Dale,
With all due respect and filial scholarly love and affection, I submit the following waste of time...
POINTLESS, you can skip all this and go bother someone in a Pokemon forum... :evil:
There are a couple of problems with your theory. Where would the City of the Winged One from QUEEN OF THE BLACK COAST be located on Kaa-u/Nyumbani? Where would the Atlantean colony of Negari be? Your theory would need to take those questions into account.
As the City of the Winged Ones was right off the bank of the Zarkheba River, which in the time of Kull would have been the Gulf of Ontogi, it would be on an island in the center of the gulf. The island is avoided by sailors of Nyumbani, as those who pass by it in the day hear terrible cries coming from it, and those who pass by in the night tend to lose a watch member or two to unknown entities, who leave no mark on the vessel...
As to Negari, that is simple... it does not yet exist if you set the Nyumbani of Imaro in the same time frame as the Thuria of Kull! For the Atlanteans from Kull’s Atlantis have not yet arisen to their greatest level of power. Negari was founded after the time of Kull, when Atlantis was at its height, just before the cataclysm. I would place Negari at that point on the southern shore of the Ontogi using your south of the Zarkheba theory for the encounter, or on the north shore using the Savage Swords version, in which Conan is going north from the Zarkheba River.
The “Atlanteans of Atlan” of Nyumbani were a different sorcerous island kingdom that predated Kull’s Atlantis. I posit that the “Atlanteans of Atlan” were survivors of ancient Elder Hyperborea (the Hyperborean of Clark Ashton Smith, Eibon, and ca. 1,000,000 - 750,000 BCE), thus being extremely pale skinned, slightly non-human, and mighty in sorcery.
The dark-skinned Grondarians that survived the Great Cataclysm were called the Zhemri and eventually evolved into the Zamorian race. I believe that the statues of the Isle of Iron Statues were probably Grondorians.
I’m pretty sure the Zhemri and the Grondarians are distinct. Howard says in The Hyborian Age “Of the civilized races of the Thurian Continent, a remnant of one of the non-Valusian nations dwells among the mountains of the southeast – the Zhemri.” Grondar in western Thuria (or Western Grondar, as I term it) is a Valusian nation, as Howard attests in The Hyborian Age to it being one of the kingdoms akin to Kamelia, Valusia, and etc. At the very least their language would be Valusian (as Howard attests that the relationship between the Seven Kingdoms is hypothesized based upon a “similar language, arguing a similar origin”), while their culture would be a mix of Valusian and Grondarian, though physically they remain a Grondarian race, related to the people of Elder Cush. Had the Zhemri been Grondarian, Howard would not have stated explicitly that they were “non-Valusian.”
I’d also say the statues of that isle were actually Muvians (see my other post) as the description fits them exactly.
The people of Lemuria have saffron-colored skin (descendants are Khitai and Hyrkania), not dark.
Yes, by the time of Conan they certainly do. However, think on this: the Atlanteans were a brown skinned race, attested to by the skin tones of Kull and Conan, as well as the testimony of the captive in THE MOON OF SKULLS. If you accept the origin of the human race as being upon Eldest Lemuria, that is, the Lemuria of Thongor as told by Lin Carter (which, knowing your dislike for the pastiches he wrote, you probably do not, though it is an accepted part of the greater Cthulhu Mythos of which Conan and Kull are a part), therein the humans were brown skinned, and thus the first race of man was brown.
Mu IS NOT Australia! In Howard's THE ISLE OF EONS, the remnant isle of Mu is described as lying five days sail southeast of Tahiti. The continent is its Thurian Age heyday was probably about the size of Australia (20 major cities) and would have lain to the east/southeast of Lemuria.
While I find most of your interpretations to be spot on, I think your interpretation of the information presented in THE ISLE OF EONS is not quite right, though that is not your fault, as the story itself is not completely consistent itself. First, concerning the location of the isle, the ship was not five days out from Tahiti; it was a nameless number of days, it had traveled “days on end” through “nameless seas, long leagues off the trade routes” is how it is termed, certainly not just five days. And that was before it was driven by the hurricane. Second, all the hard information presented was from the half-understood translations of the Dutchman, who admitted “... there is many words in the writings that I cannot translate.” One of those I am sure is the name of the god Poseidon; he had personally hypothesized that this was a land dedicated to Poseidon before he had the scroll, and I think he just used that name as a marker for a name he did not understand (Dagon, perhaps, or even maybe Cthulhu?). Second, it is never really firmly established whether they are on the ruins of Lemuria or Mu, or even which version of those eponymous kingdoms the scroll is speaking of. At first the Dutchman thinks it is Lemuria, then he translates the name as Mu. I think Howard wasn’t quite sure where they were, either. Finally, Nayah mentions that the people of Valusia worship serpents, “where men bowed to the Serpent as they did in the youth of the earth,” in other words, abjectly. This was certainly not so in Kull’s time. The Lemuria/Mu of EONS therefore predates the Lemuria/Mu of Kull’s time.
I argue that the Mu of EONS is not the Mu of the time of Kull, it is a “kingdom of Mu” that predates Kull. The disaster that sank and destroyed the kingdom of Mu did not necessarily sink the entire continent upon which Mu was found; the high places of Valla were the last remnants of that kingdom which stood above the waves, nowhere is it mentioned that they are the last remnants of the continent. Australia, the Mu of Kull’s time, could well be a remnant of that Elder Mu, which spawned the Mu of the time of Kull. The descendants of Elder Mu would have settled this remnant of the continent and named it after their homeland of Mu, during the time after the sinking of the kingdom when “South they went and east and west and north.” Or the younger Mu could have been a new continent in the time of Kull, as when the people of Valla went forth “...they abode on islands and found strange, new continents hurled out of the deeps.” There were no new continents thrust up after the Cataclysm, but in a localized Pacific Ocean cataclysm that could certainly well have happened. Plus, his mention of Atlantis could be a reference to the Elder Hyperborean Atlan of Nyumbani, which above I posit predated the Atlantis of Kull by a thousand years. Perhaps the same religious backlash that ended Elder Mu also led to the end of Atlan. This would place the fall of this Mu around the same time as the fall of Atlan, about 1000 years before Kull’s time.
BTW, my source for ISLE OF EONS is the 1979 Glenn Lord version in THE GODS OF BAL-SAGOTH; perhaps your source is a different manuscript; there are three versions at least, none of which Howard was ever satisfied enough with to complete.
The Pictish Isles became the Rocky and Cascade Mountain ranges according to Howard.
Ah, yes, but to have regular relations with Picts, as Kull, Atlantis, and Valusia did, there would have to be no less than two if not three ranges of “Pictish Isles.” The Western (Rocky Mountains), Central (Appalachian Mountains), and Eastern (Atlantic Ridge) are what I have posited. The primitive Picts did not, could not have had the technology to make regular raiding trips from the equivalent of Denver to the Canary Islands (or even the Azores). There had to be several series of islands, whereby the Picts would have spread from the Western islands (where they settled originally, colonists from Elder Lemuria), over centuries and millennia as did the later Polynesians, from isle to isle, until they arrived at the Easternmost isles, in regular striking distance of Atlantis and the Valusian coastline. It boggles the mind that every Pictish raid on Atlantis would require a journey halfway around the world... even had they galleons, such a journey would require no less than six month’s time, if they merely went and counted coup! And the Picts did not have galleons...
If I was going to try to place the Nyumbani stories into Howard's prehistory, I'd place them about 10,000 BC (at the end of the last Ice Age), since the continent of Nyumbani looks almost exactly like modern day Africa. Nyumbani wouldn't be affected by the Ice Age like Europe was and so could have the middle-Age civilization that it sports in the Imaro stories.
Realize, 10,000 BC is the exact same time as Conan; the southern portion of the Thurian Continent as far south as modern Zaire is well mapped out by Howard, with no room to add Nyumbani in that time frame. The best, most logical place for it is in the time of Kull.
To be fair, and in support of your Thurian Age thesis, the Imaro short story, THE CITY OF MADNESS claims that the men of Thule were the allies of the invading Atlanteans.
Which fits right in with the time frame I’ve worked out. Thule very well could have existed a thousand years before the time of Kull. With the early Atlan of that time frame being an Elder Hyperborean realm known for its sorcerous powers, and the people of Thule having a strong H. hyperboreanus bloodline, a sorcerous alliance could well have existed. Perhaps Thule was more powerful in that day.
