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<h3>2620 C — Cities and Literacy</h3>
<h4>Cities</h4>
Barbarian invasions, taxation, and the dissipation of trade networks have wreaked havoc on urbanism, especially in <b>Eretald</b>. Aránicer is a network of small villages nestling amid ruins; Aites is abandoned; the only habitation in Eärdur province worth calling a city is <a href="Javascript:parent.al('O%C5%BEn%C3%ABa');">Ožnëa</a> (Caď. <i>Octinila</i>), the capital. About the only cities that are prospering are those of Kebri, plus Verduria— both dedicated to trade and protected from barbarian attack, Kebri by its maritime location, Verduria by its strong island fortress, Arcaln.
<p><b>Xurno</b> would have been just as downtrodden a century ago, but it is on the rise, and it is now strong enough that not every town needs the massive walls and waterworks that were the foundation of the new empire.
<p>The <b>Čisrans</b> have been spared the barbarian scourge, and largely dominate ocean trading. The <b>Tžuro</b> have a strong urban culture, but have no genius for founding cities; urban life is almost entirely concentrated in Jippirim and to some extent in Jaešim.
<h4>Writing</h4>
The boundary of the <b>literate area</b> is not really as binary as it appears on the map. Literacy is largely confined to towns and to nobles’ castles, and in remoter areas even this is attenuated. And on the other hand, barbarian conquest may have eliminated administrative and commercial uses of writing, but not necessarily suppressed the practice entirely. The nomads would need to keep a few scribes around anyway, for diplomatic correspondance.
<p>Only in the <b>Jippirasti</b> realm is literacy really widespread, thanks to the religious injunction that worshippers of Jippir be able to read the scriptures. Among the nomads, though the men were taught to read, they largely delegated all reading and writing to women, who as keepers of the lineages’s wealth kept the accounts anyway. In worship services, the lectors were women, though the teachers and leaders of prayer were men.
<p>The <b>Caďinor minuscules</b> are a streamlined form of the classical alphabet— or rather a set of forms, since each region had its own variation. The letterforms of the imperial heartland— Svetla corridor from Verduria to Zariaspa— are the source of the modern Verdurian lowercase and cursive letters. The modern Barakhinei alphabet hints at the differences which have been suppressed by widespread adoption of Verdurian norms.
<p>The <b>flaids</b> adopted the Caďinor alphabet for their own language at about this time. The <b>Kebreni</b> learned writing from the Caďinorians when they were part of the empire. For some time they wrote in Caďinor, then (c. 2000) in their own language, using the Caďinor alphabet.
<p>The one new writing system since the last map is the <b>Demoshi alphabet</b>, worked out in the last few centuries. The consonants were largely based on Jippirasti letterforms, the vowels on Caďinor. A curiosity of the script is that in the 2600s the Demoshi began to write downward rather than rightward, rotating each symbol 90° to the right. The numbers were not Caďinorian, but based on traditional Munkhâshi tally marks.
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