So I’ve been going after the cities a slightly different way recently, focusing on love stories (as advised by the Duchess in the University murder investigation) for each of the fallen cities. Once again, it’s somewhat possible start with the most recent cities and work backwards. What this has lead to is stumbling across a huge clue for the Third City, utter confusion for the Second City, and some intriguing possibilities for the First City.
The basic framework goes something like this:
- Each of the stolen cities was swapped for some benefit to the party that sold it to the Bazaar
- These scenarios will all involve love of some sort
- In each scenario, there will be a connection to some historically known, rumored, or legendary figures, and clues about these figures are available in the game.
Along those lines, I’m going to go city-by-city and take the clues I’ve found in the game or shared here and try to match them up with historical figures, which I’ve found gives major clues to the cities (and sometimes raises more questions than it answers.)
FIFTH CITY
Clues:
- Traitor Empress traded the city in 1861 but now stays shut up with her consort in the Shuttered Palace
- The consort was ill from typhoid, but after the Fall, appears to have recovered and is healthy
- Um, the game is now called Fallen London…
Historical facts:
- Prince Albert, the consort of Queen Victoria, died in 1861, and the contemporary diagnosis was typhoid.
- The marriage had an aspect of forbidden love to it, as Albert was seen as being too low bred (only the son of the King of Belgium) to carry the title of King Consort. As such, the Lords at the time made him Prince Albert, Consort, which upset both Albert and Victoria
- Following his death, Victoria was consumed with grief, wearing mourning for the rest of her life
Surmise:
London, obviously, and the love story is handed to us on a silver platter. As I mentioned earlier, the Traitor Empress is clearly Victoria and the consort is Prince Albert, who in real life died of typhoid at the time when in the game the city was stolen. I’m only mentioning this because it sets a pattern – the city is a tradeoff for immortality, involves a somewhat unique love story, there was some hidden cost to it that we don’t fully know, and the principles involved are still running around the Neath.
FOURTH CITY
Clues:
- Correspondance dreams give you “the language of Xanadu,” there’s a fountain shaped like a tree in the Forgotten Quarter, it was filled with temples with lanterns and jade, and in the last days before its Fall people were huddled against some siege.
- There’s a whole host of “Oriental connections” surrounding one Gracious Widow who seems to be involved in a lot of covert smuggling and dealing
- I haven’t come across any specifics about life of the Gracious Widow, but Shadowy is my weakest stat, which locks me out of a lot of stuff, I think. The closest is the story of the urchin adopted by the Gracious Widow, showing some strong maternal instincts.
Historical facts and myths:
- Karakorum, which I think clues in the game conclusively point to as the Fourth City (“the language of Xanadu” would also have been the language of Karakorum), fell in 1380 under a vicious counterattack by the second Ming Emperor Hongwe (Uskhal Khan Tögüs Temür - Wikipedia).
- The most intriguing character I’ve found in the late Mongol period, as far as the game goes, was the Korean second empress of the last great Kahn, Togun Temur, referred to in the all-knowing Wikipedia as the Qi Empress. During the reign of her husband, she constantly maneuvered to install her son, Ayushiridara, as the heir to the Khanate, and was eventually successful. After Togun Temur’s death, she became the Dowager Empress, and Wikipedia leaves us with this tantalizing nugget: " It is possible that she was captured by the Ming Chinese when Mongol royal family was fleeing. According to the myth, she was pregnant when captured by the Ming army. She possibly married Hongwu and gave birth to the Ming Emperor Yongle." (Empress Gi - Wikipedia)
- The Yongle Emperor went on to become one of the most militarily powerful and feared Emperors of the Ming dynasty.
Surmise:
There’s too much that falls into place regarding the Qi Empress for me to ignore. The surmise here is that the Qi Empress, now known as the Gracious Widow, sold Karakorum as it was on the verge of being sacked in return for being able to marry the Hongwu Emperor and place her son on the throne of the Ming Dynasty, along with an endless supply of Hesperidian Cider, one presumes. As with Victoria and Albert, there is the interesting twist that she was Korean, and hence regarded as a foreigner and less deserving of the title, but rose to a position of power nonetheless.
THIRD CITY
Clues:
- Maybe I haven’t gone to the Tomb Colonies enough, or I’m hitting the wrong stories, but Third City clues seem almost as rare as First City clues. There’s some figure known as the Presbyter, who may or may not be related to Feducci (feel free to post spoilers if I’ve got this horribly wrong).
- We know the city had ball courts, temples, and five wells (leading some to rush to anoint Hopelchen, a modern village with no nearby ruins of any size whose name happens to mean “city of five wells,” as the Third City).
- The Third City fell 1000 years ago in game time, putting it in the range of 900 CE.
- The game strongly hints several times that the Third City is in the Western Hemisphere somewhere, probably tropical.
Historical facts and myths:
- Of the various civilizations which blossomed, peaked, and fell in pre-Columbian Americas, the Mayans were far and away the most dominant at the end of the first millennium CE. The Mayan “Classical” period ran from roughly 250 CE - 900 CE. The Toltecs, Aztecs, and Incas all developed their major cities later.
- In my original post in this thread, I was leaning towards the greatest of the Mayan-era cities, Teotihuacan, but I’ve slipped away from that. Part of it is there’s no way I can get five wells out of it.
- On the other hand, I originally dismissed Chichen Itza because it seemed to last too late to be a fallen city, and I could only find documentation of two cenotes, the natural sinkholes that opened to available groundwater. Calakmul, with an equally impressive pyramid, had five cenotes, but didn’t have much story to it. Since then I’ve found this document which says Chichen Itza is in an area of 13 cenotes, five of particular note (http://www.famsi.org/reports/03101/81rocio_osorio_schmidt/81rocio_osorio_schmidt.pdf), but it also had a number of other water management structures which were critical to the success of the civilization.
- . . . and then looking for a Mayan love story myth, I stumbled onto the story Sac Nicte and Canek (http://www.haciendatresrios.com/culture-and-tradition/mayan-legends-bedtime-stories-of-an-ancient-civilization/). The young, newly appointed king of Chichen Itza, Sac Nicte (“black serpent”) fell in love with Canek (“white flower”), princess of nearby ally Mayapan, but she was betrothed to the prince of a third ally, Uxmal. On the day of the wedding, Sac Nicte showed up and spirited her off, spurring the Mayapan and Uxmal to war with Chichen Itza. When they got to Chichen Itza, it was completely abandoned, with Sac Nicte having led the people of the city off to another city.
Surmise:
I don’t care about five wells anymore. I don’t care about fall dates being exactly 1000 years before Victorian London. We have a 100% perfect Bazaar forbidden love story that leads to a king abandoning his city in return for the love of the princess. The Third City is Chichen Itza – maybe I’ll change my mind on this later, but if this love story business means anything at all, this one is far too perfect.
SECOND CITY
Clues:
- No city has quite as many maddeningly specific clues… that don’t match up to anything at all in history. Sure, you think you’ve got it nailed, but oops, there’s something missing…
- The Masters of the Bazaar get mad when you talk about the Second City. The Masters of the Bazaar get mad when you talk about Egypt. Hmm…
- Per the spoiler posted here earlier, the Sisterhood of the Vake consists of a formerly royal family of the Second City that managed to hoodwink the Bazaar, but that it somehow didn’t work out. They left behind the youngest daughter as a hostage, somehow.
- Now the sisters are involved in fighting off the Vake, (SPOILER) who likes to eat people after confusing them by yelling screams of consciousness at them. Huh?
- There’s the enigmatic figure of the Duchess. She’s obsessed with cats (SPOILERS COMING), she’s dark skinned, perhaps African, she loved a young man who was bitten by a snake and made a deal with the masters of the Bazaar to save his life (or so it would seem), without realizing that his life would be that of the Cantigaster, constantly oozing highly toxic venom from sores on his skin.
- Before the fall of the Second City, the Duchess’s father was instituting reforms that removed the old gods. There weren’t many temples in the Second City, which is why the text of the game specifically precludes Alexandria.
Historical facts and myths:
- Hoo boy. Freakin’ culture with over four millennia of recorded history. Let’s see…
- You google “egypt princess death by snakebite” and you of course get 50 million hits regarding a certain Roman and a certain Egyptian queen that Billy Shakes wrote a skit about. One problem – the legend is that SHE died of a self-inflicted snakebite after HE killed himself… with a knife.
- There are two cat deities in ancient Egypt – Bastet and Sekhmet. Neither one have much of a love story associated with them or were associated with any cities that fell suddenly.
- You have the idiosyncratic rule of Akhenaten, nee Amenhotep IV, who decided to throw out all the old gods, move the Capital from Thebes/Luxor to Amarna and worship Aten the Sun Disk with his wife Nefertiti. After his death, the capital promptly moved right back to Thebes/Luxor and subsequent Pharaohs started trying to wipe the whole business out of history.
- Akhenaten was succeeded by his son the famous Tutankhamun (a.k.a. “King Tut”), who married his sister then died as a young man. At least a dozen different theories of why he died have been floated, not one of them is snakebite.
- In despair, his sister and wife (ew) Ankhesenamun wrote to the king of the Hittites that she really needed another husband. The king sent his son, who was killed along the way. The two never met, and there’s not one mention of snake bite anywhere in the whole mess. To make things more complicated, she was actually married to her father before her brother (EW!), and then later maybe married her grandfather and Vizier Ay (yeah…) in a kind of Jafar in Aladdin situation before dying herself. And no snakes anywhere (or cats for that matter).
- Akhenaten and Nefertiti had six daughters, most of whom died in adolescence before ever being involved in any kind of love story.
- There’s the city of Bubastis, the home of the cat goddess Bastet, which was (maybe) the capital for the 22nd Dynasty. In the areas around the temple, thousands upon thousands of cat mummies have been found buried. I can’t, however, find any figure from the 22nd Dynasty that figures prominently, and Bubastis never underwent a strong fall – it just briefly rose in power and then pretty soon thereafter declined, remaining a popular tourist – um, I mean pilgrimage destination for centuries.
Surmise:
Amarna comes the closest, but there are so many pieces that are hinted at that don’t seem to fit anywhere in the story here. The story of the sisters and the Duchess could line up most closely with Ankhesenamun and Tutankhamun, but so many of the specifics are missing or wrong, and Egyptian history is so replete with well documented stories of marriage and love and bargaining that I keep expecting to find something that matches up better. I must point out that the more I read, moving the capital and changing the gods around is a pretty common occurrence in ancient Egypt when the dynasties changed. I really feel like something that involves Bubastis is a better fit chronologically (Bubastis was at its peak in the 600 BCE period), as opposed to Amarna, which uncomfortably bumps up against my First City theories.
FIRST CITY
Clues:
- “Crossroads shaded by cedars,” “Even the First City was young when Babylon fell.”
- The coins with cedars on them, stones with eyes on them, the Eye Temple
- POLYTHREME SPOILER – the King with a Hundred Hearts makes the Clay Men in Polythreme
- Earlier posted story about the Clay Men, the silk trade, and the inland sea
- Possibly related or not, there’s the reference to “when the Bazaar was between stars.”
Historical facts and myths:
- In the ancient Near East, which is pretty much what we’re down to if we’re looking for very early civilizations, apart from the Indus River valley and some very early Chinese settlements, cedars are pretty synonymous with Lebanon. There are some very, very old cities in the Lebanon area, such as Byblos, but none of them appear to be stolen. The cedars grow in the mountains of Lebanon, and peter out before you get to the old cities of what became modern Syria, such as Damascus.
- Others have pointed to Tell Brak/Nagar, particularly given the presence of the “eye idols” that have been found there and in a building now known as the “Eye Temple.” On this clue alone Nagar has to be a leading candidate, but it’s very hard to make it gibe with the other clues. For the purposes of this analysis, I’m focusing on love stories, and I can’t find anything online that references love stories in Nagar (or any other stories from Nagar at this point). If you buy my premise that Failbetter Games based all the stolen cities on a known love story from the period (and of course you may not), this makes Nagar very problematic, but again, the Eye Temple clue is hard to dispute.
- On the other hand, as many have pointed out, there are a lot of things that match up with various points of the story of King Solomon. Just to be brief, as the son of King David, Solomon had 300 wives and 700 concubines, was widely noted for his wisdom in the early and middle part of his reign, but he allowed temples to be built in Jerusalem for his wives’ gods, and towards the end of his reign was said to have been turned away from the God of Israel by these false gods, which led to the collapse of his expansive trading empire following his death and a split in the kingdom of Israel. Regardless, the historical evidence is heavy that Solomon maintained some amount of a trading empire that took advantage of Israel’s access to both the Mediterranean and hence points west as well as the Gulf of Aqaba and hence points south and east.
- Three stories of Solomon from 2 Chronicles and 1 Kings are particularly interesting here, two of which have already been mentioned. The first is the number of shipments of goods that arrived from the city of Ophir, which involved gold, ivory, peacocks, apes, and all sorts of other goodies. Wikipedia has lots of speculation about where Ophir actually was, with the most believable being either the Indus river or Africa. There’s not a love story here, so I’m moving on.
- The second story is that of the Queen of Sheba. The Queen came and was impressed by Solomon (and according to apocryphal stories, seduced too) and sent back lots of gifts.
- The third story is that of the Pharaoh’s daughter and the city of Gezer. The scriptures say that one of Solomon’s wives – in fact the only one explicitly named, was “Pharaoh’s daughter,” and that as part of the dowry, the Pharaoh sacked and burned the city, which had been previously occupied by Canaanites, and gave it to Solomon, who built a large, new palace there with double walls. After Solomon’s death, the Pharaoh “Shishak” (perhaps Shoshenq I) re-took the city (The ruins of Gezer have been found at Tel-Jezer, between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, and helpfully marked by stones which say “Boundary of the City of Gezer.”
- Among all the talk of Solomon, both the Temple that Solomon built along with his palace were massive and replete with cedar, such that his house was named the House of the Forests of Lebanon.
- While there’s no record of a Pharaoh’s daughter marrying being sent out of Egypt to marry a foreign king anywhere near that time, Gezer does feature in some of the letters found in … . wait for it … Amarna. The ruler of Gezer wrote to Akhenaten to swear allegiance and to ask for help dealing with raiding tribes in the area. The city does appear to have been destroyed by fire around the time of Solomon, with several layers of rebuilding on top of that.
Surmise:
Oh, who knows. Some deal could have been involved between Solomon, Pharaoh, and the Mastars of the Bazaar, where Gezer is the first stolen city. The love story here would be between Solomon and the Pharaoh’s daughter. This is completely incompatible with Amarna as the second city, because this would have happened a half millennia after Ahkenaten. Gezer did sit at the crossroads of the east-west trading routes from the Mediterranean on to Jerusalem and points east and the Egyptian trading route that ran just inland of the coast, and one presumes that if Solomon built a massive temple or palace there, he was probably using the cedars of Lebanon that he used in his Jerusalem temple and palace. The King with a Hundred Hearts wouldn’t be all that far from the King with a Thousand Wives, and the creation of the clay men is certainly consistent with the Jewish tradition of golems. On the other hand, with Egypt so fully involved in two subsequent sacks of Gezer, would it be possible that Gezer was actually the second city, with some collection of Pharoah’s daughters double-crossing some Assyrian gods? Given that Shoshenq may have been from Bubastis, could the Duchess’s cats be involved here somewhere? Another possibility would be some forbidden, foreign love involving the Queen of Sheba, but it’s hard to find a city that would be involved there.
Taking a step back, though, one way or the other, the Biblical story of Gezer is of a city that’s traded as part of a love story, which is why I’ve spent so much time on it here.
One final note – Failbetter games is doing this game in the early 21st century. I refuse to believe that a group of writers who have managed to handle such potentially explosive topics as the church, hell, prostitution, seduction, sex, race, and so on would be so clumsy and crass as to make the hidden story of the Masters of the Bazaar somehow uniquely Jewish, playing on the ugliest of antisemetic tropes dating from the time of the Inquisition. I fully believe that Hebrew stories may be involved here, and on the border of good taste, that the Bazaar being “between stars” could actually refer to a time when, say, the Bazaar was located in Gezer or somewhere where it would have been surrounded by the “Stars of David,” or the cities of ancient Israel.