Return to homepage: Gothica
Atmospheric music: Link
By Curate Clivus of Calgoan
During the Old empire of Menhana, all written records from earlier times and many during the empire were expunged. What few primary records remain, were cataloged in the libraries of Almawar and subject to revision by the scribes therein. The more abundant records of the time come directly from writers in Almawar, but are likewise colored by their own views on Menhana. Records from the subsequent empires of Menhana itself, are subject to the errors of time and the agendas of the later governments. As such, this history is compiled with the best primary sources available to the Order of Haulain including that afforded by the archaeological record.
Drawings, reliefs, and tools have been identified in the mountainous regions at the edge of the great desert. These suggest that the original inhabitants of the area migrated down along the mountain chain from ancient Almawar. They likely built their houses into the mountainside and used tools of stone and orichalcum.
Ruined cities surface from time to time among the desert sands. These cities show similar monolithic style architecture and similar art to one another, indicating that in the distant past, a single culture stretched across the desert. Symbols are present within the art that likely represent some form of language, but too little of this art remains to make sense of it. The level of decay among these ruins is significantly further progressed compared to the ruins of the New Empire, suggesting that the Old Empire fell many centuries before the rise of the new one.
The great desert was ruled by numerous small kingdoms.
The king of Menhana forged an alliance with the queen of Riga and united their houses.
This united house maintained absolute control of the waterways of the great desert and used this control to conquer all peoples of the desert.
They concentrated their power and soon formed an empire.
The desert people were superstitious and used to self rule.
To combat this, the emperors used a network of priests to influence the culture of these remote people and to exert control.
Over time the priestly class and the emperors concentrated more and more power among themselves and made the common people more and more dependent upon them.
Over approximately a thousand years, this concentration of power transformed into a society with a god-king at the head, a bureaucracy of priests that administered the government, and a lower class of commoners and slaves.
The god-kings of Menhana ruled with absolute power, albeit promoted by the extensive priestly class.
These priests wielded the power of the god-kings while the kings themselves enjoyed the diversions that come with absolute power.
The god-kings grew ever more focused on their diversions while the true power of state fell more and more into the hands of the priests.
The major agendas of this class were to maintain the common people in as lowly and manipulable state as possible in order to prop up their own power.
To them, the common people were like cattle, meant to be born, work the land, provide profit, breed, and die.
They banned reading, math, and formal education outside of the priesthood.
They banned magical rituals outside of the priesthood.
All property was owned by the priesthood and all wages came from the priesthood.
The only meaningful difference between commoner and slave was that the common people had the freedom of travel, received small wages, and could rent domiciles of their choosing, whereas the lives of the slaves were completely controlled by the priests.
The ruling priesthood placed a ban on religions beyond the worship of the god-king.
Any individual caught practicing another religion would be subject to enslavement.
The religious destruction of information was also common.
Foreign religious texts were destroyed, unpopular symbols and religious symbols were destroyed, and even the evidence of unpopular god-kings were destroyed.
As such, during this period much of Menhana’s history was lost.
Ships from Qintian arrived on the shores of Menhana, and for the first time, the common people were exposed in large numbers to cultures from beyond the great desert.
These foreign cultures brought foreign ideas and within a few short centuries the slaves and commoners rose up and overthrew both the priesthood and the god-kings.
There was nothing to replace the government, however, and the empire quickly fell into chaos.
The city of Menhana could hardly rule itself.
Riga, the other major city of the empire, became a free city as well.
Many of the smaller desert cities that had depended upon the empire’s trade network were abandoned once trade broke down.
The cities became ruins and lawless refuges for the thousands of people who cared not for the governments of Menhana or Riga, and struck out on their own.
The centuries that followed were characterized by fierce individualism and also by fierce warfare between the many small communities that arose in the ashes of the empire.
Technology and trade moved ever onward, spurred both by the relationship between Qintian and Menhana as well as the necessity to advance in the era of constant war.
The city of Menhana became a trading and industrial hub and soon overtook the surrounding cities, as much through purchase as through conquest.
Gold would later be discovered in the deep desert, and rail-guided steam locomotion was developed to ship the gold to Green Lake.
The railroad and similar developments allowed Menhana to rise from humble means to become an industrial superpower.
Soon Menhana took to the seas and expanded up the western coast of Aurusa.
The central cities surrounding Almawar successfully repelled the Navy of Menhana, but those in the territory of ancient Cahoche quickly fell to colonization.
This period of advancement and expansion came to a quick end when the colonists of Cahoche fought a successful rebellion against Menhana, and broke away into their own proto-empire.
Menhana turned inward and returned to a culture of isolationist and fiercely independent values.
Much of the desert remains under the legal control of Menhana, but the growing cities have near absolute independence when it comes to local rule.
Gold still flows from the deep desert but is now restricted to the remote and dangerous regions with terrain that does not suit development.
Riga, from its place at the junction of the gold-sands of the desert and Green Lake, the large water source that connects these sands to the sea, has become a hub for all manner of goods, services, scams, and vices.
People from all corners of Gothica visit Riga to escape the morals of their own cultures and experience for a short time, pure hedonism.