History of Zhuma

In the city of Spring (previously Guigur), there's a magical chalice, which pours water incessantly when in contact with sand. A large cistern has been built around it, and a temple to house the cistern, and a village to support the temple, until the village enveloped the neighboring city, which is now a (poor) district in the metropolis of Spring.

Spring is in central Zhuma, which is a huge desert. Before the Chalice, Zhuma was not even a nation - just small groups of nomads eking out a living around muddy oases, crossing the oceans of dunes and crumbling stone to trade their meager possessions with the mountain people of Alquarest or the affluent river folks along the Biliad.

The Chalice is old, but not ancient - it was created about 240 years ago, but it wasn't used to its potential until 60 years ago. It was then that Marjanah (now known as the Water-Witch) and her sister Serafima got hold of it, seized control over the desert people, and carved out an empire in the stark desert. Simultaneously cruel and benevolent, the sisters created an irrigation system rivaling Earth's Roman aqueducts and the earthwork system of cisterns and channels around Petra. People flocked to the new city of Spring, and the desert was transformed into an ever-growing gridwork of farms and settlements. Some of the water was channeled far along the main trails towards the coast, and also towards Ras-Biliad and Ras-Kargha in distant Bad-Biliad, and the ancient city of Epsut halfway to the Dark Mesas. This encouraged additional settlements along these routes, followed by roads and infrastructure.

Meanwhile, Serafima employed the tired nomads, who knew the places where gold and gems could be found in the sand, oases, streams, and cliffsides, and built mines to extract new wealth. The booming population found use for the youngsters not needed in the farms: mines and quarries. People even came from far outside Arif in order to escape poverty and endless drudgery, encouraged by tales of these newfound riches in this infant empire. As might be expected, the growing population of miners stayed poor, but the once-small middle-class of the professions and merchants grew in both numbers and wealth. Still, nobody benefited as much as the ruling sisters. With their great wealth, they built new roads and constructed new mines, and raised an army to defend their growing realm. A road to the coast was constructed, and in true Zhuman tradition, a city arose on the trampled corpse of a tiny seaside village: Port Tartiah.

Only 40 years after the founding of the Zhuman empire, Marjanah led an army east, pushing Zhuman control past the Dark Mesas, to the lower foothills of Alquarest. Serafima led an army west, and took the eastern third of Bad-Biliad, essentially the entire part that lay east of the Biliad canyon.

The Zhuman empire is now one of the largest and richest empires in the world, and is definitely the youngest. Some say its power is due to Marjanah's magic, even though she doesn't overtly exercise her powers or use them to dominate her subjects, lest she be considered a Wizard-King (or a Dark Lord like Lord Chaert in the Great Weald). Others say it's due to Serafima's shrewdness, her business sense, and her heartless exploitation of the desert people she has banished to the deep mines and quarries. The truth is much simpler: Zhuman power comes from water. Clean, accessible, reliable, and salt-free, in a realm where a drop is worth more than its weight in gold, water has the power to transform a tribe of nomads into a world power. Whoever controls the water, controls Arif.