Undughu civilisation
The Undughu civilisation was a cultural bloc that dominated northeastern Outer Joriscia from the 4th century BCE to some time in the early 2nd millennium CE. Although the heartland of the Undughu Empire, which intermittently unified the civilisation, fell almost exclusively within the Lutoborsk's contemporary borders, Undughu culture was spread around the western Esperasian Ocean as far as colonies such as Kiy or outposts like Rania, and they regularly held an important position in politics and commerce around the Gulf of Joriscia long after the Empire's collapse. One of Outer Joriscia's two great civilisations alongside Chotar, the Undughu played a significant role in history, left behind an astonishing artistic legacy, and provided deep-rooted customs that have survived in the Lutoborsk and other areas to today.
Etymology
The name 'Undughu' comes from Chotarian and Old Lacrean Unduğu, which is derived from הלדע hldğ, in Imperial Undughu ōldoğ. It literally means 'presence/place that drifts'; the stem dğ 'to drift, float' produces a cognate in modern Moujique hōldoh. This term was initially used to allude to an idea of Undughu civilisation as something that metaphorically 'drifted' about through the world. It only became an unambiguous ethnonym in the the 9th century with the identification of the eponymous imperial capital of Undughy (ōldoğī; modern Undugsk) with Undughu civilisation. Its late appearance can almost certainly be connected to the rise of Undughu cultural identity positioned against Chotar. Numerous exonyms were used for the Undughu in the ages prior, most of which did not describe the entire civilisation, and were particular to regions and ethnicities.
History
Archaic era
The era of the Proto-Undughu begins fuzzily in the 1st millennium BCE as large settlements, monuments, and cultural artifacts that have identifiable stylistic continuity with the early recorded Undughu emerge around the northeastern Joriscian seaboard. By the 6th century BCE iron tools became readily used. The Undughu origin debate in Outer Joriscian scholarship disputes if sophistication first emerged in Unscany to the south, or the Mezhadchenye valley to the north. Either way, the manifestation of factional culture as professions and vocations appeared very early on to distinguish Undughu society.
Starting in the 4th century BCE, the first natively produced cuneiform and hieroglyphic records emerge alongside the sudden proliferation of both fortified towns and larger sprawling settlements or nazkady. Native legend records that Unscany was conquered by northerners, which is corroborated by a shift to northern styles in artifacts (though causes remain debated). These settlements sought to control trade routes that linked southern Joriscia to regions as far north as Kadalkhia and Kiy, as well as the Steppe via the Joghunmal. The Undughu polity first acquired its classical forms: in Unscany a number of competing cities acting as mere combinations of intertwined convergent interests appeared, while to the north the dominant polities would be more expansive but also protean confederal alliances. Though their politics were polycentric and inconstant, cities and regional interests were steadily unified under elected war-leaders or 'presidents', culminating with the First Despotism established by the Joghic general Baqbaq in 22 BCE. The Despotism exploited the chaos of the Third Chotarian Interdynastic to assert control as far south as the Joriscian Lowlands, while opening the precedent for a type of powerful leadership in the office of the Undughu despot.
City-states and the early Empire
After the collapse of the ephemeral Despotism, individual cities began to become more distinct as polities, transforming gradually into true 'city-states' where municipal interests and issues if not identity were political driving forces, and dedicated governmental bodies like despots, presidents, priests, or councils became permanent and fixed institutions. The nazkady was now walled off into separate nazty, if not entirely replaced by them. Some of these innovations were influenced by Chotarian culture, with Ishtinist temple-courts probably inspiring the practice of municipal religious rites as an important political matter. Others were more practically motivated by competition against Tableland states (the Joghic Hegemony), Chotar, or the northern peoples. As trade and exchange grew with the north, new polities in those lands also witnessed the rise of fixed political spaces and matters holding precedence in factional life, but converged towards an alternative model of despots leading charismatic feats, rather than executing municipal wills. By the 3rd century CE most cities were participants in any of the Five Leagues which vied for dominance, and collectively controlled much of the maritime trade around the Gulf of Joriscia. As Chotar fell into fragmentation again in the Equinox era, the already powerful city of Abani defeated its chief rivals in wars from 331 to 334, establishing itself as the hegemon of Unscany. The city's despot Holayqan I monumentally claimed the title of Undughu Emperor, modelled on the Chotarian Emperor while ambiguously laying claim to Chotarian heritage, and inaugurating the Undughu Empire.
The early Empire lasted until the 6th century and remained centred on city-based politics. It began as simply an oversized version of previous city-leagues dominated by Abani, and endeavours such as expansion into the Lower Nadrova were joint enterprises like before. But in imitation of Chotarian religious uniformity, a cult of the sea god Opto was promoted to increase Abani's importance among its clients, and to eventually make them into imperial subjects. The consolidation of Abani's supremacy accelerated after the Protocol War of 399–402, when the importance of the Emperor as a charismatic figurehead was replaced by proactive governance by Abani's own elders. However, by the middle of the 5th century, these responsibilities now brought instability into the city's politics, as fellow confederates sought representation and leverage as full citizens in power struggles. The emergence of major competitors, the Joghic Malkazy Confederacy and the northern kingdom of Tiha, joined with these internal conflicts to lead to a crisis for over a century known as the Torrent of Adventure. It was only ended when the emperor Hoshah, supported by the Nadzoly, began sweeping reforms along Chotarian lines, or eser, that tremendously centralised power, and allowed him to conquer the entirety of northeastern Joriscia by 582.
High Empire
Hoshah was quickly overthrown by Tihan nobles represented by their imperial candidate Hosed I, and from now on the northern Undughu, even though they were only just incorporated into the Empire, would play key roles in it. While on one hand many Chotarian-style institutions were condemned and reverted, and an independent Undughu cultural identity asserted, on the other the imposition of administrative hierarchy through reorganising factions into guilds and cities into municipalities caused permanent resentment against the imperial order. This led to the great cultural dispute known as the Culture War, as well as inconstancy of imperial power as it was attacked at every turn by nativists. Dealing with the rise of the Fifth Chotarian Empire made for the concentration of power in the hands of a Viceroy of the Undughu, whose southern half of the empire held the political and economic initiative by the end of the 8th century, but the new and definitive Undughu arts, ideas, and rituals were being developed in the north, now undoubtedly its cultural centre. The Fence of Chornohora was established to defend against Chotar, while Kiy was colonised through establishing the city of Sugooch; the Empire reached its territorial maximum, even gaining a chokehold on the Gulf of Joriscia through establishing outposts in Rania and Aushria after the Seafire Wars.
After the Intercessory War of 811–5, power moved back south to Unscany and indeed Abani itself, refounded in 828 as a new capital fittingly called 'Undughy'. In this period, eser and the concept of the Empire was accepted by the guilds with greater enthusiasm, who became powerful local governments, although the Emperor himself became practically irrelevant. On the other, the 'cultural totalitarianism' established authorities now seemed to impose met an even more strident rejection in the Culture War, amidst the rise of hynahs and disclosure-related philosophy. These conflicts were at the heart of the creations of the Torrent of Vocation, and the new anti-imperial counterculture would also spearhead a wave of Undughising influence among the Joghunmal in the Anabasis to Tonjir. The burning spite for imperial order and culture culminated in a great crisis in the 10th century, as the Namal Wars, the Nosophile Persecutions, and the Haynishkad caused the Empire to fall into instability. The concept of the Empire rapidly unravelled; to maintain order both ceremonial and practical, the Isaghash League invited the Chotarians to rule Unscany as the circuits of Undul and Rozman in 971. While by 993 a new Emperor Holayqan XI had re-established the Empire in the Anabasis to Abani and ousted the Chotarophiles from Unscany, the imperial ideal had lost all vitality and charm. This last, fragile iteration of the Empire was quickly disbanded during the Secote conquest of Outer Joriscia when local rulers and generals submitted to the forces of the Secote Empire in 1040.
Post-Secote era
Unlike the dramatic destruction of Chotar under the Secotes, the Undughu of antiquity (or at least before the invasion) did not meet a clear-cut end; a more vague transition in political terms did occur with the rise of champion warlords and Secote kunentsys, but even then many trends had been well under way before the conquest. City-states reasserted their independence in Unscany, but were soon united into the New Despotism, while in the north the competition of adventurer-warriors created a swathe and succession of ephemeral polities, defined more by the customs adventurers observed, known as the Khuikh Quests. Imperial institutions paradoxically survived most meaningfully in Kiy with the Maintenants, but even there they would soon be unseated in the Milling of Kiy. Finally, khaa raids swept across Outer Joriscia and established a diaspora of raiders, conquerors, and traders who became the Yogyee in southern societies.
Society
In broad terms the Undughu society was polycentric: authority and influence was specific to each of the main factions that defined a community's life, and for the most part were mutually independent. Under the Undughu Empire they were formalised and organised into guilds, but even then an even richer civil society existed beyond these officially regulated associations. Politics took place in many ways, and the Undughu polity was a complex environment where many political spaces ranging from 'concert' competitions to oracular 'dictations' could govern society in either conjunction or competition. Elected war-leaders or aesthetics-defining visionaries, though often recorded by foreigners as 'leaders', represented only sections of Undughu politics. Nevertheless, over time some factions or offices secured preeminence to the point of statehood, such as the Undughu despot and eventually the immense though controversial prestige of the Undughu Emperor. In terms of general regional differences, Unscany and the wider south was dominated by compact cities, while looser, regional confederacies were prevalent in the north.
The diversity and competition of factional life made most its participants a large stratum of 'freemen' who enjoyed extensive freedoms, dignities, and rights. However, there was also extensive repression and exploitation of aliens. Many of the comforts or privileges of a freeman had to be bloodily won or secured by a champion career, and the overall sense of liberty was arguably more a product of the violent anarchy that prevailed in Undughu society. Women were not permitted any public life in principle, being basically treated as property and ritual instruments in the culture of sany, although priestess guilds were able to overstep such conventions and exercise a great deal of independent influence. Despite or precisely because of all this, traditional treatments of the Undughu have depicted them as paragons of a vigorous, unpredictable, and anarchic form of liberty, where the individual will was paramount in an almost egoistic way. It was certainly not the formulated orthodoxy of Undughu culture and indeed rival institutions worked to contain it, but the champion, the innovator, or some other entrepreneur's ability to contest and defeat those objections would serve, in these historiographies, as its greatest vindicator.
Economy
Undughu economies were necessarily diverse. Of agriculture, intensive rice-farming similar to Chotar was practiced in Unscany, while to the north there was instead mixed cultivation of barley and wheat on larger fields, and a greater presence of livestock; rice farming and cuisine eventually became derided as servile in contrast. Transhumant pastoralism was also practiced and well-respected. Mining and forestry were activities most associated with the far north and later the Kainish colonies. Crafts of all sorts were well-developed among the Undughu, especially in the era of the guilds, under which a great deal of specialisation and commercialisation occurred.
Unscany was a major player in the Joriscian sea trade and many of its inhabitants were described as maritime in spirit. By the 10th century, the seasonal mass departure of Undughu merchant vessels from north to south in winter, and the corresponding return trips in summer, were well-known. The adaptations of the Undughu longship allowed it to secure sea power across the Gulf of Joriscia, as well as to make journeys as distant as discovering Daskhye or reaching the Tondaku. On land, the Joghunmal of the Steppe served as a gateway to a route that led all the way to Messenia, and exchange with the Third Sabāmani Empire exerted a surprisingly significant influence on late Undughu aesthetics.
There was a relatively large middle class in the Undughu economy, which by the 8th century enjoyed above-average living standards for the time, but by that time there was also a large, predominantly alien, lower class of Chishee who had been employed as slaves and serfs to support the economic growth taking place under the empire. Various forms of slavery were present before and most types of factional employment existed on a spectrum from bondage to freedom, but the development of factions' and freemen's dignities against imperial impositions caused somewhat of a merger of social and material status (even the dignification of previously servile factions), as well as the emergence of a single lower class at once foreign and untouchable. Competition and munificence seem to have limited the scale of direct possessions of the Undughu elite, though they were always able to sponsor various projects, endeavours, and parties supporting a landscape of polycentric politics.
Warfare
The archetypical though not always universal mode of Undughu warfare was the raid, a one-off effort by a spontaneously organised gathering of armed freemen at attaining some objective. Military strength almost always drew from deeper support by citizenries or aristocracies and reflected another aspect of polycentric Undughu society. In later times, a dedicated faction of rogue warrior-adventurers known as champions emerged to specialise in supporting idealistic political and military efforts, rulers began equipping more reliable corps of slave-soldiers (some alien and others committed for factional reasons), and polities were able to establish obligations of military service from their citizenry. However, the mobilisation of sympathetic or opportunistic freemen remained key to most military efforts; even many of the Empire's more organised local armed forces also were simply better-equipped raid mobilisation networks or well-established bands of co-opted adventurers.
The Undughu adopted many military technologies from the Jogh, especially in the sphere of mounted warfare. They were also able to dominate the Joriscian seas from the 8th century. Undughu warriors were well-known for their ferocity, but against the larger and more disciplined armies of Chotar they tended to be at a disadvantage, and defence networks like the Fence of Chornohora could only barely check Chotarian invasions.
Religion
The Undughu religion was a primarily propitiatory system appealing to a diverse pantheon of gods and an even larger cosmos of spirits. It was believed that supernatural life and entire parallel worlds coexisted closely with the naturally perceivable, and were analogous in their properties; people could purportedly depart for these realms by exit, disappearing from worldly view rather than dying. Numerous religious practices were present in Undughu society, often mutually independent if not in conflict; opposing oracles, temples, or festivals could actively and viciously compete for the faith and support of the same locality. The Undughu Empire oversaw attempts to impose an imperial cult based on Ishtinism, where the Undughu Emperor was either the incarnation of Opto or a god in his own right. This was challenged in the Culture War, though eventually the institutional co-optation of old cults into formal guilds caused a major crisis of confidence in the old priesthood altogether. The rise of quasi-religious practices of devotion towards hynahs in the late Empire has been widely regarded as an incipient revolution towards a more philosophical Undughu religion, but that role was assumed by Siriash and Cairony as introduced by the Secotes, and the hynahs themselves blended into folk beliefs as avatars of deities propitiated in more traditional ways, whose cults managed to enjoy a limited revival. Most figures of the Undughu pantheon have survived into modern folk beliefs as demons, and many are popularly considered negotiable in the same way old Undughu religion managed.
Culture
Faction
Undughu culture was based on the concept of faction, where one was primarily concerned and defined by the activity they engaged in or circumstances they were placed in; activities, matters, and innate callings, collectively known as 'facts', thus structured the Undughu worldview. How this expressed itself in the features of society was variable, not just because of a diversity of cultures across the Undughu's expansive geography but also because what faction a fact itself compelled was mutable according to that fact's demands. The conceptual primacy of faction could mean dedication to a vocation, or the aggressive dissociation of the different jobs and routines one worked through daily; unwavering preservation of customs and traditions, or their sudden revision or abrogation in service of promising novelties; and even, with respect to their explanation or facticity, actuation according to a logical and intuitive necessity, or belief in grand systems and principles about aesthetics, order, or philosophy amounting to disclosure. Documentation of the Undughu by other cultures, and indeed later histories, have tended to focus on the ways factional culture created distinctive features relative to neighbours such as Chotar, narrowing it down to a single culture of committed workmanship or irrationality, when it was probably more like a logic that those expressions were built on.
Genius and will
Of the few pillars that could be established about Undughu culture, an emphasis on individual creativity and the force of will seems to have been prominent. Aesthetics vaguely formed the guiding logic of many early polities, with communities being governed by men with 'good taste' who directed factional work towards the production of the beautiful, which may be quite independent of or even contradictory with religious or spiritual considerations. Sheer tenacity and a suitably alluring vision for an alternative were all one needed to create a social initiative that could rally awed supporters and tear down existing norms and regulations. It was within works of art or conquest that could be demonstrated to be a truly personal work that one either found the revelation of possibilities beyond factional life, or the paramount vindication of the faction that the work serviced. Many parts of Undughu culture are thus best-viewed in terms of individual expression: artisanry, bravery, devotion, creativity, and talent were, while not philosophically seen as the same, often expressed in the same forms.
The explosion in creativity during the Torrent of Vocation brought this culture to its culmination. Violent yet grandly designed and choreographed sports such as nibal-nabah did not just allow warriors to demonstrate their physical prowess (or spectacularly die while doing so), but also designers to create narratives they could trademark as their own, presented to the public in a deeply immersive and epic form of theatre. Undughu dialectic attempted to subordinate public and political discourse to archetypical characters entirely at the mercy of a playwright's imagination. Even Undughu embroidery was imprinted with the uniqueness of the artist in its dizzying patterns. It was in the plenitude of their own imagination that the Undughu attempted to create entirely new mythologies surrounding the hynahs.
Ethnology
Ethnically the Undughu comprised a great number of peoples with a corresponding diversity of customs. Linguistically, the so-called 'Undughu language' that became dominant across northeastern Joriscia under the Undughu Empire was a member of a family particular to Unscany. Its elite and official usage, however, did not prevent other major constituent tongues like Deng from holding firm positions in their own right. Regional and ethnic distinctions were prominent during the civilisation's existence. Unscany, while more populous and prosperous in material terms from its proximity to trade around the Gulf of Joriscia, accepted a subordinate cultural role to the Tihan north. This arguably originates in Unscan rulers claiming descent from northern conquerors as early as the Proto-Undughu period, and mythological genealogies, while diverse, generally alluded to the origin of Undughu man or his animating principle to the far north, possibly even beyond Kiy and at the North Pole. Into the imperial era the reasons for the north being the 'fountain' of Undughu culture became more tangible, as it was former Tiha that provided the creative artists that defined the Torrent of Vocation, while Unscans served as 'consumers' of the cultural works they produced. The dominant forms in art, clothing, music, and other parts of Undughu culture consciously took from Tihan styles, and they were especially emphasised against Chotarian influences.
The Undughu adopted the Chotarian alphabet twice, with the 'elder' or 'Urumen' script being introduced under the First Despotism, and the 'younger' Lacrean script being imposed under the Empire in the 7th century; as late as the 19th century Chotarian was still well-preserved as the writing system for Undughic languages. On the other hand, many parts of Undughu culture thus became hostile to written documentation as a distinctly Chotarian and alien matter; many already secretive guilds, associations, and cults would forbid any textual representation altogether, even regarding acts of transcription themselves as inauspicious.
Contradistinction against other cultures played an important part in Undughu culture and identity from the 4th century onwards, with Chotar serving as the great antagonist to which was ascribed all sorts of undesirable qualities, most notably servility. This came about because of both existing attitudes and discontent with Chotarian-style institutions (eser), reaching a height with the Culture War. Foreigners were further judged by the concept and institution of alienation to which was consigned all actors that did not meet the thresholds of Undughu dignity; the segregated slave castes were treated with as much hostility as one would to rival powers. The Jogh were viewed as dignified rivals, Gergotes were praised for their freedom but constantly feared as a source of immigrants, and the Kainish were often exotically treated as fossils of virtue and wisdom that had been lost to tudy. A positively fantastical view of the Sabamanian civilisation and wider Messenia developed through the exchange of goods over the Steppe, while the Dabaians were less favourably compared with Chotar.
Architecture
Monumental Undughu architecture was mainly influenced by Chotarian styles, although some Sabamani influence was observed in later buildings. One kind of distinct and unique Undughu structure was the hozkazy.