Deiocean Empire

The First Deiocean Empire is a historical state in the Daria region of Audonia which lasted from xxx BC to the 500 AD conquest of the native state structure by the nomadic Afsharii Clan, who had previously accepted Deiocean overlordship in 300 AD. This period of Iranicized Turkic overlordship over Daria is referred to as the “Afshar Empire” or the “Second Deiocean Empire.”

Highly centralized, the Empire was the first state in Audonia to truly hold the mantle of imperium over the bulk of the entire region. Under the various dynasties of the First Deiocean Empire, trade, agriculture, and technological development flourished, as did initial periods of contact with both the Occident and the far East of Audonia. The name of this historical period comes from Avesta Dahyu-Ka which means “the lands above, on and beneath the earth," owing to the universal claims of Deiocean Emperors as King of Kings.

Legendary account of the empire’s foundation:
A common retelling of the mythological story of the Empire’s origin comes from the Shahnahmeh, an epic poem of Audonian myth composed by present-day Emirati poet Ferdowsi. The Shahnahmeh begins with an account of the Earth’s creation which blends bits and pieces of both the Abrahamic and Zoroastrian creation stories, without specifying the name of the creator-deity. Shortly after the fall of Adam (at the hand of Zoroastrian demon Ahriman, rather than Satan, his grandson (of unspecified lineage) Gayōmart was crowned King of The World in a sumptuous ceremony attended to by all of the creatures of the world, the first man to crawl out of the primordial practices of the cave, and into royal glory.

Gayōmart was succeeded by his son, who was succeeded by his son, named Jamshid, the greatest King of Kings of the pre-historical period in Audonia. He had command over all the angels and demons of the world, and was both king and high priest of Ahura Mazda. He was responsible for a great many inventions that made life more secure for his people: the manufacture of armor and weapons, the weaving and dyeing of clothes of linen, silk and wool, the building of houses of brick, the mining of jewels and precious metals, the making of perfumes and wine, the art of medicine, the navigation of the waters of the world in sailing ships. From the pelt-clad followers of Keyumars, humanity had risen to a great civilization in Jamshid's time.

Jamshid also divided the people into four groups:

Kātouzians: The priests who conducted the worship of Hormozd Neysārians: The warriors who protected the people by the might of their arms Nāsoudians: The farmers who grew the grain that fed the people Hotokhoshians: The artisans, who produced goods for the ease and enjoyment of the people

Jamshid had now become the greatest monarch the world had ever known. He was endowed with the royal farr (Avestan: khvarena), a radiant splendor that burned about him by divine favor. One day he sat upon a jewel-studded throne and the divs who served him raised his throne up into the air and he flew through the sky. His subjects, all the peoples of the world, marveled and praised him. Jamshid was said to have reigned for centuries. He produced 18 equally long-lived sonssons, and after his death, his realm was dispersed among his 18 sons to form the disparate nations of Audonia. However, these sons could never live in peace, as 18 wily demons set upon the world to divide the 18 sons from their brothers, ensuring permanent war and strife throughout the Earth.

However, on an unspecified day, Fereydun, noble grandson of Jamshid by a hidden 19th son, and the first historically attested King of Kings of Deiocea, was born to the exiled Prince and a common milkmaid in the provinces of his Uncles’ warring Kingdoms. Feyredun spent his entire life in hiding, being trained in the arts of statecraft, warfare, and priestly piety by a magical talking cow named Barmāyeh. Barmāyeh’s divinely-inspired goal in rearing Feyredun was for him to overthrow the rule of the demons over the world, and subjugate his 18 uncles as his grandfather had done centuries before. With this goal in mind, Feyredun’s first trial was direct combat with the demon King Zahhak, who Feyredun easily triumphed over in the presence of his 18 Uncles. With this, Feyredun’s authority became uncontested, and Feyredun was crowned Padishah in the presence of the Cypress of Kashmar in the city of Sayendag.

Historical Analysis of The Origin of Deiocean Statehood
Given the sparse archaeological record in the area before the rise of Feyredun I in XXX BC, most historical accounts of early Deiocean statehood begin with a loose confederation of tribes, the direct predecessor to the 18 Barshom armies of the later state, and a historical analogue to the fictional 18 sons of Jamshid, which were then either subjugated or diplomatically absorbed by the predecessors of Feyredun.

Social and Governmental Structure
The first Deiocean Empire and its successors was governed through a highly stratified class system, which was leveraged by the central authority in Sayendag to harness almost uncontested authority throughout its long history:

Barsom Armies: A hereditary system of army command in the frontier provinces of the vast empire. Individual Barsom armies had an officer class composed of several component clans of leadership, and a Head Clan, which held semi-royal honors exclusively amongst the other Barsom armies. The military frontier of the empire acted as a disparate group of military fiefs under the control of the Barsom commanders, and individual clans held significant landholdings there, but were forbidden from holding lands or raising troops outside of the Pale of Control, a line which divided the official military frontier of the Empire from its metropolitan provinces.

Dispersal of the empire’s military elites to the frontier meant that the threats of adventurous commanders and usurpers commonplace in other empire’s of antiquity were effectively nullified, and throughout their history (with the greatest notable exception being the Afsharii Barsom) the Barsom armies remained unendingly loyal to the central authority of the Emperor. The central Imperial authority used each Barsom army as a “checks and balance” system against its neighboring army districts, meaning that the ambitions of one Barsom commander was always in a position to be nullified not only by troops directly under Imperial control, but by the ambitions of other Barsom commanders in adjacent sectors of the frontier.

Nāsoudian Class: the hereditary landholding class of the Empire’s provinces, who were endowed with land-grants by the Emperor in recognition of their individual prowess in previous Imperial Service. The Nasoudian class held immense power outside of the cities of the Empire, but could never coalesce this power into military power, due to the use of Imperial Armies to garrison the countryside formed from levies outside of the province it garrisoned, and imperial edicts which forbade private gendarmerie formation under threat of execution of entire Nasoudian noble families. The soft power of the Nasoudian Class came from its economic strength: they were the king-makers of the Barsom armies due to their immense wealth and landholdings, and prevented further direct imperial encroachment on their lands due to a complex trustee and patronage system developed between the hereditary nobility and the non-hereditary bureaucracy.

Imperial Bureaucracy and Clergy: The most powerful class of the Empire during its first era due to its direct ties to the Imperial Throne and complex interrelation to the other ruling classes. Appointed through a rigorous combination of harsh imperial examinations and graft, the bureaucracy held direct control over levying of taxes, raising and command of Imperial armies, and administration of any of the Empire’s cities over 30,000 inhabitants. The class was arranged with a pyramidal structure, the Imperial Court being the top, and the administrators of the Imperial land estates being the bottom. Through position at the Imperial Court, lowborn courtiers could hope to extend their power from a temporary, non-hereditary appointment, to elevation of their family into the wealthy and powerful Nasoudian path, or arrangement of one’s adoption into the ruling Barsom clans of the frontier. This was rare after the Empire’s first few centuries, as the bureaucracy was increasingly composed of second, and third sons of the Great Families of the other classes, as well as the establishment of a semi-hereditary system of appointments within the bureaucracy itself. This class also served often a dual purpose - the imperial bureaucracy being drawn from the Zoroastrian clergy, and vice versa, to such an extent that the two classes became fused as one.

IMPERIAL SUCCESSION AND HISTORICAL PERIODIZATION:
Succession to the imperial throne during this era of Audonian history was nominally hereditary, however, succession was not legally codified to be a strictly hereditary honor. The key to royal legitimacy, the lack of which acted as a universal veto to both the people and nobility of the Empire, was liturgical. The royal heir, to be considered legitimate and favored by Ahura Mazda, must lead the procession of the King of King’s remains to the Temple-Citadel at Sayendag, for it to be presented to the priests and diviners, who would then determine the royal succession. If the priests determine the head of the procession to be eligible for the throne, they would allow his entry into the citadel, forbidden to everyone but the King and the eunuch-priest class which inhabited it and tended to the Zoroastrian holy sites contained within its walls. This was a ceremonial act of divine approval of that Candidate’s royal authority by God, and he would then be acclaimed as the next King of Kings. It was this fusion of royal and clerical authority in every-day life that made this unorthodox succession practice so widely accepted under the Empire. Any attempt at usurpation would amount not only to treason to secular authority, but treason against God.

The procession-succession practice meant that hereditary royal honor could be interrupted almost by happenstance, and dynastic shifts were often caused not through military conflict, but through incidental placements of this or that notable closer to the King than his sons at the time of his death. Burgundian historian Fernan de Cazalet described the circumstances of Deiocean royal succession as a “race to the Citadel” meaning that the illness of the King meant that several candidates vying for the throne placed themselves as close to the Imperial Capital as possible in order to establish their authority at the Citadel before any rivals. This centrality of royal claimants in one place meant that even during contested successions, protracted wars of succession were never likely, as Imperial troops after the accession of the new Padishah would quickly dispatch other claimants in the capital and their retinues. The most notable example de Cazalet cites to prove his “race to Sayendag” thesis is the succession crisis of 148-170 AD, where after a smooth century of father-son succession, the royal line was interrupted by an opportunistic priest who was acting as court physician, and used this proximity to the deceased King to have himself acclaimed as Shah, only for him to be succeeded by a lesser Nasoudian lord who was in the capital on a pilgrimage. He was then succeeded for a period of three days by an aged Levantine diplomat-explorer, who then himself was finally succeeded by the grandson of the original king, reestablishing the old dynasty after a 20 year interregnum.

The difficulty of specifically periodizing dynastic succession in the Empire meant that, rather than dividing historical periods of the Empire into dynastic periods, historians designate the entire pre-Afsharii period as “The Deiocean Empire” with different families ruling the same fundamental polity. Those families are schematized as such

Kayomardid Dynasty: xxxBC-XXBC

Interregnum, multiple dynasties: XXBC-XBC

Khashvadid Dynasty: XBC-148 AD

Interregnum 148-170 AD

Khashvadid Dynasty: 148 AD-190 AD

Piran Dynasty: 190 AD-350 AD

Interregnum, multiple dynasties: 350 AD-420 AD

Nariman Dynasty: 420 AD-500 AD

FALL OF THE EMPIRE
The seeds of the fall of the First Deiocean Empire came from the culling of the Barsom Armies by the reformist Padishah Kaykaus I Piran in 300 AD. Kaykaus reduced the number of Barsom armies, and the number of territorial divisions of the military frontier of the Empire, from its historical 18, to just 10, following the only major Barsom rebellion of the Empire’s History. This rebellion came as a result of supposed Imperial inaction at the incursions of the nomadic Afsharii Uulus (horde) into Imperial territory, and their razing of several cities and estates under the control of the Barsom Armies.

In order to quell this massive rebellion of his frontier forces, who were aided in turn by their rebellious trustees in the interior provinces, Kaykaus had to turn to Irqin Khan, the leader of the Afsharii, for aid. In exchange for this aid, Kaykaus ceded the entirety of 10 Barsom Armies following their defeat, with the Afsharii becoming the 10th remaining Barsom army in gratitude for this massive land grant from the victorious Emperor. In the coming centuries, the Afsharii Barsom became increasingly powerful, especially in the interregnum following the death of Kaykaus’s grandson Khosrow in 350 AD. By the rise of Nariman I in 420 AD, the Afsharii Barsom-Khans were effectively vice-emperors, owing to their extensive control of the frontier, and their growing ties to the landholding classes of the interior. With the premature death of the second Nariman Shah, Bahram VIII, the empire was faced with another interregnum. The provinces were thrown into crisis, and no one dared present themselves to the Citadel. Seeing this crisis as interrupting the flow of trade through his land (which was vital to the silk road trade with Eastern Audonia), the Afsharii Khan (whose customs were by now extensively Deiocized) named Yazdergerd, marched his Barsom Army to the north, subduing any that questioned his authority as he marched north to the Imperial Capital. Yazdergerd was acclaimed Padishah in 501 AD, and with his coronation and the crisis that preceded it, the classical era of Deiocean statehood had ended.