Of Adobe Halls on Red Savannah: Settled Cities, Nomadic Tribes, and Everything Between

Of Adobe Halls on Red Savannah:

Settled Cities, Nomadic Tribes, and Everything Between

I'm back for this post at least. This post has been a pain, mostly because of real-life events and honestly me trying to balance covering what I want vs just getting it out. So here it is. Hopefully the next blogpost are more interesting because of that fact that I get to cover my world at least.

The Adobe Halls of Crowned Princes

In western history1, cities and civilization are intertwined, with cities being one of the cornerstones of civilization. Reason being is that these cities required planning from a central position. This need for a centralized position, alongside many other factors, lead to specialization, social hierarchy and stratification2.  From those new complex social orders, we have the origin of many tropes, cliches, and stories common throughout civilization, with even suburbs existing during that time period3

Of course, the next question would be: why would a city expand their reach?

The same reason why nomadic tribes would kill each other over hunting grounds or food gathering spots: resources.

It only takes one ambitious leader or a desperate leader during hard times to plan and execute a conquest to expand their reach for resources. To govern those lands, he needs to expand the specialized class of brick makers to make the roads for soldiers and trade, and to make temples for the priests and leadership. He will need more scholars and messengers to keep records and send them. He will need blacksmiths to keep the tools sharp for farmers, and the spear tips ready for war.

If this process repeats several more times until the city-state becomes a kingdom. If this kingdom survives and grows a few more times in size, it becomes an Empire. With each expansion, the complexity of governance grows, requiring more specialization, and causing more stratification Until collapse of the kingdom, of the empire, or in rare cases, multiple empires.

From this cyclical process, inspiration for stories can be from history: Babylonian Empire rising from the city of Babylon, before that the City of Akkad and the Akkadian Empire. Each empire starting from a singular city, growing in size before reaching their apex, staying there, then finally collapsing from various reasons such as environmental failure, failures in internal government structure, conquest from an upstart king, or other factors, which in fantasy can be pissing off a god or magical fuck-up from a Sorcerer-Empire that screw up the entire Empire.

There are many potential stories with this region. Example being a small warrior clan within a city rising to power alongside the ruling dynasty, gaining prestige, land, and wealth as the city-state becomes an empire over generations. Then losing most of it when the empire falls apart, or better yet becoming the ones who seek to remake the empire after the fall of the ruling dynasty.

Not all stories need to be focused on just cities. In the Bronze Age, nomadic tribes and people were still common. Within these tribes, their story during the Bronze Age is different, yet nonetheless still worthy to derive inspiration from.

On The Savanna, Beyond the City’s Gaze

In between cities, beyond their walls and gazer of watchers on the wall, are tribes that travel across the savanna4. Some tribes have villages, however some do not, preferring to stay on the plains, living off the land. Their social hierarchies are not as specialized or stratified as sedentary people, yet that does not mean their society can be less complex. Living directly off the land takes specialized knowledge of the land, local botany, and the seasons to make the most of it, which sedentary people lose over generations as entire groups do not need to interact with wild landscapes on the day to day.  

In fantasy settings where there are actual spirits in nature, such as a mine, these nomadic clans also need the specific knowledge of how to deal with various spirits on their migratory routes, what they like and dislike, what their demeanor is, and other specialized information. Sedentary population cultures have no need for that information as their day-to-day life duties and lifestyles are just different.  Instead of dealing with what time is best to cross a stream and how to give gifts the local water spirit at controls that riverway (or maybe just that crossing, who knows except the clan druid or shaman), the local blacksmith has to give thanks to the god of forge and the god of commerce to stay in their good graces during his busy season. Add in the fact he has to worry about paying his taxes, getting paid by local farmers or merchants, and you can see blacksmith not really caring to know about the local, nature spirits, let alone regional spirits. At most he knows a little about the local environment spirits or the major ones that most people know about.

These differences in priorities easily leading conflict between a tribe and a city’s periphery area, where conflict is most likely to happen. Sometimes those conflicts become violent5, leading to small scale skirmishes or even full on warfare. On the other side of the coin, nomads can be helpful to a city-state and its rulers via trade.

Historically, nomadic tribes often brought trading goods from far off places to local cities for supplies. It makes sense. If a tribe trades items at one city for supplies, getting some traditional items from city A as part of their payment, then travels across the land for a week or a month, people at the new city might see some of the foreign items the tribe has gotten for payment, and be willing to pay more for those foreign items. Nomadic tribes can also provide food that is not easy to produce in the city, such as foreign fruits, vegetables, and spices or in the case of pastoral  groups maybe providing meat to city-states who do not have the land for meat production, such as those who control smaller areas, or city-states whose surrounding geography is terrible for fattening cattle-equivalent creatures. This can lead to wandering class of people, who focus on trading goods, selling animal byproducts to richers classes, or in cases of warrior like tribes, becoming wandering mercenaries for hire.

Storylines can be built from this aspect: the stories of a wandering band of traders, a wandering tribe becoming mercenaries for a Prince, or pastoralists becoming well.....they stay pastoralists.

 

For stories the can inspired solely and directly from nomadic tribes, there are a few to get you start:

• A local spirit is upset, and one of the tribal members must take on a quest to appease or heal the spirit to save his tribe.  
• A interclan conflict leading to ceremonial fighting and competition between two tribes for respect is also another story.  
• Two tribes are fighting over a specific spot during migration, as settled people push the nomads to compete over limited resources. 
• A spirit journey of a young man becomes strange as he continues on his path.  

 

In the next section, I was planning on making it longer, however in the name of actually pushing this piece out and having content on my blog, I decided to cut down on the length.

Between the Savanna and The Stronghold

The difference between being a nomadic tribal members and sedentary, settled cities is a spectrum and not binary. While some tribes may be purely hunter-gatherers who source everything from the land, and there are definite city-states which do not have any mobile elements, there is definitely room in the middle for both.

The clans within nomadic tribes can easily have home clansteads where they stay for one season, then leave towards a central location for politics, arranging marriages, and celebration. A stronghold can easily have a class of people who still wander the land, collecting food and materials for the city, and in general provide a function for the city-state that settled people cannot do.

The spectrum of nomadism and sedentary lifestyles can make the world in which you build more real. From these varying cultural dynamics within an area, a small region can provide a well of stories for the writer to siphon as politics, natural resource use, and magic all interplay with one another to creat fascinating but realistic settings.

 

Here is an example story that I can up with.

“A man from a nomadic tribe murders a local merchant for ripping off his tribe. A group of mercenaries are sent to hunt him down and bring him to justice by the prince of the city, who is related to the murdered merchant by blood. The mercenaries come into trouble as they realize those who would now where the tribe is are other tribal groups, some of which agree with this man’s actions, while some are willing to help for a price or favor, as tradition among the tribes. Or maybe that is some bullshit tribes make up to get free labor from the stupid city folk who don’t know any better.
Still the mercenaries are under orders to find and hunt down this man within thirty days or lose the reward money.”

Using this interplay between urban and rural cultures leads to interesting stories that can be told. Could these stories be told in other eras? Yes.

However for me, this era give greater meaning and strength to these stories than other timelines, because of how strange and different it is. Hence why I want to focus on it.

Conclusions

For me, the Bronze Age represented the last time where civilization as we knew it did not exist as know it classically and in the same breath gives a prototype of how society works. Fiction inspired by this hazy time period is something allows me to creat fantasy setting that comes off as unique without relying on a quirk or interesting rule. Not saying stories that do are bad, but it is not my style of story telling.

This era’s emphasis on city-states, small regional politics, and the amount of small players jockying for power can make for political interesting stories that do no feature ending the world or taking over a kingdom. Which I believe is overrepresented in fantasy; saving the world, taking over a kingdom, and other stories are oversupplied. Stories about the smaller scale, about a Prince trying to take control over a local town from anothe prince, a small migratory tribe having to settle down as their old migratory routes shut down as princes take control over land, and durign the collapse of an Empire an old city-state trying to maintain independence and sovereignity in the face of desperate, hungry migrating tribes, backstabbing princes, and other issues, both mundane and magical.

As for this series, I might come back to it later. However, I honestly now I want to focus more on presenting part of the continent of Drazna my story will take place: Ishatar peninsular region and people who live there during the post-Imperial period, following the equivalent of the Bronze Age collapse on their continent.

1 I focus on western civilization as that is what I am mostly knowledgeable in from public schooling. Wish I knew more about the Bronze Ages of other areas, however I find myself lacking. Therefore, best to refine my scope to something more accurate with what I know.

2 Yes, I know a reductionist explanation, but that is what I learned and understand from my limited knowledge.

3 Source: Titriş Höyük Archaeological Expedition

4 In my setting, part of the Ishtar peninsula is a savanna-like biome with low biodiversity in comparison to the other side of the mountains, where rainforests and swamps are the most common biomes.

5 I really don’t want to go into warfare about the Bronze Age. I don’t find ancient warfare interesting.