Fallen Cities (A Great Many Spoilers)

Fallen London
261

Apologies if this has been discussed already and I’m just behind the times, but I just pulled an opportunity card referencing the previous Cities that I hadn’t seen before and thought I’d share.

[quote=]“Palimpsests”

They say that the Second City was once a blaze of copper and turquoise, and that the vitrified sheen on its best ceramics glows with the heat of that ancient sun. They say that the First City was made of shining alabaster and bone held together by belief. They say the Masters sometimes choose to dream in pictographs.[/quote]

The stuff about the Second City isn’t really all that helpful/useful–it lines up well with other evidence that the Second City was in/around Egypt but it doesn’t really help identify which city or when. (Or what love story precipitated its fall.) The info about the first city, however… I dunno, it may end up being nothing but some of the phrases used seem like they might be useful clues to someone who is more knowledgeable about history than I.

“Alabaster and bone” – city with famous alabaster architecture or sculptures?

“Held together by belief” – Implying that the First City was a significant religious center or had a major temple?

Also, anyone have thoughts on whether or not the storylet title “Palimpsests” is significant in any way? (Other than the connotations of scraping off and rewriting, that is.)

262

One thing I feel has been missed about the discussions of the Fifth city: the process and the ‘physics’ of the Fall. Something caught my eye just now: the unlucky result for converting Visions of the Surface to Touching Love Stories speaks of a poetess being crushed inside the hotel she was staying at, and then having to escape the Tomb Colonies.

Something we do know: Sections of London are intact, but have been twisted into a labyrinth and everything renamed. We don’t know what London has replaced (where are the other quarters of the Fourth City? Is it actually the forgotten quarter because it was forgotten to be replaced?) and thus we don’t know the effect of London falling from the skies hadon the Neath. My pet theory however is that it doesn’t matter: I feel that life before London was sedentary at best, and certainly not conducive to Love (Story) Making. London was the kick up the metaphorical that the Neath needed for the masters purpose.

This is incoherent I know. But sometimes you just need to unfurl the madness, lest it consumes you.

263

[quote=San ]Apologies if this has been discussed already and I’m just behind the times, but I just pulled an opportunity card referencing the previous Cities that I hadn’t seen before and thought I’d share.

[quote=]“Palimpsests”

They say that the Second City was once a blaze of copper and turquoise, and that the vitrified sheen on its best ceramics glows with the heat of that ancient sun. They say that the First City was made of shining alabaster and bone held together by belief. They say the Masters sometimes choose to dream in pictographs.[/quote]

The stuff about the Second City isn’t really all that helpful/useful–it lines up well with other evidence that the Second City was in/around Egypt but it doesn’t really help identify which city or when. (Or what love story precipitated its fall.) The info about the first city, however… I dunno, it may end up being nothing but some of the phrases used seem like they might be useful clues to someone who is more knowledgeable about history than I.

“Alabaster and bone” – city with famous alabaster architecture or sculptures?

“Held together by belief” – Implying that the First City was a significant religious center or had a major temple?

Also, anyone have thoughts on whether or not the storylet title “Palimpsests” is significant in any way? (Other than the connotations of scraping off and rewriting, that is.)[/quote]

It’s known that the king of the First City was some sort of priest-king. So religiouswise, the First City probably had a theocratic aspect.

Funny thing, I’ve been wondering, under the mysteries tab, why is it that practically every player seems to think that the First City is in Europe? Literally every piece of evidence we have argues against it.

264

Pay no attention to the other opinions in the “Mysteries” tabs on the locations of the other cities. A lot of people see what the most popular option is and then put it in themselves, leading to herd incorrectness.

265

if the first city had a priest king and the people wrote on clay is there any reason it would not have been Ur? or at least another mesopotamian city, especially a steh sumerian heaven is seen as being a cedar garden
edited by Craig Tolley on 2/7/2013

266

[quote=Craig Tolley]if the first city had a priest king and the people wrote on clay is there any reason it would not have been Ur? or at least another mesopotamian city, especially a steh sumerian heaven is seen as being a cedar garden
edited by Craig Tolley on 2/7/2013[/quote]

I’m far more inclined to think that it’s somewhere on the Phoenician coast, due to the cedars (basically modern-day Lebanon). I wouldn’t rule out Ur, but the existence of coins pins it to some time after the 7th century BC. By that time, however, Ur had long since been in decline, and was a complete nonentity politically. Finally, there’s the fact that even the First City was young when Babylon fell, which, in the post-700 BC period, I believe the consensus is the 539 BC fall to Cyrus the Great. This would suggest a city which was founded around this time, but I’m inclined to suspect that it can also mean that the First City was taken very recently when this happened. In any case, Ur by this time was hardly a city at all.

267

I wouldn’t worry too much about the coins - the Numismatrix hints that the coins that we see now may somehow be relatively modern physical representations of an older metaphysical concept. I don’t know what, exactly, but, hey, we’re talking about a city where echoes are currency - money has always been an unknown quantity here.

268

The problem with the Phoenician cities is that there’s a clue about the city sitting at a crossroads in the middle of the desert, “shaded by cedars.” I have pounded every online resource I can find trying to find something that hints at cedars growing anywhere other than the mountains of Lebanon (they didn’t even grow on the coast where the Phoenician cities are), and have come up completely empty.

The real issue I have with the dates of places like Ur or Nagar/Tell Brak is that the clues from Polythreme make it very clear that the love story behind the fall of the First City was precipitated by the arrival of a silk caravan from China. The Silk Road basically opens somewhere in the 200-300 BC period. So either we’re talking about a historically undocumented contact between Chinese silk merchants and an ancient Near East city, or these cities are out of the running.

Or the Failbetter folks just goofed and messed up their dates, which I guess is possible.

Just to recap the critical First City clues that I tend to go off of:

  • “Crossroads shaded by cedars”
  • Coins with a cedar on them
  • was “young when Babylon fell”
  • the Eye Temple
  • Stone with an eye on it
  • Love story involved the priest-king of the First City and an explorer bringing silk from China
  • Stands in a desert
  • Potentially between the Caspian and the Mediterranean

I feel like we’ve got cities #4 and #3 nailed down, and I’ve got some good guesses on #2, but I’m as lost on the First City as I’ve ever been.

269

So I know we know with 100% certainty that the Fourth City was Karakorum (thanks to The Silver Tree) so a lot of people have moved onto speculation about other cities. However, I haven’t seen any kind of analysis of all the new information we’ve got. Some of the conclusions I came up with are pretty interesting, and run contrary to previous prevailing theories. So I thought I’d make a post: Tumblr

270

Do we know that the silk-bringer is from China?

271

I’d like to suggest a different possibility for the First City…how about Dilmun?

The secretive Club in London takes its name from an ancient trading city that is first referenced in texts dating to the 3rd millennium BC, so it was it was old when Babylon was young.

The earliest records of it mention that the “ships of Dilmun brought wood”. I have no idea if this was cedar, but maybe. And, these records were on clay tablets.

Some scholars think it was an island and all agree it was a major trading port between Mesopotamia and the Indus. So, while not literally a crossroads it was one metaphorically.

Admittedly I’m not sure how the Eye and Alabaster relate, but I thought it worth considering.

(Also The Epic of Gilgamesh describes it as a paradise and the home of the goddess of the South Wind!)

272

Except that you’ve reversed the saying, which is “Even the First City was young when Babylon fell”.

… though I must confess I’ve never quite understood how this could credibly become a saying.

It isn’t really making any statement about the First City; rather, it’s emphasizing how old Babylon was, which doesn’t seem like the sort of thing that anyone would bother making into a saying. I can’t imagine there were a lot of Babylon-partisans in the Second City, wanting to make it known that the First City was just a johnny-come-lately on the historical scene.

If the saying were actually “Even Babylon was young when the First City fell”, that would make sense–that’s the sort of saying that would be made by historians in the Second, Third and Fourth Cities to give a sense to their students of how old the First City was (which, having passed from history when it became home to Bazaar, was probably a city they weren’t that familiar with) by comparing it to a city whose antiquity they were familiar.

That’s the format I would expect for a saying, something like “Even ____ (something ancient that the listener would be familiar with) was young when the First City fell”.

The quoted saying, however, would be like me saying “I’m broke when compared to Bill Gates”. Yeah, a lot of people are, just as there are a lot of cities younger than Babylon; that comparison doesn’t really convey much meaningful information.

273

[quote=Wren]I’d like to suggest a different possibility for the First City…how about Dilmun?

The secretive Club in London takes its name from an ancient trading city that is first referenced in texts dating to the 3rd millennium BC, so it was it was old when Babylon was young.

The earliest records of it mention that the “ships of Dilmun brought wood”. I have no idea if this was cedar, but maybe. And, these records were on clay tablets.

Some scholars think it was an island and all agree it was a major trading port between Mesopotamia and the Indus. So, while not literally a crossroads it was one metaphorically.

Admittedly I’m not sure how the Eye and Alabaster relate, but I thought it worth considering.

(Also The Epic of Gilgamesh describes it as a paradise and the home of the goddess of the South Wind!)[/quote]

This is a really interesting theory, even if it does, as Tesuji stated, reverse the First City/Babylon quote.
By simply googling for a connection between Dilmun and cedars, I found that the paradise version was said to be a “land of cedars.” Some people have said that it was the location of the Cedar Forest mentioned in the Epic of Gilgamesh, where the titular character went with his friend Enkidu to get some timber and make a name for themselves. Enkidu died there, and Gilgamesh started searching for immortality, eventually passing through the gates of a garden (relevant, perhaps?) whose trees bore jewels rather than fruit. This causes some people to connect Dilmun with the Garden of the Hesperides, which is, of course, where Hesperidean Cider would be from.

The only unfortunate thing about all this is that while these things support the theory, they’re all about Dilmun as a metaphorical place, a paradise. Most people place its geographical location somewhere around Bahrain, and cedars seem to grow farther north. However, Bahrain is indeed an island and could definitely have been that trading route or “crossroads,” as you said. Perhaps Failbetter is just seeking to combine the myth with the supposed real-life place? In any case, looking into it led to a lot of relevant-sounding stuff, so I’d say it’s worth some more research.

Here are the pages I was reading, in case anyone else finds something of use in them:
http://www.geocities.ws/garyweb65/eden1.html
http://www.crystalinks.com/dilmun.html
http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/serpents_dragons/boulay15e.htm
edited by TaraLyn on 3/5/2013
edited by TaraLyn on 3/5/2013

274

On a personal level, I have some fondness for associating the First City with the Epic of Gilgamesh. I’ve also suspected, on some level, a connection between the Manager and the King and Gilgamesh and Enkidu, if not literally, then perhaps metaphorically.

275

To jump back to a slightly earlier topic, it does seem that there are lands which hearken back to previous cities. However, we are also informed that the Fifth City is placed squat and flush atop the previous four. Slightly more here.

Has anyone reasoned out any sort of justification for that? For how the Elder Continent can be the location of the Third City while we still find its relics beneath our boots?

And what of that snippet?

Has no-one theorized anything like the cities moving across the ‘Neath? And what of the rumours of the Masters’ summer houses, are they connected to the fabled hospitality of the warm Second City somehow? Are the stone pigs the gods we keep silent further under us?
[li]
edited by BrightonParis on 6/11/2013

276

Well, if we’re going to revive this topic of discussion, we simply can’t ignore the invaluable clue of the Sunlight:

[quote]
The first taught restraint and the second betrayed. The third taught us hunger: the fourth we remade. The fifth will live on in the heart of the Sun, and the sixth…[/color]

I have this odd feeling that this is directly connected to what BrightonParis is mentioning, but unfortunately my real-world Watchful is too low for me to figure it out.

If you have a Zubmarine and explore an iceberg at Zee, there’s also an interesting tidbit about Polythreme, which if I understand correctly has some potent connections to the First City:

[quote]
On the underside of the slate-blue iceberg, your lamps pick out details. Long-dead trees, a low wall, a little marble temple, all upside-down. The iceberg is a small hill, possibly sloughed off from Polythreme. Every minute or so, a vibration rocks your vessel, sending the crew sprawling. It’s like the beat of a slow, slow drum.[/quote]

Again, no idea what it means, but it increases “Walking the Fallen Cities”, so it’s definitely a clue.

277

[li]Here’s an interesting tidbit from the Archaeology content (the result that gets you the eyeless skull):
[li]Horses are depicted, rearing to the sun: eleven hooded figures shrink away from its rays. [i]&quotWe are still here,&quot the shrine seems to say, &quotand we have not forgotten.&quot

[/i]Were there ever eleven Masters?

278

[quote=Aspeon][li]Here’s an interesting tidbit from the Archaeology content (the result that gets you the eyeless skull):
[/li][li]Horses are depicted, rearing to the sun: eleven hooded figures shrink away from its rays. [i]&quotWe are still here,&quot the shrine seems to say, &quotand we have not forgotten.&quot

[/i]Were there ever eleven Masters?[/quote]

Well, it’s probably not counting Chimes, Sacks, or Names, but there’s one other master that’s not mentioned if there are eleven mentioned- maybe Eaten? (or maybe Mirrors? I’m not really sure, but those two seem to be the most likely to be excluded)[/li][li]

279

Mr Mirrors is Mr Cups.

280

…Hmm, does that mean that Eaten or who Eaten used to be is included in the eleven then?
[li]
edited by Flapdragon on 6/23/2013