MotF 236: The Map Before Time

[Kaiphranos]

MotF 236: The Map Before Time

The Challenge

Make a map featuring a prehistoric or protohistoric setting.

The Restrictions

There are no restrictions on when the PoD of your map should be. Fantasy, sci-fi, and future maps are allowed.

If you're not sure whether your idea meets the criteria of this challenge, please feel free to PM me or comment in the main thread.
---
Entries will end for this round when the voting thread is posted on Monday, June 7, 2021.
---
PLEASE KEEP ALL DISCUSSION ON THE CONTEST OR ITS ENTRIES TO THE MAIN THREAD.
Any discussion must take place in the main thread. If you post anything other than a map entry (or a description accompanying a map entry) in this thread, you will be asked to delete the post.

Don't forget to vote on MotF 235!​

 

[RedBeret]

Far in the north, distant and isolated, a strange and savage land lies. One side is blocked off by a broad and jagged chain of mountains, high and sharp as they rise up, up, up into the heavens. One side is blocked by tall cliffs of ice, endless glaciers, endless white, white, white. And two are blocked off by the sea, a roiling, stormy mass of inky water, dark, dark, dark.

Beyond the mountains, they say, a land of stone villages lies, a warm and temperate place where men gather in vast conglomerations, sprawling villages wrought in rock and stone. People tell stories of this place, but no one can know for sure if it exists. No one has been there, nor will anyone ever be there. The journey is too far, too cruel, whether one travels through those bleak and barren mountains, or the unrelenting, unforgiving ocean.

So who lies in the northern lands? Two peoples, two races of men. There are the Men of the East, a slender and gracile folk, weak individually, yet congregating in great numbers, like ants in their quantity and complexity as they skitter about their homes at the far end of the world. And then there are the Men of the West, those hulking, shambling brutes that bridge the gap between animal and man, clumsy and thick-skulled to the Easterners, yet smarter than any other beast in this land. They have lasted a hundred thousand years let, and will last a hundred years more.

And where there are men, there are tribes.

Men of the East
The Skothoki: The Skothokki are herders, keepers of great, hairy beasts with tusks and antlers of ivory. Much like their beasts, they themselves are a tall and broad folk by the standards of the Eastern Men, and they carve intricate pendants and figurines out of ivory. These, and the meat and furs of their domestic animals, they trade off to the Jarrokki in return for slaves and grain. Such interactions are done with mutual distaste however, for the Skothokki consider the Jarrokki ghastly and wretched, and the Jarrokki consider the Skothokki savage and brutish.

The Jarrokki: Inhabiting the dense hills and highlands surrounding a long, meandering river, the Jarrokki are a farming folk, who grow grains and tubers on the slopes and valley floors. They live in crowded and fortified villages, insular hives of filth and disease where a man might pass his entire life without venturing into the next valley. They are fractured into hundreds of tribes and chiefdoms, each one every bit as belligerent and warlike as the other, engaged in constant petty wars and flare-ups with their neighbours, where the losers are subjected to such vile tortures that no one should have to put them into writing. As far as the Jarrokki are concerned, they are the most civilised folk in the world.

The Kurossoi: Living on a bleak and windswept coast, the Kurossoi make their living off of the sea, venturing out in flimsy rafts to brave the dark waters and catch the fish with which they sustain themselves. They live in small, enclosed villages of smoky stone huts, where they do their best to shelter from the ruthless winter tempests. There is copper in the lands of the Kurossoi from which they hammer entrancing plates and objects that shine in the sun. Sometimes, they trade these to the Jarrokki. More often, the Jarrokki claim such creations as loot and plunder.

Men of the West
The Giantfolk: Large and hulking even by the standards of the Western Men, the Giantfolk inhabit a great island off the coast, a warm, temperate and mild place, thickly forested in the south and more clear and open in the north. Though mostly roaming alone, on hilltops and clearing they will heave up complexes of megalithic stones. These are their gathering places, where they will tell myths, tales and legends to one another, and sing deep, sonorous songs that echo out over the landscape. Sometimes, they even echo out over the sea, to be heard by Kurossoi fishermen on their rafts.

The Warfolk: Upriver of the Jarrokki, the Warfolk are in many ways a distorted reflection of their southerly foes. Though they practise no agriculture, they too live in walled and fortified villages, led under powerful chieftains and hierarchical orders. Where other Western Men are solitary and antisocial, they are cohesive and co-operative, where others are slow and clumsy, they are fast and nimble. It is this that makes them so feared by the Jarrokki, their raids and attacks so feared in spite of their lesser number. Of all the Western Men, the Warfolk are by far the most organised, and the most deadly.

The Wastefolk: Once buried under miles of glacier, the home of the Wastefolk is a barren and denuded landscape, scoured of life and stripped right down to the bedrock. But the Wastefolk are a tough and hardy sort to match their land, not to mention resourceful. They know how the arts of healing better than any other Western Men, able to turn leaves and lichens into salves and ointments that save folk who would otherwise have died. They make clothes and garments for themselves too, elegantly sown and threaded together with finesse, obviously well-crafted to even an untrained observer, and just as well made for resisting the harsh conditions of the wastes. They will persist a while yet.

The Redfolk: Inhabiting a vast swathe of marsh and tundra, the Redfolk are a keen-eyed sort who paint their faces bright scarlet with the dye of a berry that grows in their lands. Unlike most Western Men, the Redfolk are traders, who tame dogs to carry sledges of their goods to and fro across their expansive lands. By the standards of their sort, the people of the Redfolk are wealthy, well-connected and well travelled, the glue holding the Western Men together.

The Fisherfolk: Living along the stormy sea-coast, the Fisherfolk are bright and quick-witted, by the standards of Western Men at least. From bone and wood they put together elegant and ingenious tools for the purposes of fishing, and speak to one another in a language that isn't the curt, simple kind that other Western Men use, but instead a tongue every bit as complex and refined as that of the Eastern Men, to the point that certain Kurossoi groups have even learnt it for the purposes of their brief contacts and interactions.

The Ruinfolk: At the foothills of the great mountains that for all intents and purposes mark the edge of the world, the Ruinfolk wander amidst the crumbling stone remnants of a more developed peoples long gone from this land. These ruins they regard with a superstitious fear, considering them the structures of demons and wicked men who the gods purged from the world – for the Ruinfolk, alone among the Men of the West, have religion. They bury their dead in their caves, paint complex scenes and abstract imagery on the stone walls, and at night gather round the fires to pass down their oral histories (as best they can with their clumsy language) and sing, sing like only the Giantfolk also know how to. ​

 

[Ten Thousand Red Lakes]

All Roads Lead to Muspuwte
(Image might be a bit overly compressed, so imgur link is attached)

https://imgur.com/3cXTECM

The Muspuwte Ascendancy circa 62Kyr BP


Long before Ur or Göbekli Tepe, civilization rose on the Sundaland plain. Cities rose from the coastal deltas and inland plains, and trade networks bound together far distant peoples. Within the span of a few millennia of climatic calm, bronze-clad warriors marched the streets of cities of a scale that would not be seen for 50 millennia thereafter. 62,000 years before the present date, the greatest and most powerful of those cities was Muspuwte. Dense networks of trade all converged on this equatorial city of ritual kings. Copper flowed from Sde Kelb, and Tin from the mines of Fo’ro, and in Muspuwte alone they were made into bronze, and flowed out into the world hereafter. The work of these city was done by a great network of slaves, the half-human Hobbits, Bawlebs, and Ubags of the Sahulian fringe. The warriors of Muspuwte raided these distant lands for captives and sent them through the great slave ports of Gwleyr and Mistfitthirs, from wherein they journeyed upriver to Muspuwte. Primitive agriculture blossomed on the Sundaland plain, and to supplement it great fishing fleets sailed from Wampt, Lwawets, and Tilpsold, all to feed the increasingly specialized industries of Muspuwte. The great number of remains under the ceremonial pyramids of Muspuwte evince their commonplace practice of human (or half-human) sacrifice, all done so as to feed the inerrant Sun’s appetites. In religious matters, Muspuwte was only surpassed by Dy’aus, mountain of the Gods, whose foothills were wreathed by priests, whose steadfast belief kept the Ascendancy healthy.


It took one century, more or less, for Muspuwte to fall. A cold snap in the global climate, coupled with some local drying, caused seven years of bad harvests. The great fleets of Wampt, Lwawets and Tilpsold had grown too bold, and as they began to run out of fish, they ceased paying tribute to Muspuwte. Armies marched to the coasts to seize what they could, but the treasury grew empty, and the city began to starve. Muspuwte was wracked by fire, by riots, and by hunger, and as it died, so did the ascendancy. Bronze tools ceased to be made, agriculture fell out of practice. Ships broke, and the tools to repair them were not made. Two million humans had lived in Sundaland at its peak. Within a century, the number had been reduced tenfold, and the survivors reduced to a primitive existence. The push of mankind into the Sahulian fringe would continue gradually, but no civilization to rival Muspuwte would rise again on the Sundaland plain.

 

[Prince di Corsica]

100.000 years ago, a cold streak of the climate, which threw much of the Northern Hemisphere into a glacial age, had the effect of drying out much of Africa and destroy much of the tropical rainforest around the Congo River, turning its lower river into ripe land for agricultural development. Bereft of their natural environment, the rainforest hunter gatherer peoples, the short-stature multitude of nations we would call 'pigmies', would learn to cultivate the native yams of the region, creating the first agricultural complex in the world and, with it, its first civilization, born on the shores of the great Mother River and supplied by massive river trade that would flourish for millennia afterwards.

This magnificent civilization, worshipping their Mother River, the stingless bees which they cultivated for honey and, with time, learning to read from the skies astrological data, would find in the line of the equator a meaningful omen, to which they'd dedicate much worship in the form of building their massive pyramids and temple complexes, the region becoming renowned for its holiness among those people. Their feats of engineering would be unmatched by any contemporaneous peoples, to whom the Congo-River civilizations would deride eternally as 'giants', brutish and unkept people useful for manual labor, intelligent cattle in all but name. Against their mighty armies was born the intelligent and organized expertise of civilized warfare, which would quickly turn the assaults on 'pygmy' settlements by 'giant' nomads on the opposite - expeditions to capture slaves from among the proud nomadic tribes.

This would set the stage for the expansion, somewhat commercial, somewhat martial, of agrarian society to the regions of the North, where the river is suddenly rendered unnavigable by the great waterfalls there. That natural stopping point for civilization grew to become important markets with the motherland in the lower river, end nodes to a trade that then went to other rivers, where there existed mines for gold, which became a prize possession of the region, greatly enriching it in a manner that, ultimately, would have it compete with the low-river economy. This competition would be heralded by the rise of a palatial economy, led by priest-kings of various cities, who legitimized their rule by building new pyramids, in the place where the equator crossed the river for a second time, expanding upstream beyond the falls to reach those lands. That would eventually lead to further upstream exploration and city-building.

The discovery of vast metal deposits in the upper river to the south, with vast sources of, among other things, copper, tin and cobalt, led to a massive economic surge in the region, one that would be accompanied by a military innovation - copper and later bronze weapons. Although copper had already been dabbled with in the north, mostly for ceremonial purposes, it was in the south that the bronze alloy and its properties were discovered, growing into an important societal factor that saw many old orders, including the pyramid-building priestly classes, overthrown. This societal change, heralding from upstream and slowly consuming its way up to the mouth of the river, would open a new chapter of the history of the earliest civilization, as a force mightier than anything the world had seen sailed down the river, conquering everything on its way...

But that's a story for another time in the long, long history of the peoples of Mother Congo.

_______________________________________________________________

So, this scenario is inspired by one of my favorite TLs in the forum, Empire of a Hundred Millennia: a Congo River Civilization TL. The basic premise there is malaria going extinct in early hominid history, leading to a much greater growth of human populations, especially in Africa, and allow the continent to develop quite sooner. It's a shame the TL is so short, but the basic idea is something that has fascinated me since I found it in my early days lurking here. So when this challenge came up, I decided to take it and finally do something about this.

In a turn of events I somewhat regret, I decided to really go to the effort and try to conjure up a language for these people, inspired by the languages spoken in the region by the "pygmy" peoples. It's actually a fascinating topic, but, shockingly I know, not one for two or three weeks of reading while studying for exam season. Anyway, I was able to conjure up a mock-language to fulfill a few words required, which is where we get the city names.

In any case, although it's great to be able to finally do something about this scenario, this is clearly not enough, and be warned that I will indeed do more about this idea (actually, the whole unification prospect at the end left me curious, I might just do a Congo Empire to see how it feels)

What else... oh, although I'm not sure it's visible or remarkable, I used this map as an opportunity to test blurriness in maps, I used it in the seas to give a sensation of depth and in the various regions to give an idea of it being more of an informal border than an actual polity. I don't know how well that was conveyed, but still

Anyway, hope you like this idea, and you can expect to hear more from these fascinating peoples