Sorry, I'm with Alex on this. Nobody is saying Glorantha can't be unique, or that Westerners are Medieval Europeans. Then again, arbitrarily mucking things around for the sole reason of being different desn't make any sense either.
What I love about Glorantha is that there are often very good reasons for the way things are. I think this is what greg meant by his 'consistency' comment at Tentacles (Feeling better now Nick?). All the different aspects of Dara Happan religion, history and society make sense. They fit together and form a consistent and believable culture. That doesn't happen by taking random disconnected bits of Kutcha and slapping them together.
If anyone's got good reasons why they think western scripts are ideographic or whatever then that's fine.
>The myths of Glorantha are astoundingly good because they use elements we know
>(the Sun deity has a Bow and a Harp, for instance), but are not just rippoffs
>from earth myths.
Glorantha doesn't so much rip off real world myths, but it does use a lot (pretty much all) of the same symbology. If I hadn't heard of Glorantha, but I read about Dara Happa and was told that it was a recently discovered culture that used to live somewhere in the middle east, I'd almost believe it. However if you told me there was an ancient animistic, zigurat building culture, that used ideographic script and played the bagpipes in north america and they were descended from vikings, I'd think you'd been reading Graham Hancock while tripping on acid. Such a culture would be similarly out of place in Glorantha.
My personal preference would be for the ancient Malkioni script to be similar to be Hebrew. Why? Because much of Malkionism and western metaphysics reminds me of Judaism. After all, European monotheism isn't a native phenomenon but an import. Why base Malkioni culture on a second hand copy, when you can use the real thing?
Judaism reveres the Books of the Law, the modern version of which was put together in historical times from more ancient sources. The Jewish sacred texts are believed to be a precise (logical?) blueprint for creation, and analysis of them gives magical powers. Judaism is monotheistic, has a complex angelology and does not have an accessible 'land of the dead' (Christian visions of heaven are based on Graeco-Roman mythology). The points of similarity with Malkionism are profound.
Simon Hibbs
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