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<h3>-2500 — The time of proto-Eastern</h3>
<p>The <b><a href="Javascript:parent.al('Monkhayu');">Monkhayu</a></b> along the Svetla were developing agriculture at this time. Their staple crops were wheat (V. <i>griu</i>), barley (<i>horže</i>), round beans (<i>fažolo</i>), lentils (<i>lëtiy</i>), and chickpeas (<i>grak</i>), supplemented by carrots, turnips, pears, oranges, olives, and grapes. The chief textiles are flax (<i>lan</i>) and cotton (<i>lácati</i>); the first domesticated animals were cows, pigs, goats, and chickens.
<h4>Language groups</h4>
The Taëse language groups are now labelled: Monkhayu, Eynleyni, and the Qaraus in the north; Easterners, Wede:i, Lenani-Littoral, and Mei in the south. Overall locations must be about right; exact boundaries are not, and again in the hunter-gatherer areas there were likely still large populations speaking languages now lost.
<p>We can trace <b><a href="Javascript:parent.updir('eastern2.html');">proto-Eastern</a></b> to about this time, and the Easterners to the lands now called Bolon and Rajjay, in northwestern Xengiman. This is frankly marginal land— mostly grassland; the Wede:i got the good agricultural land.
<p>As with proto-Indo-European, interesting cultural conjectures can be made on the basis of the reconstructed common vocabulary. Their inland location is confirmed by the absence of a common word for ‘sea’; other linguistic evidence depicts a male-dominated culture, divided into clans, familiar with bow and arrow and the canoe, and perhaps worshipping a single god, <b>*Endānor</b>.
<p>There are no common words for towns, plows, farms, or harvesting. There is a word for garden (*<i>ktats</i>), which may indicate that rudimentary agriculture was known before the dialects began to break up. There are words for the major crops, but the Easterners would have known about these crops and used them as food sources long before learning to grow them.
<h4>Elcarin news</h4>
The <b>elcari</b> have won their last major war with the múrtani, though the victory required the immigration of the elcarin settlements in the Ctelm mountains (Khakrôpmîqhridd) and the assistance of Khak Diqm (the settlement in the Diqun Bormai). This last struggle has left both races so exhausted and depopulated that both would require centuries of recuperation.
<p>The smaller size of the elcarin realms should not be misinterpreted; they are more densely populated than those of the múrtani, who are less social, even with their own kind.
<p>The elcari developed <b><a href="Javascript:parent.al('Steam);">steam</a></b> technology around -3500; steam-powered catapults and primitive moving tanks facilitated their victory in the war. Steam transformed the <i>khak</i> from surface settlements to excavations. This was partly a matter of defense (it was easier to limit entrance to the excavation complex than to fortify the sprawling surface structures) and convenience for transport (it was easier to tunnel through a mountain than to cross it). But ultimately the preference was aesthetic: the elcari preferred the freedom to create three-dimensional structures of their own design rather than rely on the arbitrary forms created by nature.
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