Chalk clicked against the blackboard in staccato chirps as Professor Athun was speaking in increasingly animated tones. He finished what he was writing with a flourish as he turned to the class, “... and so we delineate the Middle and Late Ibandr Periods by the shifting balance in population between Ibandr and the surrounding Hortens city states.”

Head slouching on one hand and fingers drumming the table with the other, Dukas blinked to wash the tired from his eyes. It didn’t work. He barely noticed the drool coming from the edge of his mouth, only feeling it on his hand as he sheepishly wiped it off.

“Yes, Manather?” Professor Arthun’s eyes eagerly peered behind Dukas.

Manather’s voice was sharp and high against the droopy quiet of her classmates, “I’m sorry Professor Arthun, I am just having a difficult time keeping the three periods defined. Why did the other Luzum city-states rise and what stopped Ibandr from taking over the city-states rather than being threatened by them?”

“Excellent question, Manather,” the professor beamed at the interaction and whirled back to the board. He paused at a map on the right side of the board, hand-drawn with chalk of different colors, outlining first the major rivers of Xanthea, then colors for each of the major archaeological sites along the Luzum and beyond, and final colors for those of the city-states with a color for each Period.

“I’ll try to keep it brief and simple.” He pointed with one long finger to a fat green circle labeled ‘Ibandr’ in green letters. “The founding of Ibandr represents potentially one of the first cities ever founded in the world. It depends on how you define a city but,” he waved his hand, “it was an old place. We know surprisingly little about the city but we do know that, for a time, it really was the only settlemenets with such a defined degree of architecture, labor, and social structures compared to its neighbors. There’s Ibandr-affiliated cultural sites spread out along the Luzum and beyond here, here, here, here, and even here.” He pointed with his finger at several green dots spread out along the thick blue line marking the Luzum, and others further inland.

“This period ends not at a specific date or point in time, but rather at a nebulous, cloudy time that we draw a decisive line at for the purposes of this class. That line is when we see the first sign that there are in fact other large cities on the Luzum, and those would be cities like Amiodarna, Kinakals, Zola, and the like. So the First Ibandr Period ends at [REDACTED], which is a somewhat arbitrary time but one where we see the Luzum and Xanthea go from Ibandr only to Ibandr and others. With me so far?”

Dukas vaguely heard Manather agree behind him.

“So the Middle Ibandr Period sees all these new cities and all these new peoples rising up to a new degree of control, of power, of influence, but all of them are derivative of Ibandr. They might not have been colonists or anything like that but it’s the fact that Ibandr was first, was powerful, and had contacts thoughts Xanthea that a lot of these cities took after Ibandr. They all structured their cities with a great temple-like structure in the middle with a palace and central storehouse, reverence for certain goods like obsidian for their religious purposes, and potentially control by a god-king type figure.”

He took a deep breath. “But there was a lot of conflict. All these cities coming up with few mineral resources. We see a sharp uptick in the number of weapons, arrowheads, spears, things like that at many of these sites. Ruined cities, towns, architecture, all that. But then came a great….something. Whether it’s an attack by some outside culture, great drought, great floodings, or something else, all of a sudden many of these sites vanished. This was the end of Ibandr as well. We believe the site was depopulated at the end of the Late Ibandr Period, and many of these cities vanish as well.”

Professor Arthun pointed to a large red dot high above the others. “Most of these cities vanished but some flourished. This northern city, which may have any one of a number of translated names but we call Kanatiuata, is a culture wholly separate from the Hortens we call the Keshkawan pops up right around the time Ibandr and the other cities disappear. We don’t know much about it except that in the Later Ibandr Period we have even more evidence of weapons and warfare, and then nothing. The city pops up in our record right at [REDACTED] so that’s when we have the Late Ibandr Period ending and a new period for academic purposes starting, the Keshakawan Period.

“We have the Nystagmene script that pops up in the middle and late Ibandr period and it only flourishes and grows with the disappearance of the Hortens cities with Kanatiuata.” He took in a breath. “Does that answer your question?”

Dukas scrunched his eyebrows. The professor hadn’t really answered Manather’s question at all. Why did Ibandr not have more of a physical presence on the river? Dukas could have answered that. He’d learned in this class all about the outposts and attempts on the river for Ibandr to either have better access to mineral goods and trade or to impose more of a physical political presence with other cities, but had been unable to make a massive attempt at consolidating multi-city power. Culturally, though, there was plenty of evidence that Ibandr influenced its sister cities, with temples to Kalliza - the Ibandr city god - and the word Ibandr inscribed onto many different monuments and structures at other city sites. The conflicts of the Middle and Late Ibandr period only hampered any further attempts at a unifying force and delegated the cities to a degradation due to the consistent conflicts. The Late Ibandr Period was believed to be characterized either by the inflow of the Keshkan peoples or some kind of warming period and all but spelled the end of many Hortens cities.

Huh. Maybe Dukas had been learning after all.

_____

Ibandr dies and so too do most of the Hortens city-states. All but one or two survive the catastrophic droughts of the past few weeks (year 800-1200), and the Qet Savaq grow to have a much stronger hold on the Luzum than previous in a new period of time, starting at week 5.