"To us inlanders (the name they pin to outsiders regardless of their geographic origin), celebrity is a strange and alluring, but often vapid thing. But to the Pem-Pah and their performer-priests, it is a matter of life and death."
- Utlush of Tal, Nambarish traveler.
''They brought me out of my cage under the temple and told me I could either lose my hand, or wear the mask for an hour. I picked the hand."
- Yapun, former swine-duffing mastermind.
Anqoh, whatever else it might be, is an architectural wonder. Though only about one eighth the size of Deneroth according to the estimates of firsthand witnesses to the place, it is an imposing and impressive place in its own right. The city is built in stone tiers a bit like Deneroth, but inverted. Rather than concentric circles growing smaller the higher up one goes, the tiers are at their widest at the city's height, gradually narrowing into the center which is positioned relatively close to sea level.
Further separating it from Deneroth visually is that the symmetrical rings are cut into on one side, opening the city up to an uninterrupted view of the bay to its west. Because of this it might be more appropriate for me to compare it to an amphitheater on a gargantuan scale, which is in fact not far off from one of the principal uses of the city's sacred space. Most amazing of all in my opinion, though least relevant to this piece in particular, is the fact that the entire city is made without the use of mortar. Every stone is cut to fit together with interlocking tabs and sockets, like pieces of a half-finished puzzle thrusting up into the off-colored sky.
The city possesses a wharf with a very high embankment, protecting those working at the water from any Killing Tides which creep into the easternmost reaches of the estuary. Gates also bore through the thickest areas of wall on the flank of the city facing the land, allowing for traffic by road as well as by platform-boat. Individual homes are rarely built out of stone, further separating it from the static and limited living space of Deneroth's tiers. Instead, they are built from clay brick, wood, thatching, and other more perishable materials which allow for the city population to fluidly shrink or expand throughout the years.
The level of importance ascribed to each semicircular ring is also somewhat of an inversion, if I may use the clumsy comparison to Deneroth one final time. While the top tier (or top two tiers) of Deneroth are held as the most politically, socially, and religiously important within the city, the central "floor" of Anqoh is its administrative and religious center. Here, the tallest freestanding structure in the city rises up tall enough to be pronounced in the skyline from two or three levels up and behind. This structure is regarded in popular legend as the oldest in the city, preceding the walls and rings themselves. It functions as the seat of the curiously minimalist secular authority charged with maintaining the city, as well as the home of the city's priesthood.
Here they are recruited, trained, and then distributed across the region for the purpose of officiating rituals and concecrating the endeavors of others. In addition to learning rites and how to blind or dissuade the gods, each acolyte must be accomplished in dance, song, and at least two or three instruments of traditional Pem-Mih make. Thus it is much like a school, with several avenues of opportunity made available to those who are initiated into the priesthood. Yet again unlike in Deneroth, this system works remarkably well. This bureaucracy works year-round to meet the demands put upon them by the very real population of its adherents, as well as to house and care for the large numbers of pilgrims who circulate throughout Khaitam-Po, culminating in the massive festival centered on Anqoh at the end of every lunar year.
Here, the amphitheater shape of the city is put to good use, as every performer-priest available is made to engage in the most serious of rituals to the Pem-Pah: The Maintaining.¹ This nights-long performance involves multiple interconnected cycles of plays. Each play is supposedly a reenactment of a much older historical event, and each plot deals with the sealing away of an evil at great personal cost to the protagonists. These tragedies begin to pile up and develop into an overarching, all-consuming threat which is at last battled in real time by the high priests of Anqoh on the final night of the hectic, fatalistic festival.
Not only trained professionals engage in these rituals, however. Audience participation is all but required, and it is not unusual either to find civilians donning the ritual masks and costumes needed to act out a part on stage. The more taxing and dangerous plays are reserved for professionals and criminals, however. For every year, those who have been condemned for some crime by the courts of the Pem-Pah have the opportunity to commute their sentences by giving themselves over to the priests for their play. Or, in the case of especially heinous crimes committed, they are handed over regardless of consent.
It is a testament to the severity of these performances, then, that willingness to participate is exceedingly low among the punished, even in the case of those whose justice requires death. Incidentally, those crimes which require that one be handed over to The Maintaining are committed exceedingly rarely, especially certain forms of blasphemy which would normally place you on a fast track to the final night.
¹ Regrettably, I do not have access to the proper name of the ceremony- only its translation into Denerothi Standard Ersuut. It appears that the Pem-Pah language name is censored from all chronicles written by outsiders, which is the great bulk of the sources available to me. Allegedly this is because the ceremony is too sacred and powerful to be dirtied or detained by human speech and writing except during the time of its invocation.
Showing posts with label law. Show all posts
Showing posts with label law. Show all posts
Thursday, August 16, 2018
Sunday, January 21, 2018
WHY THE MONGOLS (probably) DIDN'T STINK (any worse than the other unwashed masses of Medieval Eurasia)!
As my indecisive caps lock above indicates, this post is an attempted balance between reasoned caution in approaching the study of history, and impotent nerd-rage.
Some of you dear Burrowers may recall that I was in school for a degree in Historical Studies up until recently, with my area of interest being medieval Inner Asia. Ergo, I'm a huge nerd for the Mongol Empire, as well as any and all pastoral steppe nomads who came before or after.
The Mongols tend to get a bad rap across most of Western Europe. And Eastern Europe. As well as Western Asia- especially Western Asia in a lot of respects... Parts of the Indian Subcontinent, too...
Alright, they get a bad rap in most places that they encountered in their hay day.
Not all of it is unmerited either, because their sometimes very brutal tactics on the battlefield or in administration resulted in them fashioning together the largest contiguous land-based empire in history, and that empire produced a lot of unhappy historians from victimized groups. On the other hand, their warriors practiced violence in what was already (and would continue to be) a very violent world. But that's not what I'm here to argue about, because one trogloxene college student on a rinky-dink fantasy blog isn't going to resolve over 800 years of ethnic and cultural tension.
Overview:
What I am here to talk about today is one of the secondary beliefs about the Mongols, which contributed to but wasn't central to others' perception of them as the quintessential barbarian. This was the idea that the Mongols never bathed, and never changed their clothing until it literally rotted off of their bodies.
Here is a discussion of the topic on reddit which I originally stumbled upon for reasons I can't recall, and which initially got me thinking about that idea, how popular it is, and how true it may actually be. I quickly took a skeptical stance, as you will see if you manage to slog through this whole thing.
The basic idea is that these unhygienic behaviors were enforced by the Mongols' own rulers for some reason or another, and that the two practices came together to contribute to a rank smell that was allegedly so horrible that an approaching Mongol army could be smelled before it could be seen.
The original reports of these decrees against washing or bathing come to us in highly fragmentary form from various 13th-to-15th century historians and travelers, primarily of European and West Asian/North African background, who were attempting to describe the character of the Mongol Empire's Yassa Code.
The Yassa Code was a private customary law code which was used by the Chinggisid rulers of the Mongol Empire and its successor Khanates to inform their decisions on public policy. Allegedly, the Yassa was compiled from the scattered reports of the deeds and sayings of Chinggis Khan so that those who came later could benefit from his wisdom- almost like a secretive, non-religious Hadith.
Because the Yassa was secret, intended only for the nobility of the Mongols who sometimes followed it and sometimes did not, it was never made public in a clear, written form. The only indicator that the actual laws of a region in the Mongol Empire were written with the logic of the Yassa in mind was if the authorities of the time said so. Thus, even contradictory edicts could plausibly be said to have been informed by the contents of the Yassa.
That didn't deter outsiders from trying to understand it like an actual written body of laws, so any practice which could be said to be derived from the nebulous Yassa was written down by the visitor as if it was a law. Because of this, it wasn't difficult for misunderstandings or plain fiction to enter into these accounts. And again, these accounts were themselves fragmentary, with none describing the entirety of what it called the Yassa, and not all of them even corroborating the same laws.
So, our current understanding of the Yassa is formed by bringing all of those reports together and comparing their consistency, as well as taking into account the reliability of the people who originally wrote them down.
This leads to two issues. The first is that actual laws or customs could have been taken out of context and exaggerated in their reproduction. The second is that not all of these writers had what we would consider perfect intellectual integrity.
Issue 1:
The evidence that Mongols never washed themselves or their clothes comes from fragments written by a Mamluk Egyptian historian from the 14th-15th centuries, named Taqi al-Din Abu al-Abbas Ahmad ibn 'Ali ibn 'Abd al-Qadir ibn Muhammad al-Maqrizi. We will stick with just al-Maqrizi for now, as most other sources do.¹
The logic for this prohibition, according to what al-Maqrizi either wrote or repeated from earlier scholars (more on that later) was that the Mongols did not wish to pollute sources of running water and thereby anger the powerful spirits or "dragons" who controlled the water cycle. The Mongols were (and to a degree still are) a shamanic and animistic people, and belief in spirits who influenced natural elements like water is not out of the question. But the conflation of spirits with dragons is unusual, because of the rarity or almost complete absence of dragons from the native mythology of Turko-Mongols. Dragons are prominent in Tibetan and especially Chinese beliefs however, which makes me suspect that if it is authentic, this prohibition was recorded in a region where Chinese or Tibetan Buddhist cultural influences had already been embraced by resident Mongols, as much as a century after the life of Chinggis Khan. This presents the reality of Mongols living in and around increasing numbers of Chinese and Persian cities which often had public baths. It also may have been that the prohibition was developed in a non-Mongol context by some other subjects of the Empire.
Further, the original edict might have been mangled in translation, a bit like a game of telephone. A later historian and French Orientalist named François Pétis de la Croix (17th-18th century) with access to Al-Maqrizi's work formulated that the original prohibition may only have been against washing or bathing in water during a thunderstorm, due both to the inherent danger of that act, and a need to respect the power of the Mongols' supreme sky god, Tengri. Russian-American historian George Vernadsky, writing in the 20th century, agrees with Pétis and argues that the original prohibition was not nearly as restrictive as the fragments we've received would indicate, and that it originally served a "partly ritualistic" but also "realistic, or scientific" goal.² And even if this law should be read as referring to the use of water for washing at all times, it still only specifies running water- therefore, water collected in a vessel and used indoors would probably be omitted from this rule.
Water could be very scarce on the steppe or in the surrounding desert-like environments of Inner Asia, and conservation of existing water sources is a totally valid concern, and I don't mean to diminish that reality. One would probably save most available water to drink or water animals with, if the choice was between that and bathing. But a traditional nomad who performed military service but did not experience urban luxuries alongside the imperial elite would probably not need to bathe that many times in a year to be comparable in cleanliness with the rural populations of much of the rest of Europe and Asia. I say this being aware of the misconception that people of the middle ages "never" washed, but also aware of the reduced availability of bathing facilities outside of large towns or the private homes of the wealthy, in a time when the majority of people belonging to a polity or state were still rural and directly concerned with food production, whether agrarian or pastoral.
The specific myth that Mongol armies could be smelled before they could seen could probably be chalked up to a combination of folk belief, and the reality that all soldiers on campaign tend to get pretty ripe, especially if they are cavalrymen.
Issue 2:
Once again taking issue with al-Maqrizi, I point to the fact that both he and his sources may not have been trustworthy. Maqrizi allegedly received all of his information on the Yassa Code from a contact of his by the name of Abu-Hashim, who insisted that he had seen a copy of the entirety of the Yassa housed in the libraries of Baghdad, during his brief political exile there. We know little about the accomplishments of Abu-Hashim today, and nothing about the materials he supposedly studied, if they existed at any point. But what he toted as the entirety of the Yassa Code was a comparatively small list of offences and punishments (including bathing and clothes-washing) from the supposed criminal law of the Empire, so either Abu-Hashim was wrong or lying, or al-Maqrizi only paid attention to a very narrow section of what he was given.³
Further, al-Maqrizi does not acknowledge that in his writings on the Mongols, he borrowed heavily from a scholar named Ibn Fadl Allah al-Umari, who in turn wrote his material based off of what he knew from the even earlier historian, Ata-Malik Juvayni. Juvayni was an accomplished official in the Mongol Ilkhanate, as well as the author of the History of the World Conqueror, which is famous for being one of the most complete and unbiased accounts of the Mongol conquests under Chinggis Khan of the 13th century, despite much of the subject matter pertaining to the conquest of Juvayni's own homeland.
Juvayni does include the Yassa stipulation about bathing in his work, but it specifies that it could not be done during a certain time of day during the spring and summer months, which is when thunderstorms are most common, and is not repeated in al-Maqrizi's work. Additionally, the entire edict is presented so that Chagatai Khan could throw the law straight out the window and demonstrate his mercy and wisdom as a ruler by pardoning and then giving property to the poor Muslim man who was caught bathing in midday.⁴ This gives the entire entry something of a didactic or praise-literature character that was, despite Juvayni's admirable attempts at historical accuracy, one of his primary responsibilities in writing his History for the Mongols of the Ilkhanate. So, it may be that the law was present only in a small portion of the post-division Mongol Empire, little-known and little-enforced in its hay day, if it did exist at all. Juvayni, after all, was working with the same limited knowledge of the real, secret Yassa Code that most other historians were.
The section plagiarized by al-Maqrizi, dealing with criminal justice, seemed also to be chosen for a very particular purpose which has to do with the political climate in which al-Maqrizi was involved at the time of his writing. Al-Maqrizi, as an aristocrat and historian living under the Egyptian Mamluks from 1364-1442, had perhaps an understandably sour opinion of the Mongols, and the Ilkhanate and Golden Horde in particular, who represented the aftermath of some of the most brutal conquests of Muslim-majority states by the first waves of Mongol invasion. But the Mamluk elite itself, derived from administrators and slave-soldiers taken from areas of Turkic Central Asia, possessed numerous Mongol influences. This included their own law code called the Yasaq. As the similarity in names might indicate, there was a line of influence and continuity, or at least a perceived line of continuity, between the Mongolian Yassa and the Mamluk Yasaq.
When the political tensions between the Mamluks and the religious scholar elites of Egypt resulted in the Yasaq being applied to cases which were normally under the exclusive jurisdiction of Muslim judges and the interpretation of Shari'a law, al-Maqrizi was very vocal in defaming the practice. He even referred to the original Yassa from which the Yasaq was derived as being "Satanic" (lit. shaytaniyya).⁵ Therefore, al-Maqrizi's already plagiarized and de-contextualized observations on the Yassa Code have a distinctly negative, propagandist attitude, as he attempted to diminish the Yassa in comparison to the schools of jurisprudence favored by the religious scholars of Egypt, whom al-Maqrizi was strongly in support of.
Conclusion:
To try and form a concise thought out of all of this, we know next to no complete details about the Mongol Empire's Yassa law code. We should be extremely cautious in treating any fragmentary writings by outsiders pertaining to it as if they accurately depict it and apply equally to the entirety of the Empire and its lifespan. Historians such as al-Maqrizi (who could be a very attentive and respectable historian otherwise) were not above using the Yassa to take a political stance, and the popular myths which have sprung up around these centuries of scholastic smack-talking should not be taken at face-value as truth.
The Mongols probably did not smell much worse than any other political group in medieval Eurasia. To our modern senses of hygiene, they may have smelled unpleasant, but this would have been the same for any other imperial power of the day possessed of large numbers of soldiers and even larger numbers of horses.
References:
¹ Vernadsky, George. "The Scope and Contents of Chingis Khan's Yasa." Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 3, no. 3/4 (1938): 337-60. Pages 340-341.
² Ibid, 352-353.
³ Ayalon, David. "The Great Yāsa of Chingiz Khān. A Reexamination (Part A)." Studia Islamica, no. 33 (1971): 97-140. doi:10.2307/1595029. Pages 101-104.
⁴ Juvaynī, ʻAlāʼ al-Dīn ʻAṭā Malik, John Andrew Boyle, and David Morgan. 1997. Genghis Khan: The History of the World Conqueror. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Pages 204-206.
⁵ Ayalon, David. "The Great Yāsa of Chingiz Khān. A Reexamination (Part A)." Page 105.
Some of you dear Burrowers may recall that I was in school for a degree in Historical Studies up until recently, with my area of interest being medieval Inner Asia. Ergo, I'm a huge nerd for the Mongol Empire, as well as any and all pastoral steppe nomads who came before or after.
The Mongols tend to get a bad rap across most of Western Europe. And Eastern Europe. As well as Western Asia- especially Western Asia in a lot of respects... Parts of the Indian Subcontinent, too...
Alright, they get a bad rap in most places that they encountered in their hay day.
Not all of it is unmerited either, because their sometimes very brutal tactics on the battlefield or in administration resulted in them fashioning together the largest contiguous land-based empire in history, and that empire produced a lot of unhappy historians from victimized groups. On the other hand, their warriors practiced violence in what was already (and would continue to be) a very violent world. But that's not what I'm here to argue about, because one trogloxene college student on a rinky-dink fantasy blog isn't going to resolve over 800 years of ethnic and cultural tension.
Overview:
What I am here to talk about today is one of the secondary beliefs about the Mongols, which contributed to but wasn't central to others' perception of them as the quintessential barbarian. This was the idea that the Mongols never bathed, and never changed their clothing until it literally rotted off of their bodies.
Here is a discussion of the topic on reddit which I originally stumbled upon for reasons I can't recall, and which initially got me thinking about that idea, how popular it is, and how true it may actually be. I quickly took a skeptical stance, as you will see if you manage to slog through this whole thing.
The basic idea is that these unhygienic behaviors were enforced by the Mongols' own rulers for some reason or another, and that the two practices came together to contribute to a rank smell that was allegedly so horrible that an approaching Mongol army could be smelled before it could be seen.
The original reports of these decrees against washing or bathing come to us in highly fragmentary form from various 13th-to-15th century historians and travelers, primarily of European and West Asian/North African background, who were attempting to describe the character of the Mongol Empire's Yassa Code.
The Yassa Code was a private customary law code which was used by the Chinggisid rulers of the Mongol Empire and its successor Khanates to inform their decisions on public policy. Allegedly, the Yassa was compiled from the scattered reports of the deeds and sayings of Chinggis Khan so that those who came later could benefit from his wisdom- almost like a secretive, non-religious Hadith.
Because the Yassa was secret, intended only for the nobility of the Mongols who sometimes followed it and sometimes did not, it was never made public in a clear, written form. The only indicator that the actual laws of a region in the Mongol Empire were written with the logic of the Yassa in mind was if the authorities of the time said so. Thus, even contradictory edicts could plausibly be said to have been informed by the contents of the Yassa.
That didn't deter outsiders from trying to understand it like an actual written body of laws, so any practice which could be said to be derived from the nebulous Yassa was written down by the visitor as if it was a law. Because of this, it wasn't difficult for misunderstandings or plain fiction to enter into these accounts. And again, these accounts were themselves fragmentary, with none describing the entirety of what it called the Yassa, and not all of them even corroborating the same laws.
So, our current understanding of the Yassa is formed by bringing all of those reports together and comparing their consistency, as well as taking into account the reliability of the people who originally wrote them down.
This leads to two issues. The first is that actual laws or customs could have been taken out of context and exaggerated in their reproduction. The second is that not all of these writers had what we would consider perfect intellectual integrity.
Issue 1:
The evidence that Mongols never washed themselves or their clothes comes from fragments written by a Mamluk Egyptian historian from the 14th-15th centuries, named Taqi al-Din Abu al-Abbas Ahmad ibn 'Ali ibn 'Abd al-Qadir ibn Muhammad al-Maqrizi. We will stick with just al-Maqrizi for now, as most other sources do.¹
The logic for this prohibition, according to what al-Maqrizi either wrote or repeated from earlier scholars (more on that later) was that the Mongols did not wish to pollute sources of running water and thereby anger the powerful spirits or "dragons" who controlled the water cycle. The Mongols were (and to a degree still are) a shamanic and animistic people, and belief in spirits who influenced natural elements like water is not out of the question. But the conflation of spirits with dragons is unusual, because of the rarity or almost complete absence of dragons from the native mythology of Turko-Mongols. Dragons are prominent in Tibetan and especially Chinese beliefs however, which makes me suspect that if it is authentic, this prohibition was recorded in a region where Chinese or Tibetan Buddhist cultural influences had already been embraced by resident Mongols, as much as a century after the life of Chinggis Khan. This presents the reality of Mongols living in and around increasing numbers of Chinese and Persian cities which often had public baths. It also may have been that the prohibition was developed in a non-Mongol context by some other subjects of the Empire.
Further, the original edict might have been mangled in translation, a bit like a game of telephone. A later historian and French Orientalist named François Pétis de la Croix (17th-18th century) with access to Al-Maqrizi's work formulated that the original prohibition may only have been against washing or bathing in water during a thunderstorm, due both to the inherent danger of that act, and a need to respect the power of the Mongols' supreme sky god, Tengri. Russian-American historian George Vernadsky, writing in the 20th century, agrees with Pétis and argues that the original prohibition was not nearly as restrictive as the fragments we've received would indicate, and that it originally served a "partly ritualistic" but also "realistic, or scientific" goal.² And even if this law should be read as referring to the use of water for washing at all times, it still only specifies running water- therefore, water collected in a vessel and used indoors would probably be omitted from this rule.
Water could be very scarce on the steppe or in the surrounding desert-like environments of Inner Asia, and conservation of existing water sources is a totally valid concern, and I don't mean to diminish that reality. One would probably save most available water to drink or water animals with, if the choice was between that and bathing. But a traditional nomad who performed military service but did not experience urban luxuries alongside the imperial elite would probably not need to bathe that many times in a year to be comparable in cleanliness with the rural populations of much of the rest of Europe and Asia. I say this being aware of the misconception that people of the middle ages "never" washed, but also aware of the reduced availability of bathing facilities outside of large towns or the private homes of the wealthy, in a time when the majority of people belonging to a polity or state were still rural and directly concerned with food production, whether agrarian or pastoral.
The specific myth that Mongol armies could be smelled before they could seen could probably be chalked up to a combination of folk belief, and the reality that all soldiers on campaign tend to get pretty ripe, especially if they are cavalrymen.
Issue 2:
Once again taking issue with al-Maqrizi, I point to the fact that both he and his sources may not have been trustworthy. Maqrizi allegedly received all of his information on the Yassa Code from a contact of his by the name of Abu-Hashim, who insisted that he had seen a copy of the entirety of the Yassa housed in the libraries of Baghdad, during his brief political exile there. We know little about the accomplishments of Abu-Hashim today, and nothing about the materials he supposedly studied, if they existed at any point. But what he toted as the entirety of the Yassa Code was a comparatively small list of offences and punishments (including bathing and clothes-washing) from the supposed criminal law of the Empire, so either Abu-Hashim was wrong or lying, or al-Maqrizi only paid attention to a very narrow section of what he was given.³
Further, al-Maqrizi does not acknowledge that in his writings on the Mongols, he borrowed heavily from a scholar named Ibn Fadl Allah al-Umari, who in turn wrote his material based off of what he knew from the even earlier historian, Ata-Malik Juvayni. Juvayni was an accomplished official in the Mongol Ilkhanate, as well as the author of the History of the World Conqueror, which is famous for being one of the most complete and unbiased accounts of the Mongol conquests under Chinggis Khan of the 13th century, despite much of the subject matter pertaining to the conquest of Juvayni's own homeland.
Juvayni does include the Yassa stipulation about bathing in his work, but it specifies that it could not be done during a certain time of day during the spring and summer months, which is when thunderstorms are most common, and is not repeated in al-Maqrizi's work. Additionally, the entire edict is presented so that Chagatai Khan could throw the law straight out the window and demonstrate his mercy and wisdom as a ruler by pardoning and then giving property to the poor Muslim man who was caught bathing in midday.⁴ This gives the entire entry something of a didactic or praise-literature character that was, despite Juvayni's admirable attempts at historical accuracy, one of his primary responsibilities in writing his History for the Mongols of the Ilkhanate. So, it may be that the law was present only in a small portion of the post-division Mongol Empire, little-known and little-enforced in its hay day, if it did exist at all. Juvayni, after all, was working with the same limited knowledge of the real, secret Yassa Code that most other historians were.
The section plagiarized by al-Maqrizi, dealing with criminal justice, seemed also to be chosen for a very particular purpose which has to do with the political climate in which al-Maqrizi was involved at the time of his writing. Al-Maqrizi, as an aristocrat and historian living under the Egyptian Mamluks from 1364-1442, had perhaps an understandably sour opinion of the Mongols, and the Ilkhanate and Golden Horde in particular, who represented the aftermath of some of the most brutal conquests of Muslim-majority states by the first waves of Mongol invasion. But the Mamluk elite itself, derived from administrators and slave-soldiers taken from areas of Turkic Central Asia, possessed numerous Mongol influences. This included their own law code called the Yasaq. As the similarity in names might indicate, there was a line of influence and continuity, or at least a perceived line of continuity, between the Mongolian Yassa and the Mamluk Yasaq.
When the political tensions between the Mamluks and the religious scholar elites of Egypt resulted in the Yasaq being applied to cases which were normally under the exclusive jurisdiction of Muslim judges and the interpretation of Shari'a law, al-Maqrizi was very vocal in defaming the practice. He even referred to the original Yassa from which the Yasaq was derived as being "Satanic" (lit. shaytaniyya).⁵ Therefore, al-Maqrizi's already plagiarized and de-contextualized observations on the Yassa Code have a distinctly negative, propagandist attitude, as he attempted to diminish the Yassa in comparison to the schools of jurisprudence favored by the religious scholars of Egypt, whom al-Maqrizi was strongly in support of.
Conclusion:
To try and form a concise thought out of all of this, we know next to no complete details about the Mongol Empire's Yassa law code. We should be extremely cautious in treating any fragmentary writings by outsiders pertaining to it as if they accurately depict it and apply equally to the entirety of the Empire and its lifespan. Historians such as al-Maqrizi (who could be a very attentive and respectable historian otherwise) were not above using the Yassa to take a political stance, and the popular myths which have sprung up around these centuries of scholastic smack-talking should not be taken at face-value as truth.
The Mongols probably did not smell much worse than any other political group in medieval Eurasia. To our modern senses of hygiene, they may have smelled unpleasant, but this would have been the same for any other imperial power of the day possessed of large numbers of soldiers and even larger numbers of horses.
References:
¹ Vernadsky, George. "The Scope and Contents of Chingis Khan's Yasa." Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 3, no. 3/4 (1938): 337-60. Pages 340-341.
² Ibid, 352-353.
³ Ayalon, David. "The Great Yāsa of Chingiz Khān. A Reexamination (Part A)." Studia Islamica, no. 33 (1971): 97-140. doi:10.2307/1595029. Pages 101-104.
⁴ Juvaynī, ʻAlāʼ al-Dīn ʻAṭā Malik, John Andrew Boyle, and David Morgan. 1997. Genghis Khan: The History of the World Conqueror. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Pages 204-206.
⁵ Ayalon, David. "The Great Yāsa of Chingiz Khān. A Reexamination (Part A)." Page 105.
Wednesday, October 25, 2017
A Lowlander's Gloss of the Rise & Fall of the Pach-Pah Empire, Part 5.
Click here to view Part 4 on the Pach-Pah Empire
"I call to order the 298th Grand Resolutions Council, and the 2,980th Convening of the Large and Small Workers' Assemblies!"
- Officiator Thonapa Namdol, at the most recent overlap in annual and decennial meetings between the loose governing bodies of the People's Anarcho-Syndicalistic Communes of Pach-Pah Yul, 293 AR
"RECALL DELEGATE SAMTEN TITU! GUAMANSURI FOR LARGE COUNCIL!"
- An election season leaflet from Pansech Province, circa 246 AR.
The last Miqh Pach-Pah was buried without blessing or ceremony (but also without further insult or defamation) in an undisclosed location in one of the gardens of his palace. The bodies of his advisers would hang over the broken gates for some time in cages gilt with all of the precious stones and metals which they had fostered the mining of. The empire without an emperor entered a deep and extended period of mourning and protracted activity. The Pach-Pahs vanished from international commerce and society almost entirely as they attempted to piece their homes and lives back together, to say nothing of the internal struggles of understanding who and what they now were.
With the collapse of the semi-divine cult surrounding the Miqh, those with faith shaken yet unbroken turned in greater numbers and in greater piety toward the other gods of the mountains. They threw themselves upon the mercy of the deities of right conduct and justice, and prayed for those who had been lost to the underworld. A deep, collective sense of grief, guilt, and catharsis kept them united, where once the ties of common government had done the same.
This marked the point in time when the gods of the underworld were also venerated. Prior to that, stretching as far back as the early period of Pach-Pah history, those of the deep and dark places had been feared and warded against. Evil was associated with them, and they were only appeased in an attempt to ward off misfortune. Now, the fear remained truer than ever, but it was laced with a desperate hope that those whom they had taken into their keeping were being treated well. Indeed, the living hoped that the same could be had for themselves, if a buried death awaited them in the end. the practice of digging architecture entirely below the surface was abandoned in the same decade as the Collapse, save for when a temple dedicated to the gods below needed building.
The surviving instances of nobility throughout the provinces remained in the custody of various groups of revolutionaries for some time, but further spilling of blood was out of the question, now that everyone had seemed to finally "wake up" from the illusion of bloated royalty. The memoirs of former governors and their children are well-documented in the following century, as they attempted to reintegrate with those whom they had stayed above and separate from. Progress was slow, and famine was frequent in those regions where infrastructure had been damaged the most heavily. But in their reduced state, the people of the mountains consolidated, and experienced a measure of regrowth.
Eventually the question of "what next?" was difficult to ignore. And unlike the aftermath of our own experiences of disaster, vast gulfs of distance between major players did not prevent the highlanders from achieving greater cooperation once again. In the first of many summits to come, the representatives of each former province met at the base of the peak where the ruined imperial palace once stood. With each was an entourage of representatives of each industry found in that province, for over the course of the empire's history, its people had undergone quite a significant degree of specialization into various disciplines.
The various members of each regimented form of livelihood, whether they were the heads of valley ranches or of stoneworking groups, quickly found themselves in agreement about what their respective peoples needed and wanted for the future. Of course they did not agree so readily with each other group's decisions, and bickering ensued. It was only by taking on a role of arbitration did the representatives of each province at large manage to instill a state of quiet order, from which the first rough agreements on group policy were drawn up. Each industry would work toward both representation and self-regulation, and each regional government would work together to maintain a level of cooperation and public welfare between all moving parts. "Solidarity Without Kings" became something of a rallying mantra for the Pach-Pahs.
It would be a dizzying and frankly impossible task for an indigenous expert on political history of the Pach-Pahs to produce a comprehensive and all-encompassing list of the various changes between that point and now, and being that I have neither the blood ties nor the training to do so, it would be doubly so for me to attempt. But I can say with confidence that, despite nearly three thousand years of time passing, the Pach-Pahs have maintained a remarkable degree of faithfulness to that first council's resolutions. There have been many changes, transformations, and upheavals since, with more than one Trade War or would-be monarch inflicting themselves upon the people of the mountains. But in the spirit of perpetual revolution, each of these challenges has been met, dealt with, and then spun to resemble that old precept.
Before my more aristocratic readers tear this document up in a white-knuckled rage, be aware that though they constantly push against it, hierarchy is difficult to avoid entirely within this patchwork blanket of industry-communities. Furthermore, a continued and heavy emphasis upon family lineage among all Pach-Pah groups maintains a somewhat clannish divide between larger industrial groups, as well as a fairly consistent and conservative outlook on (albeit recently-created) tradition.
This, as well as limited international trade, has occupied our southern neighbors since before our own empire was divided. All things considered, they have done remarkably well for themselves. And I dare say that we have many lessons in adaptation, damage control, and human spirit to learn from them.
On a more scholastic note, I would also like to take the opportunity to push the support for Pach-Pach archaeological research. The discipline has its roots in the mountains, yet has enjoyed relatively little adaptation to the lowlands, even in regions as fixated upon its past as the denizens of Deneroth.
It is with determined optimism that I state my recently-approved budget¹ for an expedition into the mountains to accompany one such archaeological project will generate enough northern interest in the practice that Deneroth or even Nambar may soon host their own departments of history-through-earth-sifting.
¹ The initial offer of ten pounds of electrum is barely enough to cover the costs for equipment and non-university personnel, let alone the need for transportation and lodgings over a four-month period. It was quickly expanded to twenty-five pounds once I pointed out to the treasurers' council that they and everyone else on the University's campus would be free of me for a full quarter of the year if the funding was sufficient.
"I call to order the 298th Grand Resolutions Council, and the 2,980th Convening of the Large and Small Workers' Assemblies!"
- Officiator Thonapa Namdol, at the most recent overlap in annual and decennial meetings between the loose governing bodies of the People's Anarcho-Syndicalistic Communes of Pach-Pah Yul, 293 AR
"RECALL DELEGATE SAMTEN TITU! GUAMANSURI FOR LARGE COUNCIL!"
- An election season leaflet from Pansech Province, circa 246 AR.
The last Miqh Pach-Pah was buried without blessing or ceremony (but also without further insult or defamation) in an undisclosed location in one of the gardens of his palace. The bodies of his advisers would hang over the broken gates for some time in cages gilt with all of the precious stones and metals which they had fostered the mining of. The empire without an emperor entered a deep and extended period of mourning and protracted activity. The Pach-Pahs vanished from international commerce and society almost entirely as they attempted to piece their homes and lives back together, to say nothing of the internal struggles of understanding who and what they now were.
With the collapse of the semi-divine cult surrounding the Miqh, those with faith shaken yet unbroken turned in greater numbers and in greater piety toward the other gods of the mountains. They threw themselves upon the mercy of the deities of right conduct and justice, and prayed for those who had been lost to the underworld. A deep, collective sense of grief, guilt, and catharsis kept them united, where once the ties of common government had done the same.
This marked the point in time when the gods of the underworld were also venerated. Prior to that, stretching as far back as the early period of Pach-Pah history, those of the deep and dark places had been feared and warded against. Evil was associated with them, and they were only appeased in an attempt to ward off misfortune. Now, the fear remained truer than ever, but it was laced with a desperate hope that those whom they had taken into their keeping were being treated well. Indeed, the living hoped that the same could be had for themselves, if a buried death awaited them in the end. the practice of digging architecture entirely below the surface was abandoned in the same decade as the Collapse, save for when a temple dedicated to the gods below needed building.
The surviving instances of nobility throughout the provinces remained in the custody of various groups of revolutionaries for some time, but further spilling of blood was out of the question, now that everyone had seemed to finally "wake up" from the illusion of bloated royalty. The memoirs of former governors and their children are well-documented in the following century, as they attempted to reintegrate with those whom they had stayed above and separate from. Progress was slow, and famine was frequent in those regions where infrastructure had been damaged the most heavily. But in their reduced state, the people of the mountains consolidated, and experienced a measure of regrowth.
Eventually the question of "what next?" was difficult to ignore. And unlike the aftermath of our own experiences of disaster, vast gulfs of distance between major players did not prevent the highlanders from achieving greater cooperation once again. In the first of many summits to come, the representatives of each former province met at the base of the peak where the ruined imperial palace once stood. With each was an entourage of representatives of each industry found in that province, for over the course of the empire's history, its people had undergone quite a significant degree of specialization into various disciplines.
The various members of each regimented form of livelihood, whether they were the heads of valley ranches or of stoneworking groups, quickly found themselves in agreement about what their respective peoples needed and wanted for the future. Of course they did not agree so readily with each other group's decisions, and bickering ensued. It was only by taking on a role of arbitration did the representatives of each province at large manage to instill a state of quiet order, from which the first rough agreements on group policy were drawn up. Each industry would work toward both representation and self-regulation, and each regional government would work together to maintain a level of cooperation and public welfare between all moving parts. "Solidarity Without Kings" became something of a rallying mantra for the Pach-Pahs.
It would be a dizzying and frankly impossible task for an indigenous expert on political history of the Pach-Pahs to produce a comprehensive and all-encompassing list of the various changes between that point and now, and being that I have neither the blood ties nor the training to do so, it would be doubly so for me to attempt. But I can say with confidence that, despite nearly three thousand years of time passing, the Pach-Pahs have maintained a remarkable degree of faithfulness to that first council's resolutions. There have been many changes, transformations, and upheavals since, with more than one Trade War or would-be monarch inflicting themselves upon the people of the mountains. But in the spirit of perpetual revolution, each of these challenges has been met, dealt with, and then spun to resemble that old precept.
Before my more aristocratic readers tear this document up in a white-knuckled rage, be aware that though they constantly push against it, hierarchy is difficult to avoid entirely within this patchwork blanket of industry-communities. Furthermore, a continued and heavy emphasis upon family lineage among all Pach-Pah groups maintains a somewhat clannish divide between larger industrial groups, as well as a fairly consistent and conservative outlook on (albeit recently-created) tradition.
This, as well as limited international trade, has occupied our southern neighbors since before our own empire was divided. All things considered, they have done remarkably well for themselves. And I dare say that we have many lessons in adaptation, damage control, and human spirit to learn from them.
On a more scholastic note, I would also like to take the opportunity to push the support for Pach-Pach archaeological research. The discipline has its roots in the mountains, yet has enjoyed relatively little adaptation to the lowlands, even in regions as fixated upon its past as the denizens of Deneroth.
It is with determined optimism that I state my recently-approved budget¹ for an expedition into the mountains to accompany one such archaeological project will generate enough northern interest in the practice that Deneroth or even Nambar may soon host their own departments of history-through-earth-sifting.
¹ The initial offer of ten pounds of electrum is barely enough to cover the costs for equipment and non-university personnel, let alone the need for transportation and lodgings over a four-month period. It was quickly expanded to twenty-five pounds once I pointed out to the treasurers' council that they and everyone else on the University's campus would be free of me for a full quarter of the year if the funding was sufficient.
Monday, October 16, 2017
A Lowlander's Gloss of the Rise & Fall of the Pach-Pah Empire, Part 3.
Click here to view Part 2 on the Pach-Pah Empire.
Click here to view Part 4 on the Pach-Pah Empire.
"They were like children. We all were, back then. That is the lesson to take from our history. That we must grow up as a people."
- Scholar's Guild representative Metok Chicheuilte, offering a surprisingly gentle alternative to the usual stance on the mental faculties of the last reigning Miqhs.
"FEAR THE LASH."
- Inscription upon the steel head of a pickaxe salvaged from an archaeological site in the lower northwest Taneqas region. Dated to approximately 2000PR.
Eccentricities began to develop among the scions of the narrowing bloodlines of the Pach-Pah Yul royalty, as the generations wore on. Given the cult of personality which was fostered around each such individual by that time, especially the Miqh, these tendencies were only encouraged. Thus, long strings of tragic individuals became increasingly hidden from day-to-day matters, left ignorant of how to properly go about their duties when, if even faintly, the hope had existed that they could grow and develop to be wise and competent individuals. But the circumstances of high society had become so convoluted and bloated with a combination of decadence and anxiety that the later emperors did very little which could be seen as "kingly". Still, the reigning members of the family branches remained rather docile, delegating actual work to unrelated servants and administrators, and generally keeping to their own prestige-driven affairs. Civil strife all but vanished, and unknown to the aristocratic heart of the empire, their frontiers became the first sites of cultural and economic contact with the peoples of the lowlands.
But every few generations there was born a strong and vigorous "Great Miqh", often termed "Mad Miqh" in modern scholarship, who disrupted this cycle of maintenance and gentle stagnation and substituted their own idea for the world. For example, the severe deflation of currency in the 38th century PR was caused by the removal from circulation of all copper coins thanks to two successive Miqhs having a rare yet highly pronounced copper allergy. The ruinous war which was fought to conquer the unneeded hill country south of the Pach-Pahs from its now nameless and faceless aboriginal inhabitants was declared by Gulzar Quexo Miqh in 3464PR. Evidently, she had wanted to name the place as her footstool, in reference to the concept of the Miqh straddling the world (i.e., mountains). To this day, the region is said to be so devastated and scarred that not even the ████████████████████████████ bothered to settle the land during the northward push of ███████████████.
The most infamous of the Mad Miqhs was Intli Dzonlar Miqh, consecrated in 3112PR. His love of gemstones and precious metals was legendary, and it is written that his greatest dream was to have his entire temple-palace covered in a layer of gold broken only by studs of garnet. He directed enormous sums of money toward investment in mining, which up to that point in time had been small and relatively primitive among his people. Surface mining in and around stone quarries evolved into the dedicated and systematic strip-mining of entire valley regions within half a century. Numerous styles of mining were experimented with, such that today in some areas vast honeycombs of mining chutes can be seen pocking the surface, connecting with the long-abandoned remnants of shafts and tunnels, all less than a mile away from the edge of spiral-shaped open-pit mines.
It was an invigorating thing for the wealth and economy of the empire, at first. Despite the fact that Pach-Pah religious belief generally placed the roof of the monster-infested underworld approximately one hundred feet below the surface, the quietly ailing empire was given a new purpose, and great rewards for its toil. Trade and fine artifice bloomed as the Pach-Pah people took swiftly to their new, precious medium. But there existed an ever-increasing demand for more bodies to work these gaping wounds in the mountains. Entrepreneurs and the odd ancestral digger did not provide the numbers needed. And so the eyes of the powerful and wealthy turned toward the lowest of the castes which had developed over the centuries. The urban and rural poor, and even the disenfranchised masses of untouchables descended from criminals, political prisoners, and mixed foreigners were relocated and made into miners. The mines deepened every year, and before long the laborers were carving their own semi-permanent homes into the sides of their vast, subterranean thoroughfares, miles from the entrances which their parents and grandparents had initially camped around.
With the marriage and union between the Dongyal Miqh-ma Quya (roughly analogous to "empress dowager") and her nephew Kunak Poma, the last man in the almost unbroken line of purported seventy-seven Miqhs was born in 2704PR.¹ Langdah Umaq Miqh Pach-Pah, heir to a dizzying list of hereditary seats and titles², was the result of a tangled family tree, grown through a reproductive bottleneck, opening up into a thimble with one hole poked in the top. Beyond his closely-related parents, Langdah Umaq's paternal uncle was also his grandfather, and the father of that man was simultaneously Umaq's grandfather and great-grandfather. All eight of his great-grandparents were the children of only two great-great-grandparents, who were themselves the products of many cycles of brother-sister marriage originating with the Mad Miqh Intli Dzonlar Miqh himself. Umaq's rule was consecrated in 2698PR at the age of six when his mother and father had died within several months of one another due to what are described in the chronicles as seizures and an attack of the liver, respectively.
Even prior to that age, Umaq was made well aware and regularly remound³ of his own heritage, excellence, and purity of bloodline. He was seated in his court weekly by his anxious cadre of advisers to hear the refreshing of oaths of fealty given to him by those few remaining provincial kings and chieftains who had not been subsumed within the overwhelming single bloodline of the Pach-Pah nobility. Then, once he had heard the praise of these people (who were by this point kept as royal hostages in the capital city, communicating with their home provinces only through messenger), the Miqh would then dismount his ornate throne festooned with silks, beads, and jewelry, turn to face it, and then rehearse the oaths of fealty by himself, for himself, in the names of the seventeen provinces of which he was also governor. He would then bless himself as his own high-priest, and then depart upon a litter guided by his own voice and direction, as the chief attendant to his own royal personage. His very name was like a mantra to him.
Modern re-imagining of those days often casts the government of the entire empire as being an absolute self-parody, and as a case of grand ignorance allowing for the widespread practice of monstrous cruelty. The Earth itself is commonly anthropomorphized as a mother sobbing under the cuts and infantile howls of her own children. but it is impossible to say exactly what the common surface-dwelling man or woman felt about their homeland in the twilight years of the empire- before the revolution, at least.
By Umaq's time, the population of the massive under-kingdom of the Pach-Pahs outnumbered the surface. He was not one of the mad emperors, but his advisers (and most everyone else, for that matter) had become so deeply invested in the way of things that any policy or decree enacted in Umaq's time was liable to be one giving greater freedom to begin mining operations, or more strict insurance against runaway laborers. As the centuries passed, the original houses delved by huddled little mining families had expanded outward into underground towns and cities complete with foreman-governors, and living memory of sunlight and fresh air quietly died out among the dusty masses. With a profound darkness before them and the cracking of their masters' whips at their backs, those who had become little more than slaves could do nothing but press on.
The highly ritualized and religious practice of shipping loads of ore up to the surface was an affair which took months of constant travel along roads of steps and rails, yet news and knowledge from the surface spread even more slowly. After a certain depth, the miners were no longer providing metal and stones for their emperors and markets. They were sacrificing them to the dour and demanding gods of the above-world, and placating the lashes of the overseers who had become instruments of divine wrath. We can only speculate now how these people lived, loved, buried their dead, or governed themselves in the absence of any royal families willing to send their scions into the benighted underworld.
One million candle-lit stories of hardship, artwork, exploration, and ingenuity set against ever-increasing quotas and vanishingly thin resources are lost to history, thanks to what was about to come.
¹ At present, the scarcity of records detailing the names or reigns of various Miqhs following the widespread destruction of chronicles and monuments throughout the Pach-Pah Yul has resulted in only twenty-four emperors being confirmed and identifiable.
² The full list of titles attributed to Langdah Umaq Miqh Pach-Pah, as recovered from numerous royal archival fragments, is currently being translated by a most gracious graduate student of the Linguistics Department, and is sure to be available for citation at a later point in this piece as soon as it has passed routine censors.
³ After being alerted by the Committee for the Conservation of Language no less than eight times in the past year of my repeated use of "remound" as opposed to "reminded", I have been well and truly motivated to make "remound" a dedicated part of my lexicon, and I shall share its aesthetic practicality elsewhere, when before I'd have done nothing to propagate its use. All thanks go to the CCL.
Click here to view Part 4 on the Pach-Pah Empire.
"They were like children. We all were, back then. That is the lesson to take from our history. That we must grow up as a people."
- Scholar's Guild representative Metok Chicheuilte, offering a surprisingly gentle alternative to the usual stance on the mental faculties of the last reigning Miqhs.
"FEAR THE LASH."
- Inscription upon the steel head of a pickaxe salvaged from an archaeological site in the lower northwest Taneqas region. Dated to approximately 2000PR.
Eccentricities began to develop among the scions of the narrowing bloodlines of the Pach-Pah Yul royalty, as the generations wore on. Given the cult of personality which was fostered around each such individual by that time, especially the Miqh, these tendencies were only encouraged. Thus, long strings of tragic individuals became increasingly hidden from day-to-day matters, left ignorant of how to properly go about their duties when, if even faintly, the hope had existed that they could grow and develop to be wise and competent individuals. But the circumstances of high society had become so convoluted and bloated with a combination of decadence and anxiety that the later emperors did very little which could be seen as "kingly". Still, the reigning members of the family branches remained rather docile, delegating actual work to unrelated servants and administrators, and generally keeping to their own prestige-driven affairs. Civil strife all but vanished, and unknown to the aristocratic heart of the empire, their frontiers became the first sites of cultural and economic contact with the peoples of the lowlands.
But every few generations there was born a strong and vigorous "Great Miqh", often termed "Mad Miqh" in modern scholarship, who disrupted this cycle of maintenance and gentle stagnation and substituted their own idea for the world. For example, the severe deflation of currency in the 38th century PR was caused by the removal from circulation of all copper coins thanks to two successive Miqhs having a rare yet highly pronounced copper allergy. The ruinous war which was fought to conquer the unneeded hill country south of the Pach-Pahs from its now nameless and faceless aboriginal inhabitants was declared by Gulzar Quexo Miqh in 3464PR. Evidently, she had wanted to name the place as her footstool, in reference to the concept of the Miqh straddling the world (i.e., mountains). To this day, the region is said to be so devastated and scarred that not even the ████████████████████████████ bothered to settle the land during the northward push of ███████████████.
The most infamous of the Mad Miqhs was Intli Dzonlar Miqh, consecrated in 3112PR. His love of gemstones and precious metals was legendary, and it is written that his greatest dream was to have his entire temple-palace covered in a layer of gold broken only by studs of garnet. He directed enormous sums of money toward investment in mining, which up to that point in time had been small and relatively primitive among his people. Surface mining in and around stone quarries evolved into the dedicated and systematic strip-mining of entire valley regions within half a century. Numerous styles of mining were experimented with, such that today in some areas vast honeycombs of mining chutes can be seen pocking the surface, connecting with the long-abandoned remnants of shafts and tunnels, all less than a mile away from the edge of spiral-shaped open-pit mines.
It was an invigorating thing for the wealth and economy of the empire, at first. Despite the fact that Pach-Pah religious belief generally placed the roof of the monster-infested underworld approximately one hundred feet below the surface, the quietly ailing empire was given a new purpose, and great rewards for its toil. Trade and fine artifice bloomed as the Pach-Pah people took swiftly to their new, precious medium. But there existed an ever-increasing demand for more bodies to work these gaping wounds in the mountains. Entrepreneurs and the odd ancestral digger did not provide the numbers needed. And so the eyes of the powerful and wealthy turned toward the lowest of the castes which had developed over the centuries. The urban and rural poor, and even the disenfranchised masses of untouchables descended from criminals, political prisoners, and mixed foreigners were relocated and made into miners. The mines deepened every year, and before long the laborers were carving their own semi-permanent homes into the sides of their vast, subterranean thoroughfares, miles from the entrances which their parents and grandparents had initially camped around.
With the marriage and union between the Dongyal Miqh-ma Quya (roughly analogous to "empress dowager") and her nephew Kunak Poma, the last man in the almost unbroken line of purported seventy-seven Miqhs was born in 2704PR.¹ Langdah Umaq Miqh Pach-Pah, heir to a dizzying list of hereditary seats and titles², was the result of a tangled family tree, grown through a reproductive bottleneck, opening up into a thimble with one hole poked in the top. Beyond his closely-related parents, Langdah Umaq's paternal uncle was also his grandfather, and the father of that man was simultaneously Umaq's grandfather and great-grandfather. All eight of his great-grandparents were the children of only two great-great-grandparents, who were themselves the products of many cycles of brother-sister marriage originating with the Mad Miqh Intli Dzonlar Miqh himself. Umaq's rule was consecrated in 2698PR at the age of six when his mother and father had died within several months of one another due to what are described in the chronicles as seizures and an attack of the liver, respectively.
Even prior to that age, Umaq was made well aware and regularly remound³ of his own heritage, excellence, and purity of bloodline. He was seated in his court weekly by his anxious cadre of advisers to hear the refreshing of oaths of fealty given to him by those few remaining provincial kings and chieftains who had not been subsumed within the overwhelming single bloodline of the Pach-Pah nobility. Then, once he had heard the praise of these people (who were by this point kept as royal hostages in the capital city, communicating with their home provinces only through messenger), the Miqh would then dismount his ornate throne festooned with silks, beads, and jewelry, turn to face it, and then rehearse the oaths of fealty by himself, for himself, in the names of the seventeen provinces of which he was also governor. He would then bless himself as his own high-priest, and then depart upon a litter guided by his own voice and direction, as the chief attendant to his own royal personage. His very name was like a mantra to him.
Modern re-imagining of those days often casts the government of the entire empire as being an absolute self-parody, and as a case of grand ignorance allowing for the widespread practice of monstrous cruelty. The Earth itself is commonly anthropomorphized as a mother sobbing under the cuts and infantile howls of her own children. but it is impossible to say exactly what the common surface-dwelling man or woman felt about their homeland in the twilight years of the empire- before the revolution, at least.
By Umaq's time, the population of the massive under-kingdom of the Pach-Pahs outnumbered the surface. He was not one of the mad emperors, but his advisers (and most everyone else, for that matter) had become so deeply invested in the way of things that any policy or decree enacted in Umaq's time was liable to be one giving greater freedom to begin mining operations, or more strict insurance against runaway laborers. As the centuries passed, the original houses delved by huddled little mining families had expanded outward into underground towns and cities complete with foreman-governors, and living memory of sunlight and fresh air quietly died out among the dusty masses. With a profound darkness before them and the cracking of their masters' whips at their backs, those who had become little more than slaves could do nothing but press on.
The highly ritualized and religious practice of shipping loads of ore up to the surface was an affair which took months of constant travel along roads of steps and rails, yet news and knowledge from the surface spread even more slowly. After a certain depth, the miners were no longer providing metal and stones for their emperors and markets. They were sacrificing them to the dour and demanding gods of the above-world, and placating the lashes of the overseers who had become instruments of divine wrath. We can only speculate now how these people lived, loved, buried their dead, or governed themselves in the absence of any royal families willing to send their scions into the benighted underworld.
One million candle-lit stories of hardship, artwork, exploration, and ingenuity set against ever-increasing quotas and vanishingly thin resources are lost to history, thanks to what was about to come.
¹ At present, the scarcity of records detailing the names or reigns of various Miqhs following the widespread destruction of chronicles and monuments throughout the Pach-Pah Yul has resulted in only twenty-four emperors being confirmed and identifiable.
² The full list of titles attributed to Langdah Umaq Miqh Pach-Pah, as recovered from numerous royal archival fragments, is currently being translated by a most gracious graduate student of the Linguistics Department, and is sure to be available for citation at a later point in this piece as soon as it has passed routine censors.
³ After being alerted by the Committee for the Conservation of Language no less than eight times in the past year of my repeated use of "remound" as opposed to "reminded", I have been well and truly motivated to make "remound" a dedicated part of my lexicon, and I shall share its aesthetic practicality elsewhere, when before I'd have done nothing to propagate its use. All thanks go to the CCL.
Saturday, October 7, 2017
A Lowlander's Gloss of the Rise & Fall of the Pach-Pah Empire, Part 2.
Click here to view Part 1 on the Pach-Pah Empire.
Click here to view Part 3 on the Pach-Pah Empire.
"Hearken to the braying trumpets of the Miqh Pach-Pah.
His head touches Heaven. His legs straddle the Mountains.
The womb of the Earth adorns Him."¹
- Inscription lining the borders of a marble votive plaque set in the wall of a royal tomb which predates the fall of the Empire by approximately two centuries. All figural images depicted therein have since had a line drawn across their eyes or throat.
"The Benighted Age began when first the people of the earth raised one of their own above others, and named him Miqh."
- Tzo-Ngrub Codex, sheet 18. The inclusion of written text alongside more traditional pictoforms within this folding book is a clear indication of its age, making it no older than the end of the Revolution.
Sociopolitical developments and innovations aside, the way in which the peoples of the Pach-Pah Yul live today is not terribly different from their earliest history. They existed as decentralized tribes with areas of highland and lowland under their loose control, taming the rugged land enough to allow their flocks to flourish. They only dealt with their neighbors occasionally, and aside from references to the mountain people as "all the peoples of the world" in recordings of oral traditions, there are few references to them as a single, unified group. This lifestyle remained unchanged for ages before a great hardship befell each tribe in equal severity, regardless of wealth or position in the mountains.
Some chronicles describe the invasion of a foreign people, or a great monster rising up out of the underworld, or even a blight sent down upon the lands by an astral wind. Regardless of the calamity, the solution was for the Pach-Pah to band together more rigidly, and with greater structure. Outstanding tribal elders became chieftains, who became kings, who began to treat with other kings whom they held in high regard alongside themselves, now separated from the common folk by the confoundingly immaterial quality of nobility which we know so well today.
In these petty-kingdoms developed greater, more efficient ways in which to extract wealth from the land. During this period we also see a flourishing in the record of material culture, when artwork was produced more often and with greater sophistication, often incorporating the styles of other kingdoms. Trade too was established as a norm between settled states, rather than as an infrequent formality used to cement favorable relations between two transient groups which have encountered one another on the mountain slopes. Today it is believed that these trade connections were fostered via the fictive sacral kinship which developed between petty-kings and their quickly-expanding royal families.
Modern scholarship often treats the transition from many states to one as a simple inevitability, but self-reflective (and perhaps somewhat propagandistic) Pach-Pah narratives of the present day see the transformation as a long, slippery slope with countless intervals in which their people fumbled and tripped, not stopping until they had passed what they perceived to be a point of no return. This point where the early age ruptured from the middle period is typically described as being the crowning of the first Miqh Pach-Pah, an emperor of the people of the mountains.² This emperor was mostly symbolic at first, lacking the ability to mobilize every facet of the territory over which it was claimed that he ruled.
But over time, the formation of bloodlines begun by the earliest kings expanded to encompass a diverse range of high administrative and military offices. Each of these offices was hereditary, and in circumstances where members of two differing kingdom-provinces were betrothed, the titles which were descending through them were joined in any children produced by their union as well. So it was that an only child could become the king of one region and the high-priest of its neighbor. And these royal scions typically were only children, as a means of avoiding the nastiest fratricidal or sororicidal conflicts which are alluded to in legend. Of course fertility is not something which we peoples of the world have perfect control over, and for the Pach-Pah this is no different. In the inevitable cases in which multiple children were born to a couple of royal distinction and lucrative inheritance, either titles were split between them and each child was raised to be as accepting of this as possible, or, particularly in the case of brothers and sisters, they were simply married to maintain the family's sovereignty and control over the future.
While it may only be a rough inference based off of popular literature of the time, instances of sibling marriage seemed to occur progressively more and more often than sibling division or conflict throughout the empire.
One begins to see where this is all leading.
¹ Note that this popular translation does not capture the nuances of the final line. Here, "adorns Him" stands in for "has been made to adorn Him in this manner". While somewhat lacking in brevity, it does better to articulate the Miqh's power over all mines in the mountains, such that he could force the Earth to comply and adorn him with the wide variety of jewelry which can be seen in the plaque itself. Note also that what is rendered here as capitalization is the doubling of characters vertically or horizontally alongside the main body of text for emphasis. The codification of written language and adoption of outside influences on grammar did not occur until about three hundred years later.
² There was of course no "crown" to be worn by the first Miqh, because the mining of precious stones and metals did not occur to any significant degree by this point, and so the smithing required to produce an item of such care would come later. The earliest images of the Miqh do depict them with a scepter adorned with a crystal of some sort however, so it is very possible that interest in such materials was present in the culture, even if access to them was limited by whatever was found on or nearest to the surface.
Click here to view Part 3 on the Pach-Pah Empire.
"Hearken to the braying trumpets of the Miqh Pach-Pah.
His head touches Heaven. His legs straddle the Mountains.
The womb of the Earth adorns Him."¹
- Inscription lining the borders of a marble votive plaque set in the wall of a royal tomb which predates the fall of the Empire by approximately two centuries. All figural images depicted therein have since had a line drawn across their eyes or throat.
"The Benighted Age began when first the people of the earth raised one of their own above others, and named him Miqh."
- Tzo-Ngrub Codex, sheet 18. The inclusion of written text alongside more traditional pictoforms within this folding book is a clear indication of its age, making it no older than the end of the Revolution.
Sociopolitical developments and innovations aside, the way in which the peoples of the Pach-Pah Yul live today is not terribly different from their earliest history. They existed as decentralized tribes with areas of highland and lowland under their loose control, taming the rugged land enough to allow their flocks to flourish. They only dealt with their neighbors occasionally, and aside from references to the mountain people as "all the peoples of the world" in recordings of oral traditions, there are few references to them as a single, unified group. This lifestyle remained unchanged for ages before a great hardship befell each tribe in equal severity, regardless of wealth or position in the mountains.
Some chronicles describe the invasion of a foreign people, or a great monster rising up out of the underworld, or even a blight sent down upon the lands by an astral wind. Regardless of the calamity, the solution was for the Pach-Pah to band together more rigidly, and with greater structure. Outstanding tribal elders became chieftains, who became kings, who began to treat with other kings whom they held in high regard alongside themselves, now separated from the common folk by the confoundingly immaterial quality of nobility which we know so well today.
In these petty-kingdoms developed greater, more efficient ways in which to extract wealth from the land. During this period we also see a flourishing in the record of material culture, when artwork was produced more often and with greater sophistication, often incorporating the styles of other kingdoms. Trade too was established as a norm between settled states, rather than as an infrequent formality used to cement favorable relations between two transient groups which have encountered one another on the mountain slopes. Today it is believed that these trade connections were fostered via the fictive sacral kinship which developed between petty-kings and their quickly-expanding royal families.
Modern scholarship often treats the transition from many states to one as a simple inevitability, but self-reflective (and perhaps somewhat propagandistic) Pach-Pah narratives of the present day see the transformation as a long, slippery slope with countless intervals in which their people fumbled and tripped, not stopping until they had passed what they perceived to be a point of no return. This point where the early age ruptured from the middle period is typically described as being the crowning of the first Miqh Pach-Pah, an emperor of the people of the mountains.² This emperor was mostly symbolic at first, lacking the ability to mobilize every facet of the territory over which it was claimed that he ruled.
But over time, the formation of bloodlines begun by the earliest kings expanded to encompass a diverse range of high administrative and military offices. Each of these offices was hereditary, and in circumstances where members of two differing kingdom-provinces were betrothed, the titles which were descending through them were joined in any children produced by their union as well. So it was that an only child could become the king of one region and the high-priest of its neighbor. And these royal scions typically were only children, as a means of avoiding the nastiest fratricidal or sororicidal conflicts which are alluded to in legend. Of course fertility is not something which we peoples of the world have perfect control over, and for the Pach-Pah this is no different. In the inevitable cases in which multiple children were born to a couple of royal distinction and lucrative inheritance, either titles were split between them and each child was raised to be as accepting of this as possible, or, particularly in the case of brothers and sisters, they were simply married to maintain the family's sovereignty and control over the future.
While it may only be a rough inference based off of popular literature of the time, instances of sibling marriage seemed to occur progressively more and more often than sibling division or conflict throughout the empire.
One begins to see where this is all leading.
¹ Note that this popular translation does not capture the nuances of the final line. Here, "adorns Him" stands in for "has been made to adorn Him in this manner". While somewhat lacking in brevity, it does better to articulate the Miqh's power over all mines in the mountains, such that he could force the Earth to comply and adorn him with the wide variety of jewelry which can be seen in the plaque itself. Note also that what is rendered here as capitalization is the doubling of characters vertically or horizontally alongside the main body of text for emphasis. The codification of written language and adoption of outside influences on grammar did not occur until about three hundred years later.
² There was of course no "crown" to be worn by the first Miqh, because the mining of precious stones and metals did not occur to any significant degree by this point, and so the smithing required to produce an item of such care would come later. The earliest images of the Miqh do depict them with a scepter adorned with a crystal of some sort however, so it is very possible that interest in such materials was present in the culture, even if access to them was limited by whatever was found on or nearest to the surface.
Sunday, September 10, 2017
Gender & Family in the Fokari Tribes.
"What should we name her, when the day comes? She needs a beautiful name to grow into."
"How about Alyah?"
"After your aunt? She had a nose like a falcon's beak! Better to choose Golnaj, in honor of my mother..."
"You mean the one whose face is like a salt flat?"
- Fokari parents bantering over the cradle of their newborn.
Generally speaking, there are two genders among the Fokari. These are male and female, and again generally speaking, each of these genders encompasses a broad range of roles, customs, and expectations for those included within it. The most visible example of the sexual division of roles in a Fokari tribe is the existence of the Speaker and Seer. The former, a tribal archivist and overseer of youths within various age groups, is always male, while the latter, the preeminent or sole shaman of the community, is always female. This lines up somewhat appropriately with the general Fokari worldview of dualism and differing halves. But there are more divisions of labor less ritualized than either Speaker or Seer, and there are many more scenarios where these spheres may overlap in daily life.
Women are the commodity powerhouses of sorts in each family, weaving, felting, doing needle-work, and more rarely woodworking or clay-making, when available plant matter and water permits. Men will scrimshaw, tan hides or process meat, or work metal in exceedingly rare cases, but they more often attend to hunting and the maintenance of the tools relevant to it. War is ideally a male affair, but then again war is ideally avoided whenever possible, and pragmatism often calls on all to defend kith, kin, and yuum herds. Both men and women may tend to the tribe's herds, often in larger numbers of shepherds per animal head than in cultures where the use of domesticated horses is common. These house industries are overseen by the elder married couple of each family, with active parents generally exempt from the most rigorous and time-consuming projects unless a grandparent can manage their children for them.
Fertility and the bearing of children is not a private matter for families in a Fokari tribe. Because of the fluctuating access to resources common on the wasteland fringes, the family heads and other elders try to maintain a certain population range from generation to generation, encouraging marriage and reproduction here or discouraging it there. The range has initially soft limits at either end, but the sudden and severe under-or-overpopulation of a tribe's territory can lead to either voluntary assimilation into another band, or the cleaving-off of groups into new tribes. Allegations of adultery arising from unexpected children are dealt with in the same discreet manner as other disputes, with a mish'khiltah rarely ever being needed. Couples who plan for a single child and receive twins or triplets are celebrated as being gifted by the spirits despite the extra burden, but couples who do not limit themselves after multiple instances of childbearing face social stigma of varying severity, mother and father alike. The exposure of newborns is rare due to an association with blood-guilt, but it is not an unheard-of practice. Children who are both needed and desired must still survive the challenging first two years of life before having a celebrated and official name-day.
Being one of the few hereditary roles in Fokari life, chieftainship is passed down from parent to selected heir. As a general rule, the chieftain selects their youngest adult child of the opposite sex who is unmarried, in the belief that this will ensure the new chief's full dedication to their duties, as well as prevent a dynasty of personality from forming through successive generations of fathers and sons or mothers and daughters. Of course succession does not always come to pass in this way, either because of fate, or by personal choice of the chieftain.
Marriage may still occur when children are unneeded, and there is nothing to stop a married couple from constructing their own tent and living together within it. But a low fertility does not mean that infertile or discouraged couples are forever without children. Attrition and challenges to life expectancy are found at all age ranges, and in the event that a youth is orphaned of both parents, or a nuclear family unit is overwhelmed with needs, a foster pair may take them in. These foster parents are typically of the same extended family through one side or the other, so it is not uncommon for these children to be raised by aunts, uncles, or cousins. Often, these foster parents are couples which include one nyaak partner.
Literally meaning "mirrored", a nyaak Fokar is one who identifies and behaves as the gender opposite of the one they were born into. In mythic traditions held by many tribes, they are the result of a spirit being incorrectly clothed in flesh during the movement from the spirit realm to the physical world. A Fokar cannot identify as nyaak until they are of the age to be able to complete the adulthood rituals typical for all members of the tribe. But after that point and upon completion of these events, they are treated in accordance with their truer, unfleshed self. A male is for all intents and purposes a woman, and vice versa. From a certain sociological perspective, couples including one nyaak serve to limit population growth somewhat, and so they are valued as naturally-occurring moderators despite their rarity in the tribes overall. In this way a dualistic binary is maintained, but a mode of transportation between the two points is made available.
"How about Alyah?"
"After your aunt? She had a nose like a falcon's beak! Better to choose Golnaj, in honor of my mother..."
"You mean the one whose face is like a salt flat?"
- Fokari parents bantering over the cradle of their newborn.
Generally speaking, there are two genders among the Fokari. These are male and female, and again generally speaking, each of these genders encompasses a broad range of roles, customs, and expectations for those included within it. The most visible example of the sexual division of roles in a Fokari tribe is the existence of the Speaker and Seer. The former, a tribal archivist and overseer of youths within various age groups, is always male, while the latter, the preeminent or sole shaman of the community, is always female. This lines up somewhat appropriately with the general Fokari worldview of dualism and differing halves. But there are more divisions of labor less ritualized than either Speaker or Seer, and there are many more scenarios where these spheres may overlap in daily life.
Women are the commodity powerhouses of sorts in each family, weaving, felting, doing needle-work, and more rarely woodworking or clay-making, when available plant matter and water permits. Men will scrimshaw, tan hides or process meat, or work metal in exceedingly rare cases, but they more often attend to hunting and the maintenance of the tools relevant to it. War is ideally a male affair, but then again war is ideally avoided whenever possible, and pragmatism often calls on all to defend kith, kin, and yuum herds. Both men and women may tend to the tribe's herds, often in larger numbers of shepherds per animal head than in cultures where the use of domesticated horses is common. These house industries are overseen by the elder married couple of each family, with active parents generally exempt from the most rigorous and time-consuming projects unless a grandparent can manage their children for them.
Fertility and the bearing of children is not a private matter for families in a Fokari tribe. Because of the fluctuating access to resources common on the wasteland fringes, the family heads and other elders try to maintain a certain population range from generation to generation, encouraging marriage and reproduction here or discouraging it there. The range has initially soft limits at either end, but the sudden and severe under-or-overpopulation of a tribe's territory can lead to either voluntary assimilation into another band, or the cleaving-off of groups into new tribes. Allegations of adultery arising from unexpected children are dealt with in the same discreet manner as other disputes, with a mish'khiltah rarely ever being needed. Couples who plan for a single child and receive twins or triplets are celebrated as being gifted by the spirits despite the extra burden, but couples who do not limit themselves after multiple instances of childbearing face social stigma of varying severity, mother and father alike. The exposure of newborns is rare due to an association with blood-guilt, but it is not an unheard-of practice. Children who are both needed and desired must still survive the challenging first two years of life before having a celebrated and official name-day.
Being one of the few hereditary roles in Fokari life, chieftainship is passed down from parent to selected heir. As a general rule, the chieftain selects their youngest adult child of the opposite sex who is unmarried, in the belief that this will ensure the new chief's full dedication to their duties, as well as prevent a dynasty of personality from forming through successive generations of fathers and sons or mothers and daughters. Of course succession does not always come to pass in this way, either because of fate, or by personal choice of the chieftain.
Marriage may still occur when children are unneeded, and there is nothing to stop a married couple from constructing their own tent and living together within it. But a low fertility does not mean that infertile or discouraged couples are forever without children. Attrition and challenges to life expectancy are found at all age ranges, and in the event that a youth is orphaned of both parents, or a nuclear family unit is overwhelmed with needs, a foster pair may take them in. These foster parents are typically of the same extended family through one side or the other, so it is not uncommon for these children to be raised by aunts, uncles, or cousins. Often, these foster parents are couples which include one nyaak partner.
Literally meaning "mirrored", a nyaak Fokar is one who identifies and behaves as the gender opposite of the one they were born into. In mythic traditions held by many tribes, they are the result of a spirit being incorrectly clothed in flesh during the movement from the spirit realm to the physical world. A Fokar cannot identify as nyaak until they are of the age to be able to complete the adulthood rituals typical for all members of the tribe. But after that point and upon completion of these events, they are treated in accordance with their truer, unfleshed self. A male is for all intents and purposes a woman, and vice versa. From a certain sociological perspective, couples including one nyaak serve to limit population growth somewhat, and so they are valued as naturally-occurring moderators despite their rarity in the tribes overall. In this way a dualistic binary is maintained, but a mode of transportation between the two points is made available.
Monday, July 10, 2017
More on Fokari Law.
"Khayyam Arshad-parh. Using the dire authority vested in me by your Seer, elders, and tribe, I strip you of your past and your future beneath the patchwork tent. You are Kha'en. You will slit your cheeks at dawn. May the Eagle judge you more mercifully."
- Tosht Shad-parh, Speaker of the Sheyhan Tribe.
The legal system of the Fokari is surprisingly consistent across tribes and even dialectical groups. In theory each family is self-regulating, seeking settlement and appeasement of disputes through nonjudicial means as a first and most preferred option. While there is no shame attached to being brought before tribunal--for defendants or for plaintiffs--the entire affair is often considered to be disruptive enough to daily life that it is prudent to avoid the process when possible. But like any people, the Fokari periodically find that matters must been taken up with a recognized higher authority.
For this, the mish'khiltah is brought together. Literally meaning "lesser council" to set it apart from the khiltah council of elders which guides the decision-making process of an entire tribe, the lesser council is not elected publicly. Instead, it consists of one representative drawn from each major family which makes up the tribe. Generally the family head has final word on the delegation of the family's council membership slot, but appeals to dispute this within a family do rarely occur. The membership dispute is instead brought before the khiltah, the members of which are exempt from mish'khiltah membership for the duration of their office with the exception of hereditary chieftain- lacking a vote in the mish'khilah, they maintain order and flow of testimony not unlike a judge.
When the conditions for a lesser council are met, typically by virtue of the grievance having the potential to otherwise instigate familial strife significant or longstanding enough to disrupt tribal well-being, a date is set according to the calendrical and astrological predictions of the Seer. The Speaker officiates the trial, opening and closing it, but neither take a direct role in the matters of court. Each family representative swears an oath to their impartiality and uses a small knife to shave a patch of hairs from their right forearms. The hair is then gathered up and cast into a brazier by the chieftain (while standing upwind of it, of course). This brazier, commonly emblazoned with the image of an eagle, linked ram's horns, or a wheel, is often one of the precious few pieces made entirely of wrought metal in a tribe's possession.
Excepting outliers (such as a near-mythic case in which a Fokar with the cunning of a fox granted to him by a totemic compact was able to win a dispute with his grandfather and then become the representative of his family in his own trial for the accusation of goat rustling), this system works for most Fokari affairs. Only two crimes require the direct intervention of a tribe's higher council- murder, and the deliberate defacement of a tent or hut's interior ceiling. Murder's severity is relatively straightforward to understand, for it causes suffering and anguish as well as damages the pool of skill and mutual support integral to Fokari life.
Defacement of a ceiling is somewhat more symbolic. Each family keeps a lovingly-crafted, highly religiously-themed piece of artwork upon their ceilings. With the passing of seasons or the occurrence of great events, new images and designs are integrated into it until it tells the family unit's entire history. And at the center, either just beside the smoke hole or carefully stretched around it, is a piece which was originally taken from the tent of that family's grandparents. When the children who grew up looking up into this mosaic of unfolding history day and night for their entire lives mature and finally marry, they take a piece alongside a dowry in order to begin their own family tent.
The proven guilt of murder earns one a deep, preferably self-inflicted gash across the left cheek, starting about an inch below the eye and traveling diagonally across to the jawline. Defacement earns one the same, but mirrored over the right cheek. These cuts, in addition to being terribly painful and quite likely to become infected, scar over in such a way as to brand the individual with their crime forever after. The resulting loss of face (literally and figuratively) is the true punishment. Though they are not required to, the families of murderers or defacers will often take some of the guilty party's shame on as their own burden by integrating a stylized gash somewhere into their own tent ceiling- a brand new one, in some cases, if the defacement in question was of one's own history. But this is as rare as it is an awful and unthinkable deed for most Fokari.
If one were to, by some hideous abomination of thought or cruel twist of fate, commit both crimes at once, they suffer these, and worse. A small, shamefully blank tent is erected for them at the far edge of the tribe's camp one evening, where they are kept under guard until the first light of dawn. Then, often but not always while under the eyes of Seer, Speaker, and at least one of the elders, both cheeks are cut. Then, one and all turn their back upon the lone Fokar and break camp to travel until they are out of sight. The bleeding loner is from that point forward an exile from home, as well as a pariah among all other tribes who recognize such branding. Beside the tent, some bare necessities for one or three days of travel may be provided as a show of pity, but the expectation is that the exile will die soon without their people. Some tribes even pronounce the Fokar legally dead and hold a funeral for them, either just past the horizon, or while the exile-to-be is still present, ignored and treated like a lingering ghost.
Fortunately, this punishment is so rare as to be nonexistent in the living memory of most tribes at any given time.
But time and space are subject to the same nonlinear, dualistic tendencies as most everything else in the Fokari worldview.
What once was cast away may eventually find its way back.
- Tosht Shad-parh, Speaker of the Sheyhan Tribe.
The legal system of the Fokari is surprisingly consistent across tribes and even dialectical groups. In theory each family is self-regulating, seeking settlement and appeasement of disputes through nonjudicial means as a first and most preferred option. While there is no shame attached to being brought before tribunal--for defendants or for plaintiffs--the entire affair is often considered to be disruptive enough to daily life that it is prudent to avoid the process when possible. But like any people, the Fokari periodically find that matters must been taken up with a recognized higher authority.
For this, the mish'khiltah is brought together. Literally meaning "lesser council" to set it apart from the khiltah council of elders which guides the decision-making process of an entire tribe, the lesser council is not elected publicly. Instead, it consists of one representative drawn from each major family which makes up the tribe. Generally the family head has final word on the delegation of the family's council membership slot, but appeals to dispute this within a family do rarely occur. The membership dispute is instead brought before the khiltah, the members of which are exempt from mish'khiltah membership for the duration of their office with the exception of hereditary chieftain- lacking a vote in the mish'khilah, they maintain order and flow of testimony not unlike a judge.
When the conditions for a lesser council are met, typically by virtue of the grievance having the potential to otherwise instigate familial strife significant or longstanding enough to disrupt tribal well-being, a date is set according to the calendrical and astrological predictions of the Seer. The Speaker officiates the trial, opening and closing it, but neither take a direct role in the matters of court. Each family representative swears an oath to their impartiality and uses a small knife to shave a patch of hairs from their right forearms. The hair is then gathered up and cast into a brazier by the chieftain (while standing upwind of it, of course). This brazier, commonly emblazoned with the image of an eagle, linked ram's horns, or a wheel, is often one of the precious few pieces made entirely of wrought metal in a tribe's possession.
Excepting outliers (such as a near-mythic case in which a Fokar with the cunning of a fox granted to him by a totemic compact was able to win a dispute with his grandfather and then become the representative of his family in his own trial for the accusation of goat rustling), this system works for most Fokari affairs. Only two crimes require the direct intervention of a tribe's higher council- murder, and the deliberate defacement of a tent or hut's interior ceiling. Murder's severity is relatively straightforward to understand, for it causes suffering and anguish as well as damages the pool of skill and mutual support integral to Fokari life.
Defacement of a ceiling is somewhat more symbolic. Each family keeps a lovingly-crafted, highly religiously-themed piece of artwork upon their ceilings. With the passing of seasons or the occurrence of great events, new images and designs are integrated into it until it tells the family unit's entire history. And at the center, either just beside the smoke hole or carefully stretched around it, is a piece which was originally taken from the tent of that family's grandparents. When the children who grew up looking up into this mosaic of unfolding history day and night for their entire lives mature and finally marry, they take a piece alongside a dowry in order to begin their own family tent.
The proven guilt of murder earns one a deep, preferably self-inflicted gash across the left cheek, starting about an inch below the eye and traveling diagonally across to the jawline. Defacement earns one the same, but mirrored over the right cheek. These cuts, in addition to being terribly painful and quite likely to become infected, scar over in such a way as to brand the individual with their crime forever after. The resulting loss of face (literally and figuratively) is the true punishment. Though they are not required to, the families of murderers or defacers will often take some of the guilty party's shame on as their own burden by integrating a stylized gash somewhere into their own tent ceiling- a brand new one, in some cases, if the defacement in question was of one's own history. But this is as rare as it is an awful and unthinkable deed for most Fokari.
If one were to, by some hideous abomination of thought or cruel twist of fate, commit both crimes at once, they suffer these, and worse. A small, shamefully blank tent is erected for them at the far edge of the tribe's camp one evening, where they are kept under guard until the first light of dawn. Then, often but not always while under the eyes of Seer, Speaker, and at least one of the elders, both cheeks are cut. Then, one and all turn their back upon the lone Fokar and break camp to travel until they are out of sight. The bleeding loner is from that point forward an exile from home, as well as a pariah among all other tribes who recognize such branding. Beside the tent, some bare necessities for one or three days of travel may be provided as a show of pity, but the expectation is that the exile will die soon without their people. Some tribes even pronounce the Fokar legally dead and hold a funeral for them, either just past the horizon, or while the exile-to-be is still present, ignored and treated like a lingering ghost.
Fortunately, this punishment is so rare as to be nonexistent in the living memory of most tribes at any given time.
But time and space are subject to the same nonlinear, dualistic tendencies as most everything else in the Fokari worldview.
What once was cast away may eventually find its way back.
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