Daevabad Trilogy Trash

I’m thinking about Jamshid. The country boy turned captain of the royal guard, I guarantee he has a whole collection of scars. Each with an interesting story. Some horseback adventure in Zariaspa gone sideways, or some blows originally meant for Muntadhir in a drunken brawl…

…and of course, the half dozen arrows buried in his spine. What did they represent to him? Failure to prevent or stop Dara’s rampage? Success in protecting his Emir? Perhaps a bitter reminder that being a Daeva under Qahtani rule means service at the cost of your body and life? Maybe they could have become trophies one day? Once he constructed the modified saddle that would accommodate his disability on horseback, the scars could have become a reminder of what he was strong enough to adapt to for the sake of what (and who) he loved. 

inspired by this post by @bagheerita :)

Dara e Afshin: ~1450 years old

Lived around 30 years, was enslaved for around 1400 years, and "lived" another 20 years or so before meeting Nahri.

Razu Qaraqashi: 2300 years old

"Indeed. I'll be twenty-three hundred at this year's generation celebration. Anahid's grandchildren were ruling Daevabad when the ifrit took me." (KOC 45)

The Ifrit: 6000+ years old

Part 1 - Djinnistani

From the Daevapedia Wiki: The language of the Daeva tribe. Described by Nahri as sounding similar to Hebrew, though Yaqub adamantly disagreed (City of Brass, Ch.1, p.17). When discussing with fans about writing some Divasti dialogue, the author wrote, "there was an embarrassing amount of time spent with proto-indo-european roots" (Chakraborty, Twitter, 4/13/2020) (1).

First of all, what is Proto-Into-European? It’s the “reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European language family”, which contains about 446 living languages spoken by over 3.4 billion people (2). That’s quite a lot, but we can narrow it down geographically.

This is a map of West Asia slapped on top of the Daevabad map from City of Brass. I made this overlay a while ago (in Google Slides, please excuse the quality), and while it’s not a perfect match, it gives us a better idea of which countries (and languages) make up Daevastana. In case the map text is too blurry, this region includes Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyztan, and Pakistan.

This region overlaps with the Iranian (or Iranic) branch of the Indo-European Language Family, shown by this map (3): 

So here's my question: The Daeva tribe adopted the original name of their species as their tribal name. Did they do the same for their language? IE, is Divasti the original language spoken by the Daevas pre-Suleiman’s curse? In that case I want to look for the oldest language spoken in the “Daevastana” region.

The Iranian language family is chronologically classified into Old, Middle, and New Iranian, with evidence of only TWO Old Iranian languages surviving. These are Avestan, and Old Persian (4). Avestan was originally spoken from around 1500 - 400 BCE (8), and Old Persian was adapted to cuneiform around 600 - 500 BCE (6).

Fun fact, Old Persian would have been the language used around the time of Darius the Great, whose name is a derivation of... Darayavahoush (9).

Avestan was already a dead language known only to priests by the 5th century AD, so I doubt any modern production would be able to adapt it for use as Divasti (5). That leaves Old Persian, which is a DIRECT ancestor of New Persian, aka, Farsi (6). Farsi is the most commonly spoken language of the Iranian language group (4). It has been spoken in its current stage since around the 8th century, and has around 127 million speakers today, predominantly in Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan; all of which are located in "Daevastana" (7).

Here's a map of Farsi-speaking areas overlaid with the Daevabad map from City of Brass (10).

TL;DR: Divasti - Farsi/Persian

Bonus info and works cited under the split :)

Disclaimer, I'm going to be making one post per language so I can go into a deeper dive for each one :)

From the Daevapedia Wiki: Daevabad's most commonly spoken tongue; a merchant creole djinn and shafit use to speak with those outside their tribe. It is described by Nahri as a "raucous mismatch of every language she had ever heard in the bazaars." (City of Brass, Ch.13, p.231)

We can assume that once Nahri gets to Daevabad, every conversation without a specified language is in Djinnistani. English should be fine imo. Honestly, I can see an adaptation forgoing any mention of this language and simply referring to it as “the common tongue”, if at all. 

anyway Kingdom of Copper Spoilers ahead :)

I understand why Shannon didn’t give us a Dara POV in City of Brass. I fear it would have read too much like pushing a “love triangle” between Nahri, Ali, and Dara from the start. And while that does get hinted at later on, putting it front and center would have detracted from the other dramatic elements of the story (imo)

That being said, I think a Dara POV would have been hilarious because this man is absolutely an unreliable narrator for all time. Not even in a malicious way, but because he is almost as much a fish-out-of-water as Nahri is. He has no clue what’s going on. His perception is SEVERELY messed up by propaganda, bias, nostalgia, DEEP indignation, and the sheer passage of literally 1400+ years.