Samarskand and the Ancient World

A man who wishes to understand the present must first reckon with the past, and a man who wishes to understand Singhapura must first reckon with Samarskand. Your Grace will find, in what follows, that the ancient world raises more questions than it resolves.

On the question of origins: the traditions disagree, and they disagree with such variety and enthusiasm. Some hold that the world hatched from a cosmic egg. Others that a divine cow, afflicted with some celestial disorder of the stomach, heaved out the sun, the moon, the stars, the land, the oceans, the animals, and presumably other cows as well, which raises questions about the recursive possibilities inherent to cows. There is a tradition involving a one-eyed giant who lacked the depth perception to navigate a cosmic staircase, and from whose shattered bones and teeth we are mostly descended, though there are numerous competing theories about the pelvis. There is a drunken goddess of pottery who produced too many prototypes.

The modern position is that nobody knows. Your Grace need not resolve this question, and would be ill-advised to try; the various factions that have staked their authority on their preferred answer work together with difficulty, and an intervention from Daub on the subject of divine cows would perhaps not be welcome. The Haugris Church calls such questions obstruments — tools, thoughts, or tasks that actively subtract value from a situation.

Of the Yakshas and the Naagas

The stories converge to a time before the age of human kingdoms, when the world was ordered by the Yakshas and the Naagas. To the Yakshas were given the high places — the mountains, the tops of great forests, the skies. To the Naagas were given the rivers, the lakes and seas, the jungles, the deep places of the world. This is the subject of much of the Samarskand Commentaries.

We must think of Yakshas and Naagas as persons, though not necessarily in human form. Consider, as my old professor was fond of saying, a god of a small river. What shape would it want to take? What would it want?

Indeed, these beings may still exist. In the modern day, there is a category of daemon known as the Yaksha, able to leave their domain and traverse our world at will. There is the NAAGA division of the daemon realm, to whom are given the punishment of the most egregious violations of magical principles.

It is said Yakshas were ruled, in that time, by Raavan.

Of Raavan and the Origins of Magic

The official account is preserved in both the Samarskand Commentaries and The Assembly of Gold and Saffron. It holds that Raavan was a Yaksha philosopher-king of immense power, ten-headed, capable of splitting reality itself and summoning the fire of the sun onto his enemies. The Naagas are said to have been his equals in power if not in ambition. Some sources hold that they maintained the balance of the world, sharing wisdom and withdrawing it as they deemed necessary. Then there were the beasts, from which we are descended — it is said that Raavan took two monkeys and made of them men and women, and sent them forth to multiply and civilize the world. Upon his death, he gave to the world his essence — the Will of Raavan — and thus humans gained some small measure of his power as a reward.

One may debate whether civilization represents an improvement; after all, the monkey pays no taxes and answers to no law. Nevertheless.

The Book of Lost Kingdoms puts forth a different origin: it states plainly that Raavan was not a yaksha but a human being, the first and greatest of magicians, part god and part man. To temper his arrogance, certain gods created Umesh, a wild man who became Raavan’s beloved companion. Together they slew the Yakshas, banished the Naagas, founded cities, and defied the gods, whereupon the gods, having arranged the situation to their satisfaction, killed Umesh. Broken by grief and terrified of his own mortality, Raavan traveled to the ends of the earth in search of eternal life. He failed to find it, but in the searching, he systematized the study of magic, which he passed in its entirety to his citizens before his death.

The Reflections of the Moon in Still Water claims that from Raavan’s bones came the dragons and from his tears we rose, though it is widely understood that the writer was guilty of excessive use of analogy.

My own view is that all stories are on some level incomplete, and all good histories are built around a core of truth they cannot fully articulate. Both accounts seem to contain some measure of truth, but the Raavan of the Lost Kingdoms seems to me more plausible than Raavan as a daemon king. The underlying observation — that Raavan’s death distributed magic — is uniform across all three texts, and thus we may affix it as our guiding light, and attempt a more modern interpretation. Perhaps some great magician died; perhaps that magic uplifted what already existed: from the apes and the monkeys rose the humans; from the lizards rose the dragons; the beasts of the wild grew stronger and wiser, or were turned into exceptional curries.

Of Samarskand Itself

From this point we return to the Commentaries.

Humans progressed rapidly after Raavan’s death; fledgling city-states flourished, though I hasten to add that we would hardly recognize them as towns today. Something drove people to band together; most likely the threat of rampaging Yakshas, robbed of their deterrant. The Mahason Chronicle tells the tale of the Yaksha Mahasona — the name translates broadly as mass grave — and his rise to power over the leaderless yakshas; it is presented as pure fantasy, but the gaps it fills make one wonder if it is.

Thus Samarskand was born. Other kingdoms — Kishar, Magan, Samis-A-laa — appear in references, but we know of them only because people in Samarskand wrote about them. Samarskand was founded with three relics of Raavan: a tooth, an eye, the index finger of the left hand. The Haugris Church claims those same relics as the Divine Corpus from which it draws authority; one must imagine Raavan’s remains to be eternal. These relics are said to have given the early queens of Samarskand some portion of Raavan’s abilities, or at least magnified their existing power, such that they could seal away the Yakshas and Naagas and restore peace to the world.

Thus, having become a savior of all, Samarskand spread from a city-state into a proud kingdom extending the full length of the Diamond River. The Commentaries record many monuments and the willing surrender of many awed peoples, spreading south to north, east to west.

But the deeper legacy of Samarskand goes beyond relics or monuments. Your Grace must examine the two facets of Samarskand that remain with us even to this day.

The first is the formalization of magic. Until Samarskand, we can assume that magicians wielded power innately, but were few in number and spread far between. It was the mages of Samarskand who attempted a formal description of possible magics: a thesaurus, first, of what could be done, and then a proper symbology in which the description itself became the magic it described. This is what the Taprobane System descends from; this is what allowed Samarskand to field extraordinary numbers of magicians and to imbue its armies and infrastructure with dread magics. Ancient Lusian generals wrote of fighting Samarskand as a folly comparable to fighting Raavan himself.

The second is law. Until Samarskand, most places functioned according to the will of whoever held power. There were kings and queens and princes and tyrants and councils, but it was Samarskand that sat down and wrote a code that would bind everyone from the highest to the lowest. This social contract is simultaneously Singhapura’s greatest mechanism of assimilation, but is also why Your Grace’s lands cannot be seized by idle nobles without consequence. It is why we can trade across distances and trust that a mechanism exists to address what goes wrong.

These two facets represent what Samarskand actually was: the first systematic attempt to make civilization durable.

The Book of Lost Kingdoms is relevant here too. Raavan as human magician-king — who built a library, systematized knowledge, and spent his final years in the service of his people — is recognizably the ancestor of both these traditions. The grief-driven obsessive who could not save his companion but saved everything he learned; who failed at immortality and succeeded at transmission. This is not the story Singhapura tells about itself, but it is, if Your Grace looks closely, the story that Singhapura’s institutions best resemble.

The Samarskand system of writing remains in use for administration, poetry, and magic; the Samarskand system of laws, much revised and made complex over the years, governs all affairs the Empire touches; the Samarskand inheritance of Raavan’s power is formally accepted each time the Haugris Church bells toll for the Singha Adiraj. This is Singhapura’s claim to legitimacy, repeated over and made stronger.

Of Samarskand’s End

Samarskand did not last. It stood in the shadow of a mountain — Samar’s Kand, Samar’s Mountain — of which no trace remains today. Accounts from Lusia and Tangowan record a great flood that shattered the mountain, destroyed the city, and swept everything away, simultaneously destroying the ally state of Taprobane. The mouth of the Diamond River is most likely the exact site; centuries of excavation have recovered what could only have been the ruins of that great empire. The destruction was such that the work of reconstruction fell to Samarskand’s outer provinces, and that project drained them over generations until the world entered a dark age of infighting and petty warlords. The grass grew over their graves, as we say. Much of what survives can be found at the Taprobane Magisterium museum and the Hall of Ancient Arts.

It is worth visiting, if Your Grace has the occasion. Samarskand was, in a very real sense, the mother of the Empire that followed.