Vossar
The Vossar people inhabited the northern and central regions of present-day Siurskeyti and Helminthasse from the early eighth century BCE until approximately the beginning of the Common Era. They are generally regarded as being one of the precursor peoples to the present-day Siur in western Messenia.
Etymology
The origins of the name Vossar are uncertain, although the Odannach historian and ethnologist Aoife nic Amlaioibh has linked the Vossar with later references to a so-called “people of death” (modern Dael daoine an bháis), suggesting the driving out of a warrior tribe to less hospitable lands.1 Suggestions that the name is an early cognate to modern Hártal vaskur, “brave, valiant”, have been largely discounted as untenable given the relatively late appearance of Sunnic languages in the region.
Antecedents
The early proto-Vossar people emerged in what is today western Odann in the early part of the second millennium BCE; claims are made that they were the successors to the Vítrör who lived in far western Messenia (mainly in modern Helminthasse), although much of this remains conjecture. The proto-Vossar extended well into the central Odannach Uplands by around 1500 BCE, becoming a settled pastoral people; however, they found themselves increasingly hemmed in by the expanding Daelic peoples further east, even as both groups became more sophisticated cultures on the back of trading links with the Sabāmani in eastern Messenia. Forced continuously onto the defensive, particularly by the Riparian Daels, the Vossar were increasingly marginalised and were forced out of the region entirely in the early first millennium BCE; however, there is some academic debate as to whether the Vossar consciously moved south and west into a comparative void in the wake of the Hilima Eruption of 855 BCE.
Development
The notion of the Vossar as a belligerent group is given some credence by the apparent speed with which they established themselves as the dominant people in their new homelands; the first definably Vossar states, petty principalities in the valleys of the Halðamar and Levanð in what is today northern and central Helminthasse, arose from as early as 780 BCE, and several of these would coalesce into a distinct kingdom from the early seventh century BCE. This state, known as the Kingdom of Vossar in antiquarian studies, was centred on the city of Magos, located in the lower Ekna valley some way south of the modern city of Lágskáli; at its peak of expansion in the middle fourth century BCE it controlled an area covering present-day Arakan, Vernland, north-western Helminthasse as far south as Hélla, and the far west of Tvåriken. A number of smaller and more loosely-organised states extended across central Helminthasse, buffering the Vossar from the stronger polities in the south which were coming under the control of the western Sunneni.
By contrast to their claimed origins with the piscatorial Vítrör, the Vossar were much more clearly a land power; even the island of Laën (today Klettsoy), now the easternmost of the islands of Tassedar and barely 140 kilometres (88 miles) from the Messenian mainland, remained out of their compass.
Religion
While it is thought that the earliest Vossar settlers had no religious practices more sophisticated than basic animism, their movement into the Siur country brought them into contact with the indigenous faith, Thúrun, while that system of belief was probably at the height of its power and influence, and they were absorbed into the wider stream of Thúrun belief even as they overwhelmed and absorbed the indigenous population of the region. There have been suggestions that Thúrun as practiced by many Vossar was a more pared-down form, stripped of many of the excrescences which Thúrun had acquired in its partial fusion with Palthachism between roughly 1500 and 1000 BCE.
Customs
Evidence from both contemporary artworks and surviving skeletal remains make plain the practice by the early Vossar of artificial cranial deformation, typically so as to distort the skull into an elongated and roughly conical shape; this was usually done during a child’s infancy, as the skull is softer and more pliable at this time, although there are some indications of it being carried out on adults. The reasons for the custom are not clear, although it has been suggested that people with these elongated crania were in some way more intelligent or more attuned to the ways of the deities of Thúrun. The presence of the remains of sacerdotal garments alongside some of these deformed skulls has been cited in support of this contention, although the evidence is far from conclusive; and the practice appears to have died out by the early fourth century BCE.
Disappearance
The Vossar’s continuing presence in the far west of Messenia, overlapping as it did with that of the Sunneni, saw a gradual blurring of the lines between the two, in large part the result of inter-communal trade and increasing intermarriage, to the extent that the distinction may have become moot as early as 200 BCE. However, the currently accepted position among Messenian ethnologists is that the Vossar and Sunneni did not fully coalesce into the Siur people until the very end of the pre-Common Era period.