Not My Heifer - The Story of an Alternate Indo-European Migration

Why didn't Proto-HAFSIR come about IOTL? Were the people who would have brought it south simply content to remain further out on the steppes when they weren't wracked by war?

Probably because the Maykop culture was a thing of the past by the time OTL Circassia was being Indo-Europeanized, and the kind of interactions that they likely had with Cimmerians and Scythian didn’t amount to the sort of infiltration I described above, allowing for significantly less substrate influence from Northwest Caucasian languages.

Is the idea that this new *culture* is what TTL gets instead of the Yamna Culture of OTL? If so, how are the two different?

Well, for one, they have essentially absorbed the material culture of the Maykop, which includes a relatively sophisticated level of technology in terms of metallurgy and architecture, and many of them are more sedentary, engaging in a more transhumant rather than pastoralist lifestyle. That’s not true across the board, though. Their traditions and their stories are still very much within the Indo-European/Khvalynsk/Yamna basket, though. It’s also not necessarily what they get “instead” of, as this is only the first group to branch off from the Common Indo-European Khvalynsk Culture. There are still tribes in the north who haven’t gone anywhere yet despite a significant population movement to the south.

There will be a lot more development later with this group of people in OTL Azerbaijan, as I have alluded to already, so stay tuned
 
Ummm... I must be stupid, but... what does threadmarking mean, and what does it do?
One of the options you have below a post is to threadmark it, which adds it to a list of threadmarks. Anyone browsing the thread can pull up that list to go directly to a chapter instead of scrolling through all the discussion in the thread.
 
Of Sírkanas and Psaphī and the Ethnogenesis of the Sírkanais
Of Sírkanas and Psaphī and the Ethnogenesis of the Sírkanais




What is a “nation”? Wikipedia defines a nation as “a stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, ethnicity, or psychological make-up manifested in a common culture.” This differs from an ethnic group, which is usually based on shared similarities - whether real or perceived - such as language, history, common ancestry, history, and culture. Both of these differ from a civilization, which is a complex urban society with some level of social stratification, sometimes imposed by a cultural elite, but sometimes not, with symbolic systems of communication.



5,000 years ago, it could certainly be said that Ancient Sumer, known in its contemporary parlance as Khienkir, constituted all three of these, but for our time, beyond Ancient Egypt, it’s the only place in the world that we can definitively say did so at the time. The people of Khienkir, called Ungsangkika or “black-headed people” (not necessarily for how every individual looked, but for a cosmetic ideal), as far as we know shared a common language, a common territory, similar economic ways of life that were stratified for greater societal organization, and did indeed have a common notion of their origins and to some degree, their history. Many of them lived in cities of impressive sizes, and the stratification of their society was indeed imposed by a cultural elite, which was centered around temple complexes, and they used a number of symbolic systems of communication, including writing. This nation, this ethnic group, or civilization however would develop rather differently in the time of the Ríxavaka, precisely due to the ethnogenesis of a new people who would later come to define the entire region of the world in which the Ungsangkika had built their great cities. Both the Ríxavaka and history as it is recorded in this other time call these people the Sírkanais, after their eponymous ancestor, Sírkanas, who was born Nangavas, the son of Sekandrī and Martáuras, who took a contingent of his people beyond the Gates of Párukhař around the time of the fall of the Kingdom of Xasalkī, where he founded a country that still bears his name.



This is a very hazy period in history for us, and there are a number of things that scholars cannot agree on. It is usually called the “Jemdet Nasr period”, and is recognized as an intermediary period between the Uruk period and the Early Dynastic period, but while some of the details scream at us through the archaeological digs that are our primary sources, others remain rather elusive. For example, the “Uruk period” is based on the idea of the ancient city that was later recorded as Unuk as having been the center of some sort of a cultural expansion, but whether this city was unique for its time or what the nature of the expansion was isn’t clear. Was there a centralized kingdom of which Unuk was the capital? What was the relationship between the various settlements that were either mirror reflections of the culture of Unuk, or clearly influenced by them? Were they colonies of an expanding kingdom? Were they independent developments?



In the time of the Ríxavaka and the land of Sírkana however, academics see this time as one of cultural but not political expansion, not unlike the expansion of the Hellenistic culture of our time across the Mediterranean. There were indeed a number of colonies built by the Ungsangkika, but there were also a number of independent developments brought about by the demands of the urban cultures of the country. These demands brought an inflow of migrants, first from a region known to us as Transcaucasia, but later from north of the Caucasus Mountains from the country that the Ríxavaka records as Xasalkī. While the migrants belonged to different ethnic or cultural groups, their motivations were largely the same in terms of their movement, driven principally by economic opportunities presented by the demands of the cities of the Ungsangkika (viticulture, mineral exploitation, wooden and stone craftsmanship, and wool production) and also lack of opportunities in their homelands, where social stratification had barred certain classes of people from climbing the social hierarchy. The latter can certainly have been said to have been the case with the Sírkanais, and this is reflected not only in the literature and the oral traditions of the country, but also the archaeological record, which shows a developing social hierarchy in the semi-permanent settlements north of the Caucasus.



The story tells us of a conflict between the Ákkinai, the twin sons of Sekandrī, named Tanχandras and Nangavas, who lead their people in the fight against the evil general Sapsas, whose daughter, Psaphī, married Tanχandras as his war prize, while Nangavas remains single. These twins are represented as having had different abilities, with Tanχandras being the son of Xaghrevaulkas, and a true heir to his family’s name with his strength, speed, and prowess in combat, while the younger twin Nangavas is shown as not only cunning, but skilled at working with his hands. When the Virnathaukais are contracted by the King of Xasalkī, the two brothers adopt different roles within the society. Certainly, the Virnathaukais are contracted as a special military force that answers only to the king personally, but there are different divisions of this army that allude to the social organization of the culture of the time period, being segregated into a corps of builders and a corps of warriors. Tanχandras is the leader of the latter, and it is he and his warriors who take the Xasalkian women to bed, while Nangavas is the leader of the former, taking over the corps of builders, who take no part in the cuckoldery of the Xasalkian nobility. The discovery of this cuckoldery creates a conflict between Tanχandras and his wife, Psaphī, specifically when Tanχandras sleeps with the queen, Ƭevambevadī. When confronted on the matter, he is said to have responded with the question of how a barbarian such as he could refuse the advances of the queen of a rich and civilized country. At this, Psaphī is enraged, and conspires to murder her husband but is foiled by one of her handmaidens, and is thrown in prison, where she will remain during the massacre of the Xasalkian nobility. There is an interesting allusion to an ancient practice of ancestor worship in this part of the story, as Tanχandras prays to his grandmother, Panţiphā, who now lives as wife of the King of the Underworld after having bitten from one of the apples of that realm, to grant him some of the fury of Máktanas that was directed there by his father and the goddess Sevaraţī in their ritual of purification on the son of the storm god so that he might have the strength to carry out the request of the wicked queen. This isn’t granted to him, and so he goes to the temple of Máktanas in the night where he opens the sacred horsehair kursa sack of the god wherein he is able to come by some of the god's strength.



Having gravely insulted the god with such theft, Máktanas sets loose a monster called Arχunás, who himself had been imprisoned long ago in his swampy layer in a far away country called Kanaspā. While unchaining the monster, the god makes it swear that in exchange for its freedom, it will destroy the Virnathaukais “root and stem” as it were, and steal back the sacred kursa sack and mount it in his temple. This is not however at all what the monster does. Yes, he proceeds to the land of Xasalkī and begins to wrick havoc on the Virnathaukais and the Xasalkais, appearing in the night repeatedly for some months and attacking the workers, the warriors, the priests, and the civilians alike, but he makes no effort whatsoever to return the kursa sack, and in fact he is only motivated to do anything with it when Tanχandras opens it again to obtain some of the battle fury of the god so that he might defeat him. Arχunás may be a monster, variously described as a dragon, a reptile-like humanoid, or a horned yeti-like creature, but he is no fool, and he takes a cheap shot on Tanχandras by pounding the floor of the hall in which the would-be showdown is taking place, causing the scaffolding to come down on his opponent, after which he runs for the kursa sack and escapes through the dungeons, where he comes across Psaphī, whom he kidnaps and takes with him back to Kanaspā. Máktanas has made a stupid mistake in trusting Arχunás, though he is still angry for the desecration of his temple and beseeches his father, Slákanas, to destroy the Virnathaukais and the Xasalkais in a great storm. It is only as the storm is forming that Nangavas rides out onto the steppe and performs what is variously interpreted as a dance or perhaps a chant to summon the storm god to his presence, after which he swears an oath to kill Arχunás, rescue Psaphī, and return the kursa sack to the temple of Máktanas. Both Máktanas and his father accept his offer, but they do so only under the condition that “no man can accompany” him.



Now, as Kanaspā is a far away land, well beyond the Gates of Párukhař, but not quite as far away as Supharī, he has quite a journey ahead of him. He is nearly killed three times on his journey - once by wolves, once by the violent flooding of the Psāš (Kuban) River one morning as he wakes up to find his camp flooded, and once again by the hairy, bone-axe wielding wildmen that his grandfather encountered in the Gates of Párukhař. The first two times, he encounters a very old man with a long silver beard afterward who offers his hospitality, but Nangavas politely rejects it, insisting that he doesn’t have time to entertain the hospitalities of an old man as he is on a quest. The old man then tells him that if he should ever need the wisdom of an old man that he should come seek him out on both occasions. In the third instance, the old man saves his life, inviting Nangavas into his subterranean home and touching the rock door to scare the wildmen away. When Nangavas leaves the old man’s house the next morning, he sees that the bushes and grass around the hole which is the entrance to his home have died, as has one of the wildmen, implying that the old man was able to accomplish this with his touch. The same old man tells him that Nangavas’ people do not understand the rules of hospitality, and to remember them as they were shown to him the night before, in which he gave the hero warm soup, a cut of meat, a bed, and good conversation. He then tells him to take the hair of the dead wildman and fashion himself a coat from it the way his grandfather had done, but to wear it, and also to give help to whomever should need it on his journey.



The first individual in need that Nangavas encounters is a bat that is being pursued by a barn owl, which comes at him full speed begging that it be sheltered beneath his coat, which he does. When the owl comes asking if Nangavas has seen a loan bat, Nangavas says nothing, and the owl flies away. The bat, now in his debt, swears that should he ever find himself in need of the bat’s aid, that he should call out for it, and then disappears into the night. Shortly thereafter, he encounters the old man at a place that is only called the “Door to Kanaspā”, and he reveals himself as the “boatman”, and ferries Nangavas across the river, at the other side of which he presents the mountain pass that will lead him to the country that he seeks, and reminds him that he is hot on the trail of Arχunás, but also tells him to remember his advice about those in need. After entering into the country, Nangavas finds a sturgeon ensnared in a net, which practically sacrifices itself for him on the spot. He untangles the sturgeon, who swears the same oath as the bat, but then inquires as to where he is going and how it is that he has been able to avoid the Vaskakin, an amphibious river monster that lives in the river and comes out to hunt at night. When Nangavas says that he will simply find another way to Arχunás’ lair, the sturgeon specifies that he has to follow the river he is on, the Alazan, until it meets with the Ţaţamna, which is the principle river of the country that he must follow to its end and turn south. When presented with this dilemma, the sturgeon offers to help him kill the Vaskakin by taking him to its cavernous lair beneath the river. It instructs him to wait by the shore until nightfall, and when the monster comes out of the water to call for the sturgeon, who will take him to the lair, where he’ll be able to stab the creature as it emerges unsuspectingly into its lair. After he kills the Vaskakin, he finds the sturgeon floating on the surface, almost dead from having been maimed. He mourns its loss, having just saved it from the net, but the sturgeon tells him that it is honored to die helping a friend, and then instructs him to take the poisoned blood of the Vaskakin to use against Arχunás, and to take of its own body what meat that he will for his survival.



After having done both of these things and continuing on his way, further into the country Nangavas encounters a leopard who is stuck in a ravine. He offers to find it some rope, but it only tells him that it has been stuck in the ravine for days, and is too weak to climb out. “If you had some meat that I could eat, perhaps I might regain my strength.” Nangavas then offers the leopard the meet of the sturgeon, which it voraciously consumes, and then offers it the rope, and it climbs out. The leopard then swears the same oath that the sturgeon and the bat did, and disappears into the countryside. When finally he comes upon the lair of Arχunás, he finds that it is empty during the day, while Arχunás goes out to hunt, but that by night he returns with three tigers, Kandus, Ħingaršus, Spákā, who guard the doorway. Needing council on how to get into the cave, he calls on the bat, who, as a natural inhabitant of a cave is not noticed flying in and out over the course of the next few days. The bat reveals to him that the tigers were originally guardians sent by the gods who have changed their loyalties in favor of the monster instead, and that since they are paranoid of the gods’ wrath that they eat only the meat that the monster feeds them from his hunts. The bat offers to take some of the blood of the Vaskakin and sprinkle it on the meat that night so that the tigers might be poisoned, and also tells Nangavas the location of the kursa sack and the damsel Psaphī, but tells him that, “You will not find her as she was.” The bat then disappears, and Nangavas sneaks into the cave, not before praying to his grandmother Panţiphā for some of the fury of Máktanas (which is granted in this instance), expecting to find three dead tigers, he finds two dead and one alive, Kandus, “the burned”, who did not eat the poisoned meat. He attacks Nangavas, and Nangavas calls on the leopard, who attacks and distracts the tiger while he engages in a very long and epic duel with the monster Arχunás, whom he is able to wound with his poisoned sword, but only slowly succumbs until finally he is beheaded. The leopard, like the sturgeon however, also succumbs to the tiger Kandus, who is ultimately slain by Nangavas. Like the sturgeon, the leopard tells him that it is happy to die for a friend even if its life had just recently been saved, and then tells him to take his skin and wear it, promising that it will give him its speed and cunning, and this he does.



At last, he takes Psaphī and the kursa sack back to Xasalkī, where the two are wed and the sack is deposited again in the temple of Máktanas, and he is named Sírkanas on his return for the leopard-skin hood that he wears. But the tale actually doesn’t end here. No, there is still the unresolved matter of Psaphī’s hatred for her ex-husband, and the fact that she is now starting to show signs of pregnancy, having been raped by the monster while it held her hostage. It is decided that the new couple will return to the land of Kanaspā, where they will make a home for themselves and the corps of builders (and their families) that had worked under Nangavas during the period of service to the Xasalkian king. The country is renamed Sírkana, for the namesake of the hero that would perform another eight labors to prepare it for proper settlement. These labors are various and not agreed upon in every version of the story, but furthermore aren’t entirely that relevant to our purposes here… except for the last one. The last one, was to defeat the Mother of Arχunás, who, just as Nangavas thought that he had everything in order, attacked his settlements just the way her son had done in Xasalkī. By now of course, the child of Arχunás and Psaphī had been born, a son, who is described as bearing a closer resemblance to his inhuman father than he did to his human mother. Nevertheless, Psaphī and Nangavas were raising this creature among their own children, but the stories say that his temperament was never human, and he could barely speak. When the Mother of Arχunás came for him, he is said to have taken to her, only to have his foster-father step between them and fight off his grandmother, whom Nangavas was able to deal a fatal wound to. From here, he tracks her into the wilderness, where he finds an entire tribe of creatures like them living high on a plateau that is described as being “very near to the land of Supharī”. Realizing that his foster-son belongs with his own kind, Nangavas and his wife begrudgingly travel together back to the plateau to give him to this tribe of monsters, who promise never to bother the Virnathaukais again.



That might seem like a whole lot of nothing, but like much of the material in the Ríxavaka, it is in fact a whole lot of something. Again, we are dealing with a lot of allegory, here. As we already know, the incorporation of the horsemen into the society of the “Xasalkais” was a slow process, one that was intimately interwoven with the development of a more complex society with social stratification surrounding the cultivation not only of practical crops, but the production of ciders, which had both commercial and religious significance. Settlements during this period became more permanent in the sense that they were continuously inhabited by at least a portion of the population, the warriors, priests, and craftsmen, but the merchants (those who were not members of the new social elite) and the laborers remained in a perpetual state of transhumance, only returning to the settlements semi-annually for crop harvests from terraced fields and to graze the livestock in the winter pastures that surrounded them or on portions of the harvest set aside for harsh winters. This system was de facto rather than de jure, and there was a fair degree of social mobility among the classes for the first century after it had become the status quo. During the second century however, tensions began to rise between the social classes as the elites began to tighten their grip, passing laws by divine right that limited the ability of the lower classes, the herders, farmers, and laborers, to climb the social ladder. It was only when mobility became next to impossible that one day, the transhumant lower class didn’t return to one of the settlements for the winter, and then again at another settlement the next year, and so on. The brothers Tanχandras and Nangavas therefore serve not only as eponymous ancestors for two separate ethnic groups, the “fathers of nations” as it were, but also as metaphors for the conflict between the newly developed upper and lower classes in a formerly fairly egalitarian society, which ultimately resulted in its collapse.



But, where did these disgruntled laymen go? Certainly, some of them pursued their luck among the remnants of the “Xasalkais”, or migrated further into the mountains where they were in many ways integrated into the cultures there. The bulk of them however, made their way through the “Gates of Párukhař”, or the Darial Gorge, beyond which lay the valley of the Ţaţamna River, which we know as the Kura. His wife, Psaphī, is said to have mothered a hundred children here, earning her the name Kannannā - the “mother of one hundred” ( a contraction of kantam-χanna), though she is also often called Nannáχanna, the “great-grandmother”, and each of her children is recorded as the eponymous ancestor of one of the different clans of the country of Sírkana. This region was already inhabited by various different peoples however, most of whom were agro-pastoralists, but some of whom were hunter-gatherers, who left various traces behind not only in toponomy and loanwords, but also in the story. Where, you might wonder? Well, many versions of the story record Arχunás as some sort of reptilian creature, but the Ríxavaka is unique in describing him as rather yeti-like…



Tall as an elephant was he when he stood upright, though he oft preferred to slouch down on his knuckles on arms thick as tree-trunks. His claws were long and sharp, but not so long and sharp as a bear’s, for he would not have the grasp of a man’s hand if this were so, though his coat was as thick and scruffy as a bear’s, but black as the starless sky. His face was short, a strange mixture of man and panther, with long and thick horns like those of the most vigorous bull, and long teeth, and eyes blue-green, like river ice.



The monster and his tribe are the original inhabitants of the valley, whose interactions with the incoming horsemen were unfortunately often characterized by extreme violence. But what is perhaps of interest here, what is indeed lost on the anthropologists of this time is that the description of Arχunás and his tribe changes from reptilian to mammalian in the Ţaţamna Valley because it is a specific allusion to the war costumes of the indigenous inhabitants, people of a culture we know as the Kura-Araxes, who dressed in boarskins and wore horned, leather masks into battle. What is also worth noting however, is that the conflict between the indigenous and the migrants, which was long and rather tumultuous, resulted in the development of a new kind of social stratification that revolved around the war chief, or the tāgás, who, together with every able-bodied man in the clan answering only to him, (much as their ancestors had answered to the social elite in the north) were charged with the protection of the clan and its lands. Settlements in the region during this period were characterized by forts constructed on natural or artificial hills, the latter being especially common in the fertile lowlands of the river valley that were ideal for pasturing horses. On these hills, the people constructed terraces in the same fashion as the ones found north of the mountains that they would come to call the Ħáisgiras (Caucasus) that they had learned from the people they remembered as the Xasalkais, which evolved into a complex system of multi-layered hillforts, at the top of which were the drinking halls of the war chiefs and their warriors.



It is ultimately from this framework that the nation of the Sírkanais and the land called Sírkana were born.


Notes


If you cannot tell, there are multiple layers of interaction with different groups of people going on in the story here. We see for example a sacred kursa sack made of animal skin, a practice known in OTL Anatolia among the Hittites, Hattians, and Hurrians, which may or may not have been the progenitor of the Golden Fleece in the quest of Jason of Iolcus and the Argonauts. The practice of putting sacred objects inside of sacred animal-skin sacks seems to be connected to the Hurrians originally, who were almost certainly descendants of the progenitors of the Kura-Araxes culture, which got started in modern day Armenia around the valley of Mt. Ararat.

Much of the rest of the quest can be said to parallel to some degree or other the Circassian tale of the Nart Warzameg and the Damsel Psatina, in which a monster has kidnapped a woman and a hero, after encountering a little old man who offers his hospitality and tells him to help those in need, saves the lives of three animals who then help him on his quest. In the Circassian story, these animals are a hawk, a wolf, and a catfish, and they lead the horses of the Witch of the Flying Wagon back to Warzameg who is training to be her herdsman so that he can obtain a magic horse to save the damsel. Something of a different objective, but we can see that the origin of these mythemes would have been with the Proto-Circassian-speaking Maykopians that the Indo-European-speaking, Late Khvalynsk migrants assimilated into and ultimately absorbed. This is also reflected in the name of the monster that kidnaps the damsel (whose name is also Circassian), Arχunás, which survives in the OTL Nart Sagas as Arχwǝn Arχwǝnǝź, literally "the one who flies in coils", a name which alludes to his original nature as some sort of dragon. It's worth noting as well that the Ubykh version of this story records the monster as being more yeti-like as well, and so my interpretation of the yeti-like nature of the monster as having been informed by the war costumes of the Proto-Avaro-Andian-speaking Kura-Araxes peoples of the Kura River Valley is entirely my own invention, as is the Vaskakin, which would be mytheme transmitted by the Caucasian Hunter-Gatherers during a time that the Indo-European Sírkanais were still living in modern Southeastern Georgia.

I am also positing that the indigenous peoples of the Kura River basin were principally Proto-Avaro-Andian speaking, following the theory that Northeast Caucasian languages migrated to their present distribution from further south (we will be going with their original distribution being on the southern coast of the Caspian Sea ITTL) in waves. These people left more behind in the story however than the mammalian nature of the Circassian-named monster. The names of the three tigers that guard his lair are Indo-Europeanizations of Proto-Avaro-Andian Kwan-d:u "burned" (by the flames of Arχunás while he was still remembered as a dragon), ĦinHi-gwaržu "blood-fang", and Ts:wako "brilliant, radiant" (in reference to his being a white tiger). These tigers might have originally been a part of a warrior cult whose characters were appropriated for the purpose of the story. Likewise, old name of Sírkana is also from a Proto-Avaro-Andian form Kwan'a-Mšwa, meaning "bright place", as is this timeline's name of the Kura River, the Ţaţamna, which is from Čačam-mu-ana "the gnawing one".
 
Last edited:
So what we're seeing now is an attribution of the population of Palapřajaχī to the offspring of Psaphī and Tanχandras, and of the population of Sírkana to the offspring of Psaphī and Nangávas, with the two realms divided by the Greater Caucasus, right?
 
So what we're seeing now is an attribution of the population of Palapřajaχī to the offspring of Psaphī and Tanχandras, and of the population of Sírkana to the offspring of Psaphī and Nangávas, with the two realms divided by the Greater Caucasus, right?


Almost. The people of Xasalkī (that's the Sirkanian name, by the way) will be descendants of the warriors who took the Xasalkian women as their wives, with royal clans descended from Psaphī and Ƭevambevadī included. The people of Sírkana are the descendants of Psaphī and Sírkanas (Nangavas), and the two nations are divided as Xasalkī corresponding more or less to OTL Circassia north of the Kuban River but south of the Manych, and Sírkana essentially to the entire drainage basin of the Kura, which is essentially Azerbaijan and Southeastern Georgia.
 
Just slowly making my way through Chapter 2 and this is already IMO the best Bronze Age TO on this forum. A like doesn't justify how much I'm enjoying this thread.

Also is Sevaraţīa reference to the theory that Indo-Iranians first differed from their westerly cousins by the worship of purifying water goddesses manifested as Sáraswatih? Spriggs and Kocchar out put f some interesting evidence.
 
Last edited:
Just slowly making my way through Chapter 2 and this is already IMO the best Bronze Age TO on this forum. A like doesn't justify how much I'm enjoying this thread.

Also is Sevaraţī reference to the theory that Indo-Iranians first differed from their westerly cousins by the worship of purifying water goddesses manifested as Sáraswatih? Spriggs and Kocchar out put f some interesting evidence.

Aaaaawww! I appreciate that, it means a lot. A lot of research is going into this timeline. Lol

And Sevaraţī is actually not our lady here. That would be Prī Sálsevanţi, which literally means "Beloved of Many Pools". Sevaraţī's name is cognate to English swear. I'm not familiar with either Spriggs or Kocchar's ideas on the matter, but ITTL there will be no such thing as Indo-Iranians as our POD happened to early, sadly :(
 
Aaaaawww! I appreciate that, it means a lot. A lot of research is going into this timeline. Lol

And Sevaraţī is actually not our lady here. That would be Prī Sálsevanţi, which literally means "Beloved of Many Pools". Sevaraţī's name is cognate to English swear. I'm not familiar with either Spriggs or Kocchar's ideas on the matter, but ITTL there will be no such thing as Indo-Iranians as our POD happened to early, sadly :(

Very interesting. So Sevaraţī's a cognate for which OTL PIE goddess exactly? Or is she fulfilling a role that would have been fulfilled by say Hestia or Mithra as an overseer of alliances and bond?

As for the Indo-Iranians well I would have been surprised if even a similar group showed up. But that does raise the question of whether alt-Iran remains sparsely populated. AFAIK aside from Alan there have been only two or three BMAC towns found on East of the Zagros.
 
Very interesting. So Sevaraţī's a cognate for which OTL PIE goddess exactly? Or is she fulfilling a role that would have been fulfilled by say Hestia or Mithra as an overseer of alliances and bond?

Think of her more as a Kamrušepa or a Hekate. We'll see where her cult goes later, I haven't entirely fleshed her out just yet.

As for the Indo-Iranians well I would have been surprised if even a similar group showed up. But that does raise the question of whether alt-Iran remains sparsely populated. AFAIK aside from Alan there have been only two or three BMAC towns found on East of the Zagros.

Now sir, let's not lose our heads or anything :p, Iran will definitely be invaded ITTL, and by Indo-Europeans nonetheless, just not by "Iranians", or "Indo-Iranians" for that matter. I'm going to be channeling Indo-Europeans into Iran a little earlier probably ITTL, and so they're probably not going to have the same Uralic influences (collapsing of the vowel system, satemization, etc.) that Indo-Iranian manifested. We'll see.
 
Boooo, I wanted Austronesian Iran instead :/

Not quite sure how I would have been able to extend the butterflies out into Indonesia early enough to get them there before Indo-Europeans, but I’m open to an increased Austronesian Presence in the Indian Ocean, perhaps with mercantile communities in some cities in the Persia Gulf ;)
 
Not quite sure how I would have been able to extend the butterflies out into Indonesia early enough to get them there before Indo-Europeans, but I’m open to an increased Austronesian Presence in the Indian Ocean, perhaps with mercantile communities in some cities in the Persia Gulf ;)
If the Indo-Europeans don't reach the Indus Valley then maybe you could have IVC migrants moving east assimilate into Austronesian culture bringing civilizing influence to them causing an Austronesian expansion towards the Indus where they push up to Balochistan.
 
If the Indo-Europeans don't reach the Indus Valley then maybe you could have IVC migrants moving east assimilate into Austronesian culture bringing civilizing influence to them causing an Austronesian expansion towards the Indus where they push up to Balochistan.

IVC as in Indus Valley Civilization? To my knowledge, it is something of a debate where Proto-Austronesian was spoken, but even if it was spoken in Southern China at the time in question, it seems something of a tall order to get the IVC speakers into Southern China, don’t you think? The terrain of Southwest China and northern Southeast Asia is no joke.

Maybe I’m misunderstanding what you meant, though. Are you talking about some sort of an IVC maritime development? That may be possible, but IIRC the IVC had already mostly collapsed by the Late Bronze Age when Indo-Aryans came in from Afghanistan.

I’m really not sure what I’m going to do with India ITTL. Part of me wants to move the Elamites or some potentially related group (the Jiroft Culture, perhaps?) there before Indo-Europeans, while another thinks it would be interesting to havespeakers of a Para-Proto-Tocharian language move in. I was also entertaining the idea of a Tibeto-Birman invasion of some kind, but that also seems like a tall order to me, for some reason. It seems really hard to hold off potential migrants from Western Asia or Central Asia, since that’s where a lot of the technological advancements and migrations seemed to be coming from at the time.
 
IVC as in Indus Valley Civilization? To my knowledge, it is something of a debate where Proto-Austronesian was spoken, but even if it was spoken in Southern China at the time in question, it seems something of a tall order to get the IVC speakers into Southern China, don’t you think? The terrain of Southwest China and northern Southeast Asia is no joke.

Maybe I’m misunderstanding what you meant, though. Are you talking about some sort of an IVC maritime development? That may be possible, but IIRC the IVC had already mostly collapsed by the Late Bronze Age when Indo-Aryans came in from Afghanistan.

I’m really not sure what I’m going to do with India ITTL. Part of me wants to move the Elamites or some potentially related group (the Jiroft Culture, perhaps?) there before Indo-Europeans, while another thinks it would be interesting to havespeakers of a Para-Proto-Tocharian language move in. I was also entertaining the idea of a Tibeto-Birman invasion of some kind, but that also seems like a tall order to me, for some reason. It seems really hard to hold off potential migrants from Western Asia or Central Asia, since that’s where a lot of the technological advancements and migrations seemed to be coming from at the time.
Isn't it believed that Proto-Austronesians inhabited the Gangetic plain. Maybe I've got my groups confused. Anyways, here is a map I drew up quickly.
upload_2018-9-21_23-3-0.png

It's a terrible map (I know) but it gets the job done. When the IVC collapses, its inhabitants migrate east over the centuries into the Gangetic Plain where they assimilate into the local population bringing agriculture and other civilizing technology to them (like how Berbers brought agriculture to the Canaries but assimilated into native Canarian culture even adopting their language). Eventually, this agriculture causes a population boom which allows farming Austronesians to populate the Indus Valley.
 

Attachments

  • upload_2018-9-21_23-2-46.png
    upload_2018-9-21_23-2-46.png
    22.6 KB · Views: 330
Isn't it believed that Proto-Austronesians inhabited the Gangetic plain. Maybe I've got my groups confused. Anyways, here is a map I drew up quickly.
View attachment 409663
It's a terrible map (I know) but it gets the job done. When the IVC collapses, its inhabitants migrate east over the centuries into the Gangetic Plain where they assimilate into the local population bringing agriculture and other civilizing technology to them (like how Berbers brought agriculture to the Canaries but assimilated into native Canarian culture even adopting their language). Eventually, this agriculture causes a population boom which allows farming Austronesians to populate the Indus Valley.

No, it is not believed by anyone in the field of linguistics that Austronesians inhabited the Gangetic Plain at any point history, ever. Lol. I think you're confusing Austronesian languages with Austroasiatic languages, two language families with similar sounding names in English (the austro- "south" morpheme), but nonetheless entirely unrelated. Moreover, while there are a couple of branches of Austroasiatic dispersed to some degree in Eastern India (Khasic and Mundari), the most recent analyses by Paul Sidwell, coupled with genetic evidence, demonstrates that not only do Mundari and Khasic languages not necessarily form branches that are more primitive than say, Mon-Khmer, but that Austroasiatic languages only began dispersing into Southeast Asia around 3,500 years ago, IIRC. I was looking into the idea of an Austroasiatic India because of the talk of the Kubha-Vipaś substrate as being "Para-Munda", but while this language seems to share some typological features with Mundari and Khasic, it probably isn't related to them.
 
The Rise of Ešnunna and the Possession of Khanang
The Rise of Ešnunna and the Possession of Khanang




In the previous chapter, the question of what exactly a nation is was asked, and the ethnogenesis of a people and their version of this process was recounted. But now I want to ask you… how does a nation form? We like to gravitate toward certain figures in the process of the formation of nations and we simplify the process by attributing responsibility to them. George Washington might come to the American mind, or Hewitt Bernard if you’re Canadian. If you had asked a Roman in the 1st century AD to name such a figure for their own nation, they would probably have answered Romulus and Remus, or perhaps Caesar Augustus. But, can individual men be said to be the “founders of nations”, or are they just figureheads for broader movements happening within a given society at a given time? I would think that it’s probably a little bit of both, but that without masses behind them the figures that we consider to be the center of events wouldn’t have been able to accomplish much of anything. What can be said with certainty, is that nations are formed around group identities, and group identities are usually formed and hardened in conflict.



No, I didn’t say bloodshed, but conflict. One group of people sees themselves as different from the other, the reasons for which may vary from situation to situation, but ultimately the differences are strong enough as to be irreconcilable. The solutions to this problem also vary, and the lines between the groups are almost always blurred by something or other, though not so much as to render them indistinguishable. Maybe both groups of people agree to disagree and go their separate ways, maybe they don’t. We’ve seen this play out before, but it seems to be relatively rare. The “Velvet Divorce” between the Czechs and the Slovaks comes to mind. But, maybe the differences are only perceived by one group, and the other doesn’t understand what is wrong and is willing to fight to “work it out”… like a husband that is surprised to have been served divorce papers by his wife. Have you ever seen that? I know I have.



A woman all of the sudden wants a divorce, and her husband is completely flabbergasted, and pleads with her to stay… or maybe he’s pleading with her so she doesn’t take his children away and ruin him so completely financially that he’ll never be able to move out of his parents’ house again. Sometimes the guy is just a blind idiot, but sometimes the woman is a conniving shrew. I’ve seen it both ways, and I’ve seen it the other way around too. The man serves the woman with the divorce papers, and she just doesn’t know what to do. I don’t say that sarcastically either. She’s probably sacrificed her professional potential for their life together, and maybe by now her physical beauty has started to die down a little - the lines are starting to show around her eyes, or maybe her hair’s a little gray, or maybe she has love-handles. Maybe all of the above. The agreement between her and her husband was pretty simple when you break it down, though. He provides the house, and she makes it a home, and no, that doesn’t just mean making sandwiches and doing the laundry. A homemaker is a whole lot more than a maid, because if a maid was all this person was, you could probably hire one for a lot cheaper and a lot less emotional hassle. I’ve heard it said that the homemaker provides the breadwinner with the sense of security that allows them to go out into the world and put up with all the nonsense necessary to acquire the resources for the house, but the inherant trouble with being one is that your profession is completely unquantifiable, and so it’s not exactly something you can put on a resume after you’re husband serves you with those papers, is it? So the begging ensues, “I don’t understand. What’s changed? I love you! Please, don’t do this?” And then the tears, but he wants out. I’ve also seen some women get particularly vicious in these situations once they’ve realized there’s no way to make him stay. If she’s already got kids, she might accuse him of physical, emotional, or sexual abuse, but if she doesn’t, the man serving the divorce papers might find himself astounded at how sexually attractive she all of the sudden finds him.



Oh, is that uncomfortable? Good. History is uncomfortable, and it needs to be, lest we repeat its mistakes. Now imagine this on a societal scale. Group A just can’t understand what Group B’s problem is. They’ve lived together for generations, and maybe they even share blood to some degree, with the lines between the two having been blurred to some degree or other by mixed marriage. Nonetheless, a distinct core has remained in both, and now one wants a divorce. Why? What happened? Surely whatever is wrong isn’t so insurmountable that divorce is in order, is it? That’s ridiculous. No, they HAVE to figure it out, because they’re clearly stronger together than they ever would be apart. Maybe that sounds a little megalomaniacal when we aren’t pointing the lense at our own society or worse, at our own relationships, but you know… we’re different. Problems in other people’s marriages or their societies might be irreconcilable, but not ours. We’re the exception. Everyone likes to think they’re special. Of course, maybe the differences are really obvious to anyone looking in from the outside, but maybe they’re not. But it’s especially when the differences seem to only matter to such a degree as to require divorce to one of the interested parties that things get really, really ugly. You know… because one party feels betrayed. Maybe Group B, or Person B, wasn’t even playing it cool, but it was cool enough for Group A or Person A not to notice. How dare they! After all I’ve/we’ve done for them! They’re gonna be sorry. And so the history books might as well use blood for ink…



Maybe one group expels the other from the territory that they have defined as “theirs”, or maybe they just annihilate them. History is full of both of those. A lot of Germans were deported from various parts of Eastern Europe after World War II, which was complete with deliberate starvation that resulted in a whole lot of deaths. A lot of Armenians too from Turkey during World War I, and when moving them was difficult or otherwise impractical, the Turkish military took to murdering them. I’ve read some pretty horrific stories of mass executions so inhumane that it’s hard to believe that people carried them out. Genocides like these are ongoing in our modern day and age, even though it seems like you have to go to the far fringes of the internet sometimes to read about them. The conflict with ISIS in Iraq and its various splinter groups in Syria has been especially genocidal of the Assyrians and the Yazidis. But then again, it can also get pretty inhumane when Group A wants to force Group B to stay, and wants to punish them for their insolence. The Srebrenica Massacre might come to mind as an example. But ultimately, without something to contrast itself to, a conscience of national identity isn’t going to form, and once hardened, it can take a very long time to soften, especially if the nation in question finds itself pitted against its neighbors on more than one occasion after this has happened. Contrary to what a number of university professors might tell you, this process is as old as time, and probably even predates our species.



We can see it all over history, when people who previously didn’t think of themselves as different gradually grow apart, and eventually need to separate into their own spaces to be governed by people that they perceive to be more like them, whether this person is a member of the newly formed ethnicity or merely espouses values that they deem to be in line with their own. And just like the sun still rises in the east and sets in the west, this process is observable in the time of the Ríxavaka, and the Šuparšungal Khananga’, or the “Dominion of Khanang”. In the Ríxavaka, we see the ethnogenesis of the Sírkanais as having been informed by a moral dilemma in which certain members of the tribe engaged in adultery with the wives of the Xasalkian nobles while others did not. The reality was that there was a conflict between the upper and lower classes of the society, and the lower classes, with their social mobility increasingly curtailed, found somewhere else to live, because there was indeed somewhere else to go. In this story we can also observe that a certain group of people, the Xasalkais, were demographically replaced or absorbed by a large group of migrants, who adopted a number of aspects of their material culture, but ultimately replaced them in the immaterial realm in much of the lands that these people had previously thought of as their own. The Sírkanais would represent this in their story as the Xasalkais allowing themselves to be conquered in a more or less peaceful manner (minus the massacre of the Xasalkian nobility), but a very different story was to play out in the south, one that was driven at least partially by the migration of the Sírkanais into the Ţaţamna drainage basin.



Now, the phrase Šuparšungal Khananga’ literally means the “Possession of Khanang”, but is often translated as meaning “dominion” in other languages because of the way it was used to refer to a sovereign nation, but calling it the “Dominion of Khanang” tells us very little about the idealogical framework of the nation that bore this name. It’s not as though the Ungsangkikka didn’t have a word that was more or less equivalent to “dominion”, but they used the word “possession” because they thought of the land and everything in it as the collective possession of a people. If you had asked an individual Sangkikka say, 4,000 years ago who they saw as the founder of their nation, they would have given you an epithet of an individual who was deified for his deeds. This person was most widely known as the Engal Sumkika, the “great black-bearded lord”, or perhaps the Engal Aka-Ua, the “great lord of the horned crown”, and of course the Luthakha, the “savior”, but never referenced by his personal name, Lulimnir Andangal, at least not in public. That was too sacred, and was only ever mentioned when recounting THEIR story of the formation of their country. This man is credited with many things in the literary traditions, among them being the construction of a giant “ark” that is the vessel that saves the Ungsangkikka from a flood caused by the gods in retribution for their ingratitude, but also, and more importantly for our purposes here, for restoring order to the country when it was set upon by barbarians and laying the foundations of the state.



Ingratitude? Ingratitude for what? How was this displayed? The Bible tells us that God flooded the world because the people in it had become “wicked”, and we’re just supposed to let our imaginations fly off the handle as to what they were up to. The Namḫarkan, literally “the rebirth”, is quite a bit more specific to what exactly was wrong. The Ungsangkikka had taken the gifts of civilization bestowed upon them by the gods for granted, and they had not only allowed hordes of barbarians to migrate into the country almost entirely unabated, but… they had allowed them into their cities, and into their sacred institutions. It should be specified that the story is very clear about who is and isn’t a nangaḫ, or “savage”, and not everyone who isn’t a Sangkikka (“black-headed-person”) is one. The people of the city of Ḫamatsi, located to the northeast in a region known to us as the headwaters of the Diyala River in the Shahrizor Plain, were not savages, neither were the people of Nimma (Elam), or the far away land of Waraḫše. The people of Tilmun certainly weren’t savages, but kinsmen to the Ungsangkikka. So, what separates a savage from a civilized person according to the narrative?



Although it is a gross, overgeneralizing misrepresentation of the truth, the story goes into a great amount of depth describing various different barbarian groups that had, by the time of Lulimnir, invaded, plundered, and settled within the country. These peoples include the Ungurḫene, the Ungḫurrene, and the Aḫatsumakene, who can all be grouped under the umbrella term Khurene, meaning “easterners”, but also the Martune which itself seems to be a more specific term despite the fact that it literally means “westerners”. The various different “Khurene” peoples are described as diverse in religious practices and varied to some degree or other in language, but ultimately “grown from the same seeds” and highly uncivilized, living a nomadic lifestyle herding sheep and goats, but few cattle and fewer horses, adorning their bodies with various “grim images”, and wearing the teeth of their enemies around their necks. They are not described as practicing agriculture, and they frequently pillage the settlements of the Ungsangkikka and the “Martune” alike, stealing their possessions and their women. The “Martune” are a far more civilized and well-adjusted group, with many of them having intermarried among the Ungsangkikka for generations, even making up the demographic majorities of such cities as Khiš and Akate, which are referred to in the story as having been “bastardized” through this process. Though they are more civilized than the various “Khurene” peoples, they are described as somewhere between them and the Ungsangkikka, with no real inclination to the upkeep of the cities they inhabit, and certainly no real sense of piety toward the gods of the country.



Is any of this true? Well, yes. Definitely. The names are muddied up a little as they have not only been translated into the language of the Ungsangkikka, Emengir, but also because they’re confused. The umbrella term “Khurene” is referrencing people speaking various early representations of languages we would call “Hurrian”, and they were the members of a culture that we call the “Kura-Araxes” culture. We can even see the ethnonym by which we know them in the story after we shave off the Emengir word ung “people” and the Emengir plural of human nouns, -(e)ne, which leaves us with Ḫurri, itself a contraction of the native Ḫurrwoḫḫe. We can apply the same treatment to the names Ungurḫene and Aḫatsumakene (minus the Emengir genitive -ak on the latter) and we see Urḫi, a contraction of Urḫoḫḫe “steadfast (man)” and Aḫatsum, a “Hurrian” ethnonym and toponym, respectively. But, what about the “Martune”? The trained eye would be able to see Martu in here, and they might complain that that name was used by the Ungsangkikka to describe a people we know as the “Amorites”, who didn’t enter the political scene of Khanang/Khienkir until centuries later. So, is the Namḫarkan referring to “Amorites”? No, no it isn’t. The term Martu in Emengir simply meant “westerner”, and since most of the peoples to their west spoke continuously diverging varieties of languages we call “Semitic”, there wasn’t a need just yet to differentiate the “Amorites” from the “Semites” that were already in Khanang. To us, these peoples are the “Akkadians”, so named for the city that was the capital of a dynasty that belonged to this ethnicity, but what they called themselves is something that’s lost to history, in our time, at least.



We often have a lot of trouble contextualizing history, even current affairs. We like to make these charicatures of people and time periods, but the charicatures are a lot like statues in the sense that they’re lifeless representations of the human experience. That’s exactly what the Ungsangkikka did in the Namḫarkan, which, like any epic story of a country’s founding is an attempt by people who lived hundreds of years after the fact to make sense of real events experienced by real people. Now, both of these groups should be thought of as more of “pan-ethnicities” than anything else, sort of in the sense that quite a number of the Ungsangkikka thought of themselves at the time, which you might compare to how the Ancient Greeks perceived their position in the world. Different, but… the same, or at least sharing a common culture, religion, and divergent dialects of the same language. Both of them were more recently migrated to the land of Khanang than the Ungsangkikka, but opinion on their presence was quite a varied matter. The Martune described in the story called themselves the Ts’ābū, a word that meant “people”, or perhaps “army-men”, or even “troopers”, and they had been following the course of the Puranuna (Euphrates) River for about 250 years, give or take a decade or so, in search of good land to graze their cattle… at least at the start. Again, the perceptions of these people varied among the Ungsangkikka, and so did their treatment. Some people were very tolerant, even eager to accept them, others didn’t really care about their presence as long as it didn’t interfere with their daily affairs, and others were hostile, and even violent toward them. The latter tended to be the case among the Ungsakikkan herders, who had the longest and most regular contact with them, and who stood to lose the most from their presence from the start. After all, while they mostly tended different kinds of livestock, with the Ungsakikka preferring sheep, goats, and donkeys, and the Ts’ābū tending more cattle, but all of the animals drank from the same river or at the same watering holes, and water is precious in the desert. Many Ungsangkikka in the northern cities that either had significant Ts’ābū minorities or were predominated by them (Khiš and Akate) also looked down on them, as the founding Ts’ābean populations of these cities were often descendants of farm and construction hands employed by the city so that the local Ungsangkikka themselves could commit themselves to more “refined” crafts, which those poor among them perceived as an attempt by the social elite to do away with the “less desirable” members of their own.



Again, this mirrors phenomena that we can observe in real time in our modern day and age. Take for example the mass migration of Latin Americans into the United States and Canada. Maybe I’m poking a beehive bringing it up, but that’s precisely the reason that it’s worth drawing an analogy, here. See, it has been a question for some time just where the origins of the “Sumerians”, the Ungsangkikka, or the “black-headed people” lie. Were they indigenous to Southern Mesopotamia, or did they migrate from elsewhere? If they were more recent migrants, then from where? Some speculate that they came from further north, perhaps on what we call the “Iranian Plateau” or the lush, forest region on the southern coast of the Caspian Sea. Others have posited that they were from India, or perhaps the Zagros Mountains, but the most plausible theories place their origins somewhere in the “Persian Gulf”, perhaps being the descendants of the people who once lived on the shorline of a bounteous river that was formed by the merger of the Tigris and the Euphrates that used to spill directly into the “Indian Ocean”. There may be some truth in all of these theories however, but whatever the case, the people that inhabited the country and now made up its demographic majority certainly felt indigenous to it by the time in question, much like Americans and Canadians do today. On the other hand, there were those who felt that the migration of other peoples into the country was just business as usual, since their own tales said that they came from the island of Tilmun. The fact of the matter was that Khienkir, the “land of noble lords”, was itself a diverse country, one that wasn’t unified under a single overarching government the same way the United States is, albeit the various cities and the peoples that inhabited them generally respected a common social order, one that recognized the city of Unuk as the center from which that social order emmanated and where its longevity was preserved through religious ritual. This had been the status quo for some centuries now, and though the Ungsangkikka, the “black-headed people” were by far the majority across much of the country, they were not the only ethnic group there, and they shared authority by rotating the office of en “lord” or ensi “lord of the fields” between the various families of pedigree of the various peoples of the country. So, perhaps not perfectly analogous to the American or Canadian situation of the present day and time, but certainly similar enough for us to be able to have some kind of perception of the feelings of people on different sides of the issue of the future of their people.



By the time of the migration of the Sírkanais into Sírkana however, other cities had begun to rise to prominence, and some had even begun to question the primacy of Unuk openly. Not that they were obligated legally to pay the city any homage, but this was just a social norm that went back a thousand years. These feelings were particularly prominent around the cities of Khiš, called Kiššatu by the northwesterly migrants who now made up a demographic majority within its walls, and Šurupphak, the ancient city of Ninlil, who was also called Sut, and also Akate, which was composed almost entirely of Ts’ābū. For Šurupphak to question the authority of Unuk was one thing, as the bulk of its population belonged to the Ungsangkikka, but for Khiš and Akate, thought of by many in some of the other cities and especially in the country as bastard children of the gods, was another. Does that sound familiar?



Though this is perhaps where the analogies that can be drawn between Khanang and contemporary Canada and the United States ends, or maybe it isn’t… I guess it depends where you stand on current affairs. This was a time of drastic change. You might even say that the chess board was flipped over, but not by some angry player, but in fact by forces entirely out of the control of anyone inside the country. Natural disaster was one, with years of severe flooding that affected not only Khiš, but Šurupphak, and most of the cities and smaller settlements in between. The cities were damaged, some settlements leveled, fields were utterly devastated, and for a long time herders had to find pastureland far away from the cities around which they had been grazing their flocks during the warmer months for generations, putting them into direct conflict with one another, even more so than they already had been, over land. It can also be said that in times like these there’s normally quite a bit of fingerpointing. Maybe something went missing in the clean up process and someone blames someone else, “He stole my ram!” But maybe someone didn’t respect certain taboos, or carry out a particular religious ritual. It can also be said of course that times like these can bring out the worst in a society, because the chaos presents a chance for those more predisposed to predatory behavior to engage in it. After all, whose going to stop them, right? So, maybe some people make off with some other people’s belongings because the opportunity presents itself. It’s not necessarily ethnically motivated, and it might not even be just one or primarily one ethnicity reveling in the chaos. But the truth isn’t always as important as the perception of the truth, is it?



But, was Lulimnir Andangal a real person? Yes he was, just like Tanχandras and Nangavas in the Ríxavaka, and like them, his story is tied up in a lot of mythogical allegories to real events, although it could be said that his story has quite a bit more fact than metaphor in it. Maybe he didn’t build an ark and save the Ungsangkikka from a flood, but he did live at a time when a number of cities in the country were suffering from the long-term effects of terrible flooding, and he did almost single-handedly lay down the foundations of a state through what could be termed a “rapid reconquest” of the country known commonly as Khanang, but poetically as Khienkir. The epic however, paradoxically remembers historical events in reverse order, with the flood being placed after Lulimnir Andangal had become king and… well, just about restored order to the country.



He is said to have been born in a mixed family, with a Khurean maternal grandfather who is represented in the epic as having been a cruel master to his grandson after the boy’s father had died at the hands of a bull. So cruel is his grandfather in fact, that Lulimnir runs away as a child and becomes even more wild than the Khureans with whom he was being raised. He is said to have shed his clothes and let all of the hair of his body grow unchecked as he matured, slowly forgetting the language of humans, instead preferring the company of animals. As the Khurean tribe with which he was living inhabited the region north of the city of Ešnunna, this is where he roams, eating meat raw and freeing animals trapped by hunters. When he is 14, he himself his caught by a hunter named Papirkina, who parades him as his trophy through the city. The king of Ešnunna, Usakarešundu, happens to be in the market place and sees this display of inhumanity and demands a stop to it. The people of call him a monster, but the king sees that the monster is a boy, and decides to take him to the temple priestess, a woman named Ngešnukalkha, who uses her beauty to tempt him from the wild, civilizing him through sexual intercourse. On the first night, Lulimnir runs away, but when he attempts to fraternize with his animal friends, he realizes that they no longer understand him and run away when he gets too close, so he returns to the priestess for more “civilizing”. After the process is finished, he is brought to the king, who asks him for his service, which the boy gives. What this entails isn’t clear, but it would seem that three years later, when Lulimnir is almost on the cusp of manhood, the Bull of Heaven, which has been ravaging the entire country of Khanang because of the repudiation of the king of Unuk of the goddess Inanna, comes to Ešnunna and begins to wrick havoc there. The people of the city call to their king for aid, who galantly rides out of his palace atop his great stallion, Ḫupallikakal, with his new servant running along side him, and all of the king’s men-at-arms trailing behind on foot. Despite the efforts of the men-at-arms however, the bull cannot be brought to heel, as it is so wild, so enormous, and so strong that it makes short work of a hundred of them. It is only when Lulimnir grabs it by the horns and wrestles it to the ground that Usakarešundu is able to deal it a fateful blow, subsequently butchering it on the spot and distributing its meat to the masses of the city, hurling a piece of its leg at Inanna for her impudence, but carrying the horns to Unuk itself and dedicating them to her in her temple at Eanna. After this incident, Lulimnir is trained to fight in the army of the king, where he demonstrates his prowess yet again at a battle near the subservient town of Thuthup, where he is able to hold a bridge from an entire army for hours until finally falling unconscious due to his wounds. From here, it is decided by the king that Lulimnir will accompany him on an expedition to the fabled Cedar Mountain, where dwells the Living One, Ḫuwawa. There is a portion of the epic in which the young Lulimnir asks the aging king why he would journey to the Cedar Mountain and pick a fight with a monster, and the king explains to him not only the impermanence of the human condition, but the decaying nature of his people and the necessity to inspire them through heroic feat. The boy advises him to seek the favor of Uthu, the Sun God, which the king does, being granted the help of seven constellations, which will guide him on his journey, after which the men of the city are mobilized and they set out.



By now I’m sure that this sounds quite familiar to the studied eye. Usakarešundu is highly reminiscent of Gilgamesh, or “Pilkameš” as the people we call the “Sumerians” knew him, and Lulimnir of Enkhitu. Both Pilkameš and Usakarešundu are said to have slain the Bull of Heaven, which was set upon the country in a fit of rage for the rejection of her advances by Pilkameš, and likewise both kings went on an adventure to the Cedar Mountain where they encountered the monster Ḫuwawa, all with a trusty companion who was originally a wild man tamed through sexual intercourse with a priestess. The Namḫarkan however differs in that the wild man is not directly created by a god, but is a runaway child, a Sangkikka, looking to escape a scornful and abusive barbarian grandfather. It also reinforces the message of the barbarian vs. the Ungsangkikka when the king reminds the boy of the need to inspire the people through great deeds. Here, Enkhitu/Lulimnir is not just the servant or the companion of the king, but his protege. But the tale differs radically from here in terms of the showdown between the monster, the king, and the boy.



Once they have traveled beyond the seven mountains and into the forest, the entire army is stunned by one of the auras of Ḫuwawa, the cedars’ guardian, and they are all subsequently knocked unconscious. Lulimnir is the first to rise, seeing the terrible monster standing over him, which is described as being covered in scales, with a face like coiled entrails, the long horns of a bull, the claws of a bear, and the talons of an eagle. The monster disappears into the forest, and Lulimnir rouses the king and what men he can, but most of them are in a deep sleep. Lulimnir is afraid of going further, but Usakarešundu reminds him of his strength and tells him to take heart, and they journey deeper into the forest until they come upon the dwelling of Ḫuwawa, who bellows at them from within it to stop and kneel to the ground, and come no closer lest he will tear them to shreds. Usakarešundu then pretends to wish to form a marital alliance with the beast, offering up his daughters, Anenthen and Khuktiri, to be his wives. He further promises Ḫuwawa luxuries unknown to him in his remote mountain lair: water in leather bottles, sandals large and small, choice gemstones, fine flour for bread among them. For each of these gifts the monster surrenders one of his protective auras, telling the king and his men that they are contained inside giant cedars nearby, which the king then orders what men are awake to cut into logs for the journey home. Only when he has no protective auras left does the king attempt to take him prisoner, casting a net over him while his men strike him many times with clubs. Ḫuwawa entertains this and drops to the ground, pretending to plea for princely mercy from the king, while Lulimnir counsels the king not to give it, and to take this opportunity to kill him. The monster laughs and tears through the net, tearing the men to shreds and taking the king by the throat and nearly choking the life out of him. It is only when Lulimnir comes to the king’s aid that his life is saved, and the king and the boy are said to engage in an epic battle in which the trees of the forest are torn down and used as weapons. Ḫuwawa ultimately overpowers Lulimnir, pushing him to the ground and rushing him before he can get up, and saying, “You would tell your king to kill me when I was helpless. Perhaps I should kill you now? Or should I show you the princely mercy you would have denied me?” to which Lulimnir says, “Do what you will.” The monster then replies, “You have come to my home and won my auras fairly, for it is I who was foolish enough to trust a man. For that you may take them, but you will not have my life. No, I will take my revenge on your children one day when they are like I was as I sat in my home at rest. But for now, you may have my auras.” And with that, he disappears.



That’s quite a different ending to the story than the one we know. For us, the monster always dies, and his head is presented to Enlil. But, in the Namḫarkan, he lives. Why? Obviously, like the Ríxavaka is not only an allegorical memory of historical events, but a powerful piece of political propaganda that alludes to one of the foundational theories of the state. Ḫuwawa is a monster in a foreign land, one that the Ungsangkikka disturbed in his abode and even took something from, unable to be defeated or even held captive. Lulimnir was wild, but he was a Sangkikka and could thus be tamed, but Ḫuwawa is something else, and something that vows to take its revenge. So one might say perhaps that he is a reminder that the world cannot be civilized, and that expansion outside of Khanang will bring about its downfall.



The cedars are taken back to the city of Ešnunna, containing the auras within them, which will protect the city in its time of need. Still, Usakarešundu is not satisfied with this alone, and fears that the monster’s promise was to come after HIS children for the trickery he had personally used to obtain them, and so he first adopts Lulimnir, but then later elevates him as his heir once he is a man for fear that his own progeny will attract the monster. The king has three sons, Lumaḫra, Inkhalak, and Purukhuk, and as one might expect, once he dies this causes a civil war. Purukhuk supports his brother Inkhalak, but neither of them support the eldest, Lumaḫra, who seeks his support from the king of Khiš, Enmeparakesi, who gives him the grain and sheep necessary to hire an army of Ungurḫene to fight for him and storm the city. This part of the story also plays out in an eerily familiar manner. Apparently, Lumaḫra has never met Lulimnir, the latter having only entered his father’s service long after he was sent away to govern one of the subservient towns (which is left anonymous). It is also stated in the story that the king died unexpectedly, and at the instigation of Inkhalak, who wished to paint his father’s elevation of Lulimnir as his having been raving mad with a sudden, mind-eating illness. Lumaḫra therefore was not at his death bed either. Thus, when he attacks the city, demanding that Lulimnir be submitted, to which the boy now barely a man volunteers and is stripped naked and sent out of the city in chains. Lumaḫra immediately beats him once he is brought to his presence, and sends his emissaries to the city once again to bring his brothers to counsel. He then demands to know if the young man brought to him is Lulimnir, the wild boy from the countryside that was trapped by Papirkina. Lulimnir is said to be able to be distinguished by his long hair on his head, his growing beard (though at this point his beard is just stubble), and his body hair that he lets grow unchecked, despite having lived in civilized society for some years now. Having learned some level of guile from his mentor, he answers that he isn’t, and that if he were that Lumaḫra would be dead where he stood, for which he receives another beating. While he is being beaten, it is reported by Lumaḫra’s barbarian troops that the wild man Lulimnir is standing on the walls of the city, and so Lumaḫra dispatches them to fight, leaving himself alone in his camp but for a contingent of guards. It is here that Lulimnir reveals himself and breaks free of his chains and kills the guards and takes Lumaḫra hostage, explaining that the man on the wall was Inkhalak, with dyed sheep’s wool on his head to make him appear to be Lulimnir. Purukhuk has lead the charge against the Ungurḫene, who are beaten badly, and surrender when they see Lulimnir, now dressed in Lumaḫra’s clothes, and their prince naked in chains.



The brothers Purukhuk and Inkhalak apparently believe that the promise uttered by Ḫuwawa was directed at Lulimnir, and so, once back in the walls and celebrating his victory in a city that just a few years ago scorned him as a monster himself, they have him drugged, to be taken to Cedar Mountain where Ḫuwawa can take his vengeance. Purukhuk is the one given the assignment however, who is unable to carry it out, afraid of offending his father’s spirit as he knows that his father wasn’t mad when he named Lulimnir as his heir. He takes his foster-brother out of the city to the lands north of the Amumuna’ (Diyala) River and sets him free, warning him to never to approach the city of Ešnunna again. Lumaḫra is executed, and Inkhalak is made ensi, and affairs in the country resume as they had for some years, all the while Lulimnir is tormented by visions of a flood that will wash over the country and destroy the Ungsangkikka. He begins working as a fuller, and traveling with textile caravans all around the country, touring the most ancient cities of Khanang and finds most of them in a sorry state, with their sacred institutions fully monetized, the people having no sense of the dignity of their heritage, and their women lewd and adulterous. The cities of Akhšakh and Tsimbir give him hope for his people however, as they are northerly enough to have been “bastardized” (we might say “Semiticized” or “Hurrianized”, but the texts make very clear their perceptions of the matter of the presence of foreign invaders in the country) in the way that cities like Khiš and Akate had been, and yet it’s here that the Ungsangkikka are the most pious, offering their thanks to the gods of their fathers for the gifts of civilization to them.



He is also surprised to hear his own name being sung in the streets in these cities, as he is apparently something of a folk hero already for his deeds in the service of Usakarešundu of Ešnunna, whose sons now “surround themselves with barbarian guards” for fear of the wrath of their own people. The story here alludes to a sort of crisis of identity within the protagonist, who is not sure whether or not to let his father’s people whither away into obscurity for their decadence, arrogance, impiety, and ingratitude for what the gods have given them that he has personally observed in their own heartland, or whether he should fight for the preservation of his people’s inheritance. He ultimately comes to the conclusion that the gifts of civilization were given to the Ungsangkikka, and that to give up on their preservation would be to turn his nose up to the gods who, for years now have been showing him the fate of the country through his visions, and so he resolves not only to overthrow Inkhalak of Ešnunna, but also to “purge the land of the barbarian” and to preserve the sovereignty of the Ungsangkikka as a stronger, united people. The story goes on to tell how Lulimnir, knowing the barbarians intimately as he did having been raised among them (the amount of time he spent in the wild isn’t specified), amassed an army from the cities of Akhšakh and Tsimbir of pious and patriotic young Ungsangkikka and marched on Ešnunna, where he defeated Inkhalak and not only cleansed the city of its barbarian inhabitants, but Inkhalak’s supporters, and Inkhalak himself, who was sacrificed to Nunatsu, the patron deity of the city, along with the rest of his immediate family and his attendants, by way of ritual piercing of their skulls with a pick axe.



But, the story doesn’t end here. No, now that Lulimnir has claimed his rightful place as King of Ešnunna, he uses the seven cedars from Cedar Mountain to construct a giant ark, and calls the people of Khanang to bring their children and their animals aboard it, as the gods are angry with the Ungsangkikka for their ingratitude and are preparing to destroy them for it. Not everyone listens to his message, and indeed quite a number of people, especially those in the ancient city Unuk, which is perhaps the most degenerate of all, laugh at it. But, the pious cities of Tsimbir and Akhšakh gather on the ark, and so too do many of the royal families of the other cities, including Akka, the son of Enmeparakesi of Khiš, and Ensiphatakutsika, the king of Unuk. In the end however, many of the Ungsangkikka do not listen, and so when the flood comes they are swept away by it. During the flood however, which is said to have lasted seven days, the sun god, Uthu, appears to Lulimnir and warns him that he was wrong to let the royal families onto the ark, and that despite their façade of piety and good will, that they will try to kill him. The people on the ark are apparently very on edge, and so Lulimnir does not go about trying to arrest anyone until the attempts on his life begin, one for every night beginning on the fourth night of the flood. Ensiphatakutsika had offered his daughter, Ninnikašaka’, as a junior wife to Lulimnir, who was already married to Anenthen, the daughter of Usakarešundu, in order to gain his passage. Growing ever more paranoid by the night, it’s when this junior wife tries to poison his beer with crushed cherry pits that the conspiracy is divulged, by his senior wife, who tortures the princess mercilessly until she gives her the answers she wants. Now Lulimnir realizes that the corruption of the people has come from the top down, and the corrupted royal families will only corrupt the country again given the opportunity because the only thing they care about is furthering their own power. So, when the flood ends and the raven finds land, the people are released, the nobles of the different cities are each taken to their respective cities and sacrificed as Lumaḫra had been before them, along with their families and their attendants, to properly rededicate the land as the possession of its people.



Now, is any of that true? Well, yes and no. So, by the time Lulimnir Andangal was a child, it could be said that the culture of the Ungsangkikka was on the brink of collapse, and its people close to permanently losing their sovereignty to various foreign invaders. The floods happened well before he was born, a whole century in fact, but it can definitely be said that they had a substantial part in shaping the man that he became. The Ts’ābū had risen to considerable prominence, particularly at Khiš, but also at the relatively recently founded city of Akate, which traced its foundation to an original colony of Ungsangkikka, many of whom were only remembered in the city’s cemeteries. The Sangkikka herder seemed almost to be an endangered species, and so too was the Sangkikka farmer, at least in the north. The Ts’ābū had replaced the herders for the most part, but not necessarily through aggressive displacement, but because the primary grazing rights of the Ungsangkikka nearest to the rivers had resulted in their suffering the worst loss of livestock during the floods, and the same could be said of the farmers. The northern invaders, as mentioned earlier, belonged to the same pan-ethnicity, which among them was often called Urḫoḫḫena “the steadfast ones”, but among some of them it was Ḫurrwoḫḫena, and like many other pan-ethnicities in history, they perceived one another as close relatives, and thus tended to trust each other before others, although this rule was not universal. In fact, Lulimnir himself was of a mixed background as the story says, with an Urḫoḫḫe for a grandfather on his mother’s side who had taken two Ts’ābean wives after his Ungsangkikkan wife, who the tales of his upbringing remember as Mulan, and a Ts’ābean grandmother on his father’s side. Born to a tribe of Ungsangkikkan shepherds, his father died a very mundane death at the hands of a donkey that kicked him in the chest hard enough to stop his heart, leaving his mother unable to support herself, and subsequently needing to move back in with her father, as she was now once again his responsibility. His grandfather’s name is variously given as Tukkukoḫḫe, Katsinpu, and Urki, although none of these could actually have been his name, as the first is a “Hurrian” ethnic name, while the other two are Ungsangkikkan, meaning “club” and “dog”, respectively. The Khanangan accounts of this man are usually vague, but describe him as having been a cruel and abusive patron, which is an element of the story that was later added to paint Lulimnir in a more sympathetic light, because the truth of the matter was that his grandfather was a caring, but firm parent to his grandson.



Lulimnir did rise to prominence in the recorded battle near the town of Thuthup, but he was never named the heir of Usakarešundu, as there was never any ensi by that name over the city in the first place, and his crisis of identity had happened quite a few years earlier, which was why he had abandoned his grandfather’s people. The incumbent ensi of Ešnunna, Enkhuksikua, was overthrown by Lulimnir and a “nationalist” faction within the priesthood for the alliance he struck with the Aḫatsoḫḫena that granted them extensive privileges within the lands controlled by the city and also ceded just about everything north of the Lesser Tsap to them, which was to be sealed with a marriage to one of their princesses. He was indeed cast down from the kingship that he had seized however by one of the sons of Enkhuksikua, who was named Inkhalak, who was entirely backed by the Aḫatsoḫḫean chiefs, but he was not released by a younger brother of the new ensi. No, Purukhuk was instead the name of a foot soldier who was raiding Lulimnir’s hideout and saw him in the mud, hiding in the marshes of the Itikna (Tigris) River, but upon finding him, he kept his secret, asking that he remember his name when he overthrew Inkhalak and claimed Ešnunna, which he eventually did, but not before he had roused nationalist rebellions in Tsimbir and Akhšakh and overthrown the royal families of those cities and gone on a long campaign of ethnic cleansing, deporting the Ts’ābū to the upper reaches of the Itikna River and murdering those who would not go willingly, only returning to Ešnunna when his power had been firmly established. From Ešnunna, the Aḫatsoḫḫena and the Urḫoḫḫena were expelled from the lands north of the Amumuna’ all the way to the Greater Tsap, which would be the northernmost frontier in the centuries to come. These ethnic cleansing events are remembered in the story as the flood that cleansed the land not only of the barbarians, but of the impious and ungrateful Ungsakikka who had given up their heritage to them. The sacrifice of the royals when the flood was over is perhaps the grimmest memory that the story contains however, as it is a justification for the manner in which Lulimnir systematically murdered the royals of every city in Khanang and replaced them with members of his own family. This put him in direct control of the entire country, and he moved his capital to Ešnunna, where he was named Engal Enena’, the “great lord of lords”. So was established the Possession of Khanang.
 
Last edited:
Top