Pola & Ceutamă

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Yačay256
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Pola & Ceutamă

Post by Yačay256 »

Well everyone, here is my first post on Ceutamă, my conworld, and Pola, by far my most developed and main conculture on this world (my only conworld for over a year now, BTW).
General- Ceutamă is a very Earth-like planet, but there are some very important differences: Ceutamă has slightly more land area than Earth and a mostly tropical climate with a gentle temperature gradient; the latter means that the vast majority of Earth's flora and fauna from its temperate regions and virtually all that from its polar regions simply does not exist on Ceutamă, given the fact that Ceutamă's polar regions — which are furthermore both mostly water — have a Mediterranean climate at their coldest and ice only exists on the highest mountaintops in the polar and sometimes the subpolar regions. Ceutamă's climate has also been relatively stable (the last ice age was around 16 Ma ago, for example). Despite this difference, Ceutamă's people have domesticated about a dozen large domestic mammals, some, like the donkey, the zebu, the dog or the white-tailed deer, more or less the same as on Earth others, such as litopterns, prehistoric pronghorns the size of goats, like much of Ceutamă's fauna are, extinct on Earth.
Thanks to these differences modern humankind has developed more rapidly after the Great Leap Forward than on Earth, with the Great Leap Forward happening only 23 ka ago and the Neolithic Revolution occurring about 14.2 ka ago, for example.
Humans are the only sapient species on Ceutamă and there is no magic. The planet's most advanced civilizations could be said to have achieved a technological level somewhat like to Eurasia's Classical Antiquity, having, in total, developed such things as concrete, paper, ferrous metallurgy, the tunneling shield, glass, the compass, the telescope, the spinning wheel, mass production, paved roads, the concept of zero, several systems of musical notation, rubber vulcanization, crossbows and a wide variety of writing systems, to name but a few examples, while at the same time lacking printing, mechanical looms, cheap steel, gunpowder, diving suits, electrical technology and so on.
Pola- Pola is probably the most advanced civilization on Ceutamă, though the ƛabveĥ (pronounced /t͡lhɒ.b̪͡vəwx/) Aristocratic Despotate and Voppyocayadzitl(pronounced /vop.pjo.ʕɑˈ.yaˈ.d͡zɪt͡lˈ/) are pretty impressive as well.
Source Cultures- I have based Pola culture mostly on the following: On what we reckon about the Indus Valley Civilization's culture (as well as on Gupta India), the Inka Civilization's, on Ancient Rome during Classical Antiquity, on Ancient (especially Han) China and to a much lesser extent on Indigenous Californian, Northwest Coast, certain Amazonian cultures and the cultures of the Kingdoms of the West African Forests.
From each culture I mostly take in specific areas, though this is not always the case by any means. For example, I take the planned economic system of Pola mostly from the Inka but with elements of a gift economy and a related system of incentives from the Indigenous Peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast (AKA I liked the Potlatch idea), the gender relations from Classical India, the Indus Civilization, Indigenous California and the Indigenous Peoples of the Amazon Basin (hence, the Pola are very gender egalitarian yet they have arranged marriages, the latter inspired by India), the art is most heavily Influenced by the Inka — along with the other Andean Civilizations — and to a lesser extant others, as with chilkat-like weaving (the Northwest Coast), weft replacement (California) and their use of silk (China), they have advanced technology in a manner similar to a combination of parts of all the previously mentioned cultures along with awesome public and monumental architecture like the Indus and the Romans.
Furthermore, the Pola have a military organized much like the Roman Legions mixed with the Inka Army but with tactics and weaponry more like that of Indigenous California and Ancient China: Primacy of ranged weapons and the use of massed infantry over smaller numbers of chariots, war elephants (these two I took from Gupta India, obviously) and cavalry. Finally, the Pola have an elaborate and strong centralized government based around a limited and constitutional empress/emperor — known as the mărilakă (“great spokesperson”; /mɒ˩ɻi˩lä˧kʰɒ˧/) in the Pola Language, a tricameral deliberative body — known as the Ƞufărreonmă (/ɳu˥fɒ˥rə˥ŋ͡mɒ˥/), this being heavily inspired by the Mali Empire's Gbara — a fusion of powers along with a strong tradition of rule of man with a strong system of checks and balances (based heavily on Chinese and West African legal traditions).
¡Mñíĝínxàʋày!
¡[ˈmí.ɲ̟ōj.ˌɣín.ʃà.βä́j]!
2-POSS.EXCL.ALIEN-COMP-friend.comrade
Hello, colleagues!
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