The Tribe of Gryf

Nomadic Horde

Focus: Agrarian

Map

Technology

A note for the wiki, I'd like to be assigned the URL Pomerania

 

---

When there was in the beginning no world, Then there was neither heaven

nor earth. Everywhere was a blue sea,

And on the midst of the sea, a green plane-trees

And on the plane tree a Golden egg,

From which hatched three birds,

Sisters, Alkonost, Sirin and Gamayun,

They took counsel as how to create the world. "Let us plunge to the bottom

of the sea. Let us gather fine sand" sang Alkonost

"Let us scatter fine sand,

That it may become for us black earth. Let us get golden rocks" sang Sirin

"Let us scatter golden rocks and our golden eggshells

Let there be for us a bright sky,

A bright sky, a shining sun,

A shining sun and bright moon,

A bright moon, a bright morning star,

A bright morning star and little starlets" sang Gamayun

And at the end of their creation, the Sisters Birds' tree towered,

Over the newly created world,

The roots below grew in the realm of the underworld, Nav

The highest branches reached into the land of the Gods, Wyraj

-Carol of the Creation, an ancient Gryf Song

---

 

The Tribe of Gryf was founded in time immemorial in the aftermath of a clash between two cultures over the territory of Pomerania. Though their names are lost to time, the tribes can easily be identified through a number of cave paintings. The older parietal art includes petroglyphs of Cave Lions, which clearly acted as the totemic animal for the original inhabitants of Pomerania, which was a population derived from a mix of Paleolithic and Mesolithic migrations. More recent art, such as emblazoned pottery or carved totems commonly features a depiction of a White Eagle, which likewise served as the spirit animal of the later Neolithic émigrés.

 

The Rule of the Lion Culture (40,000-5,500 BC)

The Late Paleolithic, and Mesolithic Lion Culture first arrived in Pomerania following the harsh periods of glaciation during the Paleolithic. This era of harsh climate made permanent inhabitation impossible despite periods of Homo erectus habitation in Pomerania being evident since 500,000 years ago. Evidence for the arrival of proper Homo Sapiens begins in 40,000 BC, but it is not until the warming climate and resulting increase in ecologic diversity that they are able to settle the area permanently during the years of 15,000 to 9,000 BC, wedged between end of the Late Paleolithic and the start of the Mesolithic .

These peoples, known as the Lion Culture, are distinguished by several material practices:

• The world's first recorded use of boomerangs, which they made from Mammoth tusk

• The use of Mladeč-type bone point projectiles of the Aurignacian Culture

• Burial traditions including burying of the dead with gifts such as pendants and necklaces made from the teeth of large ungulates. the dead were placed in graves and outfitted with familiar objects of their surroundings

• Hamburg culture shouldered points discovered amongst the remains of reindeer

• The mining of hematite, from which ochre pigment was used for body painting, which was traded to areas as far as Poland, Slovakia, and Hungary

• Pieces of "chocolate" flint brought into this area for processing were stored in quantities that were always multiples of three, as it is believed that the Lion Culture developed a counting system based around 3's

• Social units were usually made up from several families, whose total bodycount added up to around 20-30 people on average

• Hunters and fishermen working individually or in small groups had to pursue single large and small animals using traps, javelins, bows and arrows, boats and fishing equipment, and utilizing dogs

• Women engaged in gathering of such products as roots, herbs, nuts, bird eggs, mollusks, fruit or honey

• Flint strip mines have also been discovered from which the Lion Culture acquired stone to be used in conjunction with tools such as bone, wood, horn, or plant material for rope and baskets, and such fine utensils as fishing hooks and sewing needles

• Animal figurines were made of Baltic amber

• Finally, there is the Culture's fixation on Cave Lions, which is most apparent in cave paintings, as well as some carved figures and a number of burials in which patriarchs were interred while wearing a Lion pelt around their shoulders

During the Mesolithic, warmer temperatures, complex forest ecosystems and wetlands developed and this natural diversity necessitated new hunting and fishing strategies which developed alongside the arrival of new techniques from émigré cultures, such as the Hamburg reindeer cultures. Despite the influx, a shared continuation of Lion Culture exists in Pomerania from the Late Paleolithic, all the way to the end of the Mesolithic, displaying a penchant for assimilation rather than displacement. The Lion Culture's indomitable staying power in the region, coupled with the adoption of new technologies allowed their settlements to became quite numerous. By the end of the warming period the economy of harvesting nature became very highly developed.

 

Rise of the Eagle Culture (5500 - 4500 BC)

The Eagle Culture is most likely a branch of the Linear Pottery Culture, which came to the regions of Poland and Pomerania beginning in 5500 BC. Venturing out from Linear Pottery Culture that had amalgamated around the Danube, the Eagle Culture did not adopt its totem animal until it had finally made settled communities in Poland and along the Baltic Coast. Though they came in groups of hundreds or a thousand, in much smaller populations than the established Lion Culture, the Eagles quickly became a dominant force through their use of land tilling, livestock, cultivated crops, pottery and smooth-surface tools. They populated mainly fertile soils of southern highlands and river valleys further north, all the way to the Baltic Sea.

The Eagle Culture is distinguished by several material practices:

• Their villages consisted of several, but sometimes up to a dozen or so rectangular communal houses and huts

• Some settlements included basic industrial facilities, which extended continuously over a stretch of land more than three kilometers long. Some of the identified structures functioned together, as was the case when the buildings were connected by a courtyard and protected by a common fence.

• Plants were cultivated mostly in small nearby gardens, but wheat and barley were also grown on small fields obtained by burning the forest. In the absence of animal-drawn plowing devices, soil was being hoed manually

• There is evidence for Forest Burning, which heavily impacted the ecology of the region. The entire area utilized by a single settlement, as well as their pastures, had a radius of about 5 km. Cattle, sheep and goats were utilized.

• The Eagle Culture communities kept in touch and exchanged goods over large areas, all the way to their regions of origin in Linear Potter Culture areas located beyond the Carpathian Mountains

• There is evidence that the Eagles Culture subsisted off of wheat, barley and millet. These crops were sometimes grown as maslin, or mixed crops. The lower-yield einkorn predominates over emmer, which has been attributed to its better resistance to heavy rain.

• Flax gave the Eagle Culture people the raw material of rope and cloth, which they no doubt manufactured at home as a cottage industry.

• Flint and obsidian were the main materials used for points and cutting edges. They harvested with sickles manufactured by inserting flint blades into the inside of curved pieces of wood.

The Eagle Culture lived alongside the more numerous native people who were still pursuing the Mesolithic lifestyle, but during these initial years there wasn't much interaction, as the two groups inhabited different environments. This trend of isolation would come to a bitter end, as evidence of mass graves, human sacrifice, and stone weapons points to a Stone Age war between the Eagles and Lions.

 

Primeval Warfare

The conflict between the Eagle and Lion cultures may have began with the poaching of some of the last few Cave Lions by the Eagle culture. As the Lions considered the beasts sacred, a small extant population of Panthera spelaea may have survived into the Neolithic. The most recent cave paintings found in territory that had large Lion Culture populations features images of men loosing arrows at large feline creatures, and later being chased off by hunters.

The "war" was disorganized and played out over hundreds of years at several flash points across Pomerania. Only a few bands of hunters or warriors were mobilized against the enemy at any one time, usually to undertake a raid followed by a swift retreat. The oldest weapons from this period were found near Eagle culture remains in southern Pomerania, the stone weapons bore the hallmarks of Lion make. It has thus been surmised that the Lions struck the first blow in the battle, but soon enough the Eagles responded in kind.

The conflict had a profound effect on the region, as the Eagles' expansion was halted in its tracks. Fewer Linear Pottery Culture settlers arrived as well, thus cutting the Eagles off from valuable trade. So too did the Lions numbers begin to thin out. The final nail in the coffin is evidence of a flu resulting from the domesticated animals that the Eagle Culture mad use of. The resulting disease nearly wiped out both peoples, but that did not mean the fighting was over.

The last days of the conflicted were marked with some of the most grizzly remains. A skeleton from a Lion Culture cave was ritually dismembered, and the meat shorn from its body with obsidian blades. Whether the body was cannibalized or not is up to debate, but what is clear is that there was now ritual sacrifice being committed–on both sides. A charred body with Lion Culture DNA was discovered in the remnants of a pyre in the Neolithic Stratum of an Eagle village.

Miraculously, peace eventually came to these two warring groups. A complex shrine was unearthed in Pomeralia that held the relics from two sets of bones. The bones had been grafted together with leather so as to create a single idol, which was mummified by means of a thick layer of polished clay. When the pieces were assembled, it was revealed that the idol was a chimera of both Cave Lion and Eagle: the world's first Griffin.

The Pomeralian Griffin was discovered along the banks of the River Gryf. It should be noted that rivers often hold the oldest names of any other feature, town, or region. This, paired with the local legends of the region, which tells of a shape shifter by the name of Gryf taking the form of a Griffin and uniting two warring tribes and forging a new "kingdom". These legends may have their root in the end of the conflict between the Eagles and Lions, in which a "big man" leader rose and symbolically united their totem animals into a Griffin. The artifacts certainly back this up, as chronologically following the Pomeralian Griffin, the Griffin motif displaced both the Lion and Eagle symbols throughout the region in art and pottery.

There is also ample evidence for cohabitation between the Lions and Eagles, who eventually assimilated into one another and managed to recover from the times of disease, while also adopting a semi-nomadic lifestyle. Together, the two groups were able to absorb the later waves of émigr´s while maintaining a distinctive culture. Despite its semi-legendary nature, the Tribe of Gryf may be the driving force behind Pomeranian Neolithic.

Submitted December 06, 2018 at 12:38PM by NewSouthGreenland https://ift.tt/2Uj7pf7