Godseeker Fun Fact!

Terry and I decided to hammer out the locations and time period we are dealing with in our little comic here. There were moments of “oh shit! Mammoths didn’t exist there! Tiras’s hut is impossible!” and “fuck! I can’t find any evidence of tigers…we NEED tigers…” and “uhm…were there crocodiles?” There were moments of “I don’t think we can make them travel that much,” and “damndamndamn—I don’t know if there are even volcanoes. Damn you Terry!”

Y’see—When I first started writing this—I assumed we were in India. Mountains right by jungles, volcanic activity, lots of tigers and crocodiles and, yes, mammoth-type critters. Also, I had a basic level of research about the area and the modern religion. But…well, as it turns out, the Indus River isn’t where agriculture started, and the ancient Sumerian’s pantheon was pretty close to mine. And Terry wanted to move it to the Middle East because…of some art thing that I’m sure was very awesome and that I’m also sure I didn’t understand.

Hey—I’m not the one with the art history background. I just write the words. She wanted to move it; history suggested that the story fit better there…so we moved it. And several months into it, and I realize that I forgot to check on some…key details.

I had a moment of pure panic, and started to look desperately at some research.

Whew. Fear not, folks. The story is ok—I only have to make some small assumptions, instead of shifting the habitat of some key species over a continent or two. I’ll let you know when I’m making a slightly-less then historically accurate statement—but you can be assured that I will never bring in something really impossible.

Except for magic. And y’know. The actually impossible stuff. This is still a fantasy story.

The Godseeker Fun Fact! will be a series of posts on stuff about the area; human history, flora, fauna, geology—you name it, or if you have a burning question, go ahead and ask and I’ll see if I can figure out the answer.

For this week—how’s about some tasty info about early farming in the Fertile Crescent?

Godseeker takes place in or near the heart of the Fertile Crescent. The village is located on the Tigris River.

The events in Godseeker would most likely have taken place just (give or take a couple of millennia) before 9000 BCE when people started to grow crops along River Nile in Egypt, River Tigris, and Euphrates in Mesopotamia, just before the Age of Agriculture starts. The first basic grains people in this area grew were wheat and barley, and were just starting to domesticate the grains by the simple means of only planting seeds from the best plants to produce bigger and better yields.