> Heh :) To me Glorantha resonates with ancient old world
> civilizations. Mississippi is just too strange a mental leap for me.
I think we Old Worlders may have been a bit too much European (plus Fertile Crescent) when thinking about Glorantha.
I said Mississippi because climate, relief and vegetation ought to match riverine Dara Happa. More so than Nile, Rhine, Danube, or Euphrates. The Indus might come closest. Lower Wolga or Don might be candidates.
All of these (except Nile and Rhine) flow in the wrong direction, though - this matters if the river (or parts of it) freezes over.
I said Mississippi because I read recently about the agricultural civilizations of northern America, some of which even supported what might be called urban centres. My (naive European) picture of native Americans was formed by plains Indians riding horses or chasing Brits through forests, not of farmers, gardeners or fishermen. (Appreciative nods towards John Wayne, James Fenimore Cooper and Karl May...)
Since we had been discussing Bronze Age earlier on, I thought about how Bronze Age Europe would have been different from pre-Columbian America. And I found that the main difference were the domestication of cattle and the invention of the plow.
Now how important are cattle and plow for riverine Dara Happa?
Bulls have a cultic importance as sacrifices, so there must have been cattle herding very early on in Dara Happan culture. IMO they adopted the Finger Goddess methods for a dependable source of meat and milk, then, with the male deities aquiring rule, the bull sacrifice became part of demonstrating their superiority.
The ox-drawn plow appears to have been introduced to Peloria by or with the Tawari (Fronelan cattle folk). It isn't a specific Dara Happan element.
Lodrili cultivation tools on the Gods Wall are shovel and mattock. Invaluable for irrigation work, irrelevant for plowing. Hence my assumption that the Dara Happan agriculture would (or can still) work without ox-drawn plows.
Pelorian dry farming away from the rivers is a different proposition. It is described as a different culture in Genertela Book, though - dominated by Dara Happan cities and nobles, but not originally Dara Happan. Maybe the bull sacrifice was also a means to prove superiority of the wet-farming supported cities over the dry-farming communities of Peloria.
Point of these deliberations: Dara Happan culture appears to be dependent on neither metal use nor cattle-driven agriculture. It might as well be a New World civilization, with human labour being the single most important productive factor.
The Pelorian dry farmers now use the heavy plow, but they started out as horticulturists no different from the native Americans living along the Mississippi and its tributaries. Maybe worth a look for original material culture.
I find it a lot harder to de-Oldworld the Orlanthi. The significance of plow and cattle appears to be greater to their material culture. Strip the Orlanthi off cattle herds and plowing, and you get uncultured savages in the hills (Vustria, Skanthi, Brolia) with questionable means of survival beyond raiding and hunting/gathering.
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