Silver Kings: A Tartessos Timeline

[Eadric Silvaticus]

The Sack of Agadir
566 BCE
​

The prosperity of Tartessos, which rested on a swords’ edge held by the wavering loyalty of local chiefs and foreign mercenaries, had not just flowed to the east; it soon came to the north. Although the unrelenting choppy waters of the far Atlantic made for slow travelling, tales of the Silver King spread from the shores of northern Hispania, passed from one Oestrimnian pirate to the next, to strings of villages along the Ousakonian Sea, until it reached Albiu; the land where in earlier days bronze was forged is great quantities, and where today tin is traded from one end of the world to the other.

These tin-smiths had long known about Tartessos; I would suspect that the rebel army of Kassetanos was armed with spearpoints and shield-bosses made by Albian hands, but when it was heard that the Silver King was abandoning the coasts, hiding away from the forces of nature, the seeds of an opportunity more lucrative than anything that had come before it were planted. Albiu had recently been visited by bold Carthaginian sailors, who disembarked beside tall white cliffs and advised local seamen on how to build the best ships and how to build great manmade harbours out of earth and wood.

There was, to my knowledge, a long-lost community of Tyrians on a marshy island in the east of Albiu, a place enclosed by tidal mudflats and endless stretches of reeds, that the Carthaginian restored contact with. It is said in the stories of the great voyager Himilco that an enormous wooden idol of Tanit stood on this island, her arms outstretched and embracing sailors as they made their way ashore, ringed by perpetually lit fires which could be seen from a day’s sail away. There was no doubt, then, that the Albians knew the people of Melqart well, and for several generations the two lived peacefully with one another. Yet their Gods now grew jealous and whispered in their ears to take the derelict southern coasts for their own. It was not to be a series of isolated raids, but a fleet, a host, an army of armies, the only equivalent of which I can think of is the cursed fleet of the Achaeans of the Trojan Wars.

I first saw their ships steer into the estuary of the Rherkes, having slaughtered a few cattle and taken women who had been fishing for pearls as booty. From the palace windows of Unubaal it was an unremarkable sight, four or five small mast-less boats roughly hewn from a couple of logs each. I warned the King then that they would be back in much greater numbers, and were scouring for future landing places, but he dismissed my concerns and thought that the seas between the Pillars and Albiu were too treacherous to move an entire fleet through. By the time any invasion force arrived, more ships would be languishing on the sea floor, somewhere off the coast of Oaskonia, than there would be ships sailing round the Sacred Promontory.

Thirty-one summers into the reign of Arganthonios, the waters were ominously quiet. Deep beneath the sea, the fighting of the old and new Gods had ceased; it was almost if they had taken seats in a cosmic amphitheatre, ready to gaze at the spectacle that was about to unfold. Carthaginian trading with the north crawled to a standstill, and there were stories of merchants refused entry into harbours and stripped of their valuables, to be melted down to bullion. The Greeks of Emporion and Massaila had heard from neighbouring Kelts that a madness had gripped their Atlantic cousins, one that would not subside until blood had been shed. To my relief Arganshtart was rewarded troops and supplies to guard his section of the kingdom, and a new office of Shofet of the Promontory, which the Greeks called the Promontoriarch, was rewarded to Nirabonidus [1] , a handsome warrior of Levantine and Neiroi stock who was quickly winning the hearts of his superiors. I believed then that we were safe. And indeed we were, for Tartessos was not where they attacked.

It was obvious from the moment a war-fleet, extending for many miles and manned by sailors from all corners of Eiru and Albiu, swung around the Promontory without so much as a sling’s throw in our direction. They were heading for the jugular of Tyrian civilization, the jewel of the Mediterranean and the wonder that captivated the Greeks. The island of Erythria, the city of Melqart, the plaza of the ancient Assembly, the still-standing ruins of the walls of the old city; all was to be in their sights. They had come for Agadir, and Agadir was defenseless.

The ships of Tartessos were quickly dispatched and commanded by Malshemon and his newfound protégé Nirabonidus. No supplies would have reached these vessels had it not been for Asilita [2], the widow of the mercenary commander Amphidas who had fought bravely beside the walls of Olisipo. She refused to retreat into the private estate bequeathed to her, preferring a life of action than of comfort, and although wounded by the loss of her sons and daughters, all in childhood, she was determined to feed and clothe her male compatriots. It was her fiery speeches, her unbending resolution, that lifted the Silver King from his sour mood that he had descended into ever since the sea began to tremble. For all my encouraging words over the years, what Arganthonios really needed was a wake-up call. The soul of his kingdom was about to be destroyed.

In the end it was too late to safe the Ageless City from its fate, although the swift ships headed by Nirabonidus raced towards the peninsula and fired upon the disorganised fleet, which was dousing itself in the spoils of Agadir and slowly returning west. I accompanied a trireme that tailed the main naval force, and when we reached the sacred archipelago my first impression was blackness. The tumuli of the old heroes, the towers Temple to Melqart, the bustling city itself and the gleaming white plaza that had recently been rebuilt by Greek and Punic masons, had all been scorched to their foundations. A head of Melqart stared grimly at us, toppled from its marble torso, and began to slip gradually over the cliff. Twitching bodies and the blood of women, old men and children was splayed across the islands’ clearings, where low trees and wildflowers grew in abundance. The smell of smoke assaulted us, thick with smouldering wood and bubbling metal. It was too much to bear.

In the months that followed our fleets recovered most of the treasure, either from the shores or from captured vessels, but the damage had been done. They had broken the holiest place of the Tyrians and defaced the Pillars themselves. For a King that had fought invasions, rebel armies, unforgiving summers, and the threats of the restless Ocean, this pushed him to the very edge, and the spectre of his own mortality haunted him. I can only thank the Gods that he was alive by the end of that year, and would be for decades to come.

[1] = meaning 'praised among the Neiroi'.
[2] = meaning 'the far-admired'.

​

 

[dentista campora]

This timeline is very good.

 

[Eadric Silvaticus]

This timeline is very good.

Thanks!

 

[Patukov]

Im assuming this raiding fleet was drawn by word of Tartessos prosperity?

 

[Eadric Silvaticus]

Im assuming this raiding fleet was drawn by word of Tartessos prosperity?

Yeah, but more specifically because of Arganthonios' abandoment of the shoreline, which left Agadir open to attack. They might have been drawn there from stories of the place from the Phoenician traders and settlers on the British Isles themselves.

 

[Eadric Silvaticus]

The Autumn of the West
Part I
565 - 540 BCE​

From the smouldering wreck of the Agadir, the City of the Evening Star, four Carthaginian fishermen had escaped and carried the news to their mother city before an official delegation had arrived. By the coming of midwinter, thirty-two years into the rule of Arganthonios, the walled towns and ports of the East, and as far as the fledgling colonies of the Ionian Greeks in the Euxine Sea, were well aware of the fall of the city beyond the Pillars.

Some lamented that they had not been there to save it; others believed it to be a punishment of Zeus, a reminder that Heracles still had yet another labour to complete. Yet what ran through men’s minds more than all else was fear; that their mastery of the seas, which they had long thought to have tamed by their brightly-painted triremes and billowing sails, was coming to an end. If distant people from the far West could sack the Auspicious City, then what was to stop them from setting oars across the Pillars, and menacing the lands they cherished? The scribes of Sais, the capital of the fading kingdom of Egypt, long bent double from reading spidery parchments of ancient hieroglyphs, warned their fellow Greeks that such had happened six hundred summers hence, in their reckoning; where in the days of Agamemnon and Priam the east had been overwhelmed by pirates with horned and brightly plumed helmets, wielding daggers and black-painted shields.

Yet the Silver King, Ba’al preserve his memory, was determined not to sink beneath tides of destruction. He had been proclaimed rightful ruler of Tartessos at its direst condition and would lead it yet to its greatest strength. The campaigns of the land and the abandonment of the coast had left many displaced and without hearth or home, and soon families came begging by the gates of Unuba’al, pleading to be fed, clothed, and given shelter. From the illustriously painted confines of the palace, and within the quarters of his grand barge, loaded with gifts, gold and colourful banners rippling in the cool ocean winds, earthly suffering seemed remote. Unlike rulers across the wide sea, he gazed past these veils and saw that hunger, thirst, and disease were everywhere. The harvest had been poor, and the grain that would have been ground into flour was siphoned to the Carthaginians and Greeks, their request in exchange in assisting the rebuilding of New Agadir. Locusts had marched across the fields and left valleys of fertile cropland barren, save for the withered shoots and empty husks.

In the depths of winter, Arganthonios sent his commands to the cities of Tartessos. Each town that was guided by a High Council and bore a marketplace, common assembly and Sacred Altar would construct an encircling embankment that encompassed at least half the town’s area, between 300 and 400 cubits in Egyptian reckoning. Within these low walls, the Councils had the responsibility, the duty to shelter and provide for families that sought their aid, and in exchange the Silver King would reduce tax and tribute burdens, knowing that they would have to spend their own wealth in supporting the destitute. He ordered the elites who commanded the Mesrahims, or the Great Associations, which were corporate bodies made up of trading families and agricultural estate owners who gave voice to the interests of the few, to construct Royal Silos; tall, round towers of wattle and stone that held excess grain from the lands of the King, and from the lands of those convicted of crimes against Melqart or the Gaditian Assembly. Men would guard these towers, and give freely their contents to the rural and townfolk in times of hardship, and charge a fair price in times of relative plenty. Arganthonios had heard of the vast temple silos of Egypt, and of halls full of food and wine in the distant cities of the northernly Kelts. If this was to be a deathless land, it was to be a dearthless one.

Artists' depiction of the first floor of a Royal Silo under construction, covered by a leather tarp to protect the interior goods from the elements. Credit: E. Carlson.

I was tasked with the writing and copying of these commands, translating them onto tablets and papyri with each stroke of a stylus into the speech of the Kunetes, the Greeks, the Bastianoi, the Neiroi, the northernly Oretani, and last of all the confused tongue of the Carthaginians, which had grown hoarse under the desert sands, and was a world apart from the clear language of the Tyrians of old. Carrying these documents to each Council and Mesrahim was not easy, and the Silver King was forced to conduct a savage war against the tribes of the northern quarter of the peninsula, brushing against the wild woods and peaks of Ouaskonia, to capture enough donkeys and pack animals to provide transport. Word travelled fast on the eastern seas, but for the towns nestled in the sun-scorched heartlands of the western Kelts, which had only under Arganthonios been under Tartessian lordship, news came at a crawl. And yet, sure enough, each lord and his servants were made aware, and could only follow suit. If they had rebelled and refused the order, the war they would wage would not be just against Arganthonios, but against the plight of their own people.

Agadir steadily rose from the blackened waters, and the new Temple of Melqart and the Gaditian Plaza was built on the mainland shore, closer under the shadow of the Pillars, and the islands were so much blood had been shed were sown with flowers and ash trees, and ornamented with tall monuments to the dead, some in plainer Punic style while others in the fashion of the warrior Kelts, sat atop great earthen mounds or above wooden coffins. Nirabonidus, the commander we all gave great affection for, invested his meagre wealth in building a perpetual pyre of granite and marble, that would blaze to mourn that awful day, until the stars themselves lose their strength and fall upon the earth. It was an is a fine edifice ,that I can see from my quarters in Qarta as I write.

As his kingdom bandaged and washed its many wounds, the Silver King sought to make good on the promises he had made to the nations of the East while Tartessos was besieged by the armies of Kassetanos. Voyaging in a freshly-cut timber barge, he laid anchor at Nora, the ancient city of the son of Melqart that is forever blessed by the gods, and paid tribute to the shofets of the island. Soon it became clear that his reputation had been taken beyond all proportion, and as he was admiring the silent colossi that string the coast between Sardana and Kyrnos, a delegation arrived from a city close to the Italic coast that asked for help against the Etruscans, their once-overlords and now hated enemies.

They declared that they were men of Roma, and like Tartessos had thrown off the shackles of an ancient tyranny and were now ruled by the people. The Silver King sent several companies of soldiers, but he had more pressing business to attend to; the business of the sea.

 

[dentista campora]

Great to see a leader with social responsibility.

 

[Eadric Silvaticus]

The World of the Silver King​

https://imgur.com/BqxOKpr

Notes:

• 'Tuissakos Uiladonos' is my attempt at a native term for 'Princely League', which probably existed in the Late Hallstatt C/D and was oriented around the city of Pyrene (presumably the Heuneburg hillfort)
• 'Pretanubbo' represents a Carthaginian port village that was probably around in the 6th or 5th century BCE, the remains of which exist under Poole Harbour today in the form of a Phoenician-style stone harbour structure.
• 'Scolotica' was, according to Herodotus, the Scythian name for their homeland, extending from the Pripet Marshes to the Don river in the east.
• 'Teukropolis' is a bit of a fiction on my part; it's thought that ancient Greek colonists and Phoenicians visited the Galician coast and laid the first foundations near the modern city of Pontevedra, bringing with them a legend that the Trojan war hero Teuker founded a city there in the Homeric past.
• Ebosshim = island dedicated by the Phoenicians in the 7th century BCE to the dwarf god Bes, borrowed from the Egyptian pantheon.

 

[Eadric Silvaticus]

The Autumn of the West: Part II
"The Business of the Sea", 560 - 550 BCE​

The fleets of Tartessos may have chased off raiders hailing from the shores of the northern isles, but as the Silver King voyaged from Agadir to Sardana, it was clear that the western waters of the Great Sea, which the Greeks in his company sometimes referred to as the White Sea, or, much to his annoyance, as Our Sea, were infested with pirates. More often than not these were errant trading vessels or battle-ships sent by one shofet or archon to render service to one chieftain or another that threatened their maritime interests, and so had to be neutralized or led astray.

City officials, hesitant to step into the waters themselves, thought little of the supplies and challenges that the sea demanded, and thus it was only natural that some were forced to turn to piracy. Others were captained by commanders who resented their meagre pay, or low status, or the fact that they had been exiled for rape or murder whilst on dry land. The Phoenicians had done much to tame the Great Sea for their trading purposes, but the Sea was so vast that in distant reaches, there were bays, islands and inlets that had become havens for villains of the waves. Western Kyrnos was one of these; a perilous shore that was avoided at all costs by Massailote and Etruscan sailors, preferring to hug the coasts of Liguria and Segobrigika [1] than to risk being captured into slavery.

Arganthonios was aware that the recent prosperity of his kingdom had greatly benefited these pirates, who had made rich pickings preying on naïve emigrants sailing to a promised land of plenty from hunger-stricken lands in Greece and northern Libya. The deal he had agreed with the Euboeans and Phocaeans was to protect their colonial enterprises, and that meant clearing the sea of the sharks, that scented the blood of men and women he had attracted from the east. There was also a real danger, in those days, that a barbarian crew from Albiu would meet up and discuss a common strategy with the pirates of Kyrnos and elsewhere. Indeed, Malchos, now the chief Magistrate of Qart Hadasht, told me personally that he held northerners in the dungeons of the city, who had arrived by sea and land after fleeing their desecration of Agadir and had started to trade secrets and stir up the clandestine street gangs of the encircling towns.

As I took to resting on board the royal vessel, I overhead our Greek guardsmen comparing the Silver King to their legendary Midas, a hapless ruler who turned everything he touched to gold, despairing as his crops, his dogs, his food and finally his own daughter were transformed into lifeless statues, and could only watch as looters dragged his possessions away, free to steal to their heart’s delight as his bodyguards became gold themselves. I took this as a great disrespect, having seen the King fearless in battle and shrewd in eliminating the many threats to his kingdom, but as I reflect on these years it did ring faintly true. Arganthonios, like the many Eastern kings that were soon to be swallowed by the Empire of the Medes of Cyrus, had become victim of his own success.

It was thus our mission, to fulfil the promises to the Greek colonies, to pacify Kyrnos and the route from Kyrnos to the Balarides [1], the sun-beaten islands populated by skilled slingers and tomb-builders which some called the Naked Islands, for in battle and in daily life their men and women wore nothing but strips of cloth concealing their sexual features, and even that was only when visitors happened to arrive. The pine-covered southernmost of these islands had long been dedicated to Bes, dear protector of the hearth and of fertility, and thus was safe for Greeks and Phoenicians alike. The other two great islands were under no such protection and were steadily becoming havens of lawlessness. The people of the Balarides could not sail, and were helpless to seaborne raiders and were reduced to hiding in the tombs and causeway-graves of their ancestors.

Our fleet briefly anchored along the coast of Latium, where the Silver King considered paying a visit to the Grove of Diana, the lunar hunter-goddess of the Latins revered by the people of Roma and the northerly Etruscans. Arganthonios was, to them, the Lord of the Evening Start, and the meeting of the Evening Star to the sanctuary of the Moon goddess would surely have been auspicious. However tempting a trip to the nemus Aricinum was, alas, we received word that the pirates had grown bolder and captured a sizable party of settlers en route to founding a new colony between Massaila and Palaiopolis, and so we had to depart.

The outward journey (blue) and the return journey (red) of the Silver King, 557 - 550 BCE, Himilco the Wily and his officials. The return fleet diverged at Menorca, with a fleet travelling to the Gallic coast led by Asilia and the Etruscan-Greek captain Kallias, and the main body heading to Zacynthos and eastern Tartessos, collecting slaves and booty along the way, led by the Silver King.

Winter was soon upon as we followed the winds of the Great Sea, and it was then that I truly understood the real world, the lot of pain, hardship, determination and joy, cast from the heavens to be endured by the common people. I had spent too long behind clay and stucco walls, beside a roaring fire, hunched over a podium, and had forgotten what the world I lived in, the world I spent protecting, was truly like. Our fleet tacked to the currents flowing around the northern edge of Kyrnos, a wilder and bleaker side than the south. A Carthaginian commander who accompanied us (in truth, I think, to make sure that Carthage reaped some reward), who called himself Himilco the Wily, ventured ahead and encountered two large pirate convoys, heavy with Massailote plunder. It was tough, and we drove ourselves mad scanning the horizon for dark shapes that looked like galleys, but at the end of that winter six convoys had been sunk. The rogues of western Kyrnos came to fear the spectre of the Silver Fleet.

I was recalled to Agadir on other matters, but Himilco, the Silver King and the elderly Asilia went on criss-crossing the Great Sea, hauling pirates in chains onto the coasts of northern Iberia, where the tribes were said to cannibalise prisoners of any sort. Slaves were freed and returned to their mother-cities, and the story that the Silver King founded Zacynthos, the Achaean colony opposite to the Balarides, is true in the sense that the fledgling Greek colony would have collapsed, if not for the frequent deliveries of recaptured colonists and booty seized from pirate vessels in the area. Arganshtart and Nirabonidus governed the kingdom well in his absence (Malshemon, his most senior shofet, was now old and senile), but I was worried that a local grievance would spark another revolt, and another Arkailikos or Kassetanos would rile them up into a killing spree. Thankfully, the Royal Silos seemed to prove their worth; folk who could always fill their bellies would never sharpen their pitchforks.

Six years after we set out to pacify the Great Sea, the mission was done and Arganthonios returned to report the news to the Assembly of Agadir, the plaza freshly rebuilt on dry land in bright sandstone and gleaming Greek marble. He was now sixty-eight, an impressive age for a ruler constantly on the move. His sons, rumour had it, were grandfathers themselves. But the Gods would task the old king with one more trial, one more labour to complete. They departed their stands, growing bored of his adventures in the west, and resumed their battle against the Primordial Gods with renewed ferocity. The sea, long quiet, shook and thundered once again.


[1] = The land of the Segobrigii or 'tribe of the powerful forts', a powerful Gallic tribe near to Massaila, ruled by one Comanidus.
[2] = Balarides, meaning 'Islands of Baal' in creolized Phoenician.
[3] = The Achaemenid empire referred to itself, and was referred by its neighbours, as the Median Empire for some decades after the Medes had been destroyed. 'Persia' only came into use by the time of Darius and Xerxes, a century later.
[4] = An alternate name for the Sanctuary of Diana; Aricum was the closest town.

 

[Eadric Silvaticus]

The Ocean's Nightmare
2200 AUT / 549 BCE

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The Sacred Promontory was normally deserted of occupation, being a holy place that only the Gods, and the priests, mediators of the Gods, should walk upon. That month, however, in the warm summer of the twenty-second century since the founding of Old Tyre, it blossomed with banners and men. There were gilded chariots and imported palms ripe with dates, and the cliffs sounded with the noises of wild animals taken from beyond the mountains of Atlas, where even Melqart, in his human guise, would not have dared to tread. A vast camp of many colours, growing larger by the day, had been erected to span the neck of the promontory, and increasingly resembled one of the sprawling cities of the East.

Naturally, this great gathering of people was alive with gossip; stories told by men and women arriving from the eastern shores of a new power arising in the old land of the Phoenicians, who called themselves the Parsua. Their rough and wily warriors, led by the cunning prince Kyros, had vanquished the great kingdom of the Medes, and were now encroaching upon the frontiers of Babylonia and eastern Lydia, just as Scythians and Kimmerians had done generations prior. More talk was devoted to the deeds of Mago, the new autocrat of Carthage who had subverted the power of the council of the Mighty Ones and was aspiring towards his own dynasty, and of the murderous end of Arkesilaus, the oppressive tyrant of Kyrene who had been strangled and thrown over the city walls to the hyenas by his ambitious advisor Learkos.

Why had such people gathered here? I admit I was not sure of the reason, despite my closeness to the King, until a mere two days before the event was to take place. Arganthonios had arranged the marriage of his son, the shy and bookish Gernethon [1] (or Gisneithas) to the maiden Vesia, princess of the Etruscan polis of Vulci. Previous Tartessian rulers had married local women, or minor royal maidens from Carthaginian and Libyan families. The Silver King had broken with this tradition by taking as wife Saruna, daughter of a Kynete chieftain who had won his heart early in the adventures of his youth, although Saruna [2] had become frail and was shielded from the world within the inner complex of Hesperis, the grand city that remained, for the most parts, lines in the sand alongside the Rherkes. It was rumoured that he was himself celibate, and that the true father of his children was either Malshemon or Arganshtart, his younger nephew.

But this marriage was on an order unknown to history. By bringing together the heir to Tartessos and the beauty of the Italic peninsula (so she was claimed), he could preside as the kingmaker of the entire west. Rather than to Carthage, or the Phocaeans, or the Euboeans, or, heaven forbid, the Latins, the fortunes of the Great Sea would be bound to the Kingdom beyond the Pillars. There had once been a time when the two beacons of the civilized world had been the Levantine coast and the coasts of Tartessos; all else was either in anarchy or in ruins. The Greeks had been reduced to base animals, the Etruscans were still blind to laws and writing, and the Egyptians were clawing each other apart or else under foreign yoke. Qart Hadasht, the New City that surrounded the hill of Byrsa, had not yet been built. The Silver King dreamed that he could yet restore this golden age, and provide a world safe for the Gods to tread.

Processions snaked across the Promontory, and the festivals went into full swing as the bride, dressed in a gown of ostrich feathers painted in silver and gold, arrived with a cohort of guards and attends, soon followed by the prospective husband, wearing on his head a colossal animal skull splashed with sacrificial blood, which was said to belong to the prize bull of Gerion’s cattle, a revered beast and the father of all bulls of the peninsula. I have seen it displayed at the Temple of Melqart at New Agadir, and to me it looks like a truly primordial creature, halfway between that of a lion and the great grey wanderers that roam across the lands of the Mauri, to Egypt, in search of water. Whatever it was, only Melqart could have taken it.

I wish I could write further of this dazzling union, this predestined marriage of the most sought-after couple in the western world. I dream that I could have been able to tell of this crowning moment of the Silver King’s reign, a fire of joy and passion that outshone all else that he accomplished. I can only tell the truth. This was not ordained by the Gods; it was despised. Far from the holiest of happenings on the Holy Promontory, it was a mockery that offended even the chaos from which they were birthed. I can only describe it in these terms, as that can only explain what followed.

[1] = Meaning 'follower of Nethos', a Graeco-Keltic deity worshipped by the Kunetes and Phoceans.
[2] = Meaning 'star-goddess'

 

[Eadric Silvaticus]

The Ocean's Nightmare: Part II
2200 AUT / 549 BCE

---
​

As the sun rose on the promontory at the edge of the earth, the sea began to retreat, at first imperceptibly but soon at increasing speed. The far-seers, elected among the priests for their divinely-bestowed powers of sight, were the first to notice a faint line on the distant horizon, a rippling breakwater that spanned from east to west. A few raised their voices and ran with their belongings in the opposite direction, forcing themselves tooth and claw through the crowd that massed about the camp. It was not until the Sun had reached its apex that the mass, and the royal representatives present, realized what thread the Gods had spun. In one last assault against their mothers and fathers, the chthonic forces the Greeks call the Titans, the immortal ones had struck the seabed in one blow, raising columns of earth that, in turn, displaced the wide Ocean. The lair of the Titans had been broken, and the Gods had decided that the defiance that the mortal world had shown them was worthy of the heavy toll.

Their boundless theatre now raged towards those gathered at the Sacred Promontory. The swords that they had wielded against the older gods were now pointed towards their aiders and abettors, humanity. Knidos of Kallístē, the blind centenarian sage who had heard from his community of elders of the horrors that had been inflicted upon his people many years before, when Tyre was still young, could feel the panic in the crowd and wailed aloud. Two ships passing on their journey to the ports of the Neiroi, or perhaps still further to Iktis, or Eiru, attempted to turn but were swallowed by the wall of water in an instant. As Nirabonidus was to say later, it was if the Gods, dissatisfied with the parchment of Earth they had inscribed, grooved, shaped, and painted, had given up and were rolling it up.

I was two days’ sail from the Promontory, attending to a civil dispute in a peasant village not far from Qarta, on the side of the kingdom facing the Great Sea. Yet I could see the unconquerable wave, a tidal embrace of death and destruction, and flooded the shoreline villages in an instance. The peasants I was administering two were on higher ground, but they had sons, daughters, friends and relatives, who were seized by the Ocean and never seen again. What I have heard from those lucky enough to escape is that the pomp of the ceremony, which had just begun – the bride was processing along the end of the Farmer’s Way, and the husband was waiting for her on the cliff edge – paused, and then chilled to bewilderment, and then soured sharply to panic. many who had been taught as children of the drowning of Gerion and his torture under the sea, knew that water brought the cruellest of all fates. A nightmare, wrought by the Ocean, had descended upon them.

There was a glimmer of hope as the tall wave broke up upon the undersea rocks around the Promontory, but it was dashed just as quickly when all saw that its momentum did not slow. Rather than a faceless wall of Ocean, they now faced a stampede of white bulls, thundering with hooves of salt and sand. Some prayed for Melqart to save them, a few even for Gargorix to burst from his subterranean chains and whisk them away. Most ran as they had never ran before, piling children upon their backs and carrying pets with both their hands. Several seized the moment to enact dark fantasises they had long cultivated in their minds, stabbing, and bludgeoning their rivals and casting them over the cliff to the drained shore. It truly was as the Greek dramatists later wrote. Beneath virtue and evil, beneath wisdom and unwisdom, beneath desire and ambition, the base emotion of man in that hour was madness. Faced with imminent destruction, order melted into chaos.

The waves crashed upon the cliffs, and the poor men and women who had stayed on the Promontory were lacerated by the force of the Ocean. The cliff-edge crumbled and split, and the entire landmass was washed by the sea, which reached inland for almost a hundred stadia. This same terrible display was repeated along the coast of the West, from the harbour of Olisippo, whose walls barely withstood, to the Pillars themselves. It was a stroke of forethought that Arganthonios had ordered the abandonment of the shoreline, or else thousands of Tartessians, perhaps half or more of the entire folk, would have been dragged under the waves. I can only guess at how many sailors and navvies, most of whom had made the seas secure since the sacking of Agadir, and a handful who had served the Silver King well since his accession, met their end in a watery second.

The Silver King was pacing his future city of the Hesperides when the Rherkers swelled with the wave and engulfed the river banks, spilling over close to where he stood. He guessed at once at something terrible had happened, and by nightfall reports had reached him of the calamity that had scarred Tartessos. The Promotory was ruined; Agadir was once again attacked from the sea, and the trade he had helped foster now lay in fragments on the seafloor. He mourned for weeks, not only for his lost citizens, but for the fact that no sailor or trader would dare visit his kingdom again, at least not for a generation. His son and his bride, he was relieved to hear, were safe; they had boarded two chariots and had sped as far as they could, soon reaching and resting beside the Tagus.

He was alive, and so was his dynasty. But when I met with him, his eyes spoke more than his words. The flower of Tartessos was intact, yet its roots were now severed. It was only a matter of time before it began to wilt, and rot, as it drowned on the seabed.

 

[Eadric Silvaticus]

The Walls of Water
548 - 540 BCE

---​

He had defied rebellions, the subterfuge of foreign powers, nameless hordes from across the Ocean and unrelenting droughts. I saw, however, that at last the Silver King had accepted the inevitable. Tartessos would no longer be a thalassocracy, expanding its naval might across both sides of the Pillars. It would no longer be a beacon of trade and wonderment, drawing men and families from the eastern end of the Great Sea with its siren call. As the popular poem of the Greek lyricist Stesichorus, the Geryoneis, spoke of, the Silver Kingdom was, from its very inception, cursed by the Gods. The king was not a wicked man, but his actions could only help but lead to wicked events.

Olisippo was abandoned. The Serpentine Coast was now governed from the small village of Skalabissa, a hilltop emporium further along the Tagus that overlooked the activities of the Sefesi and Oestrimnians on one side, and the Konioi and Tartessian natives on the other. Many small ports were broken up and laid waste, or else given cheaply to the Carthaginians. The Phocean Greeks of the eastern coast, guarding and trading at Mainake, Malaka and Sexi, were offered permanent employment in the Tartessian interior, or else given permission to set up small estates in the sun-bleached Bastulian mountains, not far from the coast.

I witnessed him work, with a renewed vigour, to build his golden city of Hesperis. The king believed that he had spread himself too thinly; that by celebrating all gods and marrying off sons and daughters to various foreign elites, he had deeply offended the Gods, most of all Melqart, who had defeated Geryon, and aided Habis to defeat Gargorix, so that Tartessos could thrive as an honest, simple, agricultural paradise, a land of humble plenty. It was not meant to be a giant Agora, a forum of amusements for visitors to gaze at. By trying to create the blissful realm of the Gods, he was creating a parody; a satire that the divine laughed at and kicked about to provoke a reaction.

I did not share these feelings. I believed, and still believe, that he had spent his forty years in power lifting people from ruin and had breathed life into the aging Kingdom. But like a sword that had been sharpened or a brooch hammered into shape; his mind could not be bent. Tartessos retreated into its shell, surrounded on three sides by walls of water; the ocean shore that Arganthonios would not touch. Apart from a chosen band of outsiders, the land once again became mythical, a mirage tantalisingly out of reach for the rest of the world.

The Silver King continued to administer law, to build the Royal Silos, and to govern his kingdom with a fair hand. Hesperis was steadily build from the sandy earth, and the grand palace of Unubaal was given over to the temple priests, who housed the needy in its lower floors. Qartuba, the new city established as a private retreat by old Urmoviros many generations ago, became the political heart of Tartessos. Should the tribes of the western and eastern coast turn on him, the Silver King constructed a city still deeper into Yspania, which he called Qartaceia [1], and close to this city he provided for the building of a Temple of Divine Peace [2], a holy edifice to Astarte.

Understandably, the Konioi and the wild Kelts bristled at this inward expansion, and there were revolts in both Lippoi, the military stations at the frontiers of the kingdom. Yet some were as possessed by the same superstition as the King; many of their cousins, or fathers, or wives, had perished or were made destitute by the wave that had engulfed the Promontory and lain waste to the coast. The Lusitanoi were beginning to migrate north, family by family, and so were the Ouettones and the Oretani.

This chain of fear was soon to ripple across the Mountains of Pyrene (so called after the love of Heracles), and crash against the greatest cities of the Keltioi; Nemessos, the noble sanctuary, Mediolanos, the city of the Sun Goddess, and, beside the Ister, the great metropolis of Pyrene. Perhaps the only respite for Arganthonios was that the pirate-captains of the northern Isles, who had sailed to and sacked Agadir without a second thought, grew wary of approaching the western shores again.

The crippled daughter of the peasant mother of Olisippo, who had offered to help the besiegers, rose to great prominence in these years. The blind Daughter of Charms could see what others could not, and became a mobile oracle for the anxious and afraid farmers of the land. I met with her often to counsel on matters close to the King, and I can only think that she was inspired by some higher being. Issuing portents at the Temple of Divine Peace, draped in black and scarlet robes, her feet bloody with the blood of sacrificial calves, lords from all nearby lands would kneel before her, asking for guidance.

The Temple of Divine Peace on the frontier of the Silver Kingdom, circa late 5th century BCE. Credit: Javier Ramos.​

From Agadir to Qartaceia, a strange fever slowly but steadily gripped Tartessos. Active in my work as scribe, messenger and advisor, I was for a time oblivious to it, but as I studied the faces of folk I passed I could see the tension and the worry that lay behind their eyes. The walls of the sea had cut off the kingdom from the outside world; cities left and right were being dismantled, their memories left under rubble; and the Silver King was approaching the age of eighty, beyond all normal experience. His sons were either wounded or unsuitable to rule; Gernethon was attacked by nightly terrors, reliving the horror of his day on the Promontory.

To the people, and increasingly to myself, Tartessos was a temple, overgrown with thorns and on the verge of collapse.

[1] = La Aliseda, modern Spain
[2] = The archaeological site of Cancho Roano, thought to be a temple to the goddess Astarte from circa 550 to 370 BCE.

 

[Eadric Silvaticus]

The Madness of the Shepherd
540 - 535 BCE​

I write now of events not very far from where the sun shines today. I hope to relate of the last five winters of the rule of Arganthonios, our king whose incredible age had, at last, began to bear a heavy toll upon him. It was distressing to see him age twenty years in that short space of time, but that distress was a small price for the great strides in progress, the great bursts of energy and divine willpower, that I was witness to. The Silver King was aware that his time in the Middle Land was numbered and aspired to do everything he could, before Ba’al and the high gods ushered him to the heavens.

He was listless and confused in the handful of summers following the Deluge of the West, retreating his kingdom into its shell out of an instinctive sense of self-preservation. Tartessos had been bitten by the wider world one too many times. The Silver King explained his feeling to me once, he spoke that he was an old, blind shepherd, and he had led his flock astray and wandering onto cliff faces, dangerous caves, fast-flowing rivers and were wolves and hyenas roamed. He could not see if there were safer pastures and did not have the strength to scare off the predators. The only action he could take was to call them in, beckoning them to their ever-thinning grazing land. I felt then that he was underestimating himself to a great degree. There was no mass dying, no widespread starvation or desolation that followed each disaster, solely because of his efforts; the Royal Silos, the damning of the Rherkes, the relocation of coastal folk to the interior. Tartessos ruled by any other ruler would have shrunk and withered into obscurity.

His response was that the disasters were of his own making. One of his theories, dreamt up after an intoxicated visit to the Daughter of Charms was that Melqart had been dethroned from Heaven within his generation for his meddling, and the High Gods had decided to take leave of human affairs, only returning to punish or for their own entertainment. El, the creator and the highest of all gods, had apparently been chained by an erratic Baal and sentenced to live with Mot. How else could the rise of the Greeks in the East, the fall of Tyre and Egypt, and the rise of the daemonic Medians of Cyrus be explained? Why else would the Celts now be willing to trade and marry with the Etruscans and Greeks, even though it was they who had harassed their Heracles and stolen his cattle? When he confessed all this to me, at first I believed it was a madness that would soon pass. Yet, conversing with the folk of the cities in the following years, I found that many mourned the fall of Melqart, and indeed thought El had been thrown into the dungeons of the underworld. At the time, I began to suspect the doing of the priestess Bathnoam, but now I am not sure. Maybe the old lord was right.

Gernethon recovered, or at least pretended to recover, enough for him to steward the king’s council, to keep the Council of Agadir content and the people fed and sheltered. He was never confident enough to rule outright, however, and always sought the ailing monarch for his final word, even on the smallest of decrees. I believe he was happy to oblige, for it brought a smile on his face to think that, in his condition, even the construction of a new market for a small village north of Qartuba was decreed personally by him. I was not sure who could succeed him; I envisioned a long interregnum, perhaps another period of discord and civil strife, until another ambitious young prince gained the approval of the Council to rule in the Silver King’s shadow.

Three tragedies struck the King whilst he was confined, for his own health, to the Palace at Unubaal. The first was the death of Malshemon, the Carthaginian confidante who had been critical in delivering a killing blow to the revolt of Kassetanos, and had administered with skills the west of Tartessos, as shoftet, for thirty-five years afterward. He lived just to see to the marshalling of aid from Qart Hadasht to the refugees of the Deluge. I chose not to listen to the rumours that he had been strangled by servants of King Mago, so that he, who had succeeded his brother Malchos, could legally acquire the wealth of his estates. The second was the passing of his own wife Saruna, the golden wreath to his silver armour. This distressed him more than all else, and he ordered that no glint of vegetation or nature be allowed within his walls for most of that year. The third was not a death at all, but an exile. Nirabonidus had fled Tartessos and offered his services to the Carthaginians of Motya, the most renowned port in all the Great Sea. He had sensed that he was either not welcome in palace discussions, or far too welcome for his own comfort. Again, nothing I could say could soothe the admirable commander. The walls of Unubaal were too stifling, too sickly, and he needed the open ocean.

Arganthonios aged further, his skin wizening to the look of old bark, and his eyes and hair fading to milky white. He often drifted into sleep, muttering strange things, and had difficulty looking at maps and charts that he had devised, with great passion, decades before. His recollection of things and people was still sharp, and it was thanks to his distant memory that we could dedicate monuments to the Old Kings, from Habis to Urmoviros, inscribed with their deeds and personality. There was life within him still, and it was spent solely on providing for the future of his Kingdom, and building his planned City of the Evening Star, which would take lifetimes, dozens of kings, to accomplish. He presided personally over the resettlement of bands of Ouettones, taken from an abortive raid, into the Celtic quarter of the city, where a bronze moustachioed Melqart bows before salesmen and merchants in an agora-like space.

The climate of disaster ebbed somewhat, and the tension that had gripped the kingdom had eased enough for children to play on the western beaches and for traders to disembark their boats without fear of the tides. It was another long summer, where the sun seemed to never leave the sky, and the straits were full of Greek and Carthaginian sailors anxious to make the most of the fishing season, or else out to explore the wild northern seas. There was talk that Qart Hadasht was soon to send their capable admirals to explore the even wilder south; to find the true Garden of the Hesperides, the wonderful place that lay somewhere after the infertile desert. A few rumbled about a coming conflict between the Massailotes and the Carthaginians. The island of Kyrnos, the abode of the Seirenoussai (the Sirens), was becoming a jewel too precious to share, and now ships were being built not for trade, but in order to sink one another.

Now, the Silver King sensed an opportunity. He was nearly ninety, an age surpassed only in recent reckoning by some Egyptian rulers. What better way to celebrate his antiquity, to bring together the estranged factions of Tartessos, to invite Greeks, Levantines, Celts, Etruscans and Lydians back into his kingdom, than a good feast?

The Poisoned Krater: The Prelude

Although the Silver Kingdom no longer graced the shores of the east, and indeed, of the west, it was not completely isolated; many from distant ends of the Great Sea had chosen to serve the royal household, or else found promise in the rolling terrace farms and alluvial plains beside the Rherkes and the River of Ducks. It was therefore in this period of isolation that the Phocean Greeks, who had elected Pelagonas, an exile from their mother city descended from a noble family of the Lelantine War, as their representative, became closely acquainted with Arganthonios. It was to Pelagonas [1], the man-giant who stooped before the doorways and arches of the palace, that he command to spread news of the intended occasion. He ordered the Phocaean to procure enough wine to satiate the thirst of even Heracles. This was to be a symposium for the ages, a banquet of sound and culture as much as food and drink.

The emigre Greeks first hesitated, as they were afraid that the cloud of superstition that the priestly class and the Oracle of Astarte had cast over the land would bring their guests only discomfort. Yet they too were impressed by the scale of the Silver King’s ambition; they too wanted to see the Evening Star’s city rise above the occidental horizon. He had first eluded Kassetanos, then the unforgiving seasons, and then the wrath of Poseidon himself. As they were well aware, many of their glorious poleis in the east had not been so lucky. They knew also that Tartessos had heavy debts to pay to those over the waters, for their thankless aid in rebuilding and fighting pirates on the open sea. Negotiations, Pelagonas and his circle mused, were always more fruitful over a krater of mixed wine and a helping of spit-roasted pork.

The wisps of doubt which gnawed at the Silver King, that such a gathering would invoke the wrath of the all-powerful Baal just as the doomed marriage at the Promontory had – perhaps not in the form of a flood, but a rainstorm or a hail of thunderbolts – were soon dispelled at the enthusiasm his friends and confidants showed. Arganshtart busied himself with organsiing fleets to the Massailote towns; Himilco the Wily hurried to Carthage to propose the offer to lord Mago, and the elderly Asilia, by now a great-grandmother, led a rough company of riders through bitter weather to inform the Neiroi, the great maritime tribal league who had settled into a happy arrangement with the kingdom as of late. I started to notice the king was afflicted by spasms of the chest, and of the abdomen, and he could not keep pace with myself or with the many youthful visitors.

His time was nearing, but he pledged to live yet.

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[1] = Named after the legendary progenitor of the Pelsagians, one of the 'first nations' of the Greek mainland.

 

[Tyler96]

I really enjoy the atmosphere and world you've built here.

 

[Eadric Silvaticus]

The Silver Kingdom in the last years of Arganthonios, c.535 BCE​

Black = cities formally or informally under the lordship of Arganthonios.
Purple = cities formally under the lordship of Magonid Carthage.
Reddish Purple = 'free' Phoenician cities, under tribute arrangements from Carthage.
Dull Green = Keltic / Keltiberian cities in a client relationship with Tartessos.
Dark Green = Phocaean colonies, resettled from the coast.
Blue = other Greek colonies.​

 

[Eadric Silvaticus]

The Poisoned Krater: Part I
Autumn, 535 BCE
​

The feast was not going to be held in Unubaal, nor in the slowly emerging city of Hesperis, but in a small agricultural town, flanked by tall red cliffs and a patchwork of fields of dry grain and enclosures for sheep and cattle. The town strings along the lower backwaters of the Rherkes, a peaceful and reed-bearing stream far removed from the torrent that meets the Atlantic. It is in a country ruled in law by Tartessos but governed in reality by the shepherds, and local tribes who pay tribute on the summer solstice. The name of the town was to become Hispaal, the lowland city, and although remote, not a day’s travel away is a hillside temple to the goddess Astarte, below an priestly village occupied by regional holy men for generations.

The Silver King did not want to host the gathering in the halls of his fathers and grandfathers, or overlooking architectural projects which were embarrassingly still in their infancy. Hispaal, he commanded, was to become a city of tents and banners. Houses along orthogonal streets would be raised to the air with stilt-poles and billowing sheets of purple-dyed cloth; roads would be paved with bear skins and signposted by elephant ivory, and the perimeter of the whole complex would be made of rows upon rows of fresh yew timbers, painted over in alternating blue and red. He wanted to make sure his visitors saw, and smelt, the majesty that was Tartessos.

The Daughter of Charms objected to another of his designs, to install wooden effigies of Melqart, Astarte, Baal and El across the surrounding landscape, so that those present would truly feel the auspicious gaze of the Gods, as more than a few idols of the sort had been stuck to the promontory during the marriage of Gernethon and Vesia, more than fifteen years prior. Where he had dreamt this idea up I was not sure at the time, but his Keltic associates from the Ouettones and other tribes embraced it from the outset. They would be more than happy to send men, and materials, to lift the driftwood idols from the ground.

My own age had begun to bear a toll, at this point, and Arganthonios kindly accepted my request to be withdrawn from the hurrying-around, the flurry of message-sending, that any great feast needs. I was instead tasked with the handling of the royal treasury, so that the cloth, wood, wine, and food could all be paid for. There was enough gold, enough silver, and enough tribute in kind to cover such an occasion, but as I scanned the accounts of the kingdom, written on tablets and papyri, I privately despaired. Unless a war or raid were to happen again the metal-rich tribes of the north, or a generous loan from Carthage, the Silver King simply did not have the silver to finish his Evening City, nor to secure the kingdom for his successors.

He must have already known of this, and I wondered for the real reasons of the spectacle. Would the rulers and emissaries of every nation be as generous in return? Or, would they sing in his honour, have their fill of food and wine, and leave for home without a second thought?

The first of the guests to arrive were the Sefesi, men of the Serpentine Coast who for years had been clients to the Tartessian power-centre of Skalabissa. As the feast was not to start until midwinter, when every nation would have had the chance to respond or decline, their arrival in early April was very premature, but they intended to make good use of the occasion, and pitched their wide tents on the other side of the river, as the poles and beams of the temporary city were steadily lashed together. Aïbouris [1], the stocky and hairy Sefesi chief, presented his finest gold to the Silver King as soon as he arrived to inspect the site.

Over that long summer, more Keltic and Iberian guests began to make camp around the lowland city and wander around the nearby barracks and royal estate of Qartubah. The Olkades and the Turbulatoi, relatively nearby confederations, sent parties led by their high chieftain’s sons, Altheos and Baesannabos, during the summer solstice, filling the air with the stench of sacrificed cattle and slaves. The kingdom had always very strained relations with the Iberians, who do not believe in our gods and trade only with the Greeks and Etruscans, but remarkably the Silver King had somehow convinced a probably exiled low prince of the Eisdetani to join in the anticipated feasting. The hills and fields around Hisbaal were, by now, alive day and night with the bartering and commanding of men of all languages, selling foul beasts and ugly-looking pottery between one another.

As the harvest began to be drawn in, so were more distant friends of the Silver Kingdom; The Iakketanoi, hailing from the Pyrenean mountains; the Segobriges, under their king’s cousin Commibos [2], whose walled towns traded actively with the Greeks ports of Bettara and Massaila, and nobles from the Petrokórioi [3], a famous community of iron-smiths under the vassalage of another distant Gallic kingdom. The tent city now shone with the gleaming of torcs, brooches, arm-rings and dangling charm pendants; when I arrived in late October, my first though was that all the wealth north of the Celtiberian fields was now gathered here.

Stranger tribes were still to arrive; the Kantabri sent their royal sons and daughters a few weeks later, who wore nothing but hairpins and copper torcs. Weirder still were the envoys of the Albioni, who painted their entire bodies in chalk and had a bitter feud with the piratical Oestriminains, who to my relief the Silver Kings has not invited. The Albione king, Kariakos, had sent them to appeal to Tartessos that they could be trusted to handle trade with the distant north. The envoys lamented that a mighty naval empire had prevailed along from Iberia to Iwerion in the days of their forefathers, called Albu for their obsession with white-shining metals and their chalky faces. Albu, they said, had disintegrated after their precious tin had ran out, degenerating into a mosaic of raiding tribes and impoverished nations; worst of all the merciless Oestrimini. The great island east of Iwerion had taken Albu’s name, but its true heirs were the Albiones, ruled by the same dynasty as the Kings of Albu a thousand years prior. The Neiroi, too, liked to claim an Alban heritage, but they had always been on the periphery, standing between the Land of the White and the Land of the Red – Erythria – to the south.

More surprising was the arrival of a lone rider, swathed in billowing white robes and bearing deep scars on his temple. No longer the radiant youth, Nirabonidus had returned a broken and tired warrior. After leaving the Silver Kingdom, the admiral had served the court of Qart Hadasht in cleansing Sardinia of its wily barbarians. The battles became bloodier and bloodier, and he had nearly died after being captured and entombed alive within a colossal stone edifice; one of the temples built by Melqart’s only son, Norax, that rose tall and wordlessly in the landscape. He feared also that the Silver King was dead, after seeing the Tartessian grip on the western seas loosen, allowing Greeks and Etruscans to pour forth. Now he understood the situation; the understandable hardship that had forced the King to withdraw his realm from the outside world. He wanted, more than anything else, to pay back the debt of love that he owned Arganthonios.

By the onset of winter, the truly world-apart nations began to make their way to the Lowland City. Vesia, Gernethon’s beloved, returned with a party of Etruscan warriors, decked in fine plate armour, and carrying flowery shields. She had been together with the prince for years after the marriage, but at the command of her brother Larth, ruler of the walled city of Velathri, she had returned to stabilise a social anarchy which had gripped the northern League. A delegation even came from the warlike town of Roma, headed by the king’s relative Arruns Tarquinius. Most distant of all was a combined party of Levantines, holding aloft the banners of Byblos, Tyre, Sidon, Arwad and Akko, who came bearing sad news of their mother city’s suffering under the Achaemenids. A handful of Greeks then began to trickle in, although they did not represent any land, and had come more to share in the wealth they expected to be distributed.

Although the sun in the kingdom of the Evening Star never truly withdraws its warmth as it does in the north, the forces of winter were now brought to bear. Fields of lemon trees, ripe with fruit, were now barren and withered, and on colder days, powerful rains cast down on the parched soil. Most Kelts braved it out with their bare chests and thighs, but the elders present began to wear their winter furs and cloaks. Still, no-one would admit to being bothered; the atmosphere of the Lowland City was brighter than ever. Wood was chopped, vessels were hammered into shape, pots were painted, and tables were slotted into place as the days drew nearer. It was soon also a musical city, performing day and night a cacophony of a thousand novel instruments.

Three days before the ceremony was due to begin, the Silver King arrived in his carriage; too old to stride along the paths as he had done for decades. Accompanying him were Tartessos’s finest warriors, plumed with red-stained feathers and wielding imitations of truly ancient swords owned by the first lords of the land, before even Halisibaal had tamed it. I arrived the week beforehand of my own accord, compiling the debts that the King owed to various contractors.

He was visibly weak, but still the great king whose life I had saved all those years before; still the lord whose providence and ambition stunned the known world.

[1] = A rare Keltic name meaning ‘prosperous king’

[2] = A Massaliote-influenced rendition of the name Kombinatios, meaning ‘smiter’.

[3] = An ancient tribal name meaning ‘Four warbands’

 

[Eadric Silvaticus]

The Poisoned Krater: Part II
December 31, 535 BCE / 2216 AUT

The feast begins​

Two days passed in restlessness and relentless marching-about, fetching, slaughtering, roasting and preparing the food for the occasion. Much of the men and families who had arrived at the city had survived on gritty, hard bread, twice-salted pork and whatever fruit was offered to them by attendants, and the air on day of the feast itself was filled not just with anticipation but salivation. Arganthonios did promise to distribute whatever was left to impoverished farmers around Hispaal and Qartubah, but from the wide bellies and ravenous appetite of the grizzled warriors, I doubted then there would even be a morsel to spare. The Silver King took great pain to see to the mixing of the wine; too weak, and the Greeks and Etruscans would accuse him of greed; too strong, and they would accuse him of being in league with Hades, or mating with nymphs, or worse; I won’t dwell on the point.

The guests assembled in the feasting hall, a drafty chamber made entirely of billowing purple cloth and tall beams of freshly-cut yew, lit up by torches that tinged purple and green. There was disappointment that the noble men of Euboea, Athenai and Sparta had not made the journey, but the volume of landless men meant there was nothing that could go to waste. As the sun dipped below the dry landscape, the Silver King stood before the assembled guests, a wise and looming presence in the finest robes the weavers of Tartessos could over, and proposed a toast not only to the kingdom, but for the wealth, safety and knowledge of the entire world that had made such an occasion possible.

The food and mixed wine were brought out in great polished stone platters, black-figure kylixes and kraters by servants, who were also invited to sit beside Arganthonios and have their share. The pork, lamb, mutton, beef and venison had been roasted just hours prior, and the room filled with the steam and juiced of a hundred butchered animals. There were also cheeses, legumes, plaited loaves of bread and a constellation of oranges, peaches, dates, plums, and wild almonds, and baskets of grapes and berries apparently plucked from the Garden of the Hesperides. The feasting was quickly followed by the drinking, and the nectar-sweetened wine soon induced even the sullenest of rulers present into fits of laughter and wild gesticulation. The Silver King had kept himself composed, and drank little, absorbing himself in discussion of the divine with the representatives of the Neiroi and Albiones. I sat uncomfortably between a Greek captain and a Gaulish lord, both of whom tried to convince me to leave the kingdom and find a life in the north, filled with fame and beautiful women.

The Daughter of Charms, Bathnoam, arrived late to the feast and fought over the ribcage of the last pig, and soon I became aware that the life of my king was in danger. Servants entered the feasting tent, but I did not recognise them, and I could not make them out for they were hooded. One guest, far down the table, had suddenly stood and beckoned one of the hooded men, who then left the tent silently and returned soon with a krater full of wine. I did not recognise the guest – he was too flushed, and had taken off his colourful war-gear - but the Gods were whispering a dire omen.

It was nearing midnight, and the King stood to commence the end of the feast, meeting with cheers and shouts of joy for the hospitality he had shown them. He thanked his guests, then his closest confidants, including myself, and those who had worked to make the occasion a possibility. He finally thanked the Gods, and especially Melqart – Heracles, the divine son of heaven who had suffered his labours greatly to ensure the world was free of cannibalistic monsters and many-headed giants. A few bristled at the equivalence between the Phoenician and Greek heroes, but the King meant well. The Daughter of Charms, after prophesying good fortunes for the Kingdom to come, invited the king to drink from the krater which had just been table before him. The same krater I had seen before.

There was a final great cheer, and the Silver King lifted the krater and slowly drank. I sensed that some of the hooded slaves fidgeted, knowing more than they should. He stood still, talking with Bathnoam and forgiving her for his mistrust, and there was a moment where I believed my mind had deceived me.

Until he stopped, moved his hands to his stomach, and began to choke, collapsing to his knees. The assembled guests knew immediately what had happened, and my heart sunk to the beaten earth. Arganthonios had been poisoned.

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​

Silence prevailed; no guest was willing to state in words what he had seen. Before I could see to the fallen king, I sensed that the mysterious attendants had already fled. We all soon rose to our feet to surround the body at the end of the table, which was still writhing and spluttering with life. The Daughter of Charms guided his head onto her lap, consoling him as his face turned a paler shade of white. The king was scarcely dead, and there was a moment of thankfulness to the Gods that they had provided him with such a strong temperament. But then, another thought crossed our minds. I noticed that some had started to draw daggers from their sheaths, weapons that they should have dispatched with before entering the feasting hall.

I searched around for the chief I had seen conversing with the servants, to no avail. We were hot-headed with fullness, flustered with wine and thoroughly drunk, and rumours began to swirl around the fluttering tent, which seemed to us now oppressive and stifling rather than airy and inviting. Aibouris, the hairy lord from the Serpentine Coast, suddenly raised a great yell and lunged his arms towards Bathnoam’s neck. He had seen the priestess of Astarte offer him the poisoned krater, and it was not secret knowledge that her followers despised the current state of things, wishing someone more passionate to the Gods on the throne than old, twice-cursed Arganthonios. He personally loathed her, blaming her for the ill that had befallen the kingdom in the last decade.

Forcing his way to her, a haze of fury descended upon the feasting hall. There were old enemies here, long-simmering feuds that the occasion had been designed to heal, but instead was now reigniting. The Greek captains cursed the Etruscans; Keltic youths spat at the Massailotes, and the Roman delegation damned everyone to torment in the dungeons of Dīs Pater and Orcus. I hurried towards the King, aware that his already fragile life might not be safe from the bloodthirsty crowd. It was madness, it was blindness, and myself and Bathnoam huddled around his warm body, hiding under the wooden table beneath a pile of empty platters, as the anger turned to violence.

Beneath the fragile timber planks, it felt as if we had been cast into Mot’s halls. The orgy of battering and bruising descended further into chaos; two halves of the crowd were slashing at each other wildly with swords and flailing axeheads. I saw Nirabonidus swing a blunt club at an Iberian chief who had, blood-mad, torn a servant’s eyes from his head, and he quickly dropped to the earthen floor, frothing at the mouth. There were more barbarous acts which I cannot describe. The guests had become wild animals, and they were scavenging each other’s corpses.

An eternity passed, until a collective shout from the southern doorway heralded a mass of soldiers dressed in their imperial finery, wielding polished bronze lances. The bodyguard of the king had arrived! The mob fell one by one, or were battered into corners by walls of shields. The violence calmed; the red mist began to fade. Myself and Bathnoam loosened our grip of the King, who was breathing hoarsely and heavily. We were all in shock and paralyzed by bewilderment.

The Gods quickly saw this sad spectacle, and from the eastern corner a fire began to spread, racing up the brittle beams and engulfing the embroidered geometric patterns on each wall. Madness turned to panic, and every man fled for himself, save for the royal guard, who lifted the immobile King and escorted us to safety. Beacons were lit for aid and water was fetched to quell the steadily raging fire, which by the end of the night was to claim much of the Lowland City. Myself and the men and women of Tartessos were gathered into Arganthonios’ quarters, huddled in sheepskins behind a palisade of warriors.

--------​

Some of the guests fled to their quarters, but others took to the hills, and there I spotted a curious party of chariots, who had evidently been waiting above the city for some time. I saw the same chieftain who had left, accompanied by the hooded servants. He was never seen again, but I realized later he was a lord of the Neiroi; the seaborne confederation which had, on appearances, come to admire and respect our kingdom. Why he had poisoned the Silver King I did not know. Today, I fear that Arganthonios had agreed something terrible with him; a pact that he had broken, and, as a result, he had paid for with his life.

The Lowland City was disassembled, leaving behind ghosts where posts and wooden shopfronts once stood. I agreed with Nirabonidus and the surviving confidants that a necropolis should be built close by, commemorating the dozens of soldiers, servants and innocent women and children who had died at the hand of the mob or from the fire. We chose a sullen hill to the west where a scattered hamlet span across the slopes, and named the cemetery the Necropolis of Urso [1], or Ursine Cemetery, as from the river the hill looked very much like a looming bear, watching over the souls of the dead. As I write, it has become popular for wealthy families to bury their dead there.

The Necropolis of Urso (c.535 - 210 BCE), as it looks today.​

We returned to the Palace of Unubaal, and remarkably the King held on to life for seven months, incapacitated in all but his ability to speak, which slipped from his mouth as a mumble. I was with him as often as possible, visiting the royal bedroom between attending to the daily needs of the kingdom and the political storm that his poisoning had stirred. The Divine Temple of Astarte was burned down by another mob, blaming her for the calamity, but Bathnoam escaped and hides still in a cave-temple far to the north, its whereabout known only to her most loyal and needy initiates.

Gernethon, aware that he was soon to become a subject of intrigue, did not want the same fate and rode to the Assembly of New Agadir to renounce all worldly or divine office. He would not be the king, if this is what kingship would risk. The Assembly accepted his decision, and now we are governed by a council, at least until his eldest son comes of age.

I end this chronicle of Tartessos, the land that has absorbed most of my life, without knowing what the Gods intend for us now. I try and stare into the mists of their minds, but there is no logical course of events I can understand. Why did Ba’al and the high gods punish him time and time again, after rewarding Tartessos with such riches? Why has his rule been deemed unworthy when wickeder kings live untouched? What deal did he strike with the tribes of the north?

These are only the questions of an old and feeble mind. I am tired, the kingdom is weak, and the events of the past are already passing into oblivion. I can only wait until heaven calls me from above.

---------​

I have left many pages blank; perhaps in a new century, after a new ruler, can another faithful servant write of much happier and simpler days.




[1] A real Tartessian / Phoenician necropolis has just been found on the same site, in modern-day Osuna, near Seville, dating to the 5th and 4th centuries BCE.

 

[dentista campora]

Bravo.

 

[Eadric Silvaticus]

Shadows of the Past

Restoration and collapse, 535 - 230 BCE

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Centuries after the death of the Silver King in 535 BCE, a scribe from the north comes to the crumbling palace of Unubaal and continues the Book of Hamo, narrating how the kingdom rose and fell into the flames of history.

-------

Unubaal, Keltica, southern Iberia

229 BCE​

My hand writes on an ancient, time-worn parchment, guided by sunlight streaming from the windows of the palace of the dead. I had sought the records of a golden age, three hundred summers before my time, when the land was known as Tartessos and the roads and rivers were lined with silver. Instead, stumbling on this long-abandoned volume, I saw that the past was just as filled with worry, with conflict, with human failings, as our days have been. My name is Gisgo, and my duty is to the Great Lord of Albu, whose power touches the shores of Eiru, Prettania and Iberia. His eminence commanded me to write a grand history of his people, from their divine beginnings as children of Belenos, the Sun God, to their triumph over the wild and uncompromising tribes of the three lands. Yet as I gaze into this faded chronicle, I cannot.

My grandmother was raised in this country, and she served the sick and dying as the last free city of the south, Cartaceia, was assaulted from all directions by Alba and their Keltic allies. She was dragged and forced into the home of my grandfather in Aremorika [1], and she gave birth to my mother not long after. Over the course of my life I have been dressed in gold, awarded with honours, allowed to command the processions of armies, but nothing the Alban Lords can do will remedy the hatred within me. I must write a history of her kingdom, of her people; how it waxed and ebbed over the centuries but remained the brightest of all nations.

For the Great Lord, these are just shadows of the past, marginal clouds blotting the perfect radiance of his vast and flawless kingdom. For Gisgo, High Messenger of the Great Council, these are not shadows, but memories that blaze just as brightly, waiting to be told, yearning to be known to all.

-------​

The death of Arganthonios, Tartessos’s greatest king, cast a sickly pall over his people. The priestess of Astarte, whose hair had withered and skin mottled after the events of the doomed feast, reassured her followers that the Silver King was now ruling from the stars, assuming a celestial throne beside Melqart and all the high Gods. The disorder that the war within the heavens had caused was now stilled, now that the most honoured and wizened of all men had come to provide them counsel. Three summers and winters passed in interregnum, as the Council of Agadir deliberated on who to recommend for the heir to the Silver Kingdom. They could not choose the king, only the people, casting votes with shouts and cries as each candidate passed along the Farmer’s Way, could. The many favourites were either too old, or ineligible, to take the mantle, and Gernethon was steadfast in his retirement to a farm in the rugged eastern country.

In the end, it was not a son or daughter of the king who succeeded the throne, but Qarthalo, the black-haired, green-eyed mayor of Qartubah, who had been elevated to the post of shofet of the northern frontier before the king’s death. He had stayed in Agadir ever since, attending the daily motions of the Council and seeing to the more mundane matters of grain stocks, harbour maintenance and wall-building. There was a shrewdness in his eyes; he would find answers and make commands before many of the elders had even discussed the problem. His childhood friend Tuniitesbaan administered the colony of Lippos, in the country of the Ouettones. Neither of them had royal blood, but the line of Urmoviros had long been extinguished, at least on the Iberian mainland. He was not an obvious choice, yet the drive and skill he possessed impressed the Council and a unanimous recommendation was made in early winter. He would still have to prove himself before the people, of course, and the Council considered him a suitable steward king, that would govern Tartessos with a steady hand as Arganthonios’ two grandchildren, Melisco and baby Walko, slowly came of age.

To his relief, Qarthalo was cheered as he led a party of chariots and Carthaginian elephants along the Farmer’s way. There was not the spark of vision in him that had made the Silver King so loved, but that did not matter. The ghost city of Hesperis, an empty plain beside the tall basalt citadel that loomed at its centre, and the barren shores and cliffs, reminded them that vision was not always the way of the Gods.

His kingship began with the repercussions of the slaughter at Hispalis. The agora of Mainake was burned and the city’s elites sailed to Massaila or else to their mother cities in Greece. Letters arrived of a terrible confrontation brewing between the Etruscans and Massailotes over control of Sirenoussai [2], with the rumour that Sardinian princes were prepared to aid either side in return for help against their island rivals. Worse still, a charismatic chief of the Kunetes called Tasiionos had started to rally his people, which included his Konioi cousins, against Tartessos once again, claiming that they had bled the land dry and were fast becoming a lapdog to Qart Hadasht. He heard tales of Tartessian merchants being turned away, or spat at, at ports and towns along the east coast, jeering at them with a baseless story that Arganthonios had organised the feast so that its guests could all be slaughtered, and only the intervention of some poisoned wine had averted his plans.

More disturbingly, there was only silence from the Neiroi, the seafaring league the Council now agreed was harbouring the person who had actually poisoned the Silver King, and the slaves who had facilitated it. It was only known later that this man was in all likelihood Narakaltos, the father of the king who would eventually unite the tribes of the northwest edge and assume the first Lordship of Albu.

The deal that had been struck in the waning days of the old king was buried with his body; the Nerians would not be teased to reveal it. Sensing his kingdom growing ever more brittle, Qarthalo journeyed to the Sacred Promontory and decreed the Promontorial Assembly would be restored. It was no use trying to administer law and make judgements from distant Agadir, a place that was not even part of Tartessos. The records do not allow me to say whether there was any resistant to this, but as Qarthalo was to learn it was incredibly poorly timed.

Eight months later, in the breeze of early spring, a hoard of warriors streamed down the slopes of Konistrogis, just a dozen miles or so from the Royal Palace and not much father to the Promontory. Tasiionos was out to burn the Silver Kingdom to its core.

[1] = Armorica, modern Brittany
[2] = The 'Homeric' Greek name for Corsica.

 

[Eadric Silvaticus]

Voyagers of the Moon
525 - 515 BCE​

For three months, the grassy plains of the southwest around the Royal Palace were not only torched, but ploughed with rock, salt, and rubble so that little could grow there again. There is nothing in the archives that gives any reason for this behaviour; from all I could gather, the Kunetes were happy subordinates up until the accession of Qarthalo. Perhaps there was always a lingering resentment; an anger only overcome by the generous supplies of grain, silver and exotic produce that Arganthonios had provided for them. The new generation had forgotten these deeds, and saw themselves chained to a kingdom whose language they did not speak, and whose Gods they did not believe in.

In spite of their ignorance, Tasiionos was a shrewd warlord; he knew that his forbears Arkilaios and Arkiliragus had been sapped of their strength trying to take control of the east. He had an admiration for the wild captains of the North, who had swooped to crush the jewel of Agadir like a vole caught by an eagle. He was after the jugular, and luckily the new king of Tartessos had moved it right next to his doorstep.

The shofets of the eastern and western provinces slowly mobilised their forces; the urgency of the situation meant that communication between them was impossible. Himilco the Wily, now Himilco the Old, was summed from his naval station in the Balarides to counter the Kunete assault from the shore. Nirabonidus had promised to serve Qarthalo as shofet of Malaka for five years before his injuries caught up with him, and he reluctantly marshalled his men and rode steadily westwards. The new shofet of Qartubah, Qarthalo’s successor Abdiram [1], sent sixty warriors along the Guadiana to intercept any northward raids. They were all expecting a great insurrection, and probably looked forward to crushing the barbarous southern Kelts for good. Yet, Tassionos only had one objective.

The Promontorial Assembly had now been rebuilt. The deluge of thirty years prior had left a slick layer of sea-grass, molluscs and clams that had to be cleared with scythes and shovels, which even then failed to remove the overpowering stench of rotting plants. A rectangular platform, enclosed by two semi-circular timber walls with entrances at either end, supported three marble, pillared halls where assemblymen would vote, discussed the issues of the day, and inscribe royal deeds and orders on clay tablets. The cliff-edge had been buttressed with alternating grooves and monoliths, that together acted to break incoming waves and drain the water away. There were also pits, roughly square and the depth of three men, that would capture seawater, from which salt could be collected once the sun had shone upon it.

It was altogether a marvel, and still stands, but there was nothing the assemblymen could do against an attack from the land. The whole host of Tassionios had withdrawn from their slaughter and were now gathered before the Promontory, and in the dawn light threw a volley of spears and slingshots over the flimsy enclosure. The Promontorial Guard that watched over the platform wielded only short daggers, as their only purpose was to ward off would-be assassins. Against an army of hungry warriors, they were useless.

The provincial fleet of Malaka, together with the advance flotilla of Himilco the Old, arrived just too late; they warded off the last of the raiders who were picking the jewellery off corpses, but not before Tassionios had beheaded and butchered the bodies of every single member of the Assembly. The enclosure burned in their wake, but in an poetic twist of fate the tides swelled and the fires were soon extinguished by volleys of sea-spray. The walls could always be rebuilt, yet the lives that for so many years had steered the fortunes of Tartessos, bringing it into dialogue and harmony with the lords across the Great Sea, were now heaped in piles, their headless torsos slumping down onto the blood-stained earth.

--------​

South of Konistorgis, summer of 522 BCE

Yet, the Gods had decided that this was not the end. My reading of Old Tartessian is poor, and the chalky script crumbles at my touch, but from what I can gather, a mass of storm-clouds gathered from the distant ocean horizon, and descended upon the returning, hollering army of the Kunetes with an inconceivable rage. Raindrops boiled as they fell, scalding the exposed heads and arms of the warriors, and with piercing clap of thunder a bolt of pure white - the blazing whip of Ba’al Hammon - struck the iron chariot of Tassionos and in an instant, the chief of the raiders - the King of the Hounds – became ash and bone. The horses ran free, with such terror in their eyes that they did not stop to drink or to rest. I have heard tales from the folk of these grasslands that they run still, pounding their hooves from one end of the Surrounding Ocean to the other.

Although his army survived, the divine punishment they had witnessed sent them into the hills and into the safety of their mountain fortress, from which another invasion force would not emerge for many years. Anarchy continued to prevail in some places, and the land of the Kunetes no longer was client to Tartessos, being leaderless and without lords willing to pay tribute. Tartessos was leaderless to; beside from Qarthalo, the wearing shofets and the reclatriant Gernethon, all of those who had advised the Silver King were now dead. Except from Hamo, whose chronicle I am containing, but I am sure he was too blind or too ill to bear any more responsibility.

--------​

Some praised Astarte for the victory, while in other parts the cults of Melqart and Ba’al Hammon grew strong once again. The coastal fleet, which now had no commands, received a new order. Over years of negotiations, the quadrumvirate of Qarthalo, Nirabonidus, Gernethon and Himilco had organised with Qart Hadasht that one of their aspiring navigators was to launch a trading expedition northwards, establishing ports and treaties in a land that had only the foolhardiest of sailors had ventured to.

Their navigator was the learned and cunning boatbuilder Himilco, a distant but dear relative of Himilco the Old. He had fought well off the coast of Kyrnos against the Massailotes, and was renowned for plotting a straight course using only the position of the moon. His half-brother, Hanno, was just a boy, but eager to accompany his elder brother in the adventure of a lifetime. The supplies for the journey would be provided by Tartessos, and whatever riches they encountered, the Royal Treasury of Unubaal would have to be given at least a fifth.

The trading wealth of the north was well known, but Arganthonios had been cautious; his deal with the Neiroi had given the kingdom a dark reputation that would not have been easy to break. Only Himilco, voyager of the moon, with the wind of the west behind him, dared to leave the safe harbours of Carthage, and venture into the Encircling Ocean.

[1] = 'The brotherly love of the Gods'