Prehistory of Great Kirav: Difference between revisions

Using the traditional narratives as a source, it would appear that the key military advantage ensuring the security of the Lawful Commonwealth was its primitive form of {{wp|collective security}}: Lawful tribes were safe from attack than Lawless tribes because they could rely upon neighbouring Lawful tribes for assistance in a simple threat environment wherein numerical superiority was sufficient to guarantee victory. The deterrent effect of collective security allowed the Lawful tribes to become more populous as they were spared the extremely high death rates from warfare that afflicted the Lawless tribes, providing additional fighting-age men that galvanised the deterrent effect. It follows that the Lawful Commonwealth could only be defeated ''{{wp|Africa|in toto}}'' by an adversary if a countervailing tribal alliance was able to assemble more fighters, which is what the sources say happened. The Great Law chant includes the narrative of the Lawful Commonwealth's demise as an apologetic for its model of governance, essentially saying that its only flaw was that it worked too well, allowing the Lawful tribes to raid and displace the Lawless tribes further and further until the retreating Lawless tribes formed a grand alliance to counterattack and overwhelm the outer villages of the Commonwealth, after which the inner villages, being unprepared for war, fell swiftly. The Commonwealth was dissolved and Emperor Akˣɛ died a glorious and noble death in battle, but, the Chant says the scattered survivors of the Lawful tribes "carried the Law with them to the edges of the Sea," taken to mean both the east Kiravian coast and Suderavia-Levantia.

=== High Neolithic ===

Megalithic farming societies continued to depend upon potato and other root vegetables, buckwheat, honey, and swine (Nearctic boar) for the agricultural foundation of their diets, engaging also in extensive fishing, hunting, and foraging activities. True cereal crops would not be introduced from Levantia until much later, though Megalithic Kiravians did gather varieties of "wildrye" (''{{wp|Elymus}}'') as a minor contribution to their food supply and used it as feed for boars and ''tinav''.

====Megalithic Coscivians====

The diffusion of megalithic technology took place chiefly in a coastwise manner, flowing outward from [[Ilánova|Éorsa]] with seaborne emigrants and establishing itself first in coastal beachheads before gradually extending into the hinterland, presumably through a mix of settler expansion and the adoption of megalithic techniques from the Éorsan settlers by neighbouring peoples. Present academic orthodoxy in Kiravia maintains that the emergence of megalithic building on Éorsa and its spread to the Éorsan diaspora overseas was made possible by the much greater social stability enjoyed by the Lawful tribes of the island, but made ''imperative'' by their particular religious system of Emperor-ancestor worship and Lunar Monotheism, which demanded monumental funerary structures and celestial timekeeping complexes-''cum''-temples in service to the Ancestors, the Ascended Emperor, and the Divine Moon.

The figure of the [[Coscivian Emperor|Emperor]] remained important in prehistoric Kiravian cultures, diffusing beyond the tribal and geographic bounds of the former Commonwealth. During the more mature Megalithic, the early Coscivians built giant stone sculptures representing the eternal Emperor as a religious figure from whom chieftains derived legitimacy and to whom they appealed for favour. The mythologies of most Coscivian groups today feature descent from one or more of the original Emperors, and it is believed that such myths date back to this period in the past when Emperor-worship became combined with preëxisting traditions of ancestor worship. Through this synthesis and the consummate sacralisation of the Emperor, the Four Laws and Four Precepts were cemented as religious laws and precepts (if they had not already been such for centuries), and a proper Coscivian macro-ethnic identity took shape as the legacy and laws of the Lawful Commonwealth became the patrimony of the Ancestors, embodied in the Emperor as the greatest among the Ancestors.

====Other early civilisations====