LogFAQs > #890136622

shadowsword87 posted...

All right, well how about people who are claiming descendance from Assyria? I know that people will claim ancestry over it even nowadays. Would it be reasonable to have a group of them riding around still, 200 years later still raiding stuff?

People always claim descent from all sorts of mythological forebears. Greeks were pretty keen on tracing their ancestry back to some great-grandfather or other who was secretly one of Zeus' kids or the like, and even today you've got lots of groups claiming to be descended from one of the Lost Tribes of Israel (which aren't actually missing - we basically know exactly what happened to them in the same way we know what happened to the settlers at Roanoke. The problem is that most people just repeat things they've heard verbatim without doing the 5 minutes worth of research it would take to get the answers).

The real problem is, the "survivors" of lost civilizations rarely get pushed out and become vagabonds and wanderers like in stories. What actually happens is that they intermarry into other groups, slowly evolving into new groups. What happened to the Assyrians after Assyria fell is that its land got absorbed into other empires (Persia, Chaldeans, the Medes, etc), and the people who used to think of themselves as Assyrians started thinking of themselves as Persians, Medians, and so on. Moreover, that's mainly the upper classes - most peasants never had an overdeveloped sense of cultural identity (remember, this is long before the advent of nationalism as a concept), so from their perspective the only real change was that they went from being peasants who paid taxes to one ruler to being being peasants who paid taxes to a slightly different noble. Sure, individuals might get pushed out of power and become bandits out of desperation, but that happens all the time anyway even without political upheaval, and the resulting outlaws rarely propagate their ideology beyond their own lifespan.

If you're bending history a bit to make things more interesting, you could go with having a secretive group that considers itself the surviving legacy of fallen Crete (ie, the Minoan civilization that was ultimately supplanted by the mainland Greeks prior to the Greek Heroic/Golden Age), or go back even farther and bring Atlantis into the mix (since Plato's version of the story had them as rivals to ancient Golden Age Athens).

Or you could go with the more mythological version of Troy (as opposed to the realistic version we're learning more and more about over time, which probably survived the Trojan War, got rebuilt, and continued on with life without any realistic inclination to swear 1000 years of vengeance against the Greeks - who were themselves a mostly different culture by 400 BC anyway). Virgil has Aeneas escaping Troy and going on to found Rome (well, to found Alba Longa which in turn founded Rome) while most of the other Trojans are killed and the city is destroyed (in reality, lots of people probably survived and just rebuilt the city, like they'd done half a dozen times before, because that was what life was like back then). In that scenario, a few dozen war-scarred survivors of Troy might theoretically establish a Greek "mystery cult" sort of group that exists to destroy Greece (and which might actually have been responsible for the soon-after fall of Mycenaean civilization and the beginning of the Greek Dark Age).

For flavor, maybe Trojan assassins kill targets with the ritualistic greeting "When you meet Priam in Hades, tell him the Sons of Ilion still honor his name."


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