Tecton

The tecton or technician was a sacred artisan prominent in the societies around the Medius and Messenic Seas in ancient times, from about the 3rd to 1st millennia BCE. The craft that a tecton practiced and specialised in, or techne, was ascribed with great religious significance, treated as divine knowledge, for which tectons were revered in their own right. The tecton also importantly served the sacred kingship or phagos that headed many such societies, as their work was often first dedicated to kings, cementing the office's significance as the recipient of such wondrously and divinely crafted products. To fulfil the king's other equally significant if not synonymous role as gifter and redistributor, the goods were then distributed out to wider society, forming the typical palace economy that tectons worked in.

Sagans

The Sagan sacred artisan, or ur (Sularin uz), was likely the original tecton. In Sagan records of the 3rd millennium BCE, craftsmen were not a distinguished class among the greater Sagan polity, whose entire raison d'être was to build tengriliks and stuff them full of artworks to beautify the world and appease gods. In this sense the entire population of a Sagan polity would have been urs, though this term was not used then; in the arid climate of north Lestria, agricultural knowledge, including both farming and animal husbandry, seems to have been treated to be as intricate as metallurgy or masonry. The more sedentary polities established in the later half of the 3rd millennium saw the rise of phagistic god-kings or qaghans, and subjugated populations employed to farm en masse, causing a differentiation in the seniority of technological knowledge. The urs primarily comprised masons, blacksmiths, sculptors, painters, and brewers (whose craft superseded that of farming, now viewed as lowly), directly doubling as priests of the cults surrounding the patron gods of those arts.

After the qaghans were overthrown at the end of the 3rd millennium and the era of the bayraks unfolded, more respublican governments emerged with urs at their helm. However, a second differentiation in their ranks happened, with power mostly assumed by master-priests, or bögüs (cognacy with 'phagos' still disputed), that represented the technical cults, rather than tectons performing the bulk of actual production. The bögüs were initially still closely involved with their craft, but as commerce between bayraks and with other cultures grew, their administrative roles took precedence. The bögüs evolved into more of a merchant class that oriented their cities' crafts for export and exchange; their detachment from the techne caused major tensions from the urs, and conflict between the two dominated late Sagan society. The main exception to this was the blacksmiths or tarqans, who were the most honoured of all urs, and were mostly able to collectively and directly represent themselves in politics. The Karabugha Empire was ruled again by a qaghan, who seems to have restored some measure of stability by acting as phagos, but by its collapse the bögüs-ur conflict had again become the issue driving the empire apart.

Urs were still widely respected fixtures of north Lestrian political economy in the 1st millennium BCE. Corporations of tectons travelled and colonised around the Great Golden Arc, bringing with them distinctive features of their culture in the form of key societies. As they retreated into these closely-knit associations, some of which eventually became Houses when converting to Siriash and others dynasties or cliques ruling over polities in their own right, they shed most of their ideas of an obligation to society outside, which in their internal genealogies and mythologies was frequently blamed on the late Karabugha conflicts against corrupt priestly managers, or some parallel thereof.

Messenians

In the Messenian civilisation tectons also emerged early on as an important part of society. In the oldest kingdoms of the late 3rd millennium BCE typified by Lison, the phagos was served by tectons that included farmers, masons, sculptors, jewellers, blacksmiths, and many other professions. The tectons famously seized power in the upheaval of the early 2nd millennium BCE, ushering in the Spring of Democracy in which power became more evenly distributed through mechanisms like referenda, sortition, or election. Like the Sagans however, a class of elite tectons came to assume most of these powers as an aristocracy, and became detached from their original craft.

The Antissan civilisation developed along similar lines, with tecton-dictated democracies displacing the phagoi early on in the culture's emergence. With the unification of the Antissans under Dammuri, and the rise of Palthachism, however, the elite shifted over to a combination of a military aristocracy and the temple-bound priesthood. The tectons were left with little direct political representation, becoming either more humbled within the palace economy or serving the Palthachist priests as artisan slaves. By the time of the Sundering, there were almost no traces left of artisanry as a prestigious, let alone divine, vocation, further cemented by early Siriash's focus on warrior virtues.