The latest Hashas innovations have come about in response to both need and desire.

Contact with other cultures in Dawn has yielded not only new luxuries for the Hashas estates and temples but also a new sense of competitiveness in terms of trying to impress Dawn’s other peoples with the sophistication of Hashas culture.

In spite of the terrible dual famines that still held their place in the Hashas cultural memory, the Hashas and their ancestors are well-known to their neighbors for the extent of their finesse and artistry in culinary pursuits, at least when the occasion involved cooking and baking arises. Those who are wealthy enough to both dine in the halls of Hashas estates and travel to the lands of other peoples, however, have often found Hashas deserts to be relatively lacking in variety and nuance compared to those made by their neighbors; honey, sumaq, and occasionally pistachios have historically been the only flavor additives used in Hashas deserts, leaving all of these with a uniformly sweet flavor and only so much variety in general taste. A recent improvement upon Hashas cuisine has roses from Dao-Lei to thank for its development: priests staying in occupied Dao-Lei found the scent of these so pleasant that they not only grew the plants around temple complexes in Ershutisharu but also crushed the petals to add a pleasing aroma to the water they used for ritual bathing and other religious practices. When priests and adherents occasionally tasted this water by accident, however, they found (at least when the water was clean enough) that the rose extracts added a delicate taste to it. Creative chefs, learning of this, began to incorporate rose petals into their own works, both by adding whole petals as decoration and garnish and by flavoring their desserts with rosewater. Hashas-made rosewater is still found wanting in terms of quality and consistency, but already Hashas gentry and their guests look forward to dessert more than they did previously.

Another example of this is the Arathee trade mission that fostered increased interest in gold and other precious metals among the Hashas. Like all people who encounter the stuff, the Hashas have always found gold to be desirable, but history and geology dictated that they would have such minimal access to gold that seeking it was hardly even on the backs of their minds. The discovery that surprisingly large reserves of gold exist far to the west has had a mixed reception among the Hashas--certainly it is valued for jewelry, but Hashas geologists dejectedly observe that their homeland is gold-poor--but they have at least felt a newfound drive to improve the quality and output of their own luxury goods so that they might trade and therefore share in the wealth of foreigners. As a curious side-effect of encounters with Arathee merchants, the Hashas have also developed an interest in producing the cheese that the Arathee sometimes bring with them as part of their dry trail-food. Of far greater consequence, though, these interactions have catalyzed innovation in weaving, arguably the first of the great Hashas crafts.

The ancient legacy of Ashad/Hashas textile work, originating the warp-weighted loom, resist-dyed textiles, and mordants yielding vivid and varied colors has now produced the next great leap forward in textile crafts in northeastern Dawn. As weavers dreamed of accumulating wealth expressed through various means, including the embossed-metal crafts that Hashas smiths were famous for, some wondered how they could simulate an “embossed” design in their woven works. Those who reflected on the embossing process for longest realized that, in essence, it involves working metal on both sides; making a logical leap from here, Hashas weavers experimented with passing fiber through two heddles rather than one, quickly producing more elaborate, if more labor-intensive, results. Striving to make this technique practical with actual looms, weavers, with the help of inventive carpenters, eventually engineered the drawloom, combining the innovation of the double-heddle system with the previous invention of the foot-treadle to weave two-sided or reverisble textiles in a labor-saving fashion. While the first textiles produced using these new looms were clearly still a work in progress, current “embossed” textiles [in other words, damask] have improved substantially in aesthetic quality, especially once early successes with the drawloom made craftsmen bold enough to risk using more valuable materials for these textile creations.

The other innovations of this time have chiefly concerned water management, as has a fair portion of the sum of Hashas/Ashad technology. The first of these originated from a combination of Hashas technology and observations of by now ancient ruins in Dao-Lei and its surroundings. The Hashas conquerors (who, of course, likened themselves to liberators or saviors) quite admired a number of facets of Tao culture, even amid the sociocultural wreckage that was Dao-Lei, but one of the features that impressed them most was the presence of aqueducts to channel water across massive distances and over difficult terrain. While the irrigation canals that fed Hashas cities and the qanat systems that supplied their countryside settlements meant that there was not a pressing need for the Hashas to imitate Tao-Lei water management practices at the time, later in its history, Ershutisharu would require substantially improved water infrastructure in order to keep its soldiers supplied at its most tenuous borders. Using sarju, a waterproof mortar of unique Hashas design, teams of slaves constructed massive aqueducts in their own fashion for exactly these purposes.

However, yet more construction projects required yet more available labor. Even with early arrangements to procure additional slaves for the country, the frequency of combat within certain frontiers, particularly Old Onginia and those Tao lands which the Hashas still held, meant that the country was hard-pressed to muster a large enough labor force even to build these aqueducts. Thankfully, an engineer and his students, by happy accident, found a means to free a substantial portion of their country’s laborers to work on other tasks. When one Lamahiin al-Gandas was lecturing at the bank of a stream, using a miniature model saqia, absent-mindedly fumbled with his device while placing it in the water. As his “toy saqia” made the plunge, facing parallel to the stream, the rushing water spun it in a manner that caught the eye of one of his students. Seeing that the bottom of the wheel was pushed ever so slightly, this student was reminded of the function of a geared mill, pushed by draft animals or sometimes hapless slaves, and wondered whether a sufficiently large current of water could achieve the same purpose. Designs with life-sized wheels confirmed this, culminating in the revolutionary invention of the undershot waterwheel. Automated “work” performed by rivers themselves proved valuable for the previously-stated purposes, especially as these naaratii could be readily incorporated with the flowing waters of aqueducts, allowing the possibility of automating some forms of labor at strategic sites.