Zalgisbeck

Zalgisbeck is the largest city in the nation of Hendalarsk and is also the capital and largest city of the Mouth of the Zalgis province. Located on the estuary of the Zalgis, the longest, largest and most prominent river in the nation, Zalgisbeck is increasingly understood as Hendalarsk's modern cultural capital, although traditional culture and political power remain firmly rooted in the national capital, Frehmenwerth. It is also one of the largest cities of the Vandarch littoral, rivalled within Hendalarsk only by the Pentapolitan city-states of Hukenen and Wrzeczsz-Kokoszki.

History
Zalgisbeck's history long predates its status as part of Hendalarsk, as it was only incorporated into the country in the course of the Maximilianic Unification in the 16th century. The city was connected to the country even before then, however, as its position at the mouth of the Zalgis made it a key entrepôt for Hendalarskara traders intrepid enough to venture into the Vandarch.

Recent archaeological excavations suggest that Zalgisbeck was first settled by the Nünsyak, the auochthonous pre-Gothic inhabitants of northern Hendalarsk, in approximately 1000 BC; at that time the Nünsyak cultural sphere is believed to have encompassed all of the lower Zalgis as well as the better-known Nünsyak settlements along the Herne. Its Nünsyi name is not recorded, although Nünsyak political figures have adopted the name Nönst'Altx (Western Gateway) in recent years; Hendalarskara scholarly convention is to refer to the pre-Gothic settlement as Old Zalgisbeck and this is the only designation which enjoys official recognition.

Old Zalgisbeck was a substantial settlement by the standards of the time, with an estimated population of c.5,000 by 900BC, but was likely peripheral in the Nünsyak order, with the Herne rather than the Zalgis at the heart of Nünsyak culture, cosmology and trade. Although the original inhabitants of the Zalgis watershed before Gothic settlement cultivated the river's banks, there is little evidence of long-distance trade between Old Zalgisbeck and any area of the Zalgis south of modern Agaren, suggesting a patchwork of stable but relatively small subsistence societies along the river's course rather than major polities. Military conflict seems to have begun within a few decades of the Gothic irruption into southern Hendalarsk in around 750 BC, however, as the presence of Gothic-typed weapons in burn layers of the Old Zalgisbeck archaeological record imply destructive Gothic raids along the Zalgis. Both Gothic and Nünsyak oral traditions recorded in the early first millennium AD suggest that the lower Zalgis, and Old Zalgisbeck with it, had been dislocated from the Nünsyak sphere by no later than 500 BC, and Old Zalgisbeck seems to have collapsed as an urban centre of consequence by 300 BC, although small-scale habitation persisted well beyond the city's collapse due to the opportunities for a fishing economy afforded by its natural harbour.