The Coal Age, A History of Antarctic Civilisation. R. Giger, Penguin Books

'''The Coal Age, A History of Antarctic Civilisation. R. Giger, Penguin Books'''

Chapter 30, 'Decline of the Coal Kings', excerpt

The Ceramic Age, or the Copper and Bronze Ages, as some describe it, marked the precipitous decline of the coal kingdoms. There were several reasons for this.

The domicile technologies represented by the Sunken Cities, particularly with the addition of ceramic ducts and venting and forced air ovens, presented an almost rigourous thermal stasis. With underground temperatures at a uniform 55 degrees fahrenheit, little more than collective human body heat in confined spaces was needed to maintain stable temperatures.

This reduced energy demands, or demand for coal to minimal levels. The Sunken Cities needs for coal amounted to food preparation and water heating, ceramic manufacture, other community uses, and minimal heating. Initially, this allowed for the expansion of Coal Kingdoms as given volumes of production served many more communities. However, this was a false expansion. The Coal Kingdoms were forced to administer wider and wider networks at more and more expense. This was compensated by cutting back supplies and raising the prices. Records from that time report bitter complaints from many cities over exorbitant prices.

High coal prices, stringently regulated supplies, and significantly reduced or dwindling energy demands drove many communities to turn to alternative fuels to become viable alternatives. In the early periods of intensive demand, these alternative resources were often at risk of exhaustion. Now with substantially less pressure or demand, regional recovery and better management, alternative energy forms were far more viable.

During this period, charcoal wood increased greatly in importance, peats, driftwood, scavenged dung, wrapped plant fiber, animal fats and animal and plant oils all contributed to the local economies. The Sunken Cities engaged in a broad period of local experimentation, turning to literally every substance and preparation to examine its burning properties.

In particular, relatively marginal or small coal deposits, and accessible oil deposits were accessed and adopted. At the end of the Coal Age, or beginning of the Copper age, there were five great Coal Kingdoms, of which Tcho Tcho was by far the greatest, accounting for almost all Coal production, and the vast bulk of energy production.

Less than five hundred years later, there were more than fifty documented coal production sites. Throw in principal charcoal farms, peat harvesting complexes, and other principle sources of burnables, and there were almost a hundred significant producers.

The power of coal kingdoms lay in regional monopoly of a key resource. The efficacy of that monopoly steadily diminished to the point of near irrelevance. For a long time, the Coal Kingdoms retained dominance based on their pre-existing control of transportation and communication networks, and on accumulated military superiority. But as their power waned, many of the Coal Kingdoms became highly conservative, and hostile to new resource technologies which they didn’t control. But the effort to maintain control was doomed. Power waning, unwilling to change, ruling over a growing and increasingly difficult to control population, the Coal Kingdoms were unable to cope with either the threat of local copper and bronze production complexes at the fringes of their reach, nor with the serious threat of the Zhudan. Even the development and adoption of gunpowder could not arrest the decline. By 3500 BC last of the Coal Kingdoms was gone. Tcho Tcho, at its height the mightiest city on the planet, was all but abandoned.

Although the political structures of the Coal Kings faded away, the culture of the coal kings spread through Tsalmothua. Forms of community organization, architecture, technology permeated through much of the Tsalmothua region, in cities and towns, to areas where the Coal Kings had never ruled. The technological and architectural packages developed under the Coal Kingdoms spread with a life of their own.

As they spread beyond the regions of Coal King domination, as that domination faded away entirely, the culture spread to encompass much of the Tsalmothua, and to influence the Islands of the West, the Azul and lake Vos.

In turn, that culture adapted and changed in the new areas where it spread. Instead of kingdoms we saw a plethora of city states and towns and small principalities, often warring, sometimes trading, always competing. Lack of control lead to innovation and cultural diversification. By 3300 BP indigenous bronze manufacturing had established itself in Tsalmothua, significantly later than other parts of Antarctica, but competently done.

There were negative consequences to the lack of unity or organization. The Zhu of Zhudan Lul assumed hegemony over the coasts and inner sea, conquering up rivers and establishing their own 'crusader states' over the Tsalmothua. Azul, the Hali culture of Lake Vos, and the Island kingdoms of Tsorle, Zhoole and Yhqt also intruded on Tsalmothua culture.

The perception is that only the development of gunpowder preserved the Tsalmothua cultures, and that for the next thousand years, the Tsalmothua would remain a cultural and technological backwater.