry shields in one hand, bronze and wooden swords in the other. “Who are you?” “Mercenaries from Tlaxcallān.” “Where’s that?” “Oh, you wouldn’t know.” “Where are you going?” “To Qusqu.” “Where’s that?” “Oh, you wouldn’t know.”

Sometimes Dabeiba meets other Panamanian chiefs heading north for Ācuappāntōnco. He is alarmed to see that most of them have far more gold on them than he, but at least, he tells himself, these are real ruling chiefs. He is only the son of a chief, and it is only natural that he wears less gold. The gods know Menchaca is no poorer than any other vassal of Ācuappāntōnco.

The king of Ācuappāntōnco really controls only a little bit of land directly – their capital city itself, the Ācuappāntōntli road, and the city of Tēmicco on the southern ocean that is the southern terminus of the road. But all the chiefs throughout the Isthmus, his father among them, obey their every word.

Sometimes – no, very often – the company crosses swampland. And they marvel at how the roads are still straight most of the time, and how the Ācuappāntōnco kings have channeled so much of the marsh away from the stones with thousands of drains and culverts, and how buttressing walls and causeways keep the roads dry from what water there is left.

After a few days’ travel, they reach a hilltop promontory where the city comes into sight below. The Menchacans are speechless. How to describe it all? The rivers run like silver into the azure sea, and stone buildings are jammed between them and in between the ocean and the hills, and Menchacan eyes cannot help but follow the huge paved avenues that lie parallel and vertical to the coast, bringing order to the crowdedness of the buildings, dividing the city into little square blocks. And everywhere they see pyramids in walled compounds, some of them glittering with gold-reflected sunlight, and huge buildings half-concealed in trees – the gardens and palaces of kings, and of the Council of the Rich. And beyond, on the sea, cotton-sail ships sail in and out, rising and sinking against the blue horizon, bringing goods from every corner of the world.

This is Ācuappāntōnco, the city that connects the two seas.

The city has no walls. Why have them? There are more people here than anywhere else between the Maya lands and Jocay. Who could ever conquer Ācuappāntōnco, who could ever defeat its kings in their hometown, these kings whose soldiers fill a hundred towns and whose ships make whole seas brown-and-white?

The Ācuappāntōntli transitions smoothly into the Solar Road, the main east-west road in the city. The roads are more crowded now, sometimes so much that you are pushing through a river of people, a river that flows in every direction. The little houses of commoners pack the roadsides – Dabeiba smiles to see that even here, the commoners live as befits them – and all generations of extended families peer out the doors to watch the provincials go by.

Dabeiba and his servants learn that the Solar Road is so crowded because it leads to the Grand Market, a place where every nation of the two seas comes to share its wares. They gather that the sellers at the Market include Taiguano merchants selling their resplendent new featherwork styles in honor of their new god of art, Isatian mercenaries selling slaves taken from some town long since looted now, noble Maya refugees from the Wars of the Holcanob auctioning off their priciest heirlooms, all sorts of goldsmiths from the Ācuappāntōnco realm itself, and an entire fenced quarter white and fluffy with fattened llamas for sacrifice, no doubt guarded by Siki-hired shepherds.

A cry of “Bannaba onwiko!” echoes down the street, and the people rush back to their houses and scurry into the shade of the buildings. The road empties as if by sorcery. Dabeiba doesn’t know what onwiko means, but they follow the crowd. They know that bannaba means “far away,” at least.

Onwiko, they later learn, is a portmanteau of sorts. Onhuih is the plural form of the Isatian verb for “to go away,” and the kings of the city are Nahuas who spoke that language once. But -ko is a local suffix for making orders. Such is the language of the Ācuappāntōnco elite: a Panamanian one but one heavily influenced by Isatian and Mayan, a bastard child of this magnificent mingling of tongues.

Dabeiba watches a procession of feather-mantled men pass down the street, at their center a balsawood litter draped with brilliantly patterned llama wool cloth. They make a great fuss as they go, beating skin and wooden drums, piercing the air with their flutes. A cohort of young women play the musical bow immediately before and after the litter, the clangs of the string reverberating.

This man, the people mutter, is one of the Council of the Rich. The city of Ācuappāntōnco lives and dies by trade, and it is only natural that its richest resident merchants have a say in its governance. By some process unknown to all but the Council itself, held with utmost decorum in the innermost sanctum of the city’s ceremonial quarters, certain prosperous merchants are selected to join the thirteen-man Council of the Rich. The king of Ācuappāntōnco can make no decision without the consent of all thirteen members, and it is said that half the army is controlled by the king, the other half by the Council.

The procession passes. The men return to the road. Dabeiba and his company meet a royal agent who guides them away from the main Solar Road to a side path skirting the market kept clear of the crowd. They walk, and soon the walls of the ceremonial compound come into sight.

The tops of the two pyramids of the city’s gods loom over the walls. The pyramid to the left is rectangular and stepped, with square temples and altars for the Plumed Serpent God at the pinnacle; the pyramid to the right is conical, topped by stone spheres and giant gold-plated peg-base statues thrice taller than a men. The left is for the gods of the sea, Quetzalcohuātl-Kukulkan the Plumed Serpent who came with the Nahuas who conquered the city, and the right is for the gods of the land who were always with the people here, the people who were conquered and who conquered their conquerors.

Dabeiba marvels at what little he can see and smell and hear of the pyramid, and he reflects on what he knows of the history of this city. Almost two hundred and fifty years ago – the year we would call 1207 – the Nahua mercenary Cītlallatōnac fell in love with the daughter of the chief of what now is the city. The princess loved him too, but the chief rebuked him. So Cītlallatōnac conquered the chiefdom with the secret help of the princess and founded Ācuappāntōnco, with her as his queen. The resulting Nahua dynasty of kings reigns to this day. But can you really call them a Nahua dynasty, now? For generations their kings and the Council of the Rich have spoken nothing but the local language, and they worship the gods of the land as fervently as the gods of the sea. And from the beginning, why should the father count more than the mother?

 

[Wolttaire]

Great update I wonder what happening in northern Mexico and California and is the east coast like eastern Columbia

 

[LunazimHawk]

I like this Panamian version of Constantiople, a place where East and West meet. Northern Mexico should be more populated than OTL, especially along the Texan rivers. I expect the llama incursion into North America to be pretty fast. Southern California is another place I'm curious about.

 

[LunazimHawk]

I'm also curious about earlier irrigation in parts of Southern California, under perhaps Nahuatl migrants. If the Panamanians could reach that level of sewage and swamp maintence, being able to clear away swampland in order to build roads, building large irrigation channels in Southern California shouldn't be beyond their reach. Especially when they get the influx of manpower, and Llamas.

 

[Wolttaire]

I like this Panamian version of Constantiople, a place where East and West meet. Northern Mexico should be more populated than OTL, especially along the Texan rivers. I expect the llama incursion into North America to be pretty fast. Southern California is another place I'm curious about.

I agree it pretty cool and also yes u got mention those lama and of far they had spread or when they do arrive they will revolutionize warfare because less porters and what going on with California it was the Most populated place in ther America otl in this it gong to be India encase how many different tribes live there and Also what about the other domeatactes animals and finally are we going to see Greek style trading post show up?

 

[Thesaurus Rex]

Ooh. What's going on with the Galapagos? Is that a port of call, simple claimed territory or are people starting to make it their home? What do you expect the population density to reach, if any? Have the turtles submitted a complaint to the Valley House about noise levels/murder rates?

The greatest strength of the ol' Four Suyu, I think, was their sheer grasp on resources and infrastructure with astounding efficiency. That alone put them up in the big leagues of powerful states around the world. That command economy also made them a rather unique chapter of history, especially when you're contrasting it with modern day people who assert the command economies of socialists and communists could never work (though, of course, Incan and Andean culture has little in common with either).

While markets and trading existed in the Andes on a small scale, even in Inca times, the Siki have great potential to overturn this system or at least force the Incas to adapt. If the Incas still manage to be nearly as powerful as they were IOTL, they may have to resort to more open (although potentially regulated) relations with other states. And someone's going to have to work out to whom the Sun is supposed to pay child support.

Waitwaitwaitholdon Tlaxcala mercenaries are traveling to Cusco? Some interesting shenanigans are afoot!

Have the Incan system of interconnecting highways spread anywhere else ?

I mean, highroads themselves aren't exactly unique to the Incas or to the Andes for that matter. The Aztecs maintained a road network of their own -- more specifically, maintenance of parts of the ohquetzalli ('new road', the road reserved for state affairs, which would also include tribute transportation) would be left to the towns it connects with and loosely supervised by Tenochtitlan as part of a tribute requirement. Ross Hassig has a short section in Aztec Warfare about a courier system somewhat similar to the Inca chasquis where a relay was built every 10 kilometers along the highway. The ochpantli was the commoners' variant, connecting many places throughout the Aztec territory; Bernardino de Sahagun described it as a bit less pretty, more run down and muddy (but not much of a problem for people traveling on foot anyway). Logically, it would be difficult to transport tribute, goods, information etc. without some kind of unified transportation system. Likewise Maya sacbe'ob functioned as main roads for many local kingdoms, but probably because of the political landscape there doesn't seem to be a great deal of interconnecting.

I'm also curious about earlier irrigation in parts of Southern California, under perhaps Nahuatl migrants. If the Panamanians could reach that level of sewage and swamp maintence, being able to clear away swampland in order to build roads, building large irrigation channels in Southern California shouldn't be beyond their reach. Especially when they get the influx of manpower, and Llamas.

Spoiler: This is long-ish.

I've seen someone else wonder this before and I gave a terse "Y tho?", but I'll be a bit more detailed in trying to highlight the implications of such an event.

The answer to that "Why?" question, I imagine for most, is "because it would be cool". Or perhaps even that replacing the people of a region with a culture you're more familiar with makes it easier to write about. Which I completely agree with on both accounts, but it's also not very realistic.

First and most simply, California is just too damn far away. Even by sail (which most people won't have access to anyway), you're going around hundreds of miles of (ostensibly) infertile desert to get to a place that's slightly more fertile than the many days* of wasteland that burned into your retina and either gentrify or subjugate the local people you have no clue how to talk to and assume all will go well.

*Why did I say many days of wasteland rather than the weeks it could potentially take to travel from the west coast of the Aztec Empire to Southern California? Because during most of that journey you're nonsensically passing up prime territory to settle down in. Green lands, reasonably wet and with agricultural communities of their own for either moving into or conquering: you also have a slightly higher chance of someone actually understanding you. North wouldn't be the first direction coming to mind when people want to pack up and move (or when aspiring rulers want to carve out an empire). Not counting the Maya to the east, there's numerous lordships, petty kingdoms, citystates and confederacies southeast of the Aztec domain. You could even go to the distant Cuzcatlan, whose people speak a language close enough to Nahuatl that you could probably understand someone if you both talk slowly enough. If you must go north, why not to the various polities of West Mexico? If you must go further than that, why pass up the free real estate of Jalisco and Sinaloa?

As you continue to go north, the wealth of the people apparent to your views would appear to diminish along with the prospects of a flourishing polity or a comfortable life. If you go north enough, the woods give way to arid scrubland and desert as you approach the Opateria, the last region populated by sedentary agriculturalists. If life with the Opata isn't quite your thing, they'd probably tell you of the various Puebloan peoples to the north that they think you'd like to hang out with. All in all, that doesn't sound like a bad idea. At least one or a few Mesoamericans have to have done exactly that in our own history, if not a more sustained level of direct or indirect contact.

Although you appreciate the advice, you turn it down and say you'd rather keep sailing north looking for your promised land. There isn't any more sea up north, they say. That's fine, you'll just go around. They give you a few weird looks, and you are on your merry way, sailing right past the Colorado river delta, which should have given you some hint because it's really quite lush and fertile without a "United States" to dam the river profusely. Despite the warnings of the Opata that there's nothing good in Baja, you find yourself sailing back south with only the provisions you had on board because you have no idea how to find food here and the few Cochimi that are friendly have barely any food to trade (no, you're not hungry enough for 'meat on a string that everyone else had in their throat' yet). Against all odds, you--er, most of y--at least some of you survive the journey and make it to the promised land...the San Diego River appears before you! ...Now what?

My anecdotal example of the crazed Nahua adventurer is a little simplified, but hopefully highlights the fact that there's multiple layers of insulation that keep direct contact of California from Mesoamerica at a relative minimum. It's too far to be convenient with a good bit of inconvenience in the middle, and there are many, many many options to exhaust first before a journey into the Great Unknown.

When most people emigrate, they do so having at least some idea of where they want to go and what it's like there.

Could Nahuas gentrify the West Mexican coast? Perhaps. Northwest a ways? Sure. Going into Oasisamerica? It's a bit of a stretch, but let's say okay.

California could be settled or influenced much later on by people from the Southwest influenced by Mesoamerica, but at that point you can hardly say it's ethnic Nahuas doing any colonizing.

Spoiler: But what if we went deeper?

Our headstrong hypothetical Nahua knows a promised land when he sees it. And this ain't it. He decides to go further north, away from anyone who could possibly challenge his prosperity...

His heart grows bright as he finally sees the sign: a bald eagle grabbing a caribou from a huckleberry bush. He high-fives a polar bear and finally presses B to Build City.

The spread of llamas into North America though, is an interesting point you brought up. They're probably going to be the most common in highland regions like the Guatemala Highlands or the Mexican Plateau, the periphery of agriculture yet prime locations for llama herding. Unlike city-dwelling agriculturalists, herders need to move around a lot, and they'll also trade and share their knowledge. Llamas should be able to adapt to nearly anywhere in North America reasonably well, but I think the Great Basin has a huge potential for llama pastoralism, as a slightly weirder Altiplano: high altitude, not the best for agriculture but good grazing land overall, and it's dotted with waves of "sky islands" that are cooler, wetter and greener than the surrounding flat valleys. It should make for an interesting political atmosphere.

 

[Aspiring Author]

I am really curious about what affect the introduction of the Llama would've had on North American. Also is this the only serious timeline where the Taino and Manteno are saved?

 

[Wolttaire]

I am really curious about what affect the introduction of the Llama would've had on North American. Also is this the only serious timeline where the Taino and Manteno are saved?

Honestly other than the saint berdan timeline this is the only good active pre Colombian timeline where tanio and manteohave a chance at survival I am surprised that this timeline has not gotten more attention

 

[Aspiring Author]

Honestly other than the saint berdan timeline this is the only good active pre Colombian timeline where tanio and manteohave a chance at survival I am surprised that this timeline has not gotten more attention

Oh is there a St Brendan timeline?

 

[Wolttaire]

Oh is there a St Brendan timeline?

https://www.alternatehistory.com/fo...western-hemisphere-512-to-the-present.447209/ Yep

 

[Aspiring Author]

https://www.alternatehistory.com/fo...western-hemisphere-512-to-the-present.447209/ Yep

Thank you. I am writing a story with time travel: they make a few changes that whilst they have massive affects none of them make a qualitative difference.

 

[Wolttaire]

Thank you. I am writing a story with time travel: they make a few changes that whilst they have massive affects none of them make a qualitative difference.

can’t wait to see it!

 

[Wolttaire]

Wait forgive if you have already mention but what happening with the musica civilization because they were one of the lost advanced civ otl and had metal working tech so what happening with them?

 

[Every Grass in Java]

Ooh. What's going on with the Galapagos? Is that a port of call, simple claimed territory or are people starting to make it their home? What do you expect the population density to reach, if any? Have the turtles submitted a complaint to the Valley House about noise levels/murder rates?

It's a sparsely populated supply outpost, settled by the Siki government to supply food for ships sailing directly from West Mexico. There's probably just a single Chiliad living mostly on Santa Cruz and San Cristóbal.

Isabela Island, the largest in the Galapagos and the only one to intercept the Equator, is considered sacred and the colonists won't hunt its animals. So the tortoises there are safe. The tortoises on the more hospitable eastern islands are rather... less safe.

* * *

The humans came like lice. So, what we mean by that is this: the humans came riding on the back of a giant wooden bird with red-and-white wings. See, they can’t fly on their own, not even swim. They ride on these big amiable wooden ducks like lice, or our parasitic flies.

We thought they put up a poor show, really. Every animal that had come here had either flown or swum. Even the tortoises, even though they eventually got so obese that they forgot how to swim. But still, the humans were here, and they were our neighbors. We held a conference to decide what to do.

“Do we let the humans live, or do we kill them all?” Growled the giant tortoises, who held presidency in the conference.

“Can they swim?” Muttered the marine iguanas. “There’s no evidence they can. So why should we care?”

“Hear, hear!” Opined the penguins.

“Oh, look, it’s the animals of the sea at it again.” The land iguanas iterated. “They never think of anything but themselves. The salt water gets to their brain.”

“Chittery-right,” we chirped. “The marine iguanas are as stupid as our cousins the medium-beaked ground finches and the small-beaked ground finches.”

“You take that back!”

“We would, little-beaks, but our beaks are slightly too big to stand stupidity.”

“Well,” one small-beaked ground finch said, “At some point there’ll be a time when the majority of the seeds of the majority of the plants get slightly smaller. That means that your slightly too big beaks will be slightly less advantageous for breaking these slightly smaller seeds, so you guys will eat slightly less and we slightly-smaller-beak finches will reproduce slightly more. Slightly reproduced over hundreds of thousands of generations and millions of years, you guys will go extinct because your slightly bigger beaks were slightly less suited to eating slightly smaller seeds. And all the finches will have slightly small beaks. Did you not study the slightest biology?”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” all the animals said, and it was soon decided that that particular small-beak would be excluded from all future meetings for her slightly preposterous theories.

Anyways, the conference was a failure. The humans stayed, out of inertia really. None of the animals could be bothered to do anything.

There were never very many humans here. So few, actually, that most of us recognized each individual human. There isn’t much water here that doesn’t come from the sky, and for reasons we’re still not sure about, this was a problem for the humans. The humans always drooped their little fleshy beaks, and we know enough to know that means they’re not happy. We asked them why they’d come here if they were going to be so moody about it, but they didn’t know how to talk in normal animal language.

The main purpose of humans in life appeared to be growing plants in the middle of nowhere, even though big nice edible seeds were all around them, building wooden caves again in the middle of nowhere and stocking those caves with plant roots and plant seeds that they grew and refused to eat. We thought all this was very stupid of them.

“I think their beaks are too small and flabby to crack even a single seed. So they put them in that cave and wait until the seeds get smaller.” We said, and we felt bad for them.

Later, we learned why the humans were doing this. When another giant wooden duck appeared – which they did very often – they brought the ducks the roots and seeds in the cave and got new things in return, like new feathers to wear (humans shed their feathers very often). We had to revise our old theories. Humans weren’t parasitic on the wooden ducks, they were in a symbiotic relationship.

The humans all wore different feathers, and some of them were always a bit shinier than the others and bossed the not-shiny ones around. But the shiny ones always went away after ten years, riding away on the big wooden ducks, and were replaced by new humans just as shiny. We never understood this either. Maybe the shiny ones got homesick earlier?

Yeah, we liked the humans. Usually because they threw us bits of bread. Especially the shiny ones. Bread is always nice, and the shiny ones always had more of it. Even though the little-beaks were usually a little better at eating the bread morsels because they were soft and small. Hmm. Maybe there was a grain of truth in what that crazy little-beak said.

Not all animals liked the humans, though. The tortoises absolutely despised them. “They catch us and cook us!” They’d tell us. “Us giant tortoises, the king of the animals!”

“Good.” We said. “We call dibs on the presidency of future conferences.”

“Finches? President? Ridiculous!”

Unfortunately, there were never enough humans to make giant tortoises go extinct, though we did notice a lot fewer tortoises and a lot more humans with tortoiseshell bowls.

And the humans could never kill all the tortoises because they never showed up on our island – we had to fly to their island for the bread – even though it was the biggest and had the bossiest and grumpiest tortoises. What a pity. But they ate all the tortoises on that one eastern island with the lake. We were sad about that, because that island had nice tortoises who used to let us perch on their heads.

Well, almost never. The first thing they did when they showed up was to erect big stone tables and stone trees on our island. Every year, they’d make a circle around the tree at the hottest point of day in the hottest point of year. Then they’d go “Ooooh” and point out that the tree made no shadow. Isn’t it a bad thing for there to be no shadow in this scorching heat? See, they were really stupid.

These humans stayed for about sixty years. Then, one day, came another wooden duck. This time, all the humans who visited the duck started weeping, crying their eyes out.

We tried to ask them what was wrong, and why they wouldn’t give us any bread. But they didn’t understand anything we said. We felt sorry for them and tried to make them feel better by sharing good big seeds with them, but they didn’t seem to know you could eat them and threw them at us instead.

Then the shiny humans all jumped into the sea and committed suicide. The sharks say they were delicious.

The next year, a group of new humans arrived on a squadron of wooden ducks, led by humans that were even shinier. The new humans took over the old human nests, and the old humans that we’d known all boarded the ducks and left and were never seen again. We finches were all a little sad.

 

[Thesaurus Rex]

I am somehow getting a huge Hitchhiker's Guide vibe from this entry. Absolutely brilliant.

It's also, once again, eerily close to the ideas I've been having for my own TL. Well, maybe a little different. But I loved this bit.

 

[Wolttaire]

Hmmm maybe the musica kill the siki empire