>Lets face it - soaring white pillars of marble are a heck
>of a lot more etherial than stalwart mounds of brick and stone sporting
>scenes of big-beared, squareish guys waving dead things.
I hate to nitpick again (but hey when you're good at something...) but this idea of white Greek temples is pretty common and completely wrong. Most if not all of that lovely white marble you see in ancient buildings in Greece and around the Mediterranean was originally covered by (to modern eyes at least) garish paint. You wouldn't have seen much white used on a Greek temple.
Something I don't understand is people taking the histories Greg Stafford has written, like King of Sartar and the GRoY, etc. as verbatim accounts. My impression has been that these are highly subjective accounts. It's like taking everything Herodotus wrote about or the Bible as the gospel truth (pun intended). There's a reason why Herodotus was known as the Father of Lies. He was quite capable (as were most ancient historians) of altering the truth to fit his facts. These sorts of subjective histories are certainly interesting colour and in many cases the only sources we have but they shouldn't IMHO be taken as being anything more reliable than that.
The Dara Happan's may claim to have thousands of years of uninterrupted history but this claim seems to be contradicted by the write-up in the history section of the Doraster book that the Tripolis was founded by the slaves freed from horse-riding Yelm worshippers by the First Council. Hardly thousands of years of uninterrupted history. Someone is being lied to. Personally I find it more interesting to believe that the priesthood is lying to their worshippers than that their history is so at odds with the rest of Genertela's.
All historical accounts are relative and depend highly on who's writing them or who's passing them along.
On an added note has anyone ever worked on a unified historical timeline for Glorantha that could put historical events into context? It'd be an interesting project.
Oliver B. Bernuetz
bernuetz.oliver_at_cbsc.ic.gc.ca
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