The Ghurz
The Ghurz, who appeared in The Silver Pipe and, though not explicitly identified as such, in The Guardian, were a nomadic tribe that lived in the lands north and west of the Opthalm Sea. Visually, their ancient incarnations took a lot of inspiration from the Ouled Nail of Algeria:
Being nomads without a consistent place to store their shit, Ghurz women typically wore much of their family's wealth on their bodies in the form of elaborate jewelry.
In ancient times, the Ghurz used domesticated akhs (Altirhinus) as mounts and beasts of burden, and they had also domesticated an unspecified genus of proceratosaurid for use as guard animals.
Altirhinus by Jack Wood.
Proceratosaurus by Gabriel Ugueto.
In Saum Geron, among the largely patriarchal Saumadhi people, the Ghurz had kind of a mixed reputation. While they were a valued source of exotic foreign goods picked up on their travels, they, and particularly their women, were also looked down on for their cultural attitude towards sex; among the Ghurz casual, premarital sex was not seen as bad or shameful, and in fact many Ghurz women engaged in prostitution to earn money on their stops outside villages and cities. Unfortunately, while they saw nothing wrong with it, and they had no shortage of enthusiastic customers, it gave rise to a social stigma among neighboring groups that believed that women should be quiet, submissive, and chaste. Not like those Ghurz hussies, who liked to laugh and dance and fuck all the live long day!
Unfortunately these undeservedly negative attitudes towards the Ghurz would haunt them into the modern day, where if I'd featured them in any stories they would have basically become that region's version of the Romani, an unfairly persecuted minority kept on the fringes of society.
