Worldbuilding Wednesdays: Bronze-clad Development

Welcome to Worldbuilding Wednesdays!  Every Wednesday, we spend what is probably far too much time walking through our worldbuilding process.  This week, we're going to skip right through the Bronze Age and a good chunk of the Iron Age to land in the age of the apartment building.

What We Have So Far

We spent last week coming up with the names of some of the biggest things around, using languages that are both uncommon enough to probably avoid offending a native speaker and similar enough to the languages we came up with for our species to have reasonably used the same words.  For example, no longer do we have to call the glowing, sun-like satellite The Lantern.  It is now Lumera!  Which translates to, uh, "Lantern."

It's progress, we swear.

Before we did that, we went through and built a cultural mythology out of a mixture of different religions and folklore.  Before we did that, we established what our city would look like as its different peoples ascended from the Stone Age to the Bronze Age-- effectively, moving from working as extended families to working as a fledgling civilization.  We're going to move forward in history next, but before we do, a note about what that history is going to look like.

We aren't going to assign dates as we move forward, but if anyone is following along with this series in an effort to build their own setting, feel free.  Dates are a great way to pin down the flow of time, and it is frankly wild how different a setting can feel with a timeline that goes back 400 years as opposed to one that stretches back several thousand.  That said, there's a reason we're avoiding dates: unlike on Earth, each of the civilizations on our world is, by the very nature of the planet, semi-isolated.  There's a rich historical tapestry in and around the Euphrates Valley on Earth, for example, but one of the big reasons for that is that there were something like half a dozen nascent civilizations all competing for the same 1,500-mile-long patch of land.  On Istenaiti (that's the name of our world), the closest civilization is likely more than 1,500 miles away.  History is, quite often, a list of grievances, and our people don't have anyone to really argue with, so until technology renders the distances more manageable, time flows differently in our world.  Rather than concern ourselves with exactly how different it is, we're just going to note it and move on.

Millennia-Long Handwaving

One thing we do know is that military innovation is a major driver of technology, and (aside from dealing with monsters, as discussed in our companion series about Magicbuilding) there isn't much call for it.  Certainly there will be no major wars any time soon.  It would take more than a year just to march to the closest belligerent.

With war, the progression from Bronze Age technology to Iron Age technology took thousands of years, as sources of bronze became increasingly difficult to access through trade, and smiths began working the more difficult but common iron.  Once iron became ubiquitous, the ready access to metal spurred development, and slowly, technological progress began to speed up.

Without war, the only reason to move from bronze to iron would be if copper or tin mines ran dry.  In a world with 100 times the natural resources per capita, that won't be an issue.  We can thus expect that the Bronze Age of our world will last rather longer than Earth's.  This has some good sides and bad sides to it: continuing refinement of bronzeworking will lead to some incredibly long-lasting masterpieces of art and engineering.  Some aspects of construction will suffer, since bronze tends to be stronger than iron but also more likely to break instead of bending.  Regular work with iron led directly to the discovery of steel, which is several times stronger than bronze; that won't happen in our civilization until some enterprising young person discovers how to cast iron, which in our world didn't happen until just before the Renaissance.  Until then, economically speaking, iron just isn't worth it.

Given that, why don't we just skip to the point right before iron starts to take off?  While plenty of important things will happen on the local scale, by historical standards most of what happens between where we left off and the advent of cheap iron is the steady improvement of old technologies, rather than the revolutionary development of new ones.

The Peak of Ancient Civilization

The last time we looked at our city, Karha, it was a city with massive, sloped, glazed stone walls.  Within, the important community buildings were made of stone, houses mostly of wood.  Buildings clustered at the foot of the trees of the hyperforest, which were only rarely removed due to the sheer logistics involved.  Smaller satellite locations were discussed but never explicitly described, beyond mention that any arena would be close to the sea.  Thanks to ease of glazing and its many benefits over untreated stone, the city was a vibrant mosaic.  So what has changed over the millennia?

The population has grown steadily, if much more slowly than on Earth.  Three species that can't interbreed means that the number of breeding couples is that much lower, and this is only somewhat offset by the lack of warfare.  Smaller communities have popped up at regular distances.  If we look at the gold standard set by the Roman Empire, we can assume that each community is about one day's travel from the last, built around a rest stop for travelers.  That won't be a uniform distance, thanks to the hilly terrain.  Travel is mostly due to trade, itself a side effect of the growing logistical issues of Karha's population.  Those small communities that have the most valuable or needed goods will grow over time.

The city's appearance has changed, significantly but not drastically.  Stone has become the predominant building material; thanks to those massive walls, the people of Karha have built up rather than out.  The Bronze Age-equivalent of high-rise apartment buildings are the norm, with the tallest subtly tied to the trees.

A fun fact for you folk that demonstrates unintended consequences:  you would think that buildings could grow much taller on our world than on Earth.  At this stage in history, you would be wrong.  While stone is much easier to work with, the limiting factor is wind.  While we've established that the weather of Istenaiti is much more gentle than Earth's, it isn't 10 times weaker, and Bronze Age buildings primarily used weight to resist wind... meaning that our 10-times-lighter buildings are knocked over much more easily.  Still, building with stone is cheap, and even the increased risk of wind damage would only knock the maximum height of your typical apartment building to about 15 stories.  Karha's apartments would likely be tall enough to attach to the lowest level of the hyperforest's massive branches.  Above that level, smaller detached homes (of mostly wooden construction) in the branches would be the norm.

In addition to the older community buildings, we'll see both stone and bronze sculptures.  In fact, working stone and metal would be an incredibly common method of artistic expression.  This is in line with Earth, for the record; as soon as we started building with materials that would stand the test of time, we felt the need to decorate with equally permanent abandon.  Fountains would be easier to build on Istenaiti and thus common, and true hanging gardens would be possible.  Terraces on the apartment buildings ringing the trees would have plenty of plant growth, and the apartments themselves would be quite colorful.

Public education would not be a thing yet, but there would be multiple options for learning.  One could apprentice oneself to a master of any of dozens of professions, or sign on with a church, or take up work with the city's administrators.  Those skilled with math might take up with a merchant, traveling the various small towns to bring raw goods into the city and finished goods out to the satellite communities.

The occasional traveler from beyond the edge of civilization would appear.  Llaikan nomads that never gave up on the freedom of the megasavannah would visit, but raiders would be rare; outside of the little ring of communities around Karha, there aren't enough people to raid sustainably.  Along the coast, traveling bands of Siculi looking for an audience would be more common, and they would invariably find their way to the arena by the sea.  The most popular would likely make regular trips, taking advantage of the novelty of their act.  These are the folk most likely to invent coastal sailing, though given the chaotic tides of our world, it'll be more like a communal form of surfing.  The Rontakowa, the most insular of the species, will be the rarest visitors, and almost always with a purpose.  This provides us with a little worldbuilding proverb our people can spread:  "If you meet a Llaikan on the road, ask about the weather.  If you meet a Rontakowan on the road, ask them what's wrong."

One last visual for our city this week:  the regular appearance of bronze cladding.  The newer bronze-clad buildings will have shining, almost golden edges, as the bronze helps mildly with stability and a great deal with wear from weather.  Over time, the bronze will darken to the deep, almost black patina that older bronze objects are known for.  This is the sign that our people are ready for the next step, technologically- they're reaching the limits of what can be accomplished with bronze alone.

Conclusion

Karha is now a city of colorful mosaics, edged by gold and black metal.  Apartment buildings ring the trees, a second level of the city built on their rooftops.  Our city-state, in turn, is ringed by towns and villages, a true civilization in its own right.  The process may have taken longer than it would have on Earth, but nobody has invaded our razed our peaceful city by the hill.  That should count for something.

Next week, we're going to pull in some information from our magicbuilding series to fill out a couple of edges that we've only hinted at.  It's time for our blend of technology and magic to more prominently showcase that blend.