Virishian History
---- Extract from manuals of the Diplomatic Corp: introduction to History of the Virishian Collectivity ---
DARK AGE
Genetics established clearly the origins of our species, yet its cultural origins are blurred with myths and absence of written sources. The Virishian race diverged from common ancestors with other not-sentient plains’ herbivores of smaller size: a specialized diet on certain wild wheats rich of proteins provided the boost in terms of muscular and cerebral mass that allowed the sparkle of intelligence.
Society at the time was primitive and shamanic in culture, religion centered over unexplained nature’s phenomenon and tribes gathered hundreds of individuals. There was no complex political structures, and tribe leaders were usually older and most experienced individuals. Biology evolved our species to be fertile and prolific: different fathers sired the 3 or 4 children for each litter and females worked together to raise them collectively.
We were not the only sentient species of our world: we shared the planet with the formidable “Urrgodh” (literally the “Sons of Moons” in their own language), more commonly known as the “Night Chasers”.
Thrice the size of a male Virishian, these bulking yet fast creatures evolved from fourth-legged predators and were the bane and the nightmare of all tribes for thousands of years, hunting down and devouring Virishians. The Night Chasers however did not evolved technologically as the Virishians, and their culture never developed from an extremely primitive status likely because their extremely aggressive nature (even with their own members, matched with high territoriality and low breeding speed). After tens of thousands of years of pre-history, the Virishian tribes begun developing new weapons in their struggle for survival: the discovery of fire was paired with improved weapons of defense and offense. Tribes of the Central Plains found the principles of agriculture and become sedentary.
Oral records (and some archeological evidences) indicate that a male Virishian named “Zann-Kha” rose to prominence during a gathering of the Central Plains and organized a huge tribal army to exterminate the Urrgodh. Remains of skeletons and cave-paints depicts bloody battles, but despite their strength and size, the Urrgodh were few in numbers and fragmented compared to the united Virishian. This would be known as the only genocide committed by our kind: a mark of sadness and a lesson for our modern civilization to not fall again in such savagery. By the time when Zann-Kha proclaimed himself first Ruler of the Plains, most of the Urrgodh were eradicated except in some isolated mountains. Zann-Kha’s legacy is mixed, because he was hailed as a hero and unifier, yet he was rumored to be merciless with all his rivals: regardless of the historic interpretations, his actions laid the foundations to the first “state-entity”. His legacy was also biological: according to modern estimates, legends that he coupled with over ten thousand females with little competition are likely true considering that a fourth of the Virishian population can trace back a particular haplotype associated with Zann-Kha birthplace.
MIDDLE AGE
Merely a hundred of years after Zann-Kha’s death, the Virishian civilization boosted an incredible speed in new discoveries. Writing records begun to appears, while temporary villages grew in size and complexity. Society also developed, and Zann-Kha’s dream of unity broke piece by piece when different Virishian tribes organized in their own separate Rule. Each Rule centered on the male leadership of a dominant Ruler and his associated companions: the power was hereditary and females played little to no rule apart being gathered for exclusive breeding privilege of the dominant class.
Society soon developed into a multi-class society male-centered society: only fraction of the females were assigned to lower classes as sexual solace, most of them remained privilege of the upper class.
Peasants were kept into a state of servitude and ignorance; the first scholastic academies were privilege of the Rulers while sacerdotal orders and their religious faiths played an instrumental part to justify wars and fool the peasants with promises of afterlife.
While the richness of the Central Plains provided resources, the lack of competitors and enemies like the Urrgodh, soon caused an increase of population.
Rules waged wars to each other, to claim new swath of land: interestingly, these wars were less violent compared to other sentient species across the galaxy, because our original herbivore nature likely associated fights with ritual combats rather than directly killing an opponent. At first, these wars begun also to capture females of a rival Rule, but this practice fell in disuse with the growth of population: more and more female joined the males in lower classes, tending the fields and the crops.
The ending of the Middle Age usually match the demise of many smaller Rules and the forging of three political powers: the Tallhassian Rule (named after Tall-Has the First), the southern Confederacy (peculiar for its sea exploration of the only small ocean of our world), and the large Central Union. With little knowledge of the others nations, the northern Tallhassian Rule searched and destroyed the last Urrgodh hideouts in the mountains. Their kind didn’t developed above the status of a tribal primitive society and the last Urrgodh War ended with the killing of the only chief known as Arrdaggoth the Unifier that managed to rally all the other packs into a single insurgent army and naming himself Ruler. There are Tallhassian records over the chief’s defiance before his mock trial and execution, and his oral “testament” was recorded, providing an incredibly valuable source for archeologists and researchers.
INDUSTRIAL AGE
The Industrial Age begun with the significant changes within the Central Union society, the largest nation formed at the end of the Middle Age. Enveloping most of the inhabited mainland, the Union’s birth was a bloody affair of internal conflicts and downfall of dynastic rules associated with growing power of a middle-class of trading companies. For the first time in History, the Virishian people was not ruled by “one” but by a council of “few”. For decades the Confederacy contended that this more democratic rules was invented by their own state-cities, but this is firmly denied by Unionist chronicles. What is of interest, it’s while the Confederacy’s political system based upon trading councils was at first efficient, the Union faced different problems. Peasants composed most of its population but a new class of workers was born once the trading cities increased the demands of tools, refined objects and items in larger numbers than the ones produced by artisans: modern industry was born and females greatly benefitted for these progresses obtaining new roles and duties aside motherhood.
Soon the society become complex and day by day, the middle-class increased its demand for better living standards and increased benefits: the Union’s choice was an attempt to mitigate the angry voices but paved the way for historical events. For the first time in History, Virishian gained the right of vote even if it was only a privilege of the male population: it took another half-century before the females were allowed equal rights of vote.
Allowing peasants and workers to vote, the Unionist leadership believed to control the masses giving the false impression of granting power: in reality, rich companies begun buying and selling votes with electoral propaganda changing little for the daily lives of the lower classes.
It was during the Rule of Tall-Has the Sixteenth that history changed page once again. Conspirators and exiles who wanted to overthrow the last existing Rule, found refuge into the Union and this triggered the most bloody conflict ever occurred on our planet. Technological discoveries like flying machines were quickly adapted for warfare, bringing for the first time to large killings of non-combatants. The Confederacy was involved on the Unionist side forging an Alliance. The combined Allied Armies overwhelmed the Tallhassian defenses and Tall-Has the Sixteenth (and Last) took his own life.
From the ashes of the conflict, the Union emerged victorious: the Tallhassian territories were absorbed while only the Confederacy maintained its independence. It soon become a Golden Age for the Union, explorative expeditions discovered every uncharted northern peak and every island of the southern Ocean: new plants and exotic animal species were discovered and studied, improving the medicine and the chemical industry. With much surprise for the growing media industry, a scientific expedition into the mountains discovered the last living survivor of the Urrgodh: the young nameless male however knew little of his own culture and history having spent most of his childhood hiding into a cave. History would remember with shame the embarrassing media parade around this sad creature, the Unionist government made a show of “civilizing” the Urrgodh (even granting him a Virishian name), and publically apologizing for the “Tallhassian crimes committed against his people”.
A single unbiased (and unforged) interview survived to our days, done by a courageous journalist that recorded the deep state of sadness off solitude of the young male, who could recall only his mother’s lullaby as memory of his other kins. The Urrgodh was found deceased the morning after the interview and the journalist was incarcerated after admitting to have murdered the “guest” on his own request. So it passed away the only other native sentient species of our Home world: exterminated at first by primitive struggle for survival and finished by modernity.
REVOLUTIONARY AGE
The Unionist hegemony at the end of the Industrial Age soon spawned problems on global scale. The end of conflicts, the democratization of society and the growth of population increased the demands of land, resources and wealth. A series of ill-fated summer crops (long-lasting results of large volcano eruptions, with lowering of global temperatures) in the eastern plains triggered a local emigration toward largest western centers: overpopulation in urban areas brought epidemics that the growing medicine struggled to contain. The very nature of the government become stagnant: each new elected council was more and more dependent toward rich trading and industrialist families. While most of the population still trusted the government or accepted it blindly, soon emerged a secretive sect of conspirators who gathered around a political ideology established by an economist named Kann-Man.
Resources were not going to last and a social change was needed to lead the Virishian toward a better future, but such ideas attracted only few cultured young males and females. Even after the economist’s death, his followers maintained a low profile but they gained more prominence after large taxations to finance spectacular water projects to irrigate the eastern plains with dams and artificial lakes. Once rumors spread over money squandering, pocketed funds and enrichment of large Confederate banks, riots begun spread among the workers into the eastern construction sites: government reacted sending soldiers and that’s what conspirators waited for.
They gathered around Lenn-Thu, a young male of peculiar noble Tallhassian origins who refined Kann-Man theories into the Collectivist ideology.
The Unionist government was unprepared to face the escalation of riots and uprising and few members of its leadership were actually prone to accept Lenn-Thu as one of them: proposing a seat for him into the government. With some initial surprise (and the rage of the most radicals) of his followers, the young male accepted.
The move suddenly worsened the relationship with the Confederacy: it’s powerful families were particularly wary of the Collectivism, the old “Unionist-Confederate Alliance” was just a memory. Agents within the Unionist military, secretly linked with the Confederation and the most conservative members of the upper-class, put Lenn-Thu under arrest and this was the catalysis for a large uprising within the Union’s capital city. The Union fell, and was replaced by the Collectivity.
Just two days after the triumph of the revolution, Lenn-Thu was found dead into his room where he was confined. Decades after his death, letters seemed to indicate the Revolution’s martyr chose voluntarily his fate because he could not imagine his existence into a world so different from the one he grew and struggled to change.
Studies of other alien civilization remarked how society’s changes rarely occurs easily and without bloodshed. The same occurred for the Virishian Collectivity, albeit on less violent scale. The southern Confederation was smaller, but rich and technologically advanced and attempted many times to overcome the new revolutionary government.
Because the Collectivity made real the Kann-Man theories: peasants and workers begun working in self-managed groups, with directions of inspectors and experts nominated by specific committees. Landowners, industrials and banking companies lost all their privileges and powers, many chose exile into the Confederacy as well as the religious authorities. Life wasn’t easy in the early days of the Collectivity and strong leaders made often difficult choices to sustain the Collectivity’s existence.
Confederate agents instigated an uprising in the northern regions, among the former Tallhassian inhabitants: the peasant masses there still blindly followed the ex-nobles as well as the religious faith. No less than three large insurrections occurred in just two hundreds years, the very same Collectivity temporarily deposed and reformed two times. But with the passing of the years, technology and science improved: at first it was exploited by some rich Confederate companies to sell distractions to the young minds but the digitalization of society with the creation of global networks of information and news began to force the Virishian people the reality of the global drama.
There was simply no more time, economists calculated that the population should restrain itself from growth and exploitation of resources or it would incur into no-return point in a matter of few hundreds of years. People’s consciousness changed, as well as the messages and the activity of the neo-Collectivist groups. Many historians often described this as the “critical point” of development or downfall of a sentient race: according some studies, sentient beings who evolved from predator races can easily jump into the abyss of extinction.
However, the Virishian people had an innate instinct to collective action and the capabilities to accept the sharing rather than fighting for each span of land. The reformed Collectivity’s central committee absorbed members of the neo-Collectivism theorists: a first dramatic change for our culture was a massive world-wide birth control regulation. This was realized less dramatically than other sentient species across the galaxy: except for noble or rich middle-class families, most of Virishian had little concept of “families” and a massive use of contraceptive and scheduled pregnancies by scientific committees allowed the global population to stop its growth and gradually decrease in numbers in a matter of few generations.
Scientific progress rationalized the production and the nutritional efficiency of crops, while medicine maximized the health and prolonged the lifespan.
By the time of the first positive effects, the Confederation ceased to exist and was absorbed into the Collectivity after the last ruling trade families lost their traditional sources of wealth. The Second Revolution was over, but the Collectivist central committee was aware that its policies were not meant to last forever.
It was time for the Virishian people to look to the stars.
