Common to most Indo-European societies, actually, including Persia and India. In India, they became so prized that it became sacrilege to kill them (although it is permissible to eat them if they die of other causes, like a car hitting them)(leading to lots of tragic accidents during bad crop years).
> However, I am wary of close real world analogies for Glorantha,
> so I started to ponder a secondary one for the sartarites.
>
> People have told how they played Sartar as hellenic, with the cities
> and the armour and weapons depicted in the RQ 2 rulesbook. Personally
> I use a minoan/mycenaean/general mediterranean primary analogue for
> the Holy Country.
>
> If I stretch that a bit, into iron age Hellas, the ionians (mainly)
> built colony cities and interacted with wild and unruly barbarians in
> the forests and mountains to the north. That does sound a bit like
> king Sartar, no?
>
> So, there I was, with thracians as my secondary analogue for
> the orlanthi of Sartar. Comments, ideas, flames?
Wrong side of the peninsula. The Thracians were notoriously horse loving, and may have been the real Centaurs. Obviously, they should therefore be the Grazelanders (the True Horse/Pain Centaur descended, not the Vendref).
The Sartar Orlanthi are closer to the Dorians, or perhaps the Achaeans (of Trojan War fame), while the later Ionians (in the Islands and Turkish coasts) more like the Tarshites. Saird/Holay/Aggar can be the Hittites or Lydians (of modern Armenia and Turkey, respectively). This yields Dara Happa as Sumer or Babylon (its primary analog, from the artwork in GRoY and Fortunate Succession) and either Alkoth or pre-Carmanian Pelanda as Assyria, thus nicely matching up pieces of the jigsaw puzzle.
In any case, using these or Irish Celts as analogs has problems, since all the analog cultures presented are strongly sea or ocean-influenced. Maybe we can try something wildly different, like Iroquois for Sartar, Mound Builders for the Esrolians, and Aztecs and Mayans for Alkoth and Yuthuppa, respectively. There is a problem in that the above cultures didn't flourish at the same time in the RW, and never got beyond the Chalcolithic (mixed copper and stone) stage, but we can get around that with a little literary licence. With these analogs, Hiawatha is Sartar, and his Feathered Horse Queen, Minnehaha (or however it is spelled). Both are legendary enough for the purposes of 1620s Glorantha.
OK, big parts of the Canon don't fit, but how many of them are artifacts of the analogies, I wonder? Orlanthi steadings do look a lot like Iroquois long houses, and they played a game enough like Iorgh (RW hurley, from an old digest) to fit.
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