The Axva, Chapter 5
Chapter 5:
War in the Se’an:
If there was a defining characteristic in the way the two incubators of Nemasian civilization are viewed in the popular imagination, it is the perception of a deeply spiritual history to the peoples of the Se’an. The famous poet Gapinir, reflecting on the literary history passed down to us from ancient times, wrote the famous words:
There is some truth to this perception of the Se’an as a religious and philosophical culture, and of the Tele as a center for war and empire-building. The subject distribution of the corpus of classical texts that has survived from ancient days largely reflects this division. However, care must be taken not to belabor this point.
In the early days of the Open Plate Culture, large-scale war appears to have been unsustainable as a practice. As agricultural techniques improved, however, and the first cities around the Se’an began to appear, the practice of war grew into an accepted part of life in the settlements of the succeeding Hexan Culture.
Little is recorded of these wars. Archaeologists have helped to fill in the record with discoveries of copper axeheads, stone arrowheads, and in the Late Hexan Period (from 8100 BCE to 7500 BCE), bronze variants of the same. The discovery of bronze allowed for tools that were even more resistant to wear and tear than the copper that was contemporaneous along the Tele, which means a great collection of the artifacts from the Late Hexan Period have come down to us in the present day.
Generally, in contrast to the evidence about the Tele civilizations, war along the Se’an appears to have been more frequent, but less bloody. Cultural surveys of the region indicate the presence of highly complex, ritualized war societies that most likely have their origin in earlier societies. These war societies are more dedicated to the practice of acts of daring, such as stealing war-mounts and drawing first blood on the enemy without suffering a blow in return, than they are to the total annihilation of the opposing force. Relatively few Hexan sites have been found with markings of the gigantic battles found in the darkward Tele.
Writing: The Second Genesis
The Hexan culture left us only fragmentary written records. Originally, it was thought by scholars that the two separate scripts found in the ruins of Hexan cities were evidence of two separate cultures living in sequential order on top of the buildings of the previous civilization. This view has been challenged in recent years with the finding of both scripts intermingled on single tablets and in the same debris layers.
While it could still be theoretically the case that the Hexan culture was composed of a union of two separate cultures using the same language, or that Hexan library stores contain records from these different cultures, the preponderance of evidence suggests that the Hexan civilization used two separate writing systems for a single administrative language. Why the Hexan civilization did this is unknown, but there are some clues that lead towards possible explanations.
In the first place, Hexan culture exhibited a strong distinction between the priestly/scholarly class and the merchant/tradesmen class. The former was often ensconced in privileged dwellings close to the city center, whereas the latter often were housed close to the place where raw resources were extracted for their input. More lavish decorations and other signs of wealth are found in priestly/scholarly dwellings. This indicates a severe separation between the usual class incubators for writing, probably also demonstrating two separate origins for the writing systems.
Perhaps more importantly, however, one system of writing is definitely more associated with warehouses where trade/resource input was collected. The other system of writing can be found mainly within temple complexes and libraries.
In any event, neither of these two scripts, dubbed Pictorial Hexan and Abstract Hexan, have ever been deciphered. This is compounded by the fact that no known language can be linked to the area prior to the arrival of the Ezhan. While these scripts represent a literary tradition at least as old as Archaeoform in the darkward, the vast corpus of Hexan fragments remains unfortunately occluded from our understanding as a result.
First Philosophy:
When the two exist, they are one.
When the one exists, it is two.
From this truth, many are born
In Heaven and in Earth.
And the many die on Earth,
But they are reflected in Heaven
In the one that is in the many.
Sokanir:
It is now widely thought that the words above represent the first attempt at a comprehensive philosophy of existence, and furthermore that they represent a much older tradition than originally thought. These seven lines express a profound philosophical concept that explores the interplay between unity and duality, as well as the cyclical nature of existence and the relationship between the spiritual and physical realms.
First attributed to Sokanir (the Aulanized version of Shokanli in the original Se’esh), the philosophy laid out in these words describes in poetic form the main thrust of early Se’esh philosophy. In the time before the Ezhan and Gye’an came to inhabit the lands sunward of the Tele River, these seven lines were known and repeated throughout the lands of the Se’an - they are often set down in Ezhan chronicles during the classical era as a mantra to begin every book. Sokanir, according to classical historians, lived in the 3rd Millennium BCE, long before the arrival of the Teacher in the Se’an. There is even an argument that Sokanir lived much earlier, during the 4th Millennium, before the Great Dark Age - as an analysis of some of his poetry concludes.
Sokanir’s words are represented by the Dual Sigil - one of many such sigils that appeared to represent philosophical and religious concepts during the period of Ezhan rule, and was carried over in mystical circles to this day. This sigil is equivalent to the words of Sokanir in much the same way that energy is equivalent to mass times the square of the speed of light.
Which makes the sigil’s appearance in Hexan ruins, circa 7600 BCE, of all places surprising.
After thoroughly discounting the many other more simple explanations (Ezhan occupation of Hexan ruins, an alternate meaning behind the Hexan use of the sigil, etc.) the broad consensus is that the First Philosophy finds its basis in and among the Hexan people, over three millennia before it was first thought to have originated. This speaks volumes about the intellectual life of the Hexan civilization, and contributes greatly to the contemporary archaeo-philosophical outlook on the early Se’an River.
Who wrote these words first then? Which scholar sat under which tree and achieved this enlightenment? Which priest took their leave of the temple, and where did they wander to in order to find this truth? What poet scribed these words as the rainy season flooded the banks of the Se’an? The answer is tantalizingly unknown.
Dawn of Echuche:
With the advent of the 75th century BCE, we come at last to the first attested name in the mytho-historical account of the early Se’an. Among the tribes that came before the Ezhan, Echuche was both the philosopher god who gave the knowledge of the wheel - the perfect geometrical shape - to the Ezhan, and a king who lived in the area during the Age of the Righteous - their word for the times that came before their theogony.
Echuche has many parallels with the Proto-Gye’an tribal chiefs that slowly began to occupy the region from the Hexan people, sacking city after city in their relentless pursuit of riches and plunder. Numerous small figurines of these chiefs were fashioned out of the gold that they found within the Hexan temples. Though their names were long forgotten and never written down, it is likely that the memory of a particularly powerful chief was carried down to the present in the form of the myth of Echuche.
The king is said to have trampled the ground before him and torn down the early dwellings of humanity because it upset him that humans should turn from their nature as beasts of the world and aspire to be as glorious as the gods. It was only after meeting the bizhdu Ayc’ha that he turned from this path and spared the earliest humans. This myth probably reflects the meeting of two worlds - the cosmopolitan and egalitarian Hexan reflected in the character of Ayc’ha, and the wrathful, warring Proto-Gye’an in the form of Echuche’s raw, naturalistic intellect.
Among the invaders of the Hexan, the development of chariots seems to have been particularly prevalent as a status symbol among the elite (more so than a practical element of the battlefield). This adds to the evidence that Echuche probably represents a real person, or at least a cultural ferment that allowed for the development of wheeled vehicles.
Scholars continue to debate the validity of this mytho-historical approach, but what is unquestionable is that the city Echuche founded according to myth, is undoubtedly a real place. The city of Echuche, the earliest archaeological records of which stretch back circa 7200 BCE, was situated near the mouth of the Se’an, close to the silt-filled delta region that abutted the Nemasian Sea. It is here that prehistory gradually fades into historical record - nearly a millennium after the first archaeoform records began to be written down in the Tele River System.