Map Thread XIX
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Thanks! (Though, I do pride myself on more on my narrative writing than my textbook-style excerpts. The former comes a lot more naturally to me.)
Hands of Fate
I've seen several people doing variations on the "fantasy series is superimposed on our world" idea during my time on this site, so I decided to give it a shot myself.
The year is 1511, and the Persian Civil War continues to rage on. With the death of the previous emperor in a raid on the palace by barbarians from the west, his sons have torn the nation apart fighting for the throne and have drawn every other nation on the Asian continent into the war, save the Mughal Empire, which has acquired a reputation for being a lazy backwater, and the Khmer Empire, which is far too reclusive to get involved in any such affairs on the continent. However, Khmer did give the rest of Asia a "prophecy" of sorts: five children, one Khmer, one Tibetan, one Zhongguan, one Nipponese, and one Persian, all born during an eclipse, will bring the Persian Civil War to an end. These five teenagers, who are currently being raised beneath the western mountains of Tibet by an organization called the Hands of Fate, do in fact exist. However, there is already a flaw in the plan: the Tibetan infant was killed by Persian soldiers when the Hands of Fate attempted to retrieve it, and with no other Tibetan children having been born during the eclipse, they had no choice but to replace it with a child from the Mughal Empire. Furthermore, the five children are hardly happy with the "destiny" that has been laid out before them, and the fact that they've been trapped in a cave for most of their lives by the Hands of Fate hasn't helped matters. Instead, they mainly want to be reunited with their families, with ending the war only being a secondary priority for them, especially given that none of the emperor's three sons are particularly appealing choices to ascend to the throne.
From the bloodthirsty ruler of Tibet, to the overprotective queen of Nippon, to the disorder of the Mughal Empire, to the dark northern islands where the Khmer Empire now resides, to the divided land of Persia, the five children from across the continent certainly aren't going to have an easy time accomplishing any of their goals. And as it becomes clear just how much the Khmer Empire's leaders are involved in manipulating events across the continent, their hopes and dreams are going to become a lot harder to achieve.
The Vylkove Culture (4800-2200 BC)
The POD for this is the Eurasian Wild Horse being hunted into extinction during the Neolithic before anyone had got round to domesticating them: as a result, the Yamnaya migration into Europe is far slower and less consequential. In their place, offshoots of an essentially Old European monoculture expand northwards into OTL’s Ukraine.
One of these offshoots is the Vylkove Culture (named after the indicative site in OTL’s Romania which will be the first to be excavated by later archaeologists): first arising in the wetlands of the Danube Delta, the Culture consists of a loose network of marsh villages (comprising of thatched huts built on stilts) each containing about 100-150 people. Analyses of grave goods suggest a matriarchal and essentially egalitarian culture: Phase I sees a partial shift from a primarily hunter-gathering based diet to one derived from wetland agriculture and aquaculture.
The Vylkove Culture first domesticates the Eurasian otter around the middle of the fifth millennium BC – fulfilling a similar niche to the cat in OTL, the otter rapidly becomes religiously significant to the Culture, with most burials featuring otters being interred alongside their masters. This holds true to the extent that the approximate borders of the Culture’s influence at any one period can be inferred by examining where otter burials cease to be found.
By Phase II, the Vylkove Culture has started to expand along the coast of the Black Sea and upriver, and has developed an increasingly sophisticated material culture: trading links have been established as far North as the Baltic Sea (for amber) and as far South as Cyprus (for copper). Phase III sees the adoption of large-scale irrigation works, the heavier alteration of the environment to create “artificial wetlands” along the Dneister and Dneiper and the establishment of the first cities (an estimated 25,000 people live in Kremenchuk by 2750 BC). The Culture ultimately fragments in the wake of significant climate change caused by the 4.2 kiloyear event.
The POD for this is the Eurasian Wild Horse being hunted into extinction during the Neolithic before anyone had got round to domesticating them: as a result, the Yamnaya migration into Europe is far slower and less consequential. In their place, offshoots of an essentially Old European monoculture expand northwards into OTL’s Ukraine.
One of these offshoots is the Vylkove Culture (named after the indicative site in OTL’s Romania which will be the first to be excavated by later archaeologists): first arising in the wetlands of the Danube Delta, the Culture consists of a loose network of marsh villages (comprising of thatched huts built on stilts) each containing about 100-150 people. Analyses of grave goods suggest a matriarchal and essentially egalitarian culture: Phase I sees a partial shift from a primarily hunter-gathering based diet to one derived from wetland agriculture and aquaculture.
The Vylkove Culture first domesticates the Eurasian otter around the middle of the fifth millennium BC – fulfilling a similar niche to the cat in OTL, the otter rapidly becomes religiously significant to the Culture, with most burials featuring otters being interred alongside their masters. This holds true to the extent that the approximate borders of the Culture’s influence at any one period can be inferred by examining where otter burials cease to be found.
By Phase II, the Vylkove Culture has started to expand along the coast of the Black Sea and upriver, and has developed an increasingly sophisticated material culture: trading links have been established as far North as the Baltic Sea (for amber) and as far South as Cyprus (for copper). Phase III sees the adoption of large-scale irrigation works, the heavier alteration of the environment to create “artificial wetlands” along the Dneister and Dneiper and the establishment of the first cities (an estimated 25,000 people live in Kremenchuk by 2750 BC). The Culture ultimately fragments in the wake of significant climate change caused by the 4.2 kiloyear event.
Isn't this something you'd be interested in @Salvador79? As I recall you also wrote a timeline about a matriarchal society in this era.
If you're the chap who wrote The Book of the Holy Mountain, that's genuinely one of the most interesting things I've ever read - just fantastic from beginning to end.
That'd be @Salvador79. He's the brains of the outfit. I'm just the guy who edited it.
If you're interested he has a new timeline concerning a more democratic revolutionary Russia. Here's the title:
Feeble Constitution - A Red-and-Green Russia 1917 Timeline
Feeble Constitution - A Red-and-Green Russia 1917 Timeline
@XTrapnel,
thank you for the praise! Glad you liked it! And @Betelgeuse was indeed a great help with writing it.
About your Vylkove Culture: nice idea!
Just a few questions:
1) Are you sure there were still any hunter-gatherers around in the Danube Delta by 4800 BCE?
2) Would they trade copper from Cyprus when there are bountiful sources much closer in the Carpathians?
3) What use exactly would their otters be to them? Care to elaborate? (Lovely idea.)
thank you for the praise! Glad you liked it! And @Betelgeuse was indeed a great help with writing it.
About your Vylkove Culture: nice idea!
Just a few questions:
1) Are you sure there were still any hunter-gatherers around in the Danube Delta by 4800 BCE?
2) Would they trade copper from Cyprus when there are bountiful sources much closer in the Carpathians?
3) What use exactly would their otters be to them? Care to elaborate? (Lovely idea.)
1) If by hunter-gatherer you mean people who practise hunting and gathering exclusively, probably not. If you mean people who derive a significant portion of their calorific intake from hunting and gathering while also engaging in some small scale agriculture, definitely. In general, I seem to recall the boundary between hunter-gathering and agriculture to be less absolute than we used to think: there's actually quite a lot you can do to maximise food yields in an area without necessarily doing something we'd directly consider to be farming proper (clearing non fruit-bearing trees, rerouting rivers so migrating salmon and eels are forced through a particular channel, etc).
2) Reasonable point. In my partial defence, I thought that the Carpathian copper deposits were about two mountain ranges away from the Danube delta as the crow flies and that someone who'd spent their entire life in and out of river-going craft would prefer to get to Cyprus and back via hugging the coast to hauling copper up and down mountains for a couple of hundred miles.
3) You muzzle the otter, take him out on your canoe into a stream and then let him out: he drives fish into your nets in exchange for food. I think people in Bangladesh still do something like that today. You can do the same thing with a big enough otter, waterfowl and a higher net.
Wings of Fire.
Southeastern Asia was the former site of the Khmer Empire before it collapsed into the ocean thanks to a series of natural disasters shortly following the mysterious disappearance of a powerful Khmer enchanter, causing the surviving Khmer to flee to what we know as the Aleutian Islands.
Kingdom of England in 1284
This map depicts England towards the end of the 13th century, during the reign of Edward I 'Longshanks'. Edward I rose to power during a baronial reform movement that lead to the Second Barons' War, during which he was taken hostage, escaped, and defeated Simon de Montfort, becoming king upon the death of his father in 1274. Edward's rein is famous for reforming royal administration and the securing of his realm. Between 1282 and 83, Edward conducted a conquest of Wales during which he placed all of Wales under England's control with the Statute of Rhuddlan in 1284. After the conquest was complete, Edward turned his attention to Scotland, conducting the Scottish Wars of Independence during which he successfully occupied the country to assert full control over Britain. Edward was a brutal and evil ruler, issuing the Edict of Expulsion in 1290 and failing to compromise with nobility to prevent revolts that ripped apart his kingdom in the reigns following his death.
This map was created using a wide variety of sources, including topographical data from Paragon World Atlas (1962), medieval counties, bishoprics and county palatines from Atlas of Medieval Europe (1982), Welsh lordships and internal divisions from An Historical Atlas of Wales (1972) and road information from the Gough Map and Matthew Paris' maps of Britain (taken from The Transport System of Medieval England and Wales - A Geographical Synthesis (1987)). The coat of arms comes from WappenWiki (wappenwiki.org/) (Retrieved: 10/04/2019).
The map is also the same scale as my Scotland map and is a continuation of it. I've updated the Scotland map to be a lot more detailed, showing many more towns, villages, castles and monasteries, including roads, which I got by digging through primary sources and itineraries of Edward I when he came to Scotland.
Let me know if you have any feedback! Or any suggestions for a medieval country that I could do next, or something ATL even
This map depicts England towards the end of the 13th century, during the reign of Edward I 'Longshanks'. Edward I rose to power during a baronial reform movement that lead to the Second Barons' War, during which he was taken hostage, escaped, and defeated Simon de Montfort, becoming king upon the death of his father in 1274. Edward's rein is famous for reforming royal administration and the securing of his realm. Between 1282 and 83, Edward conducted a conquest of Wales during which he placed all of Wales under England's control with the Statute of Rhuddlan in 1284. After the conquest was complete, Edward turned his attention to Scotland, conducting the Scottish Wars of Independence during which he successfully occupied the country to assert full control over Britain. Edward was a brutal and evil ruler, issuing the Edict of Expulsion in 1290 and failing to compromise with nobility to prevent revolts that ripped apart his kingdom in the reigns following his death.
This map was created using a wide variety of sources, including topographical data from Paragon World Atlas (1962), medieval counties, bishoprics and county palatines from Atlas of Medieval Europe (1982), Welsh lordships and internal divisions from An Historical Atlas of Wales (1972) and road information from the Gough Map and Matthew Paris' maps of Britain (taken from The Transport System of Medieval England and Wales - A Geographical Synthesis (1987)). The coat of arms comes from WappenWiki (wappenwiki.org/) (Retrieved: 10/04/2019).
The map is also the same scale as my Scotland map and is a continuation of it. I've updated the Scotland map to be a lot more detailed, showing many more towns, villages, castles and monasteries, including roads, which I got by digging through primary sources and itineraries of Edward I when he came to Scotland.
Let me know if you have any feedback! Or any suggestions for a medieval country that I could do next, or something ATL even
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