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Description

Al-Mashreq al-Baiid, otherwise known as Baiid Mashreq, or as it is referred to in some of the more vulgar tongues, Lemuria, is a landmass situated in the center of the Pacific Ocean, bridging the islands of Nusantara in the Old World to the shores of the Baiid Maghreb[1] on the other side. Although for most of the world the lands of Lemuria did not enter into their history until at least the 14th century CE, its own history stretches out long before what most think of as The Contact.

The history of human settlement in Lemuria begins around the 15th century BCE, initially colonized by a glut of Polynesian people who had originally left their home island of Sirayaman[2] earlier in the 31st century BCE. These settlers rested upon the shores to the mouth of the inland sea, and over the next six hundred years made their way around the coasts and islands of Lemuria. An agricultural package reliant upon starch rich tubers, fish, and various large native fowl led the lands of Lemuria to actually be dominated by the smaller islands that circled it, the mainland itself typified by an increasingly pastoralist and agriculturalist society that was met by constant inland raids by the surrounding islands for food and tribute.

This period saw the birth of Lemuria’s first and greatest thassalocracies, a period in which the power between the islands and inland was so lop-sided that an ariki war chief with enough boats and war clubs could easily bring vast estates under heel within a lifetime. This state of affairs continued from the 9th century BCE to the late 3rd century BCE, finally being disrupted by the second migration to Lemuria.

In 210 BCE, Xu Fu of the Qin Dynasty was sent with a host of 60 ships and a crew of over 5000 (composed mostly of virgin pubescents on order of the emperor) on a search for the elixir of life. Xu Fu’s fleet landed in the Northwestern islands of Lemuria, during a period of war between three of the dominant thassalocracies, and found his fleet overwhelmed and boarded by the War Fleet of the Houpo’e Kingdom, which hoped to use his ships to break the stalemate between their Kingdom and the rival states of Malihini and Kea. Finding themselves unable to use the ships though, despite months of having them in tow, the King of Houpo’e relented and offered to give Xu Fu and his crew their freedom in reward for aid.

Although Xu Fu’s aid found itself being instrumental in the war, any gains for Houpo’e would be short lived, as diseases from the Chinese fleet, most notably leptospirosis from the fleet’s pigs, began to rip through Lemuria. A disease which at most produced occasional flu-like symptoms in the Chinese carriers caused massive swelling and ruptures in the kidneys and spleen for the Polynesian Lemurians. By 198 BCE 7 out of 10 Lemurians in the Northwestern Islands and the island at the mouth of the Inland Sea. were dead. The inland Lemurians however fared much better, losing 2 out of 10 people to the disease instead, likely owing to forms of leptospirosis in their water fowl.

This would mark the beginning of the period known as Classical Lemuria, which ran from the 2nd century BCE to the 11th century CE. During this period Xu Fu’s fleet established a kingdom in the ruined Northwest, sending occasional expeditions to the inland to continue to look for the elixir of the immortality. These expeditions were typified by trade with the inland Lemurians, and with that the transmission of Chinese technology such as the adjustable plow and rudder, and the Chinese agricultural package. The spread of soybeans, rice, and pigs in particular resulted in a population boom on the inland, completely shifting the balance of power away from the old islands and to the now growing Lemurian Mainland.

The classical period was also typified by the birth of metal working, and soon Lemuria’s jump into the Iron Age. This was followed by the advent of writing, roadworking, and urbanization. In contrast to Old World or even the lands of the Baiid Maghreb though, this development was not met with the rise of large states because of the geography of Lemuria, which was dominated by a long series of volcanic mountains and highlands. The lack of any subcontinental wide plains meant that despite Lemuria’s rich soil and agricultural packages, large regionally dominating states were a rarity, and beyond occasional thassalocracies the emergence of empires was rarer still. The average state at the time in Lemuria as a result was around the size of 12th century Valencia.

This did not mean that there was nothing approaching a continent sized polity or organization on Lemuria however. For where Lemuria did not have continental empires it did have large religious ecclesiarchies. The Classical Period saw the rise of five religious “states” which stretched across the land. These “states”, through an almost byzantine system of networking and cultural pressure exerted considerable political and martial continuity, and whom across the Classical Period frequently warred with each other for influence.

In the South East was Rapa Nui, a religion based around a system of ancestor and sky worship stretching back to the initial colonization of Lemuria. This ecclesiarchy was also the most geographically cogent, occupying one continuous chunk of the land. Being centered on ancestor worship the head of the Rapa Nui was seen as the physical manifestation of the first ancestor, occasionally being given direct political authority over all of the Rapa Nuian states. These periods were the closest that the Classical Period came to seeing the birth of a “proper” empire, though they were short lived, as they depended upon the rise of particularly charismatic heads of the faith and ended upon their deaths.

In the North were the Family of Na ‘Unihipili. Centered on a sage class of Kahuna the Na ‘Unihipili worshiped an ancestral creator being who birthed the world and a plethora of spirit beings that the Kahuna communed with. A religion based strongly on family relations and a sage class that was also divided along family lines the Na ‘Unihipili were a notoriously divided ecclesiarchy, as a result taking on a flair not unlike that of the Mediterranean Venetians as traders and craftsmakers for other nations. An ecclesiarchy also renowned for its sailors, even compared to other Polynesians, the Na ‘Unihipili were the first to make a comprehensive global star map which is still in use today.

The Arioi stretched across the South and West of Lemuria. Descended partly from surviving islanders that made landfall on the inland, the Arioi Ecclesiarchy were one focused on the worship of the War God Oro. A salvationist religion, the Arioi preached that worship and divination in the name of Oro could be rewarded with eternal life. Often this worship came in the form of religious warfare against the other ecclesiarchies and as a result the Oro were the primary instigators of religious war on Lemuria. The Arioi were also the inventors of the blast furnace during the 10th century and the primary motivators behind Lemuria’s adoption of quench-hardened steel.

Once one ecclesiarchy, the Old Fire and New Fire people practiced worship of the volcanic ranges of Lemuria and the spirits associated with them. Both ecclesiarchies believed that the primordial cosmos had been trapped in an endless sea of dark water, until the first fires and lavas began to burn away the oceans and rip out from them to form the land. Believing that this Great Fire was the progenitor of the universe and the creator of life the Old and New Fire believed that all fire and heat was in some way divine and alive. The division between the two ecclesiarchies began as the volcanic ranges of Lemuria died down, causing a crisis over whether the Great Fire had died or not. The Old Fire held that the Great Fire had not died, it had merely begun to slumber and that mankind must tend the world for its return. The New Fire held that Great Fire was dead and that all still living fire now held dominion over the cosmos, with mankind playing center stage. By the time of the Late Classical Period the Old and New Fires had waged war against each other for hundreds of years, a tentative peace emerging largely because they had found themselves geographically separated on opposite ends of Lemuria’s volcanic ranges.

In the Northwestern Islands at this time reigned the Chinese Kingdoms that had arisen since the time of Xu Fu. Although long separated from the mainland they continued to practice a form of Chinese shamanism and Taoism, relatively isolated from the rest of Lemuria politically and lacking an ecclesiarchy like the inland they would occasionally intervene in and/or make money off of the religious wars.

This state of affairs however, just as the Age of The Thassalocracies, would also come to an end. Beginning in the 1030s Lemuria started to see occasional landfall from Hindu sailors from the islands of Nusantara, which spread word of a land to the Far East back to Asia. Although this was largely met by silence by the late 11th century fishermen and traders from Fujian and the Pearl Delta began to make landfall in the Northwest Islands, establishing a degree of contact with the Chinese descended kingdoms there. This was soon followed, around 1084, by the arrival of various Taoist, Buddhist, and Shenist monks and worshipers, and although the Song paid little attention to Lemuria those fishermen, traders, and monks that set up on the islands caused massive social and political ripples, bringing with them two new religious ideas that would be eagerly and aggressively absorbed by the islanders, Guanyin and Mazu cults.

Many of the monks and worshipers, themselves belonging to sects of Buddhism and Taoism that worshiped the Goddesses Guanyin and Mazu, and sometimes conflated them with each other and even the future Maitreya Buddha[3], were happy to see their adoption by the Islander Kingdoms. What was not originally realized by the new settlers though was that much of this adoption came by way of a revelationist Taoist sect that had taken grip on the islands prior to their arrival, and which taught that the next iteration of the Chinese sexagenary cycle[4], which had begun in 1084, would be met by a mass of spiritual revelations from heaven and the rise of an ecclesiarchy to challenge the inland Lemurians.

This new ecclesiarchy which would bring an end to the Classical Age was the Path of Mazu. Although in many ways a peaceful ecclesiarchy, centered on goddesses of compassion and wayfaring, the Path of Mazu was prone to periods of massive and sudden violence dictated by the calculations and fortune telling of high monks and shamans. Although these bursts of violence, along with the Mongolian invasion of the Song, eventually caused the naval contact between the islands and the Chinese mainland to dry up, the Path of Mazu continued. Over the next 200 years it waged a series of wars with the Arioi and Na 'Unihipili Ecclesiarchies, seizing any island land that they had in the Northwest, and several times sweeping down into the crescent islands in the South of Lemuria. From the late 13th century and onward though the Path of Mazu and the other Lemurian Ecclesiarchies entered into a period of relative peace, bringing us close to the period before The Contact.

We leave off just 5 years before contact. The year is 1320 and the peace between the ecclesiarchies is starting to come crashing down. As the next sexagenary cycle begins to dawn the Path of Mazu launches its largest warfront against the rest of Lemuria, touching down on the mainland regions of the Arioi. Arioi armies find themselves choking on toxic clouds of sulfur and saltpeter being cast out from the mouths of the Mazuite landing fleet. As the Arioi lay dying the Mazuite army begins to move inland, pillaging town after down, and tearing down country after country.

As war begins to rage, far to the west a group of Arab and Persian traders argue. They’ve heard stories about a land to the far east, but the Indian Ocean is wide and the Pacific is mysterious. They could take their Dhows out to try to find it, and maybe they could make a fortune, but it would be a gamble. To the north of Leumuria a Na 'Unihipili leaves home, intending to make her way to the islands in the Northeast to attend a communion with the spirits. Soon she will be blown off course and brought far more easterly than expected, making landfall in a place far more spacious and hilly than she thought she remembered. Neither of these actors understands what is about to befall them, nor what they are about to open up to the rest of the world.

The Contact between Lemuria and the rest of mankind will bring about a period of revolutionary changes. Among these are the great age of Na 'Unihipili colonization and empire, the Mazuite invasion of the Ming, the Wars for Aotearoa and Nyitiny Boodjar[5], the introduction of Islam to Lemuria and the birth of Al-Mashreq al-Baiid…

…but that, is a subject for another time.

- - - - - - -

[1] The Americas

[2] Taiwan

[3] Semi-Salvationist future form of the Buddha who is supposed to re-teach the true Dharma to Man. Historically had apocalyptic undertones in Tibetan and Chinese forms of Buddhism.

[4] A form of timekeeping that dates back at least to the ancient Zhou Dynasty. This form of timekeeping played a huge part in Chinese numerology, divination, and shamanism, and is still used by fortune tellers and some Taoist groups today. Also used on more than one occasion to predict the end of the world and launch religious uprisings, the most popular being the Yellow Turban Rebellion (184 – 205 CE).

[5] Australia

Description

Al-Mashreq al-Baiid, otherwise known as Baiid Mashreq, or as it is referred to in some of the more vulgar tongues, Lemuria, is a landmass situated in the center of the Pacific Ocean, bridging the islands of Nusantara in the Old World to the shores of the Baiid Maghreb[1] on the other side. Although for most of the world the lands of Lemuria did not enter into their history until at least the 14th century CE, its own history stretches out long before what most think of as The Contact.

The history of human settlement in Lemuria begins around the 15th century BCE, initially colonized by a glut of Polynesian people who had originally left their home island of Sirayaman[2] earlier in the 31st century BCE. These settlers rested upon the shores to the mouth of the inland sea, and over the next six hundred years made their way around the coasts and islands of Lemuria. An agricultural package reliant upon starch rich tubers, fish, and various large native fowl led the lands of Lemuria to actually be dominated by the smaller islands that circled it, the mainland itself typified by an increasingly pastoralist and agriculturalist society that was met by constant inland raids by the surrounding islands for food and tribute.

This period saw the birth of Lemuria’s first and greatest thassalocracies, a period in which the power between the islands and inland was so lop-sided that an ariki war chief with enough boats and war clubs could easily bring vast estates under heel within a lifetime. This state of affairs continued from the 9th century BCE to the late 3rd century BCE, finally being disrupted by the second migration to Lemuria.

In 210 BCE, Xu Fu of the Qin Dynasty was sent with a host of 60 ships and a crew of over 5000 (composed mostly of virgin pubescents on order of the emperor) on a search for the elixir of life. Xu Fu’s fleet landed in the Northwestern islands of Lemuria, during a period of war between three of the dominant thassalocracies, and found his fleet overwhelmed and boarded by the War Fleet of the Houpo’e Kingdom, which hoped to use his ships to break the stalemate between their Kingdom and the rival states of Malihini and Kea. Finding themselves unable to use the ships though, despite months of having them in tow, the King of Houpo’e relented and offered to give Xu Fu and his crew their freedom in reward for aid.

Although Xu Fu’s aid found itself being instrumental in the war, any gains for Houpo’e would be short lived, as diseases from the Chinese fleet, most notably leptospirosis from the fleet’s pigs, began to rip through Lemuria. A disease which at most produced occasional flu-like symptoms in the Chinese carriers caused massive swelling and ruptures in the kidneys and spleen for the Polynesian Lemurians. By 198 BCE 7 out of 10 Lemurians in the Northwestern Islands and the island at the mouth of the Inland Sea. were dead. The inland Lemurians however fared much better, losing 2 out of 10 people to the disease instead, likely owing to forms of leptospirosis in their water fowl.

This would mark the beginning of the period known as Classical Lemuria, which ran from the 2nd century BCE to the 11th century CE. During this period Xu Fu’s fleet established a kingdom in the ruined Northwest, sending occasional expeditions to the inland to continue to look for the elixir of the immortality. These expeditions were typified by trade with the inland Lemurians, and with that the transmission of Chinese technology such as the adjustable plow and rudder, and the Chinese agricultural package. The spread of soybeans, rice, and pigs in particular resulted in a population boom on the inland, completely shifting the balance of power away from the old islands and to the now growing Lemurian Mainland.

The classical period was also typified by the birth of metal working, and soon Lemuria’s jump into the Iron Age. This was followed by the advent of writing, roadworking, and urbanization. In contrast to Old World or even the lands of the Baiid Maghreb though, this development was not met with the rise of large states because of the geography of Lemuria, which was dominated by a long series of volcanic mountains and highlands. The lack of any subcontinental wide plains meant that despite Lemuria’s rich soil and agricultural packages, large regionally dominating states were a rarity, and beyond occasional thassalocracies the emergence of empires was rarer still. The average state at the time in Lemuria as a result was around the size of 12th century Valencia.

This did not mean that there was nothing approaching a continent sized polity or organization on Lemuria however. For where Lemuria did not have continental empires it did have large religious ecclesiarchies. The Classical Period saw the rise of five religious “states” which stretched across the land. These “states”, through an almost byzantine system of networking and cultural pressure exerted considerable political and martial continuity, and whom across the Classical Period frequently warred with each other for influence.

In the South East was Rapa Nui, a religion based around a system of ancestor and sky worship stretching back to the initial colonization of Lemuria. This ecclesiarchy was also the most geographically cogent, occupying one continuous chunk of the land. Being centered on ancestor worship the head of the Rapa Nui was seen as the physical manifestation of the first ancestor, occasionally being given direct political authority over all of the Rapa Nuian states. These periods were the closest that the Classical Period came to seeing the birth of a “proper” empire, though they were short lived, as they depended upon the rise of particularly charismatic heads of the faith and ended upon their deaths.

In the North were the Family of Na ‘Unihipili. Centered on a sage class of Kahuna the Na ‘Unihipili worshiped an ancestral creator being who birthed the world and a plethora of spirit beings that the Kahuna communed with. A religion based strongly on family relations and a sage class that was also divided along family lines the Na ‘Unihipili were a notoriously divided ecclesiarchy, as a result taking on a flair not unlike that of the Mediterranean Venetians as traders and craftsmakers for other nations. An ecclesiarchy also renowned for its sailors, even compared to other Polynesians, the Na ‘Unihipili were the first to make a comprehensive global star map which is still in use today.

The Arioi stretched across the South and West of Lemuria. Descended partly from surviving islanders that made landfall on the inland, the Arioi Ecclesiarchy were one focused on the worship of the War God Oro. A salvationist religion, the Arioi preached that worship and divination in the name of Oro could be rewarded with eternal life. Often this worship came in the form of religious warfare against the other ecclesiarchies and as a result the Oro were the primary instigators of religious war on Lemuria. The Arioi were also the inventors of the blast furnace during the 10th century and the primary motivators behind Lemuria’s adoption of quench-hardened steel.

Once one ecclesiarchy, the Old Fire and New Fire people practiced worship of the volcanic ranges of Lemuria and the spirits associated with them. Both ecclesiarchies believed that the primordial cosmos had been trapped in an endless sea of dark water, until the first fires and lavas began to burn away the oceans and rip out from them to form the land. Believing that this Great Fire was the progenitor of the universe and the creator of life the Old and New Fire believed that all fire and heat was in some way divine and alive. The division between the two ecclesiarchies began as the volcanic ranges of Lemuria died down, causing a crisis over whether the Great Fire had died or not. The Old Fire held that the Great Fire had not died, it had merely begun to slumber and that mankind must tend the world for its return. The New Fire held that Great Fire was dead and that all still living fire now held dominion over the cosmos, with mankind playing center stage. By the time of the Late Classical Period the Old and New Fires had waged war against each other for hundreds of years, a tentative peace emerging largely because they had found themselves geographically separated on opposite ends of Lemuria’s volcanic ranges.

In the Northwestern Islands at this time reigned the Chinese Kingdoms that had arisen since the time of Xu Fu. Although long separated from the mainland they continued to practice a form of Chinese shamanism and Taoism, relatively isolated from the rest of Lemuria politically and lacking an ecclesiarchy like the inland they would occasionally intervene in and/or make money off of the religious wars.

This state of affairs however, just as the Age of The Thassalocracies, would also come to an end. Beginning in the 1030s Lemuria started to see occasional landfall from Hindu sailors from the islands of Nusantara, which spread word of a land to the Far East back to Asia. Although this was largely met by silence by the late 11th century fishermen and traders from Fujian and the Pearl Delta began to make landfall in the Northwest Islands, establishing a degree of contact with the Chinese descended kingdoms there. This was soon followed, around 1084, by the arrival of various Taoist, Buddhist, and Shenist monks and worshipers, and although the Song paid little attention to Lemuria those fishermen, traders, and monks that set up on the islands caused massive social and political ripples, bringing with them two new religious ideas that would be eagerly and aggressively absorbed by the islanders, Guanyin and Mazu cults.

Many of the monks and worshipers, themselves belonging to sects of Buddhism and Taoism that worshiped the Goddesses Guanyin and Mazu, and sometimes conflated them with each other and even the future Maitreya Buddha[3], were happy to see their adoption by the Islander Kingdoms. What was not originally realized by the new settlers though was that much of this adoption came by way of a revelationist Taoist sect that had taken grip on the islands prior to their arrival, and which taught that the next iteration of the Chinese sexagenary cycle[4], which had begun in 1084, would be met by a mass of spiritual revelations from heaven and the rise of an ecclesiarchy to challenge the inland Lemurians.

This new ecclesiarchy which would bring an end to the Classical Age was the Path of Mazu. Although in many ways a peaceful ecclesiarchy, centered on goddesses of compassion and wayfaring, the Path of Mazu was prone to periods of massive and sudden violence dictated by the calculations and fortune telling of high monks and shamans. Although these bursts of violence, along with the Mongolian invasion of the Song, eventually caused the naval contact between the islands and the Chinese mainland to dry up, the Path of Mazu continued. Over the next 200 years it waged a series of wars with the Arioi and Na 'Unihipili Ecclesiarchies, seizing any island land that they had in the Northwest, and several times sweeping down into the crescent islands in the South of Lemuria. From the late 13th century and onward though the Path of Mazu and the other Lemurian Ecclesiarchies entered into a period of relative peace, bringing us close to the period before The Contact.

We leave off just 5 years before contact. The year is 1320 and the peace between the ecclesiarchies is starting to come crashing down. As the next sexagenary cycle begins to dawn the Path of Mazu launches its largest warfront against the rest of Lemuria, touching down on the mainland regions of the Arioi. Arioi armies find themselves choking on toxic clouds of sulfur and saltpeter being cast out from the mouths of the Mazuite landing fleet. As the Arioi lay dying the Mazuite army begins to move inland, pillaging town after down, and tearing down country after country.

As war begins to rage, far to the west a group of Arab and Persian traders argue. They’ve heard stories about a land to the far east, but the Indian Ocean is wide and the Pacific is mysterious. They could take their Dhows out to try to find it, and maybe they could make a fortune, but it would be a gamble. To the north of Leumuria a Na 'Unihipili leaves home, intending to make her way to the islands in the Northeast to attend a communion with the spirits. Soon she will be blown off course and brought far more easterly than expected, making landfall in a place far more spacious and hilly than she thought she remembered. Neither of these actors understands what is about to befall them, nor what they are about to open up to the rest of the world.

The Contact between Lemuria and the rest of mankind will bring about a period of revolutionary changes. Among these are the great age of Na 'Unihipili colonization and empire, the Mazuite invasion of the Ming, the Wars for Aotearoa and Nyitiny Boodjar[5], the introduction of Islam to Lemuria and the birth of Al-Mashreq al-Baiid…

…but that, is a subject for another time.

- - - - - - -

[1] The Americas

[2] Taiwan

[3] Semi-Salvationist future form of the Buddha who is supposed to re-teach the true Dharma to Man. Historically had apocalyptic undertones in Tibetan and Chinese forms of Buddhism.

[4] A form of timekeeping that dates back at least to the ancient Zhou Dynasty. This form of timekeeping played a huge part in Chinese numerology, divination, and shamanism, and is still used by fortune tellers and some Taoist groups today. Also used on more than one occasion to predict the end of the world and launch religious uprisings, the most popular being the Yellow Turban Rebellion (184 – 205 CE).

[5] Australia