12,600 Years Ago - The War Against the Water Kings

12,600 Years Ago - The War Against the Water Kings

Urtulu, a chief among Calendar Men, swung his long flint edged war club, all around, his warriors surged forward. Finally, winning the hill, his men raised the standards of their communities, Yth and Pna. He took a moment to look around.

The other hills were being taken, the power of the Water Kings was finally broken. Beyond the hills, he could see the buildings and towers of Uhgghot, the massive city around which the Water Kings had made their stand.

A runner came scrambling up the hill.

“What news?” Urtulu demanded.

“Bahdash and his generals were killed by Hytnin the bold,” the messenger panted, the forces of the Water Kings are retreating. A delegation has approached to negotiate submission.”

Urtulu nodded. Even better than he had hoped.

“I will go to join the Calendar Men for council, we’ll see to undoing their wicked works.”

“There is a complication.”

Of course. There always was.

“What is it?”

“Bahdnash has had all his slaves killed.”

Urtulu was appalled.

“It’s not even close to slave killing season,” he snarled. What an appalling waste.

“What was he thinking? Who labours for the Water Kings if he kills his slaves out of season,” a man protested.

The Yag were known as the people of the Calendars. Everything in their lives was regulate by the demands of season. There was a time to sleep, a time to wake, a time to eat and a time to fornicate. There was a season to plant, and a season to harvest, and a season to kill the slaves. To act out of season was to invite disaster and ruin.

“Fool,” replied Urtulu, “why have we fought this war. We would have been the Water Kings slaves after this, had they won. They lost, and so they planned to spoil the harvest of victory.”

He shrugged.

“So be it. Let their own people labour and toil in place.”

“And in slave killing season?”

Urtulu paused. By rights, the labourers should all be put to death, as was only right and proper. But these people were Yag, like himself. Misguided perhaps, tyrannical. But his own countrymen?

Still, they had tried to still and steal the waters. Let them alone, surely they’d try again. One war was enough for a lifetime, he thought.

“When the season comes, we kill them all,” he announced.

*******************

The Water Kings War, memorialized in song and folklore, was only the latest in a series of conflicts that had escalated slowly through Yag territory. Water flowed down from the shadowlands to all the Yag communities. But as water workings became more ambitious, the dykes and dams, the canals and trenches larger, communities upstream had begun to affect the waters downstream.

Some of these conflicts had been settled by joint agreements between neighboring communities, or by negotiations among Calendar men. But the farther upstream and inland, the more remote and inaccessible the water engineers had been, the more removed and indifferent they became to communities further and further downstream. The results had moved on to small wars, usually not in favour of those living downstream. Further upstream, the water engineers had better crops and more population, they had greater access to larger numbers of slave labour.

For centuries, tensions between upstreams and downstreams had built even as the ambitions of those who worked and ruled and remade the waterways grew.

Then one day, downstream, the waters had not come at all, or appeared as mere trickles. The scheduled floods predicted by Calendar men did not materialize. Desperate journeys were made further and further upstream, finding community after community stricken with panic, until the fertile lands were reached.

A coalition of dozens of upriver communities had pooled their labour and slaves to create an immense system of ponds and channels reaching into the shadowlands, which gave the upriver peoples almost complete control of flows and floods. This had been deemed vital to the upriver peoples, often victimized by erratic and violent floods.

Facing starvation, the peoples of the downriver had no choice. Nation after nation had marched forth, the Calendar Men organizing a vast coalition which had bulled its way up, and avenged a hundred prior defeats with a campaign of victory.

**************

“Astonishing that men could achieve so much,” Urtulu said. He and his companions looked out upon the works of the Water Kings, a series of immense ponds and dams, shining like jewels on the plain below. Off in the distance, the glaciers shimmered, as if radiating their own light. There was a sound of distant thunder as ice sheets broke down.

“It seems almost a shame,” Syath replied, “that such glorious works could make such misery. Perhaps some good could be brought from this.”

“No,” Urtulu replied, “whoever rules here would rule all. For everyone downstream, the only choices would be starvation or slavery.”

Syath shrugged.

“What men make, men unmake,” he replied. “The new slaves are making breaches, the water will flow. When all is restored, we will finish.”

Urtulu nodded, surveying the networks of ponds and dams. He pointed.

“There wasn’t supposed to be anyone working there,” he said doubtfully. Water was flowing rapidly into an immense artificial lake, surging down from above.

“There isn’t,” Syath replied. “The slaves were much further above.”

The earthen banks of the great pond were no match for the pressure of water cascading into it. Already Urtulu could see breaches, water sluicing out.

“There’s too much water,” Syath said, “it’s break flood.”

Break floods were the terrifying rush of water, that sometimes occurred when a dam or pond work failed. It was not a normal flow or flood, but a mad swirl.

“It will spend itself,” Urtulu said, with far more conviction than he felt. “Break floods are frightening, but they spend their waters quickly, normality follows.”

“But so much water...”

As the men watched in horror from the hilltop post, more and more water came surging down, dams collapsed, ponds broke apart, there was a roaring of rushing streams joining together, surges of white rapids. And still more water.

Miles of carefully dug channels overflowed in minutes. Dykes and barriers were swept away in torrents of mud.

“What have we done?” Urtulu whispered, a raging, frothing, brown wall of water raced toward them, climbed half the height of the hill, cutting savagely into the slopes, and then coursed past.

The two men could only watch, as their civilization was swept away....

---

'''No Surge? Yag New World'''

The early Yag remind me a lot of the Greeks, with their democratic towns and cities, their emphasis on individual rights and the proto-scientific philosphies of the calendar men, all of it wiped away by the surge. So here’s a POD. What if the surge hadn’t happened? The Yag cultures would have continued to develop as democracies, the calendar traditions would have evolved into full grown literacy and an empirical system of inquiry. We know the Yag were sailing the sea of tranquility. If not for the surge, wouldn’t they have developed the first high civilization? Ruled all of Antarctica? The Yag civilization would have predated every other human civilization by years, perhaps they’d have discovered Tierra del Fuego and then what?

Well then....

It’s a yag world after all.

Of course, given the time spans, you’ve butterflied the rest of human civilization. Congrats.

That's just my two cents, and yes that's pretty much what I have happening in my TL so I may be a bit biased, but still it is a realistic possibility. __________________ A world with a communist KKK, a more powerful Brazilian empire, and a steam punk US army:

No way out.

The Yag culture had established itself around a series of flood plains. Sooner or later they were going to get hit with a flood. They were doomed. Unless they adopted other Tsalal crops and spread out more. But that’s a different pod.

The trouble is that the Yag did it to themselves. The shadowlands at the foot of the glaciers were basically cold swamps, muskeg, streams and ponds. Glacial flows were often uneven, but the shadowlands were a giant natural sponge that absorbed the fluctuations and released the water slowly. The Upriver Yag started digging these huge channels right up to the glacier. Water that would have taken weeks to work its way through the system was just drained right out immediately. They tried to compensate by building these giant earthen dams and holding ponds, more and more of them, but that just made the problem worse. Eventually, the sheer pressure of pent waters was going to break through one of these dams, and once that happened, it was all over. Which is what happened.

A hundred year level glacial melt, bypassed all the natural holding systems and got flushed into this system that turned it into a Ten thousand year level flood. Once it let go, it was all over.

Fifteen thousand years later, we still haven’t learned a damned thing. We’ve spent the last century cutting away the swamps and marshes that buffer the Caribbean coast from hurricanes. Why do you think we lost New Orleans to a lousy category three.

— Smugger than the rest of you

So all that had to happen was they built better dams? Or didn’t build as much of a channel?

Unlikely. The Yag had been developing water management for thousands of years. Half their territory consisted of artificially flooded cropland. So it’s hard to imagine them pulling back at the last minute. Besides which, the most heavily populated and fastest growing region were the upstream areas, and they’d traditionally had a lot of trouble controlling flood conditions. Economically and politically, they needed to increase cultivation and control their waters, the only option was to go into the shadowlands. To avoid the surge, you’d literally need a geological POD which would make this ASB, or put your POD so far back in Yag culture that they simply wouldn’t develop the same way. So... ASB.

- Smugger than the rest of you

Don’t buy the propaganda

I don’t think that those early Yag were such nice guys. Most of their earthworks were constructed with slave labour, and they executed most of their slaves every year. There are mass graves with thousands of people. Every year, they’d go out and hunt new slaves, they depopulated half the continent. Genocide vs Cannibal? Sounds like Vampires vs Nazi’s to me. Not much to choose from.

—Don’t fear the reaper

Not much to add, Starsemen said it all. But I wanted to note that the Yag ‘sailing era’ was later period. Early period, they showed no interest in going on boats, and in fact, no interest in anything outside their territory. There were lots of areas that were cultivateable with their agriculture, but they never bothered leaving. And although they knew about other crops, they didn’t care enough to adopt any of them. Early stage Yag culture was extremely inward looking. I think the idea of a ‘Yag spring’ world is pretty farfetched.

It’s cool though to imagine an Antarctic civilization that wasn’t a bunch of psychotic monsters like OTL.

I’ve warned you several times already about these racist remarks. Kicked for a week.

Can we move this thread to ASB? Anyone?

- Smugger than the rest of you-

---

A great series of posts. The least nasty Tsasal civilization is as nasty as the worst of OTL!

In this timeline, there's a modern tendency to idealize the Yag culture, and in particular to idealize the early Yag period.

But how would TTL's present know that the Yag were experimenting with Democracy? It doesn't look like they had a true, widespread writing system from what you wrote, unless cultural continuity remained for over 12,000 years despite their fall, I don't see how their "writing" would be translated.

By the time of the surge, Calendar symbology had become quite uniform through most of Yag territory. Long gone were the days that the Calendar men would simply invent their own symbols or stylizations. Among other things, the Calendar movement had refined a set of number symbols whose use had already spread into the general population. But you are correct, despite assertions to the contrary, the Yag calendar glyphs, though arguably on the verge, had not made it as true writing.

The 'proto-democratic' aspects of early Yag were taken from recorded folklore. In the saga of the Wars of the Water Kings, there are a number of instances where heroes are forced into town debates and must sway with argument and oratory, or act in ways atypical of later Yag. These are believed to be glimpses into the culture of the age.

There are also linguistic arguments. Certain Yag words, particularly in their archaic forms, can be deconstructed back to original root meanings which suggest some populist tradition.

Finally there are various bits of archeological evidence. The remains of sometimes quite elaborate debating forums in community sites, findings of coloured decision sticks, and even representational artwork on pottery or in murals suggest community decision making processes.

The early Yag, by the way, were some of the only people in Antarctica at this time who regularly engaged in representational art. Another factor which endears them to westerners.

I still think you're playing up the cannibalism/general disregard for human life a bit too much. I understand this is in ASB, and it's for story purposes, but once you have settled agricultural society, slavery, and lack any real protein deficiencies or starvation issues, it's hard to see cannibalism continue, except perhaps in a rare highly ritualized fashion. The labor of undesirables is far, far more worthwhile than their meat.

Cannibalism in the early human era was extremely widespread, perhaps effectively universal, due to regular seasonal famines and the rigors of the Antarctic environment. This can be called subsistence cannibalism, and appears to have become part of the underlying cultural strata.

Subsistence cannibalism largely, but does not completely, comes to an end during the middle human era, as widespread domestication of crops and animals provides for an wide series of alternative and food sources with better productivity and nutrition. Winter diets become stable. Subsistence cannibalism does resume in outbreaks of famine, and resumes readily, but these were atypical.

Cannibalism, for instance, essentially disappeared among the early Yag and appears to have been held in low esteem. One of the ways in which the early Yag considered themselves superior to outsiders, as depicted in their pottery, was that inferior beings ate each other. The Yag practiced mass slavery, and drowned their slaves annually in seasonal rituals when the labour was no longer needed. But they didn't eat them.

During the Middle Human Era cannibalism morphed from a subsistence practice to a social function. Cannibalism became an expression of social dominance. In relations between groups or communities, the dominant group would enforce the sacrifice and devouring of selected children or weaker members of the inferior group.

Within communities, sacrifice and cannibalism were enforced as part of social conflict and dominance. Warriors, and alpha or beta males, and childbearing women, the most valued members of a community were generally immune. Babies, children and juveniles, and low status males and females were most vulnerable. Within Tsalal societies, the border between human and food was fluid, and power dynamics could move that border.