>>I do not believe the Palace
>>of Excellent Reward to be in Vithela for the Tortured Dead plague
>>Kralorela and not the East Isles.
>The Palace of Excellent Reward is where you go _after_
>Vithela, once the emperor arrives and takes the waiting
>souls with him.
Nope. The people go to the Palace of Excellent Reward to await the passing on according to Gods of Glorantha's 'What the Dragon Lord Whispers'.
>>Nils, similar conservatism can be found in the roman script
>>based on the Cadmean Letters. We can still see the Ox Head
>>in the A if we flip it upside down! Are you going to claim
>>that the West has been unchanged on this basis?
>
>I claim _continuity_, not complete stasis.
But Continuity does not imply Stasis which is what I keep pointing out. The Byzantine Empire is culturally continous with the Roman Republic despite being:
Despite all these changes, they were still anal-retentive about things Rhoman and the Emperors got really pissed off when some ignorant latin (like the Pope) addressed him as King of the Greeks or something similar. One can find similar attitudes in China and I expect Kralorela to be the same.
>>You haven't disproved my point. The claim is true for each
>>and every one of those other cultures that I listed for they
>>all claim (with some justice) to have Golden Age traditions
>>that are lost to the rest of the world.
>_They_ claim, as opposed to _Genertela book_ claims.
And what did 'with some justice' imply? The idea that some or most of their claims were factually correct perhaps?
>I'm not trying to disprove your point since it doesn't
>adress the same thing I was. Or is there a secret
>code that makes some source quotes sacrosanct and
>others dismissable?
I suppose it goes something like:
My source quotations address the issues.
Your source quotations miss the point.
His source quotations are completely irrelevant and untrue.
Vesa Lehtinen:
Me>>This would mean that Kralorela is very fragmented politically
>>as there are at least nine exarchs.
>IMO Kralorela is not as homogenic place as it
>would like to be. Language may be standard but (again
>IMO) the provinces have different customs et al. Regional
>governors are sure to have extensive powers to handle
>local affairs.
I agree, but I'm talking about the central government. Reducing Godunya to the level of Chief Priest of Kralorela means that there is no organisation that can supervise the exarchs. Whereas I think there is.
>And where there is power, there is abuse of
>that power. What do you think governor of Sha Ming tried
>to do ? Use the taxes for his own purposes, probably.
>You wanted court intrigue. How about inter-governor
>intrigue ?
Sha Ming (and Boshan in general) have never liked Kralorela and the problem goes far beyond the governer. I think Boshan is the equivalent of Vietnam (who fought a thousand year war to oust the chinese).
Stephen Martin:
Me>>>It may be but we know Kralorela cannot be that place for it has
>Nils>Then please tell us in what way they changed Kralorelan
>>_culture_ in a major way. Foreign conquerors don't
>>necessarily mean broken tradition.
>Also, some of Peter's objections are irrelevant, because they are untrue
>- -- it is never said that Orlanth or Kajaboom _conquered_ Kralorela, it
>merely says they _invaded_ Kralorela. No, it does not even say that --
>it says they are mentioned in the Kralori Catalogue of Foes as being
>enemies of Kralorela in the Gods Age.
No it doesn't. If you had bothered to look things up, you would have found that the quote is from the Jonston Compendium which mentions nothing about a Catalog of Foes but describes the invaders as 'major' or 'minor issues'. If the Seshnegi who ruled Kralorela for nearly 400 years are a 'major issue' then (although this is not stated but I follow common sense), it follows that even the 'minor issues' must have been catalysmic events. You are thinking of the description for the Huan To in the Gloranthan Beastiary where the Catalog of Foes is mentioned. So before you accuse me of raising irrelevant and untrue objections in the future, take care to get your facts straight before sprouting off.
And on the unwelcome tone in the above (I'm no longer in a forgiving mood for it's the second time today):
<Stephen_Martin_argumentation_style>
Besides Stephen has never bothered to refute my point about the Path of Immanent Mastery having far greater prominence now because that blows his (completely ridiculous IMO) claims of Kralori cultural stasis out of the water. Could his reason for claiming that I raise untrue statements be little more than a petty desire to fling mud because I've been showing that he doesn't know much about Kralorela as he likes to think he does.
</Stephen Martin_argumentation_style>
And if Stephen wishes to pursue this style of argument, I will quite happily email him buckets of abuse offline.
>If the Kralori have a written document
>which has been added to over time, since the end of the Golden Age, this
>implies a lot more cultural continuity than Peter wants to allow.
Of course Stephen quite conveniently forgets that Shang-Hsa _burnt_ _all_ _the_ _books_ and thus these golden age documents must have been _reconstructions_ from the memory of a few biased scribes. This was a real problem with the Confucian writings which were ordered to be burnt by the First Emperor (to be fair, he kept a copy in the Imperial Library but that burnt down in the Civil War that followed. Oops). A large part of the writings are legalistic doctrines that have been added in and the origins of Chinese textual criticism started when scholars were trying to figure out what had been added in.
>I agree
>with Nils that it would be more interesting to have one Gloranthan
>culture which actually _is_ culturally 90% or more the same as it was in
>the Golden Age. And yellow elves don't count.
Cultural Continuity or Cultural Stasis? Make up your mind! Even if we accept the Martinesque assertion that all the books have been perfectly preserved (which I find highly implausible), then there remains the following issues:
Of course Stephen Martin is quite welcome to ignore all this in favour of a timeless Kralorela. But I will to insist that such a stasis means that Kralorela becomes a two-dimensional caricature and not a vibrant human culture.
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