Tedeshan Expansion for Week 1, Years 500-1000

RP: Over the past few centuries, trade between the Tredeshan and Exaanos has flourished, after a chance meeting between a Tedeshan adventuring party and an Exaanos nomadic herd. Now, Tedeshan sailors regularly trade salt, seafood, linen clothing, and wooden crafts for Exaanos meats, wool, leather, and olives, the last now considered a delicacy among the Tedeshan. The land between the Tedeshan and Exaanos was sparsely inhabited, by natives known to the Exaanos as the Meraan. As Exaanos herds expanded their migratory paths downwards to infringe on northern Meraan pastures, so too did Tedeshan fishing villages and farming communities begin to encroach on the Meraan's southern lands.

Living near trading partners provided a profitable and exciting life, one that many Tedeshan jumped at the chance to have. The exotic and practical goods from the Exaanos provided a greater quality of life to those with frequent access to them, and the land between the two was no less fertile than the current Tedeshan homelands. In fact, it was more fertile than much of Tedeshan, having a more temperate and less dry climate, suitable for growing crops and not being uncomfortably hot all the time.

Although the Meraan inhabitants of the land weren't exactly interested in becoming homeless, the Tedeshan settlers didn't exactly care for their opinion. The advanced fishing and established farming techniques employed by the Tedeshan, such as the newly-adopted innovation of fishing weirs, enabled the Tedeshan to ourproduce and outcompete the Meraan. Thus, the bulk of the Meraan were inexorably driven them from their ancestral lands, or died in skirmishes and blood feuds with the Tedeshan immigrants.. Those who stayed intermarried into Tedeshan families and were subsumed into Tedeshan settlements, and over the generations became culturally assimilated into the Tedeshani whole.

Now, the lands between the Tedeshan and Exaanos are a mix of both cultures, with the Tedeshan dominating on the coasts and on the southernmost plains, and the Exaanos dominating on the northern and central plains. The occasional oases and freshwater creeks that dot the steppes are home to both Tedeshan and Exaanos farming communities, although individual settlements tend to be predominantly comprised of one culture or the other.

References: QH's expansion, diplo with QH, Tedeshan week 1 research.

Map: https://imgur.com/a/gUJXS90