Joghunmal
The Joghunmal, Old Joghs, or High Joghs were a continuum of cultures that flourished in eastern Inner Joriscia and northern Outer Joriscia in the 1st millennium CE, which gave rise to the Joghic peoples.
Name
Joghunmal was an Undughu term (jgi-nml, Imperial Jōghī nāmal) that literally meant 'gobbling jay'. Animals were often used for symbols of peoples and therefore ethnonyms in northeastern Joriscia, with names modifying the same basic animal with different attributes connoting relation. The 'Joghs' or 'jays' were originally understood to comprise the entire folk of the particular migration that produced the Joghunmal, while the Joghunmal in particular were the tribe founded by Gegmal, although through cultural diffusion and common identification 'Joghunmal' became applied to a much wider range of peoples than those he originally fathered.
History
Nomadic Proto-Joghs first began raiding the Dovhyi Tableland in the 4th century BCE, but it was only in the late 2nd century BCE that they migrated south en masse, subjugating the Larwir that had moved into the region earlier and settled down. Conflicts between those of opposing lineages and origins among the diverse conquerors, the Joghic Confection, turned out to unleash a state-building process that had spread to Unscany by the 1st century BCE, with the Joghic general Baqbaq establishing the First Despotism. In inland Lutoborsk this culminated with the first major Joghic state, the First Animation, being founded by Gegmal in 15 CE, which also established the more long-lived institution of the Joghic Hegemony. The Despotism and the Animation exercised strong mutual influence on each other that was to survive into persistent Joghic cultural symbiosis with the Undughu civilisation, even long after the disappearance of Joghic rulers in Unscany.
As the Dovhyi Joghs (or 'Agnujoghs' as they were known in the Hegemonic hierarchy) sedentarised, they set up kingdoms structured around the Hegemony which came into increasing conflict with their nomadic counterparts. Assertions of independence by nomadic confederacies soon involved proclamations of ethnogenesis, and secession from the Hegemony's ritual system. A wave of nomadic invasions at the turn of the 4th century produced the Joghunghal Confederacy which imposed itself on the Tableland, and reanimated the Hegemony through forms of mobilisation appealing to charismatic leaders and mystical pursuits, though this was ultimately short-lived. In the 5th century the Malkazy Confederacy embarked on institutional reforms to confront the Undughu Empire and other rivals in the era of conflict known as the Torrent of Adventure. Tableland communities, nomadic and sedentary, were integrated into polities known as aganes, evolving in a way parallel to the Undughu city-states, and the Malkazy established a powerful sedentary empire that was even able to cow the western Joghunghet. By the late 6th century, however, it was being overshadowed by the Undughu Empire, and it soon broke up into independent agane cities, which now rallied around chohbahs, a model whose charm was spreading even to the Joghunghet of the west and the Joghunqazh of the north. The Malkazy's collapse in 630 marked the end of the Joghic Hegemony as an effective institution, and soon the shift of the Tableland into a peripheral interface between Unscany and states in the Joghunmal Plain.
Agane fragmentation and chohbah ezny marriages served to control the Undughu's western frontier, but after the Zcharletid Confederacy swept through the Tableland and seriously threatened the coastal empire in the early 9th century, the Undughu embarked on a more radical strategy. Following the Zcharletids' fall in the 860s, champion colonists and acculturating Jogh nobles pioneered a programme of intense Undughisation in the Anabasis to Tonjir, creating the Namaru states that defined the last major classical Undughu-Joghic cultural exchange. While in the Namal Wars of the 10th century they proved fearsome in invading the Undughu Empire, in the 11th century they were conquered by the Yarovids — originally Secotised Joghunghet — and co-opted by the Secote Empire to serve in the Secote invasion of the Undughu. The age of the classical Joghs soon ended with the Secotisation that took place under the various Yarovid commanderies and later the Lutoborovid Confederacy in which the Agnujoghs became part of the Lutoborians, while distinct Joghic cultures held out with the Dilidjoghs and Badgajoghs to the north.
Society
Joghic society and culture was based around factions, or the definition of oneself based on an action or vocation being engaged in, similar to the Undughu. Clans and larger kin associations were the main social units. The unity of an individual clan was taken as a given, but any higher level of organisation required definition by sophisticated abstract systems that formed the centre of Joghic polities, traditionally attributed to the conflicts of the Joghic Confection. This role was first taken by the Joghic Hegemony and its 'microcosmic' local variations, and then various high cultures or elaborate myths constituting fleeting empires in the long era of Joghic fragmentation, as well as chohbah celebration. While histories have usually noted the comparative orderliness of Joghic communities, whether nomadic or sedentary, compared to the anarchy of the Undughu, a point has also been often made, even by traditional accounts, that the independent competing personality in each culture was merely constituted differently; some studies have suggested the Joghunmal's peculiarities reflected only a common 'northeastern Joriscian society' adapted to inland economic circumstances.
With the aganes under the Malkazy and nomadic empires that emulated it, clans and other household-like groups became the units of factions within communities of a more political character, sometimes evolving into guilds and other times creating more closed professional castes. The autocratic patriarchs of households, as independent citizens and the way factions were brought together, were replaced by powerful individuals of a competitive political elite, who maintained a more exalted 'entrepreneurial' character, probably originating in the privileges of ruling clans or patricians in the better-established confederacies and kingdoms. 'Houseless' men, or rather men who were houses and clans unto themselves, were revered as generators of order. This produced a notion of a separate, exalted political elite above clan affiliation or factional occupation, a role that could be easily adopted by the Mentusian Zcharletids, the Undughising Namaru, and finally the Secotes; it also influenced champion politics further east on the Esperasian coast.
The Joghs were in material and everyday terms quite similar: all three main groups shared a fundamental tripartite of nomadic nobles, freeholders (usually just land-owning nobles), and peasants. The nobility was akin to Undughu freemen and included merchants who were admitted fairly generously. Among the lower classes, those simply assigned to labour in a clan-confederacy were never clearly distinguished from slaves and serfs, or various tributary peoples deemed fundamentally alien, and this was often a drive for 'hierarchy-inverting' revolts by less advantaged groups. On the other hand, Joghic polities and communities were quite welcoming as far as inclusion into the polity was concerned, and never developed a problem with fundamentally 'foreign' aliens as the Undughu had with the Chishee.