Aiwa valley
From Almeopedia
Yet another info-rescue pasted in verbatim. I'll format it later.
| Author: Radius |
Notes on other tribes in and around the empire:
- Ngauro. Still extant as a distinct ethnicity, subjugated by the Ndak but fiercely maintaining their pride in their former accomplishments (often grossly exaggerated in their legends) and their language, which despite their claims of superiority was in fact dwindling away. The remaining cohesive communities were north of Kasadgad proper.
- Miu and Meshi. mostly peaceful, scattered tribes that spoke languages related to Ngauro. Pre-agricultural with religious rites that shocked even the Ndak (I'll leave this to your imaginations). They and the Ndak mostly left each other be, at this point, though conflict occurred later on.
- Hitatc (Wan, Mlir, and many smaller tribes). Little was known of them; they were the only people to defeat an invasion by Tsinakan, an affair left out of most official histories.
- Faraghin and Fer?jin. Two related, but distinct, contentious peoples that might have been able to resist Ndak invasions had they not fought against each other as much as against the Ndak. Their languages were related to that of the Ngauro, but much more distantly than Miu or Meshi. Among the Ndak they had a reputation for stupidity, heavy drinking, and being content to wear rough animal skins... or nothing at all. Despite this they had begun to settle down and were even producing the occasional scribe and poet.
- Gezoro. Ancient arch-enemies of the Ndak, aside from the Ngauro. Credited with being the first to develop serious metallurgy, they for centuries had better weapons and better armor than anyone else, which combined with their mountain strongholds had kept them quite secure. Until Tsinakan's father Terakan succeeding in cutting off all their trade routes, which gradually weakened them until Tsinakan himself, early in his reign, fought them in a series of massive campaigns. The final result of these was 60,000 Gezoro marched to Kasadkad in chains, where they remained enslaved for generations (cf. the Hebrews in Egypt). Interestingly, the slaves in Kasadkad held onto their language, which was related to the languages of the civilizations to the far west, longer than the Gezoro remaining at home, who in time became absorbed into the Ndak world. By the end of Tsinakan's reign the former mountain home of the Gezoro had become a mining region of utmost importance to the empire.
- Tlaliolz. Legends say that the Tlaliolz and the Ndak were once one people, but that they split when the Tlaliolz turned their backs on Omb?si in favor of a new religion. These tales are doubtful, as the Tlaliolz were worshipping a mother goddess they called "Adasi", so perhaps there was another reason for the split, lost in the mists of time. They largely escaped the later Ndak conquests by packing up and moving into the deep forests north of the river, into which armies had great difficulty penetrating.
The Canal
The Ndak had a few early engineering achievements, most notable of which was a canal (the name of which is no longer remembered) from a branch of the lower Aiwa twenty miles to the nearest arm of the sea. It was dug over the course of a generation by slave labor, building on the previous aborted attempts by the Ngauro to do the same. it did not actually connect to the Aiwa at the upper end; instead, a long ramp rose out of the end of the canal and descended into the Aiwa on the other side, with ships being pulled across the ramps over log rollers by - you guessed it - up to several hundred slaves pulling ropes tied to the ship.
The canal is represented on the map by a blue line, just north of the final D of "Kasadgad".
The original canal did not include the ramp, the waterway opening directly into the Aiwa, but this arrangement caused most of the river to divert down the narrow canal in a torrent sufficient to prevent upstream travel.
The canal was necessary for ships to get from the river to the sea or vice versa; the Aiwa does not empty into the sea by a single channel, but instead splits and splits again into a thousand small and shallow channels winding though the flat, swampy delta, which change course every time the river floods.
