Got hung up today on the question of whether I should be talking about time in weeks or not. The short answer is “yes”, I decided to go ahead and do that. But the long answer includes a review of duodecimal systems and the broader question of which numbers tend to have cultural significance and why.
While I enjoy wandering through the twists and turns of what we know about ancient life, what we suspect or intuit, and what we absolutely do not know, my goal here is to tell a story. It really does not matter for the purposes of the story whether a week is 7 days long or 6. However, for the purposes of storytelling, it matters very much whether I am consistent in how I define “week” and true-to-life in how I express the passage of time during that interlude.
Here are some of the approaches that I’m using to streamline the process of settling on details.
For technology, anything that existed by 5000 years ago anywhere in the world is fair game. Finding out what all that includes is the best part of this whole undertaking!
For setting, I am creating mock-ups of the locations in Minecraft. That might sound a bit weird to anyone who doesn’t know Minecraft… but it’s a perfectly valid use of this ultra-flexible gaming platform. I even confirmed that their copyright allows me to publish my screenshots, so here’s an example - the communal cooking area at Gaia’s Rest.
For language, I am using modern English as much as possible. So yes, I will be talking about “months” and “weeks”, not ”moons” and “quarter moons”. I will be drawing on other modern languages for cultural and regional characterization, including Swahili, Arabic, Welsh, and Hindi.
For climate, I am starting off with a location similar to my own current location. Unfortunately, I know just enough metereology to want the trade winds to dictate what happens across the broader region, but no idea how to get the settings I want while doing that, so… we’ll see what happens with that.
That’s the quick overview of some of the challenges that I’ve run into so far. There are lots yet to come, however!