The last and greatest of the old 'Awali empires was that of Zaba-Tutul, founded a little over a thousand years after the downfall of the Umatili Empire and centered on a city that was relatively young by 'Awali standards; Zaba-Tutul had been founded around 6200 AA, ironically starting out as a colony of Umatil, and was among the many tributary states to have broken free of its mother-city's control when the Umatili lost control of their mercenaries. In late 7062 AA, a troop of mostly Qormat and Mun'umati deserters from the Umatili army harassed the outskirts of Zaba-Tutul and threatened to besiege the city if they were not paid a sufficient ransom; the Zaba-Tutuli king Yur-eni-bil, a distant relation of the ill-fated Umatili monarch Dumuz-a-bil, elected to meet them in battle after first sacrificing his wife to the city's patron goddess, Yannu, in a desperate bid for the goddess' favor - and actually won the resulting battle, to the surprise of everyone but himself. Thus Zaba-Tutul managed to avoid the economic devastation that either being sacked or paying a heavy ransom to the deserters brought upon many of its neighbors, and Yur-eni-bil & his descendants used their position of relative strength to bring said neighbors under their rule. By 7562 AA, Zaba-Tutul had conquered its former overlord Umatil and was master of the lands between the Abanarir & Muryurir rivers. The only serious opposition they had left among the 'Awali was a league of the three next greatest city-kingdoms: Ilenga, Dagan, and ancient Ubeizan itself, the latter of which led the league.
Yet even the combined strength of these three kingdoms, minor empires in their own right, was not sufficient to bring down Zaba-Tutul's star. At the great Battle of Igigi Plain in 7567 AA, King Tiqip of Zaba-Tutul - freshly transformed into an avatar of Yannu's - led his army to meet the gathered hosts of his three rivals and prevailed utterly, having detached a unit of engineers to destroy several major dikes south of the battlefield and flood the larger army of the Ubeizani League's positions (mostly, for much of the Zaba-Tutuli vanguard was washed away as collateral damage too). Simultaneously, with the power of Yannu, Tiqip raised up great walls of earth to block off the retreat of the Ubeizani League forces, ensuring that not only would the flood be contained before it devastated Zaba-Tutul's own farmlands but also that as few of his enemies as possible could escape. The kings of Dagan and Ubeizan were among the drowned, while King Dun-he-nuna of Ilenga survived by virtue of having also become an avatar (in his case, of Abanah) but bent his knee soon after the battle. Evidently, Yannu must have frightened the rival goddess into submission on that battlefield. By the end of the year, Tiqip was able to march his forces into Dagan and Ubeizan with little effective opposition and proclaimed himself Paramount King of the 'Awali in the ziggurat of the latter. No other still-independent kingdom among the First had the strength to contest his claim, and one by one (or in batches of up to a dozen, on the occasion that they formed a coalition in a desperate bid to stop the Zaba-Tutuli) they were swallowed up by Tiqip and his heirs until by 8080 AA, the entirety of the 'Awali Riverlands knew a single master for the first time in history. It is for this reason that the Zaba-Tutuli Empire is also sometimes referred to as the 'Awali Empire by historians.
But dominance over 'just' their fellow 'Awali would not be enough to sate the hunger for power and conquests that had by now possessed the descendants of Yurlabil, oh no. Zaba-Tutuli armies began to assail a diverse crop of new foes, ranging from the indigenous marsh-people of the north to Mun'umati tribes at the edge of the Riverlands and the Great Sand Sea to the east to Qormat mountain men & Saurii colonists in the south, in an effort to plant the Zaba-Tutuli flag in new lands and bring more slaves, material resources and trade routes into the fold of the Paramount Kings. With their vast arsenal of acceptable-to-high-quality bronze equipment and chariots, professional soldiery, sophisticated administrative/logistical apparatus (all made possible in large part by their massive slave economy) and most importantly their formidable Kings leading them from the front as avatars of Yannu, the Zaba-Tutuli found few equals capable of slowing or halting their relentless wars of expansion out of their native riverlands.
The Zaba-Tutuli empire shortly after the Battle of Igigi Plain, 7,567 AA |
Legend:
Red - Zaba-Tutul
Green - Ubeizan
Cyan - Ilenga
Burgundy - Dagan |
Society & government | The Zaba-Tutuli empire followed in the footsteps of Ubeizan rather than its founder and former master, Umatil, in that it had a centralized governing structure. Native kings and chiefs who were subdued by its armies were turfed out of their seats, their subjects instead being placed under the rule of a governor appointed by the Paramount King in Zaba-Tutul. As governors had no fixed term limits and were appointed & replaced at said Paramount King's pleasure, these governors could reign for life so long as they did not offend their patron, which could be most easily accomplished by maintaining a careful balance between sending sufficient tax revenue and slaves home & preventing their subjects from revolting against Zaba-Tutul's overlordship. These governors were supported by a population of Zaba-Tutuli colonists, originally a category comprised of the soldiers assigned to a given city's garrison and their families but soon expanding to include administrators, judges and clerics sent from home; although the native aristocracy and elder statesmen were still involved at the lower echelons of Zaba-Tutuli local government as accountants, bookkeepers, tax-collectors and interpreters, all decision-making power rested with the governor and his cabal (and above them, the royal court in Zaba-Tutul's ziggurat), which was required by law to be made up entirely of Zaba-Tutuli immigrants and their patrilineal descendants.
Above these governors and the traditional nobility, per 'Awali custom, the Paramount King was considered an avatar of Zaba-Tutul's patron god Yannu and thus considered sacrosanct, while the priestesses of Yannu enjoyed similar status on account of being thought of as their goddess' lesser spokeswomen on Earth. When sufficiently angered or frustrated, the Paramount Kings would order great sacrifices of food, wine, gold and slaves or enemy prisoners-of-war to be conducted at the Golden Temple of Yannu so as to please her and draw her into the material world, thereby making themselves into her avatar in more than just name. While few Paramount Kings survived the experience, while possessed by Yannu they could reportedly devastate the armies and homelands of their foes simply by transcribing words of power provided in their minds by the goddess, and then reading these Mandates out loud.
Cylinder seal impression of the Zaba-Tutuli king Etaqip appointing a governor, c. 8,800 AA | |
Despite this greater centralism, the Zaba-Tutuli were aware that if they didn't integrate conquered natives into their system more effectively, they could easily fall as the Ubeizani did. Thus, after one to three generations, a city that had not revolted against Zaba-Tutuli rulership would be given the status of Ebiti Zaba-Tutul (literally 'Like Zaba-Tutul'), which amounts to Zaba-Tutuli citizenship. The upper echelons of the existing native nobility were allowed entry into highest echelons of local governance and even parts of the central government in Zaba-Tutul itself, while a significant number of the local slaves were manumitted and drafted into the Zaba-Tutuli army, to be replaced with the foreign slaves these new soldiers were expected to bring in. Their families would be freed along with them as well, and for all intents and purposes, this population of freedmen could be thought of as new Zaba-Tutuli citizens in their own right. Within a generation, even if they still speak their own dialect of 'Awali at home, they could serve as officers and bureaucrats in the halls of Zaba-Tutuli power just like men born in Zaba-Tutul itself.
Now all that said, being a low-ranking cog in the engine of lower-end governance was one of the best possible outcomes for the first and second generations of peoples placed under the Zaba-Tutuli yoke. Their empire's economy was much more heavily reliant on slaves than Ubeizan's and Umatil's, as free men were overwhelmingly required for the army or civil service and consequently someone else needed to do their work. Every time the Zaba-Tutuli army conquered a town or tribe, unless otherwise agreed upon in prior peace negotiations - which Zaba-Tutul famously always adhered to unless betrayed first, not necessarily because their kings were paragons of honor but because they knew that if they broke such agreements first nobody would ever trust their word and surrender instead of forcing a bloody last stand - anywhere between half to three-quarters of the subjugated men, women and children would be enslaved. While there exists many a lurid tale about a decadent Zaba-Tutuli king or aristocrat's harem of nubile foreign women, the truth is that the vast bulk of newly enslaved peoples were sent to do decidedly un-romantic manual labor in the farms, mines and workshops, freeing their former occupants to go join the Zaba-Tutuli army and bring back even more slaves in the future. Slaves could not marry non-slaves and any children a slave woman gave birth to was automatically made a slave; while they could be manumitted by their master, this did not appear to occur frequently, and freedmen were almost always immediately drafted into the Zaba-Tutuli army. In case they suspect a rebellion might be in the works, masters were encouraged to put on a show of force by randomly killing several of their strongest slaves to scare the rest back into line; this was no great loss, as Zaba-Tutul's constant wars meant a constant stream of replacements for them to pick out of too.
Relief depicting Zaba-tutuli overseers and Qormat slaves, c. 8,100 AA | |
As for the free men of society's lower orders...well, squeezed between the surfeit of slaves capable of doing their work for free and nobles & priests above of them whose positions in society were guaranteed, they had little choice but to join the army or civil service (mostly the former, for the latter required basic literacy & numeracy), or else starve. Thus the majority of the Zaba-Tutuli army's vaunted professional soldiers were formerly free peasants and artisans, retrained to march and kill at the command of their superiors after losing their jobs to slaves. Assuming they survive their minimum decade-long service, they would receive a severance package in the form of a plot of land and anywhere between three to a dozen slaves carved out from the territories they had helped to conquer, the size and quality of both being determined by their rank at the time of their dismissal from the army. Veterans could, of course, re-enlist and serve at a higher paygrade, and their second severance package included having their family name added to the rolls of the nobility. While men and boys were slated for the military or civil service, women and girls did what little civilian work that wasn't already being done by slaves; home-making, sewing, working pottery and so on.
Some free men became merchants and led caravans or trading convoys westward into the cities and ports of the Allawaurë and Saurii (at least when their Paramount King wasn't at war with their destinations) to turn a profit, selling off cargoes of everything that could be found wherever the Paramount King had power from rice to gold to salt and buying whatever the 'Awali did not grow or mine themselves. Unfortunately for them, the occupation of trader - one who did not create goods, but only moved around goods created or harvested by others - had never commanded much respect in the martial/agricultural society of the 'Awali and Zaba-Tutul was not about to buck that trend, and so even merchants who grew wealthier than the traditional Zaba-Tutuli aristocracy had next to no official influence in the empire. In times of great need or extravagance, Paramount Kings and their lords were also known to seize merchants' goods without compensation to fuel their armies or wild parties, turning away even more of those who were considering taking up trade for a living.
Artist's imagining of a Zaba-Tutuli farm, worked entirely by slaves while the owner's wife chats with a neighbor | |
Outside of the 'Awali Riverlands proper, Zaba-Tutuli administration was less rigorously centralized. In the Great Sand Sea, up to a dozen Mun'umati tribes (most prominently the Enezi or 'Forlorn' and 'Ilmi or 'Righteous') were subjugated by the force of Zaba-Tutuli arms by 9000 AA, but as they were nomads with little to no knowledge of farming & whose homeland mostly consisted of nothing more than worthless desert, it was decided that trying to forcibly settle them and setting up an extensive administrative apparatus as had been done in the conquered cities of the Riverlands were not feasible options to deal with them. Instead, the Paramount Kings pragmatically permitted their eastern subjects to continue living their nomadic lifestyle and watering their horses at government-controlled oases in exchange for annual oaths of fealty and tributes of cheese, milk, meat and slaves (usually gathered in raids on the independent Mun'umati tribes even further out east), and to meet quotas of cavalrymen and skirmishers for the Zaba-Tutuli army in times of war. A single Zaba-Tutuli permanent envoy was attached to each tribe's chief to keep tabs on them, but beyond that, the central government more or less left the Mun'umati to their own devices, and they were not remotely assimilated into the broader 'Awali culture or governing structure. This same deal was cut with the handful of Suuvulk tribes brought to heel in the empire's extreme northeastern reaches, as well.
A similar arrangement cropped up in the south, with subdued Qormat tribes being allowed to retain their traditional lifestyle so long as they exclusively focused on raiding the enemies of Zaba-Tutul, turned over a share of their spoils and provided soldiers to the royal army in wartime. The only Zaba-Tutuli settlements in the Great Sand Sea sprang up around oases and mines (particularly salt mines), and these were all respectively slave plantations crossed with waystations for trading caravans or slave-staffed mining operations with their only free inhabitants being the Zaba-Tutuli overseers, garrisons and merchants catering to the former. Meanwhile, in the Green-and-Grey Mountains of the south, the physical footprint of the Zaba-Tutuli Empire was limited to just mining towns, where slaves extracted tin, copper and precious metals & stones under the whips of overseers & the spear-butts of soldiers assigned to them.
Entrance to an ancient Zaba-Tutuli salt mine in the Great Sand Sea | |
How do modern historians know all of the above, one might wonder? Well, the Zaba-Tutuli had the good manners to leave behind one of the best-preserved law codes of this time period, and excellently preserved records in general. The Law of Etaqi is a great basalt stele covered in hieroglyphs laying out the laws and customs of the Zaba-Tutuli Empire circa 7,800 AA, and may in fact be the oldest preserved legal document in human history. The laws were organized in groups, with the laws judging nobility inscribed into the top parts of the stele and those for commoners and slaves further below, and transparently discriminated against the lower orders of society: for example, it decreed that should a common man or slave murder a noble he was to be executed by dismemberment via oxen, but a noble who murdered a commoner or someone else's slave would only have to pay restitution equal to the commoner's salary to his family or the slave's price to his master, and there was no punishment for killing one's own slave. People were judged by both a judge (obviously) and a jury comprised of the higher-status party's peers. The code further specified that 'all are considered guilty until they prove their own innocence', so that though both the plaintiff and defendant could present their evidence before the court, said court operated from a presumption of guilt to begin with. Finally, any non-noble sentenced to death had their execution dedicated to Yannu.
Aside from Etaqi's Stele, Zaba-Tutuli officials were quite thorough when it came to keeping records, and significant quantities of clay tablets and papyrus scrolls on which annual censuses (recording the age, gender, ethnicity, patron deity, job and length-of-residency of every one of the respective city's permanent residents), tax records, imports and exports, monthly visitors to a given city, the number of travelers passing through the city & ships docked in its harbor, and other bureaucratic minutiae have been discovered in the archives of ruined Zaba-Tutuli ziggurats.
Etaqi's Stele, now preserved in a museum | |
Speaking of the executions newly dedicated to Yannu...this particular goddess, once a fairly inoffensive and oft-overlooked one, catapulted to prominence among the Zaba-Tutuli, and began to usurp the roles of the other deities in their pantheon as well. The Zaba-Tutuli still worshiped these other gods, of course, but they revered Yannu above these others to the point of borderline henotheism. Gold (for the upper classes) and bronze (for everyone else) statues of cats were placed in every household so that she might watch over them as they slept, a hundred dogs were ritually killed on her altar upon the autumnal equinox to honor her, and she demanded sacrifices at increasing rates - bullion and gems for her temples' treasuries, exotic perfumes and spices from abroad, choice cuts of meat and finely aged wine, and finally even the occasional human sacrifice. The first four were expected by her worshipers, for she had always only been receptive to the best of offerings, but the last of these was something she'd never asked for before Zaba-Tutul achieved greatness. Her demands for blood, as communicated through her priests, never touched the Zaba-Tutuli themselves and thus didn't give them cause for rebellion: she only ever asked for the blood of their enemies, sometimes the hearts of strong enemy prisoners, at other times those of their most beautiful women and children.
An 'Awali noblewoman makes a material offering at one of Yannu's shrines, c. 9,600 AA | |
The Zaba-Tutuli obliged, every time. She was the reason their empire grew mighty and prosperous, after all. And of course, it was dangerous to fail in satisfying a goddess who demonstrated her power regularly. In her most sacred place, the sanctum of the Golden Temple atop Zaba-Tutul's highest hill where even the doors and pillars were gilded, Yannu's main statue stood: a great golden cat with onyxes for eyes and a crown of pure silver, with a hollow in its chest housing the very first statue the founders of Zaba-Tutul found of her - an ancient wooden cat statuette that could fit in a man's palm, again with onyxes for eyes, preserved over countless ages on account of her spirit dwelling within it - with smaller statues of silver, ivory and ebony depicting the rest of the Zaba-Tutuli pantheon circling it. Curiously, all of these other statues have always remained prostrate before Yannu's, even despite the efforts of the occasional non-Zaba-Tutuli rapscallions who slip (or rather, are allowed to slip) past the temple guards to lift them upwards. As far as Yannu's faithful were concerned, their goddess allowed fools to pull stunts like this from time to time just so she'd have another opportunity to show off her superiority over the other gods.
As Zaba-Tutul grew mighty, Yannu also empowered her priestesses well in excess of the other gods of the pantheon. No longer would they be the glorified bean-counters and smiths of the 'Awali priesthood: no, by receiving the touch of their goddess, they gained the power to deftly manipulate matter, particularly the minerals of the Earth. A middling priestess of Yannu could now turn lead into gold (though reportedly their goddess, being more aware of the effects of inflation on an economy than even the keenest of the Paramount Kings' bureaucrats, explicitly warned them against doing this without her express permission, which she issued with extreme rarity, and punished those who didn't heed her warning by turning them into gold), sand into bronze for weapons & armor, dust into glass, and so on. While the main consequence was that Zaba-Tutuli citizens enjoyed a degree of prosperity unparalleled in the rest of the world for most of their empire's existence, as mage-smiths capable of working materials with a precision no mundane could match, the clerics of Yannu were also responsible for ensuring the Zaba-Tutuli army was one of the best-armed and armored fighting forces of the Bronze Age.
A priestess of Yannu in resplendent scarlet robes and a golden headdress, c. 9,890 AA | |
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The Zaba-Tutuli military | While the Zaba-Tutuli administration was instrumental to holding their empire together, to achieve any conquests in the first place they needed an army. Fortunately for the Paramount Kings, their heavy usage of slave labor in virtually every sector of the imperial economy meant that they had a ready supply of free but unemployed men and boys with little to no economic prospects but to join the military! Thus Zaba-Tutul was able to raise a large and professional army, composed entirely of free citizens who signed on for a duration of ten years at minimum. Just as crucially was the degree of meritocracy employed in the army's lower and middle ranks: while aristocrats still monopolized the topmost echelons of the military, enlisted veterans were promoted to ranks up to Ene-bali ('leader of many', translating to command of up to 500 soldiers) based solely on their personal fighting prowess and command ability, and virtually all Zaba-Tutuli drill sergeants (who were expected to train fresh recruits for a period of three to nine months, depending on their role) were enlisted commoners themselves. The imperial administration and the priesthood of Yannu took care of the procurement of military equipment, ensuring that their numerous soldiers were equipped with bronze armor and weapons of a quality and standardization that no other Bronze Age state was able to match.
Relief depicting a Zaba-Tutuli infantry recruits marching in formation, dated to 8,428 AA | |
Now, as to the composition of the Zaba-Tutuli army: that was decidedly less innovative than the previous 'Awali empires. As expected from an 'Awali fighting force, the majority of their soldiers were archers or infantrymen, who despite being more professionally trained and better-equipped than the men in their predecessors' armies were still too poor to afford horses and chariots. The bowmen fought entirely unarmored and formed the first ranks of the average Zaba-Tutuli force, always exchanging projectiles with the enemy's own missile troops or peppering the front ranks of their army with arrows before retiring to allow the infantry to advance. Most of the footmen were armed with bronze or copper-headed spears, tall square-shaped tower shields made of wicker, and a knife or club for close combat, while senior units were outfitted with one-handed bronze axes or maces used in conjunction with a solid wooden shield and appear to have served as shock troops. If the steles depicting soldiers are to be believed, all Zaba-Tutuli infantrymen were outfitted with a copper or bronze conical helm worn over a soft cap, with the elite shock troopers and officers also wearing a circular bronze disc-shaped protector held over their hearts with leather straps. These soldiers did not have to buy their own gear: in a sign of Zaba-Tutul's martial professionalism, they were equipped at state expense with weapons and armor produced in state-run foundries by slaves directly owned by the government.
Zaba-Tutuli spearmen in tabletop wargame miniature form | |
Zaba-Tutuli infantry tactics appear to have been nothing special, only distinguished from the armies of older powers by their superior discipline. Spearmen were organized into phalanxes, typically eight men wide and six ranks deep, and invariably formed the center of a Zaba-Tutuli battle line. Most of the time they would advance to meet the enemy head-on, presenting a wall of wicker shields bristling with spears, and lock the opposing center into a push-of-spear contest while the ax- and mace-armed shock troops mustered behind them would split into two groups and advance from behind the phalanx in a bid to flank the opposition. In other cases, the shock troops formed the front ranks of the infantry and rushed forward to engage the enemy first, with the spearmen following up to add numbers & force to their push. As mentioned above, the real advantage held by the Zaba-Tutuli infantry over their rival counterparts was in discipline: their regiments advanced in a more orderly fashion than most contemporaries of this period (with soldiers rarely marching out of step), were less likely than their adversaries to break and rout under the pressure of a prolonged melee engagement, and even their spear phalanx was able to turn to face a threat on their flank with surprising speed (the lightness of their equipment probably helped in that regard). Infantry armor, though of excellent quality, was fairly light compared to what the chariotry was packing: a conical bronze helmet, little different from earlier 'Awali designs, was standard-issue for everyone but the unarmored archers & skirmishers, and the heaviest infantrymen only received the addition of a round bronze chest-protector fastened to their shoulders with leather straps and a protective cloak of bronze flakes sewn onto a fur or leather backing.
The main killing arm of the Zaba-Tutuli army remained its aristocrat-manned chariotry, as with all the other 'Awali states. The most popular design in the Zaba-Tutuli ranks was a spoked-wheel chariot supporting a crew of three: a helmeted driver, a shield-bearer of low birth (usually a trusted servant of the nobleman in charge), and a heavily armored nobleman. The shield-bearer was usually unarmored and naturally carried a shield with which to protect the chariot crew (hence his job's title), and also wielded a spear for close defense and to assist his lord in charges. The nobleman was armed with a bow and bronze arrows for ranged combat, a 3-4 m pike for the charge (its length giving them a greater reach than the conventional spear, which made for a lethal combination when put together with the speed of an onrushing chariot) and a khopesh (a bronze sickle-bladed hacking sword that appears to have evolved out of the socketed battle-axe design) for close defense, and further wore a bronze helmet and an armored coat of bronze scales or flakes sewn onto a leather backing for protection. These chariots were heavier than the 'Awali standard popularized by the Umatili Empire a thousand years prior to Zaba-Tutul's own rise and sacrificed speed for stability, shocking power & fighting 'elbow room', making them just as brutally effective in headlong frontal charges as they were in flanking maneuvers. The Paramount Kings and their corps of 100 bodyguards rode on three-horse chariots made of gilded copper or bronze, and uniquely wore coats of bronze scales sewn onto to a linen backing.
A regiment of Zaba-Tutuli chariots prepares to charge at full gallop, c. 9,000 AA | |
Zaba-Tutul had learned not to rely overmuch on foreign mercenaries and auxiliaries after witnessing the downfall of its former patron Umatil, but that didn't mean its army was totally bereft of foreigners. As mentioned under the 'society' section above, the Paramount Kings required tributary Qormat and Mun'umati tribes to send auxiliaries to join the royal army in wartime. Qormat auxiliaries were typically light infantry, unarmored skirmishers who fought with javelins and axes or clubs and were deployed alongside the archers at the frontmost ranks of a Zaba-Tutuli army; the Mun'umati auxiliaries in highest demand, on the other hand, were horsemen and camel-riders who chiefly functioned as outriders and mounted archers, for the existence of only very simple saddles (a wide fringed pad secured onto the rider's mount with a breastcollar, cinch and cruppers) and a lack of stirrups & specially-bred large warhorses made mounted melee combat difficult and riding while wearing any more armor than a simple helmet impossible. Various mercenaries from around the Muataric Sea and further inland to the east - Allawaurë, Saurii, Suuvulk, Golga and even the occasional Omete - were also employed, but their numbers (combined with those of the subject auxiliaries) were never allowed to exceed a quarter of the Zaba-Tutuli army in total and they were closely watched by Zaba-Tutuli liaison officers.
An Enezi dromedary auxiliary in Zaba-Tutuli service, c. 9,000 AA | |
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Unlike the sudden and unexpected downfalls of the preceding Ubeizani and Umatili empires, Zaba-Tutul's fall was more protracted, and there were some definite warning signs along the way. Starting around 9,000 AA, the global climate shifted for the worse - snow fell for the first time in the empire's northern reaches that year - and worldwide cooling increasingly hurt crop output. Unfortunately for the 'Awali, no magic of theirs could shift the weather, not even that of Yannu's most powerful priestesses. In the east, expanding desertification chewed up the previously arable lands at the old border between the Riverlands and the Great Sand Sea, while many of the oases within Zaba-Tutul's zone of control in the western parts of said Sand Sea shrank or dried up with no replacement to be found; adding oil to the fire, the Zaba-Tutuli government imposed heavier taxes in slaves and horses on their subject Mun'umati tribes in exchange for permitting continued access to those few oases they still controlled, obviously aggravating said Mun'umati who now found themselves increasingly forced to choose between getting water & food and selling their own children into slavery in order to meet the price for oasis access. Zaba-Tutul's wars of expansion ground to a halt as soldiers were sent back to the home front to suppress increasingly frequent food riots & slave revolts and to help collect taxes at spearpoint, as the masses - long used to abundance and prosperity - were not in the least inclined to give up even a fraction of their meager crops under the dire circumstances.
In 9,730 AA the major towns of Zaibali, Henematil and Quya-Qumil along the Muryurir threw out or lynched their Zaba-Tutuli governors and launched the Revolt of the Three Cities. This uprising, the largest in Zaba-Tutuli history at that point in time, took eleven years to suppress and ended with the three cities destroyed utterly - but not before the rebels devastated the Riverlands' southern irrigation networks, further worsening the food situation. Matters were not helped by the growth in numbers and rapidity of revolts and desertions among the still-enormous slave population, who sensed a shot at freedom as their masters' chains rusted, and Zaba-Tutul's Qormat and Mun'umat tributaries, who were upset that their patrons were doing little to nothing to alleviate their own climate-related suffering and sensed opportunities to break free amidst Zaba-Tutul's decline.
Still, the empire lumbered on with increasing frailty for nearly three hundred more years after the Revolt of the Three Cities. It was only around 10,000 AA that the beginning of the end finally arrived at their doors: two of the most powerful tribes of the Great Sand Sea, the Shamshi and Taibani, had buried their millennia-old hatchet to form an alliance out of climate change-induced desperation and were now riding west at the head of a vast confederacy of fellow Mun'umati tribes, united by a desire to escape their searing desert homeland where most of the last few oases known to them had dried up. The nearly all-cavalry armies of these desert nomads, including a previously unseen innovation in the form of camel-mounted lancers, proved to be quite a challenge for the infantry-and-chariot model of the 'Awali. Taking advantage of Zaba-Tutul's preoccupation with putting down yet another uprising among its northern cities at the time and aided by rebellious slaves and entire tributary tribes of their fellow Mun'umati who were defecting to their side in record numbers (indeed the 'Ilmi tribe was the first to defect, and not a man among them remained loyal to Zaba-Tutul when their chief & elders announced their decision), the Mun'umati invaders rapidly overwhelmed Zaba-Tutul's eastern defenses, wiping out the badly undermanned forces of local governors and sacking city after city: by the time Paramount King Muš-eni-bal was prepared to march south to finally deal with them, they were nearly at the gates of Ubeizan.
Fortunately for Muš-eni-bal, he had succeeded in keeping the Enezi tribe on his side by taking their chieftain Daydan bul-Wazzah al-Dhadh's son hostage at the same time that some of the Mun'umati confederates had grown too confident from their triumphs & peeled away from the main confederate army to settle down in their conquests, allowing him to inflict a string of significant defeats on the disjointed and victory-drunk confederacy as a whole starting with the Battle of Ubeizan in 10,003 AA. The Mun'umati had speed, numbers and a barbaric ferocity compounded by the knowledge that they and their families would surely die if they were forced back into their desolate homeland, but the superior discipline and equipment of the Zaba-Tutuli allowed them to carry the day in most of the post-Ubeizan engagements of the war. Within two years, Muš-eni-bal had succeeded in expelling the invaders from all Zaba-Tutuli territory save for the western edges of the Great Sand Sea. Feeling he needed to complete his victory, recover his empire's pre-invasion borders in full and utterly break the power of the Sandmen rather than give them any breathing room to recover and menace his lands in the future, the Paramount King made the fateful decision to continue his counteroffensive into that great eastern desert on the eve of summer, 10,005 AA: the first domino in a chain of events known to modern historians simply as his Desert Campaign.
Artist's imagining of Muš-eni-bal and his shield-bearer outside of Ubeizan after saving the city from the Mun'umati, early autumn of 10,003 AA | |
Critical to the outcome of this desert campaign was a feast thrown by Muš-eni-bal a week before its official beginning, where he and his nobles celebrated their latest victory over the Mun'umati in the smaller Battle of Tuntubalit. The Paramount King's only son Ulath-eni-bal, a dissolute and spoiled gentleman, guzzled far too much rice-wine for his own good and raped the Enezi chief Daydan's daughter, having first beaten her unconscious when she tried to fight back. Muš-eni-bal was unwilling to punish his heir for this crime and instead tried to browbeat Daydan into falling back in line by reminding him that his son was still a hostage in Zaba-Tutuli hands, further enraging his only remaining Mun'umati ally; the only concession he would make was ordering Ulath-bal to stay home while he campaigned in the east, and he gave that partly out of the fear that the Enezi would try to murder the debauched young man in revenge. The Paramount King's fears turned out to be fully justified, as it didn't take long for Daydan to initiate secret communications with Harith bar Hassur al-Medya and Murrinat buth Makarib ul-Athir - the supreme leaders of the Shami and Taibani, respectively - and agree to betray his overlord to the Mun'umati league. He and his Enezi guided the Zaba-Tutuli deep into the Great Sand Sea, carefully directing Muš-eni-bal away from any known oasis and arranging for the Mun'umati to throw small easily-defeated detachments their way to maintain the illusion that he was leading them to victory, until finally the entire tribe up & deserted (pun intended) under the cover of a late-night sandstorm two months into the campaign. Muš-eni-bal woke up to find all his guides and cavalrymen had vanished, and the guards he'd assigned to keep an eye on Daydan's son had had their throats slit and their charge similarly disappeared.
Realizing the danger they were in, the Paramount King's officers advised him to turn back, which he agreed to. But they were stranded in an unfamiliar desert with no idea of where exactly they were, no tracks with which they could retrace their steps (those had been buried by the previous night's sandstorm) and the unforgiving sun constantly beating down on them. On the flipside, the Enezi who had just abandoned them knew this desert like the backs of their hands, and were gladly giving that knowledge over to their new allies. The Zaba-Tutuli army had to wait for the sun to set again before they knew which direction was west, and exhausted their remaining water supplies - which they had failed to replenish on account of having been subtly steered away from any oasis by the Enezi for the past two months - within two days, suffering constant harassment by Mun'umati raiding parties almost every hour as they marched. Finally, the day after the Zaba-Tutuli had run out of water, the Mun'umati descended upon their exhausted and dehydrated ranks as they limped between two great sand dunes: the Shamshi emerged to block their westward progress, the Enezi and 'Ilmi came down from the north with most of the lesser Mun'umati tribes behind them, and the Taibani closed the trap from the south, all while the sun seemed to burn especially hotly above them. Retreat into the east, back the way they had just came, promised certain death for any of the 'Awali who tried it. Modern estimates peg the number of Mun'umati present at as high as 35,000, of whom 20,000 are thought to have been cavalry or dromedary fighters.
The ensuing Battle of the Dunes was lost by the Zaba-Tutuli before it had even begun. Their soldiers and horses alike had experienced significant attrition and were thirsty, exhausted & demoralized, but even worse they had no time to reform from a marching column into actual battle ranks before mounted Mun'umati warriors began to pour down the slopes to their north and south. The Mun'umati foot followed behind their few chariots and far more numerous cavalry/camelry while their archers, slingers and javelineers hung back to rain death on the surprised and weary Zaba-Tutuli from all sides. Though more than a few of his armored officers had succumbed to sunstroke by this point, Muš-eni-bal managed to arrange about half of his chariots into a wedge and led them in a desperate effort to break through to the west - yet the Shamshi were too numerous and too ready for this gambit to work, while his own men and horses were too tired and too thirsty to effectively execute his strategem. Within a little under two hours, the once-proud host of Zaba-Tutul - estimated to have numbered around 25,000 at the onset of the desert campaign, and including up to two-and-a-half-thousand chariots manned by the cream of the 'Awali nobility - had completely disintegrated, their famous discipline having been worn down by betrayal and weariness and thirst and the scorching heat before finally collapsing in the face of the three-pronged Mun'umati assault.
The bulk of the Zaba-Tutuli infantry, 'Awali and Qormat and mercenary alike, routed and fled east in disarray after putting up only token resistance in many cases, with several of the regiments on the extreme edges of the marching column breaking and fleeing even before the Mun'umati made contact; but, overwhelmed by thirst and the stinging arrows of Mun'umati archers, nearly all were killed by their pursuers throughout the day while the rest presumably died, alone and dehydrated, deep in the shifting sands, as evidenced by the discovery of skeletons with preserved 'Awali-style armor and weapons in the area. The chariots that weren't taken out early on were annihilated over the course of a dozen frantic and poorly-coordinated attempts at breaking out in every direction, along with the two Golga mercenaries brought along for this doomed campaign. Muš-eni-bal himself had died very early in the battle, felled by Harith bar Hassur (in what was probably a premonition of the decline of the chariot in favor of proper cavalry, the Shamshi warlord was fighting from atop a stallion when he struck down the chariot-riding Paramount King with the sun at his back), and the entirety of his heavily-armored guard had been overwhelmed and destroyed with him. Not a soul of his army would return home, save as skulls on Mun'umati spears, while the Mun'umati themselves experienced comparatively light casualties. This annihilation of Zaba-Tutul's largest field army at the Dunes all but ensured the eventual destruction of their empire and with it, the 'Awali people.
(Of course, this battle was not recorded by Zaba-Tutuli chroniclers, who followed 'Awali tradition in not recording any defeats for propaganda purposes. As far as Zaba-Tutuli records were concerned, Muš-eni-bal and his entire army simply fell off the face of the planet one day. All information on the Battle of the Dunes was pieced back from the oral and recorded histories of Mun'umati elders, wise-women and chroniclers from the early Iron Age onward, though the complete collapse of the Zaba-Tutuli Empire soon after the battle's purported date does indicate that the Mun'umati were telling the truth about it)
Mun'umati warriors swarming the 'Awali chariots as they attempt to break out of the Dunes, summer of 10,005 AA | |
Ulath-eni-bal formally succeeded his father as Paramount King of Zaba-Tutul and its dominions after word had reached the capital of what had transpired in the Dunes, but by then the Mun'umati had retaken almost all of the territories previously recovered by Muš-eni-bal and were gearing up to march on Ubeizan for a second time. Worse still, Yannu's priesthood found their powers suddenly greatly diminished after the disaster at the Dunes; a sign that either Yannu had abandoned her people in their hour of greatest need, or she had been possessing the late Muš-eni-bal and either died with him or was gravely weakened by his death. Either way, this meant that the 'Awali could no longer count on easily producing stashes of high-quality equipment to outfit any replacement recruits they trained, ensuring that any new army they fielded would be less effective than the one lost at the Dunes.
As Ulath-eni-bal was hardly the picture of a capable or even interested war leader himself, the task of rebuilding the 'Awali army and stopping the invaders fell to his uncle Marad-ani-nud, who was the true power behind the throne on account of his nephew's preference to waste time in debauched parties over actually ruling. Marad-ani-nud achieved a few small victories and one major triumph, routing the Mun'umati vanguard and avenging his brother by slaying Daydan of the Enezi in the Battle of Chunanibi in early 10,006 AA, but the Sandmen just kept on coming. Even Chunanibi only won the Zaba-Tutuli Empire a year's respite before Harith & Murrinat returned to decisively defeat Marad-ani-nud at the Battle of Hawarnibi, and soon after that Ubeizan - the key to the western 'Awali Riverlands - fell. Further worsening matters, in Marad-ani-nud's absence a faction of Ulath-eni-bal's courtiers convinced him that his uncle was plotting a coup against him and cared more about seizing the throne than protecting the empire, resulting in the Paramount King putting a hit out on his own uncle. Thus did the 'Awali lost their best remaining commander to a bout of petty palace intrigue at the worst possible time, with the Mun'umati exultant and on the verge of overrunning the rest of the 'Awali Riverlands.
And overrun the Riverlands, they did! Marad-ani-nud's army, with which he had been planning to counterattack before an assassin relieved him of his head at his own nephew's orders, promptly disintegrated with the loss of their leader; the majority of the host simply went home with their weapons, but some nobles and common soldiers alike were so disgusted at Ulath-eni-bal's treachery and the corruption within the royal court that they actually defected to the Mun'umati. Indeed, entire cities laid down their arms and threw open their gates to the Mun'umati advance rather than fight, both out of disillusionment with their overlord's evident inability to defend them or delegate to those who were willing to defend them and out of fear that they could not stop the Mun'umati themselves. More armies were levied out of the 'Awali populace that had remained loyal, but demoralized, hastily trained and poorly-led by the newly dominant court faction's toadies, these forces were but a shadow of the army that Muš-eni-bal had led to the Dunes. One by one, these patchwork collections of feuding nobles, embittered veterans and ill-prepared commoners were crushed by the ever-advancing Mun'umati until their army was at the gates of Zaba-Tutul itself, which they began to besiege to in the fall of 10,011 AA. The desperation of the 'Awali cities caught in the path of the Sandmen must have been palpable, as evidenced by this recovered letter from the governor of Andunanit, a city that fell to their advance in 10,009 AA:
Originally Posted by Zebbab, Governor of Andunanit
My lord and my god, Yannu-made-flesh,
The sand-skinned and salt-blooded barbarians from the east have come. When Ahayen-Pulu went forth to confront them, he was crushed and his skull mounted on a stake along with those of his officers. The barbarians did evil things in the countryside: they murdered old men and young boys alike with impunity, tore infants from their mothers' arms, built a ziggurat out of the heads of priests and defiled priestesses, and [illegible] and furthermore they drove thousands behind Andunanit's walls, far more than we could hope to feed. I have directed the men to break out three times and three times, but [illegible]
Today the worst has come to pass, despite our prayers and [illegible, probably 'sacrifices']. The [illegible] scaled a section of the wall we lacked the strength to sufficiently garrison before the dawn, when nobody was able to spot them. They have killed the sentries and thrown Andunanit's gates open. They are storming through the streets on their filthy horses and camels, cutting down warrior and citizen alike with no mercy, and some of them have made it here. I can hear them downstairs and they sound like rabid dogs the size of a mighty thunder-beast, shouting and fighting with fury. I write this to you now not to beg you for your aid, for we are lost, but to beseech you to send reinforcements to Bensi and Inabi before t
*Note: Bensi and Inabi were the 'Awali towns nearest to Andunanit. Both sites exhibit signs of having been sacked soon after Andunanit. As this increasingly frantically-written letter was unfinished and partly stained with dried blood, modern historians can safely assume that Mun'umati warriors broke into the solar where the tablet was discovered and killed or wounded Governor Zebbab before he could complete it.
In early 10,012 AA Ulath-eni-bal sobered up enough to attempt to negotiate a peace treaty, and managed to buy off the Mun'umati with the total cession of the eastern & northern Riverlands to the tribes making up the Mun'umati alliance; a quantity of gold and silver so vast he had to strip his ziggurat's temple's decorations to contribute to it; and a thousand of the fairest boys and girls of good birth in Zaba-Tutul. For three years these terms sated the Mun'umati and gave Zaba-Tutul a respite, but tensions within the Sandman coalition resulted in its breakdown and the Taibani breaching the peace to conquer what was left of the 'Awali nation - an eventuality for which the typically decadent Ulath-eni-bal had failed to undertake adequate preparations. The Taibani and their allies annihilated a smaller 'Awali army thrown out to stop them in the Battle of Abermammu, laid siege to Zaba-Tutul near the end of summer and took the city after discovering a negligently-unlocked gate in the winter, all before any reinforcements from the remaining southern provinces of the empire could reach them. Ulath-eni-bal was killed along with all his sons, brothers and officials, his capital was plundered and razed to the ground, and those among his people who survived the sack (including most of his sister-wives, concubines and daughters) were carried off in chains. Without Zaba-Tutul, the remaining 'Awali cities of the western and southern Riverlands were left leaderless and adrift in the face of continued Mun'umati aggression. Thus did the Zaba-Tutuli Empire come to a miserable end shortly before the end of 10,015 AA, marking the dawn of a fundamental shift in the demographic makeup and geopolitics of the eastern Muataric Sea in the process.
Artist's imagining of Zaba-Tutuli soldiers preparing for their last stand at Abermammu, c. 10,015 AA | |
Zaba-Tutul immediately before the great Mun'umati invasion, c. 10,000 AA |
Red - Zaba-Tutul
Brown lines - Loosely controlled territories (inhabited by tributary Mun'umati chiefs, few if any permanent settlements)
Dark circles - Territories frequently contested with regional rivals (incl. the Allawauric kingdoms and Saurii leagues) |
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