#1 Ahari series. Simulation of civilisation

I started a new section on the blog on my project called Ahari. This is a simulation of a civilisation focused on economy and demographics as it runs in a fictional world, with fictional plants and animals, and fictional materials. All of those shape lives of ordinary people differently, create different religions, mythologies and governments.

What if sea water was fresh, not salty? What if your world orbited a giant planet? What if there was an actual pantheon watching over your civilisation? What if the night sky looked completely differently? What if neanderthals never became extinct, and there is also an eusocial species of humans? What if telepathy was a thing, and you could enhance and enchant objects with magic?

All of this was explored by many a fantasy lore, but few looked into its effects from a perspective of economy. And where economy is affected, organisation of human life, including demographics, are affected with it. New professions appear, leaps of civilisations proceed differently, different things are traded by different transport.

This is a long, at least 10 years project. Story of my last project, Tangia, was taking place in one place at one point of time, and yet it took me five years to accurately describe it.

Where are we?

To start such a project, I needed to make several assumptions. It all starts with a map. Generation of those maps I leave to Space Engine program, as well as the cosmological neighbourhood. Here we have Ahari – Earth-like Moon orbiting around some gas giant. I loved the continent to seas layout, but there were many problems:

• Atmosphere generated by the program had twice as much oxygen as ours. That is a risk to 1. fires! 2. big bugs. Earth has now 21% oxygen, but had more than 32% in Carboniferous era and there were monsters such as Meganeura, the giant dragonfly.
• Very elliptical orbit. That spells a lot of problems. Average global temperature of Earth is +14°C (+57°F) all year round (that encompasses all extremes, from Sahara to the Antarctic). Here we would have +2°C (+35°F) in winter and +36°C (+96°F) in summer. You can’t have life like that.

To cope with it and create a friendly climate for our humans to settle in and thrive, I decided to drop a heavy admixture of fantasy elements into the cauldron and see what happens. Here they are:

1. There were 3 typical “ancient advanced and now absent civilisations” before humans. First one installed something that autonomously controls the climate change, and then quit the region. Second one introduced its own strings of life into the oceans, and third one improved the climate control, set up some kind of inter-worlds gates in four places of the world, through which humans were introduced. Those events happened billions and millions of years ago, but the last civilisation left some emissaries. Those beings will become the pantheon on our civilisations, for which gods are someone tangible and with measurable power.
2. There are three types of humans: the neanderthal, the homo sapiens sapiens (us!), and the homo sapiens eusocialis. Eusocialism is the thing with animals likes bees or ants where their society is strongly divided into roles not on a cultural, but on a genetic level.
3. There are fictional animals and plants, as well as geodes which can be mined and processed into materials, sometimes with magical properties.

When do we start?

We start 400 000 years ago. On Earth, this was deep in the paleolithic era, basically hunters-gatherer’s stone age of family clans. Here, it will be the same. We have 4 titan gates (left by 3rd alien civilisation) through which humans were let in. Please note that those humans did not come straight from paleolithic Earth. Those first humans first were moved on some other worlds, evolved a little (or not), and only then were let onto Ahari.

Cutting it to the interesting part, you see on the map above four prehistoric civilisations (from east to west): Misava, Helai, Ouran and Kaeri. Misava will in time dissolve into many smaller tribes and will be slower with development, but the rest are quite interesting as they connect into one trade route:

• Helai (?土) will be our China. They grow midu, a rice-like plant. They also keep sou – a local silk moth. It is the second most ancient civilisation.
• Ouran (???) lies in the middle and it is our Mesopotamia, Egypt and the general Middle East. They produce giant amounts of food, but it is a region poor in other resources such as copper, tin, silver and gold.
• Kaeri (Ⲕⲁⲉⲣⲓ) is on the east on the island of Ka’ori and the Okka bay. It will be a naval power rich in gems and fuels later in the eras.

My primary attention will first be turned to Ouran and to a smaller extent Kaeri. For this purpose, I studied ancient Mesopotamia and how its economic system works. About this, I will write in the next post of the series.

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