To continue the thread, though, I haven’t updated recently because I haven’t been able to find anything conclusive (though not for lack of looking). As with everything in this thread, please consider the following to be laced with SPOILERS:
On the Third City, which I’m probably the most interested in, I’ve got absolutely nothing new. Which brings me to mention… does anyone have any tips on either getting to the Elder Continent or finding out anything about it? I’ve killed Feducci but the closest I’ve gotten to the Presbyterate is the Killing Wind. I’m off on scientific expeditions at the moment, so if that leads anywhere, I’ll be there soon enough.
I’ve made a fair bit of progress on putting together clues about the First City, but they’re maddeningly inconclusive and sometimes contradictory. With some reading, I am firmly convinced that the story of the First City is that the King with a Hundred Hearts was either Zhang Qian, a member of his party, or someone in another Chinese emissary from around the time period of the opening of the Silk Road, sometime between 50-250 BCE. This comes from, among other places, the words of the Clay Men in Polythreme, the clues about the King with a Hundred Hearts, the writings on the walls of the eye temple in Polythreme, and a number of other places that pretty directly indicate the time of the opening of the Silk Road. (The Wikipedia article on the Silk Road, like most, misses some details but is a very good start for nailing down that period: Silk Road - Wikipedia) Among other things, if we accept the general hints that the First City was one near the western ends of the Silk Road in this time frame, we’re looking at basically the last days of the Hellenistic period and very likely a city that was either part of the late Seleucid Empire or one of its antagonists, like the Kingdom of Armenai, Parthia, Pontus, or one of another half dozen minor fiefdoms in that area. (I’m generally eliminating distinctly Roman cities because this would have been around the time of their founding and flourishing rather than the time of their fall, and in the case of Karakorum at least, the Fall in the game seems to roughly correspond to the time of a precipitous decline or fall of the historical city.)
I realize that this time frame causes major problems for a lot of the going theories of the First City, being way too late for many of them (and further causes big headaches for Second City theories as well). I realize this, but there’s just too much evidence that plants the city in the Seleucid
Unfortunately, the clues get very confused after that. The key features I’m looking for in First City candidates:
- Somewhere on or near one of the Silk Road routes. (There’s lots of maps online – here’s a basic one: http://www.east-site.com/images/silk_road_map.gif)[/li][li]A city that didn’t last into Roman times or beyond, or at least had to be rebuilt. The time frame works fairly well for the extension of Roman domination into Anatolia (Turkey), the Levant, and beyond, but there’s a lot of turmoil around that time so it doesn’t have to be Roman conquest.[/li][li]The city also shouldn’t be too ancient. It was apparently “still young when Babylon fell,” which while Babylon fell multiple times, the canonical Fall of Babylon was somewhere around 1500 BCE. Potentially, this could also refer to a more thorough sacking in the 600-700 BCE range.[/li][li]Some manner of crossroads. [/li][li]Cedars, whether live, imported wood, or symbolic. The most famous cedars grew in Lebanon, but some grew in the mountains of southeastern Turkey. I’ve found some very sporadic references to a few in modern Armenia and the southern coast of the Caspian Sea in Iran, but they’re hardly cultural touchstones there. There’s also “salt cedars,” but they’re low growing desert bushes that would hardly be shade for a crossroads.[/li][li]Based on the maps in Polythreme, the city should be in the vicinity of “in the land between the Caspian and Mediterranean seas.” If the King with a Hundred Hearts is really based on a historical figure, it’s probably going to be closer to the Caspian side, as neither Zhang Qian nor any of his immediate successors made it past Mesopotamia. It’s possible that the authors of the game have surmised an explorer that pushed all the way to Syria or Lebanon, which is why I include a number of those cities here (and because of those pesky Lebanese cedars…).[/li][li]Cedar coins, although I think these may be an invention of the game and not exist historically. Every single coin I can find from the period, if it has any recognizable picture on it, is an image of the ruler who issued them. The only cedar-decorated coins I can find are very recent Lebanese coins.[/li][li]Any of the geographic features of Polythreme, which I believe to be the Neath-located remnant of the First City. (It’s quite obviously related to the First City, but it’s possible that it’s not the First City itself.) From “A long chat about the town” in Polythreme, we get “Steep streets lead up from the harbour to the rambling, abandoned villa that overlooks the island” and “there’s marble to be found on the island, and copper. But little else.” Further (an item I just now noticed), Polythreme is an island – "The business is overseen by Mr. Fires, although it’s not been seen on the island since before London’s Fall. Some accommodations have to be made for changes in geography when a city is brought miles underground, but certainly with London the general local geography (particularly the winding of the Thames) remained the same. Of course, it’s tricky for something to be both a crossroads and an island, which is complicated more by Asher Wilsford’s text from Heart’s Desire, ". . .[color=rgb(34, 34, 34)] a mud brick town next to a cedar grove. Hot, dusty plains stretch to the horizon." If Polythreme is the First City, and it was an island on the surface, it seems clear it was an island in a river.[/color][/li][li][color=rgb(34, 34, 34)]A temple with eye carvings on the walls of the portico.[/color][/li][li][color=rgb(34, 34, 34)]If the pictures in Polythreme can be believed, the architecture was at least moderately Hellenistic. Most of the pictures are of decidedly Greek pillars, and the city seems to be dominated by marble.[/color]
[color=#222222]Again, what this leaves us with is latter Seleucid Empire cities or potentially Parthia, Armenia, Pontus, or something else in there. Here are the candidates I’ve beat my head against:[/color]
[ul][li][color=#222222]The Phoenician cities of Lebanon, including Byblos, Beirut, Tyre, Sidon, Arwad, and Tripoli. The big thing they have going for them is the cedars, but not much else. Most lasted well into the common era and are still extant today. While several were important harbors for the silk road, they weren’t exactly crossroads, and they certainly weren’t on desert plains. Most of them are also so old they couldn’t have been called young at the fall of Babylon.[/color][/li][li][color=#222222]Tell Brak/Nagar. It has the Eye Temple, but that name derives from relics that have two to eight eyes on them, not the walls of the temple. It also has no harbor, and is way, way, way too early for Silk Road traffic, marble sculpture, Grecian architecture, or as mentioned earlier, coins.[/color][/li][li][color=#222222]Antioch. It’s one of the most important cities of the period, was a major terminal on the Silk Road and certainly a crossroads, and isn’t too far from the great Cedars of Lebanon. Part of the old city sat on an island in the river Orontes. The biggest problem is that historically, Antioch was just hitting its stride when Zhang Qian arrived, and was a massive city and major player in the early Christian world. Also, it was a good deal bigger than a “mud brick town next to a cedar grove,” being called “Antioch the Great” or the “Golden City” at times.[/color][/li][li][color=#222222]Baalbek. Founded after Alexander the Great came through, it’s the site of one of the largest and best preserved Roman temples in the world. Sits right on a dry plain in Lebanon, but again… Roman. Most of the temple was built in the Common Era. I can’t find any text associating it with the silk trade either. Still, those Corinthean columns from the temple of Baal Jupiter sure look like the graphics of Polythreme…[/color][/li][li][color=#222222]Aleppo. A major Silk Road city where the routes to Antioch and to Tyre split. It also hits a lot of the geographic requirements, being a river city surrounded by the dry plains of Syria, but is close enough to the Mediterranean that it’s not inconceivable that a small grove of cedars grew there once. Biggest problem – Aleppo really wasn’t a city before the opening of the Silk Road, and most of its historic remnants are from the Common Era. Although this has nothing to do with the games, it’s hard to look up facts about Aleppo and ignore the violence going on there. Here’s hoping for the best for Syria.[/color][/li][li][color=#222222]Apamea. Another of the Syrian cities, this one left in ruins, and one I keep coming back to. It was apparently a “treasure city” on the Orontes, and its ruins have lots of lovely fluted columns and a hill with some interesting structures on it. No cedars nearby, unfortunately, and it also suffers the just-a-bit-late problem of the rest of the Syrian tetrapolis. [/color][/li][li][color=#222222]Palmyra. Some of the grandest Roman ruins in Syria, and unquestionably a major stop on the Silk Road. Palmyra was an oasis and a waystation in the Syrian desert, and grew massively in importance along the Silk Road, but its period of importance was brief as the growth of the Sassanids in Persia shifted the travel routes. It certainly wasn’t an island, and I don’t know what cedars would grow that far out in the desert, but I can’t eliminate it based on any evidence other than the standard time scale problems for all these Syrian cities. [/color][/li][li][color=#222222]The Armenian cities, including Artashat and Tiganocert. Founded by the relatively short-lived Kingdom of Armenia, these cities were waypoints on travel from the Syrian cities like Palmyra into Asia Minor, and were the capitals for their respective kings Artaxes and Tigranes. Just from a perspective of positioning, they’re in a very believable spot, but there aren’t many ruins to get a good read of anything else from. I keep hoping I’ll find some temple with eyes or something to justify pursuing these cities further, because they match a number of features and don’t have any major strikes against them, but there’s just not many specifics to match up.[/color][/li][li][color=#222222]Tarsus. Most famous as the birthplace of St. Paul, I include this because it certainly had cedars nearby (the Turkish subspecies of the Cedars of Lebanon) and was a very minor crossroads.[/color][/li][li][color=#222222]The Parthian cities. There’s well over a dozen decent candidates among the cities of the Parthian empire, which didn’t have a major capital. (Parthian City Index). On the one hand, Parthia remains the most likely location for the First City, given that it’s the westernmost point that Zhang Qian actually reached and was generally the stopping point for merchants who actually started out in China, where they would trade their goods to other merchants from the west. Geographically, it fits a lot of the criteria, with large swaths being roughly between the Caspian and Mediterranean seas, covering much of Mesopotamia and modern Iran and Afghanistan. In the clay man’s story in Polythreme, the journey came to the “shores of an inland sea, where they had never even seen silk before,” which could easily be the Caspian, Black, or even Aral Sea. My favorite of these is Hekatompylos (meaning “City of a Hundred Gates,” where hundred here means “lots,” giving a nice symmetry with the Hundred Hearts) in Hyrcania, which was allegedly one of the capitals of the Parthian empire and is at least moderately close to the modern Abr Forest.
On the other hand, one of the supporting yet maddening things about Parthia is that historical information is ridiculously hard to come by. The ruins of Hekatompylos haven’t been conclusively located, and the ruins of other cities (like Ctesiphon) are in very bad shape. The back side of First City coins have writing that “no one living can decipher” – “parthian” is a modern idiom for a completely indecipherable language, as what remnants of the Parthian language we have are still untranslated. Parthia itself was perhaps the biggest confounding factor in the Silk Road trade, as it basically controlled all the overland routes (except for the rarely used and very dangerous route around the north end of the Caspian Sea) for a couple hundred years, and effectively kept Rome and China from fully communicating well. [/color][/li][/ul]
[color=#222222]So, like I said, I have an enormous amount of nothing to show for my research. But maybe someone can find something in all of this worth using.[/color]
