The citizens of the city-state of Paznixs live in a world of wild extremes, and so tend to stay on the well-beaten paths forged by pathfinders in both their business and personal lives.
A man is born a member of a caste, and usually stays in that whether he be merchant, warrior, beggar, or of noble blood. Women, it is commonly understood, have no caste, nor souls (they borrow their soul from the man of the house).
To the north is the great mountains covered by white ice year-around, and to the south is the Great Sea. It is body warm in winter, and in summer great fogs rise from it to water the ground.
P. trades to the west with Yacraz, and around the Dragon's Head Uplands with their bitter winds, is Morzub. To the east a very long way one comes to a space where the sea and the cold meet, and you travel over the Cold Route for several days of bitter freezing weather, if unlucky, the mishapen men of the North have heard of your travel caravan, and come to kill, loot, and take slaves.
The Northmen live under the clouds, and rarely see the sun, and have no fish so their bodies are twisted. But, they are hugely strong, so much so that a Northlander bronze dagger is a sword for an Edgelander.
Once over the cold route, it is down the Staircase of the Gods, made by the great ones born after the Great Water. The Staircase reaches down from the natural dam between the Northland and the Hotland. It is the height of a thousand men of the current generation that marches down the face of the natural dam that holds out the Great Sea, and overshadows the Pleasant Land.
The toll to travel it is steep, but free to those of P. for one of the gods that built it was also the founder of P.. He came many hundreds of years ago, and took him seven daughters of the land, and made on them babies, and from them, the nobles were born. In time, the city he had made bored him, and he left to found another, and if the tales are right, he came to and end after six hundred years at the hands of another of the gods. It is said that the two of them fought all day for a week, and broke a hundred seventeen swords before mischance took the god of their city.
There is good reason to send trade to the Pleasant Land, for it is a great valley, shaped like a flattened lemon, with over a hundred cities of importance and wonderful weather for growing crops. It is one of the wealthiest spots on Earth.
There are monsters, creatures that frolic in the deep, and take down galleys. There are monsters in the heights, which even the Northmen fear, dragons they name them. But the edgelands are largely peaceful from monsters.
And so life is good under the god-king of P. for many as long as one is prepared to sweat freely in summer for temperatures reach a hundred ten Fahrenheit for multiple days.
But, the seas are seen to be cool to listen to the elder generations of a couple hundred years who recall that in their youth, the sea steamed until the mid-point of winter. And as the logicians point out, the sea cools, less steam comes, and thus less snow. One can, if one is daring, ride forth into the Northland, and see how the land is scraped by ice for thirty miles further than the ice is. Of course, to do this is take your life into your own hands, or perhaps more aptly into the Northlanders hands.
Conversely, the god-king had to order the docks to be rebuilt higher last year as waves swept over the top of them.
Already, Rortan, which was planted further to the sea than us, they have walls to keep out the Sea. Arrogance and stupidity, I say. We will have to try the Uplands which sprout more green each year. We shall have to take them from the Northlanders even as we surrender our beautiful city to the Sea.
By fervent questioning of taletellers, I hear an uncertain story that someone has already done this. They have built a town they call 'Troy' to replace their old city. I know not where Troy is except that it is above another valley like the Pleasant Valley, and that worries me, for if they fled the safety of a great valley for the unknown heights and cold summers, what do they fear? I only know now that when I climb down the great natural dam between North and South, that I look at it with worry, and I wonder why the rock hums under my hand during storms out on the Great Sea.
The merchants of P. primarily use single hump camels in caravans, and lots of slaves to carry their goods.
Historical Note: P., in this story, would be one of many Bronze Age cities lost to the waves. They are suffering global warming (and I may have made this world too hot as it gets hotter as the continent covering glaciers melt). The 'natural dam' is of course, the one between Europe and Africa at Gibraltar, and the Pleasant Valley is the Mediterranean Basin before the dam broke and covered everything in a deluge that was not the Great Water, but was certainly impressive in its own right.
The Dragon's Head Upland is Spain, and the mountains are the Alps.
Trade would be primarily bronze and tin, I would think. I should think back to my games of Civilization the orginal board game with 'ochre'.
The Northlanders are Neanderthals, and the Edgelanders are Cro-Magnon. The N. have the advantage of coming from a very large strain of humanity, and possibly giant blood, but the disadvantage of vitamin deficiency due to lack of sun and no fish.
Eventually, the more numerous and technically advanced Edgelanders destroy the Neanderthals except in isolated regions. Like many migrations through history (The Irish in the Potato Famine) they are driven by necessity. In this case, the rising waves cover their cities as the glaciers melt and flow down to the Sea.
Eventually, the water rises high enough that the land bridges which join the continents are broken or covered over.
And yeah, the dragons are dinosaurs.
Welcome to the World of Ice and Bronze.
isn't the idea of a caste society from India, or something? just curious.
1. This is before India is founded. I'm not sure when India was actually founded, but I think during this time it would have been covered by ice. Off-hand, I'd put India's founding sometime fairly early after the end of the Bronze Age, and the story is set right before the end of the Bronze Age.
2. Also, worldwide, there might not be castes in many other countries through history, but you did tend to go into your father's profession...Dad's a shepherd, and so are you, just like the nine generations before you.
3. I'd not make these castes as hard and fast as India's castes are. The world is young, and people are scared in a strange world, and so they seek familiarity, but if you really, really want to be something else, its possible (except for nobility, and that might be possible if you for example go found a city which is something people were doing some of.)
India has had people in it for about as long as Mesopotamia and China, and nearly as long as the Rift Valley, from what I recall of my world history courses. I'm not sure when the specific society that gets used as the poster-culture for caste systems came about, though, so that's not terribly helpful.
Searching for "caste" on Wikipedia would probably clear this up in under twenty minutes.
Well, in my history here, Spain aka the Dragon Head Highlands, is mostly covered by ice. If its covered by ice, then India, not that far from the Himalayas is probably covered by a lot of it as well. Of course, as India gets closer to the equator....
There are a lot of cities underwater. Its probable that at some point the water rose (end of Ice Age), and the city dwellers of the Bronze Age were forced to move inland to set up shop at the new port on the river they had been using.
I'd say that India picked up the idea of caste systems from earlier peoples or they just took something that was a general 'the way we do things' and turned it into a system with reasons and rules and stuff.
My history here is likely out of the mainstream, but if you have underwater cities, you pretty much are driven to one of two conclusions 1)Some local area disturbance that sunk certain lands aka Atlantis!! 2)General rise of the sea level.
My Indian history is basically 'there were a bunch of peaceful farmers who lived there, and then the Vedic people invaded from the north in chariots and took over, and those invaders got turned into gods as history wound onward.'
Wikipedia wasn't that helpful except to make clear that a lot of nations engaged in caste systems.
Brock, if your question is whether castes originated in India, the answer is probably that is not known, but India is famed for the most structured caste system in the world.
A caste system in essence means that you are locked into the status of your ancestral family, and cannot expect to rise below it or fall below it. You should marry within the caste, and plan to work at a caste-appropriate job.
Something like it has existed nearly everywhere, because it is an excellent tool for nobles to protect their rights and status. It has been more structured in the East than in the West; James Burke has asserted that it is the primary reason why technology developed in Europe but not in China: in China if you invented something, your master would take it and use it and send you back to the fields to keep working, while in Europe if you invented something you would become rich and famous manufacturing and selling it, and might even be raised into the social circles above your birth (e.g., knighted for your discovery). Thus there was incentive to invent and improve in the West that did not exist in the East.
Some of this is used in Dark Honor Empire, although not as strictly as might be--a peasant who excels can become a sumo or a kabuki, and so enter the ranks of nobility at the lowest levels, but this does not happen very often.
--M. J. Young