Near Eastern Project

 
Near Eastern Fantasy World Project

Since wrapping up on my four week diagnostic project, I've made a start on my semester 1 practice project. Sticking with concept art, my new project is to create a fantasy world that takes inspiration from Ancient Near Eastern civilisations. Some prominent examples include the Assyrians, Sumerians, Babylonians, and the Achaemenid Empire. My justification for this project is that I feel that the rich cultures of  the Ancient Near East are heavily underused when it comes to historical influences in games, and pop culture in general. Having studied this area of history quite heavily during the final year of my bachelors, I've realised how interesting it is, and I'm now hoping to draw inspiration from it to develop a concept for a fantasy world that feels refreshing within a medium that is saturated with the more widely known Norse, Greek or Japanese influences, to name the obvious examples. The ideas for this world have been floating around in my head for a while now, so I'm glad to be taking them further.

Above is the initial piece I created when starting this project, and it depicts a key moment that would occur early within the game, and is a core world event. The idea is for the game to follow two timelines, with this being the one that occurred in the past, somewhat like a series of flashbacks. The primary purpose of this piece was for me to orientate myself and establish an early look and feel for the world. The scene depicts two brothers, central characters to both the world and the game's story, as they stumble on a sunken ruin while searching the dunes for supplies to bring back to their small caravan community. Though they have explored plenty of sunken ruins from a better age gone by, they have no idea what awaits them this time. The chambers of this ruin house an orb that will grant them the power of creation, such that they become veritable gods in a world where the concept of deity does not exist. It will become clear that they are not the first to inherit this power, but are rather next in a long, ancient line to which the sunken ruins once belonged. The brothers will go on to raise a fertile, prosperous paradise from the treacherous lands they inhabit, establishing a new, hopeful age. However, they will grow apart and eventually their fighting will destroy everything they created. It will be left to someone else to restore what could have been.

Here are some early explorations of the scene shown above:

I ended up going with the composition from the third thumbnail because it best incapsulated the feel of a new age's arrival that I wanted to convey, with the sun rising in the distance.

At this stage I also played around with some rock formation ideas:

I wanted to explore various unusual forms that were in some cases inexplicable (3 and 4 for example). The idea is that the landscape would feature some giant rock formations such as these, parts crumbling and some still standing, and after the point at which the two brothers acquire the power and begin to play and discover their abilities, it should become evident to the player that the odd rock formations spreading across the land are the remains of similar experimentation by previous power holders, possibly thousands of years ago.

Near Eastern Kingship

The central inspiration and theme for this game world is the idea of kingship in the ancient Near East. Researching the subject has shown me that there are a few key imagery-based pillars of kingship in this milieu. These are the King as the gardener, the shepherd, the lion-hunter, and the temple builder. A king's charismatic nature is also hugely important, either in the sense of personal charisma/excellence, or of charisma of the institution of kingship itself, as is the case for the Achaemenid Empire. I'll give a rough explanation of each of these pillars, trying to keep it brief.

The ideas of gardening and shepherding speak to the king's role as a protector, cultivator and provider to his people. A key example for this would be the image of Ashurnasirpal II pollinating the tree of life (above middle), found on a stone relief from his throne room, mid 9th cent. BCE. We also see many murals depicting kings' personal gardens, filled with fruit-bearing tress and impressive irrigation systems (above right). A Near Eastern king's garden also represents his Empire in a geographical sense, which he is duty-bound to tend to such that it grows in the best way possible. The idea that the king should be a hunter of lions (above left) represents his capability in conquest, and indicates his individual excellence. This is an essential display of personal charisma in kingship. Lions are hence one of the most important pieces of ancient Near Eastern imagery, seen repeatedly across all forms of art. The image of the temple builder speaks to the kings role in insuring that the gods are well looked after, as the primary justification for their kingship tends to be divine ordination in service of some greater purpose, such as to bring the whole world out of the shadows of lies, and into the light of truth, as is the case with the Achaemenids. Depending on the specific culture, this can essentially position a king as an extension/conduit of the divine will. Unlike a Pharaoh that is considered a god, an Achaemenid king for example, is more like a servant of God.

Another aspect of kingship in the Near East is that kings often try to situate themselves as part of a long line of previous rulers, no matter how tenuous the links. The Sumerian King list for example, is essentially a timeline of the rulers of ancient Sumer, composed late 3rd mil. BCE, and updated with later kings. The further back the list goes, the more mythologised it gets, with some of the earliest kings stated to have ruled for thousands of years, and it becomes more reasonable in the later portion. There is a clear attempt by the later kings to tie themselves to this 'history' of their land, perhaps in reinforcement of their right to rule, by adding themselves to the list. Separately, when Cyrus the Great, the (debatable) founder of the Achaemenid Empire took Babylon from under Nabonidus' rule, he presented himself (through murals and foundational inscriptions) as a course-corrector in Babylon's history by ending the Neo-Babylonian rule that had usurped Assyrian rule a century before, despite himself being unrelated to that dynasty. In doing this he tied himself into the city's dynastic history, positioning himself in the legacy of the Assyrian dynasty, while simultaneously degrading Nabonidus' image and justify his own rule in response. He also took care to assert that Marduk, the patron god of Babylon, had come to him and declared him his champion in freeing Babylon from Nabonidus' tyranny, even though he was an outsider. This feeds into the idea of Near Eastern kings justifying their position by claiming divine ordination, and also serves as an example of charisma's importance since Babylon's god selected him for kingship based purely on personal excellence, regardless of his origin.

Inspiration Within My Game World 

The most important aspect of my game world is the orb that grants the power of creation if absorbed. This power allows a person to create effortlessly, raising great cities and palaces out of the sand, or creating unlimited sources of impossibly pristine water. These creations would be able to defy natural physics, for instance with water flowing upwards or its surface temporarily hardening to accommodate somebody's footsteps. Structures made by the user could defy gravity or balance in impossible ways, as long as the creator lives. The world is one without religion, so this ability would be utterly inexplicable and wondrous, making its user the closest thing to a god that exists as a concept. Though the brothers do not initially choose to be rulers, the people designate them as such in the end. This is a flip on the source material, since Near Eastern kings fulfil the roles discussed above because they are kings and that's what kings do, whereas the brothers are made kings by the people because of the roles they have fulfilled.

After acquiring the power, the two brothers would create great cities that convey the ideas of Near Eastern kingship in a very literal (and big) sense. One city welcomes all within its walls as it expands, providing shelter from the treacherous world outside and bringing harmony to the land, just as an Achaemenid king brings the world from the lie to the truth, or from chaos to order in the case of the Assyrian kings. Further, while clean water and nourishment were once a struggle, the brothers are now able to provide both in unlimited supply, and thus they enact the shepherding and gardening roles/themes of Near Eastern kingship. 

The orb itself is also emblematic of divine ordination, as the brothers discover it and were thus in a way selected for its power by it much as kings are selected for the role according to the will of the gods, for instance with Cyrus and Marduk in Babylon, to use the example given earlier. Further, they are not the first or last to acquire the power, and the one thing they have in common with all previous rulers/creators, though they may not see it this way themselves, is that they acquired the orb's power, which places them within a legacy, as is often seen in the presentation of kingship in the Near East. I plan to make a concept piece at some point of the orb chamber, which involves a self-fulfilling wall relief of its line of owners, to illustrate this point further.

The Near Eastern inspiration for this world concept will show up hopefully in some way across everything I produce for this project and of course isn't limited to just what I've discussed in this post. This was instead an initial look at some of the ideas and inspirations that I'll be fleshing out over the course of this project.