Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the OnlineDistributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
THE HYBORIAN AGE
By Robert E. Howard
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was first published in The Phantagraph February, August, and October-November 1936 issues. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
(Nothing in this article is to be considered as an attempt to advance any theory in opposition to accepted history. It is simply a fictional background for a series of fiction-stories. When I began writing the Conan stories a few years ago, I prepared this 'history' of his age and the peoples of that age, in order to lend him and his sagas a greater aspect of realness. And I found that by adhering to the 'facts' and spirit of that history, in writing the stories, it was easier to visualize (and therefore to present) him as a real flesh-and-blood character rather than a ready-made product. In writing about him and his adventures in the various kingdoms of his Age, I have never violated the 'facts' or spirit of the 'history' here set down, but have followed the lines of that history as closely as the writer of actual historical-fiction follows the lines of actual history. I have used this 'history' as a guide in all the stories in this series that I have written.)
* * * * *
Of that epoch known by the Nemedian chroniclers as the Pre-CataclysmicAge, little is known except the latter part, and that is veiled in themists of legendry. Known history begins with the waning of thePre-Cataclysmic civilization, dominated by the kingdoms of Kamelia,Valusia, Verulia, Grondar, Thule and Commoria. These peoples spoke asimilar language, arguing a common origin. There were other kingdoms,equally civilized, but inhabited by different, and apparently olderraces.
The barbarians of that age were the Picts, who lived on islands far outon the western ocean; the Atlanteans, who dwelt on a small continentbetween the Pictish Islands and the main, or Thurian Continent; and theLemurians, who inhabited a chain of large islands in the easternhemisphere.
There were vast regions of unexplored land. The civilized kingdoms,though enormous in extent, occupied a comparatively small portion of thewhole planet. Valusia was the western-most kingdom of the ThurianContinent; Grondar the eastern-most. East of Grondar, whose people wereless highly cultured than those of their kindred kingdoms, stretched awild and barren expanse of deserts. Among the less arid stretches ofdesert, in the jungles, and among the mountains, lived scattered clansand tribes of primitive savages. Far to the south there was a mysteriouscivilization, unconnected with the Thurian culture, and apparentlypre-human in its nature. On the far-eastern shores of the Continentthere lived another race, human, but mysterious and non-Thurian, withwhich the Lemurians from time to time came in contact. They apparentlycame from a shadowy and nameless continent lying somewhere east of theLemurian Islands.
The Thurian civilization was crumbling; their armies were composedlargely of barbarian mercenaries. Picts, Atlanteans and Lemurians weretheir generals, their statesmen, often their kings. Of the bickerings ofthe kingdoms, and the wars between Valusia and Commoria, as well as theconquests by which the Atlanteans founded a kingdom on the mainland,there were more legends than accurate history.
Then the Cataclysm rocked the world. Atlantis and Lemuria sank, and thePictish Islands were heaved up to form the mountain peaks of a newcontinent. Sections of the Thurian Continent vanished under the waves,or sinking, formed great inland lakes and seas. Volcanoes broke forthand terrific earthquakes shook down the shining cities of the empires.Whole nations were blotted out.
The barbarians fared a little better than the civilized races. Theinhabitants of the Pictish Islands were destroyed, but a great colony ofthem, settled among the mountains of Valusia's southern frontier toserve as a buffer against foreign invasion, was untouched. TheContinental kingdom of the Atlanteans likewise escaped the common ruin,and to it came thousands of their tribesmen in ships from the sinkingland. Many Lemurians escaped to the eastern coast of the ThurianContinent, which was comparatively untouched. There they were enslavedby the ancient race which already dwelt there, and their history, forthousands of years, is a history of brutal servitude.
In the western part of the Continent, changing conditions createdstrange forms of plant and animal life. Thick jungles covered theplains, great rivers cut their roads to the sea, wild mountains wereheaved up, and lakes covered the ruins of old cities in fertile valleys.To the Continental kingdom of the Atlanteans, from sunken areas, swarmedmyriads of beasts and savages--ape-men and apes. Forced to battlecontinually for their lives, they yet managed to retain vestiges oftheir former state of highly advanced barbarism. Robbed of metals andores, they became workers in stone like their distant ancestors, andhad attained a real artistic level, when their struggling culture cameinto contact with the powerful Pictish nation. The Picts had alsoreverted to flint, but had advanced more rapidly in the matter ofpopulation and war-science. They had none of the Atlanteans' artisticnature; they were a ruder, more practical, more prolific race. They leftno pictures painted or carved on ivory, as did their enemies, but theyleft remarkably efficient flint weapons in plenty.
These stone-age kingdoms clashed, and in a series of bloody wars, theoutnumbered Atlanteans were hurled back into a state of savagery, andthe evolution of the Picts was halted. Five hundred years after theCataclysm the barbaric kingdoms have vanished. It is now a nation ofsavages--the Picts--carrying on continual warfare with tribes ofsavages--the Atlanteans. The Picts had the advantage of numbers andunity, whereas the Atlanteans had fallen into loosely knit clans. Thatwas the west of that day.
In the distant east, cut off from the rest of the world by the heavingup of gigantic mountains and the forming of a chain of vast lakes, theLemurians are toiling as slaves of their ancient masters. The far southis still veiled in mystery. Untouched by the Cataclysm, its destiny isstill pre-human. Of the civilized races of the Thurian Continent, aremnant of one of the non-Valusian nations dwells among the lowmountains of the southeast--the Zhemri. Here and there about the worldare scattered clans of apish savages, entirely ignorant of the rise andfall of the great civilizations. But in the far north another people areslowly coming into existence.
At the time of the Cataclysm, a band of savages, whose development wasnot much above that of the Neanderthal, fled to the north to escapedestruction. They found the snow-countries inhabited only by a speciesof ferocious snow-apes--huge shaggy white animals, apparently native tothat climate. These they fought and drove beyond the Arctic circle, toperish, as the savages thought. The latter, then, adapted themselves totheir hardy new environment and throve.
After the Pictish-Atlantean wars had destroyed the beginnings of whatmight have been a new culture, another, lesser cataclysm further alteredthe appearance of the original continent, left a great inland sea wherethe chain of lakes had been, to further separate west from east, and theattendant earthquakes, floods and volcanoes completed the ruin of thebarbarians which their tribal wars had begun.
A thousand years after the lesser cataclysm, the western world is seento be a wild country of jungles and lakes and torrential rivers. Amongthe forest-covered hills of the northwest exist wandering bands ofape-men, without human speech, or the knowledge of fire or the use ofimplements. They are the descendants of the Atlanteans, sunk back intothe squalling chaos of jungle-bestiality from which ages ago theirancestors so laboriously crawled. To the southwest dwell scattered clansof degraded, cave-dwelling savages, whose speech is of the mostprimitive form, yet who still retain the name of Picts, which has cometo mean merely a term designating men--themselves, to distinguish themfrom the
true beasts with which they contend for life and food. It istheir only link with their former stage. Neither the squalid Picts northe apish Atlanteans have any contact with other tribes or peoples.
Far to the east, the Lemurians, levelled almost to a bestial planethemselves by the brutishness of their slavery, have risen and destroyedtheir masters. They are savages stalking among the ruins of a strangecivilization. The survivors of that civilization, who have escaped thefury of their slaves, have come westward. They fall upon that mysteriouspre-human kingdom of the south and overthrow it, substituting their ownculture, modified by contact with the older one. The newer kingdom iscalled Stygia, and remnants of the older nation seemed to have survived,and even been worshipped, after the race as a whole had been destroyed.
Here and there in the world small groups of savages are showing signs ofan upward trend; these are scattered and unclassified. But in the north,the tribes are growing. These people are called