Y'know what low key pisses me off more about Darayavahoush now that I'm giving the Daevabad trilogy a reread?
One would think it'd be the bigotry. The stunning lack of insight/reflective capacity. The "just following orders here, sir" attitude, his tendency to reinforce his own oppression, the lack of ability to learn from the past...
No.
It's the way he wouldn't be in any of these situations if he wasn't constantly trying to control everyone except for himself. This fucking guy.
On second read, its glaringly obvious that his controlling attitude is not reserved for Nahri, because he tells Maniza that he wouldn't have allowed her to play in the fields as a child--and then he refuses to allow her to do the thing he just refused to do with the Marid worshiper, not because he suddenly agreed with the choice, but because he "can't allow" her to dirty her hands. Even in the grove of judgment, when his sister is like "you're super dead, it's time to go", he refuses not out of some fear of harshness, but because he's just not ready yet.
My very dumb morally bankrupt guy, it's been 1400 years of following these same narratives and never once benefitting in any way. You got your entire family dismembered. You caused untold destruction as a weapon of war. And yet every time there's the hint of a path to another life, you go "I must control this other person in some way" and bathe the world in blood anew so you can roil in your own self loathing and then Do The Exact Same Thing five pages later.
Just why? Why don't you die and stay dead? There is no vindication!
You absolutely hit the nail on the head with this!! Dara reminds me of a sheep dog in an apartment. He doesnāt know how to do anything other than control others and when he canāt do that he goes insane and eats the curtains.
Your mention of how he ācanāt allowā Manizheh to ādirty her handsā made me realize heās not controlling in the usual āIām better than youā way, but in a āyouāre better than meā way. He has such a warped view of the Nahids as being divine-adjacent that it loops right back around to dehumanization.
Thereās a great example of this in Kingdom of Copper! Before the invasion Manizheh is praying with ālittle more than a brass bowl set atop a circle of rocksā (KOC 388), and Dara replaces it with āa proper silver vessel, glimmering on a shining marble baseā (KOC 392). Compare this to city of brass, when Kartir shows Nahri the ORIGINAL fire altar belonging to LITERAL ANAHID HERSELF, and itās tiny! Itās "a humble thing, rough and undecorated, small enough to fit in [Kartir's] hands" (COB 397).
Anyway, I think the Nahids of Dara's time were strategic in creating an image of themselves as divine-adjacent, because it quells dissent and creates such a warped loyalty that their followers never question their decisions because they forget that the Nahids are just as fallible as anyone else. It's the weaponization of organized state religion to create blind obedience.
That doesn't exempt Dara from continuing to choose bloodshed over and over, but it does make it more satisfying that he ends up leaving the city for good. Unlike his first exile, he's finally lost that blind loyalty to "the infallible Nahids". Additionally, his new mission, freeing enslaved djinn from the ifrit, does nothing to upend the balance of the world or bring about the sweeping, bloody exchanges of power he once believed were the only way to do good. It's saving a handful of lives because it's the right thing to do. There is no quick vindication. Just a very long atonement for a very long lifetime of bloodshed.
āYou know, Daevabad is the absolute embodiment of dull. Apart from the occasional sex scandal provided by yours truly, nothing happens hereā
- Muntadhir
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? Itās the āreconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European language familyā, which contains about 446 living languages spoken by over 3.4 billion people (2). Thatās 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 itās 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):Ā
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-Suleimanās curse? In that case I want to look for the oldest language spoken in the āDaevastanaā 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 :)
Divasti is the only language of Daevabad for which we have actual dialogue samples!
City of Brass, Ch.9, p340:
"[Dara] glanced back at Ali. 'Naeda pouru mejnoas'".
"[Dara] jerked a thumb in Ali's direction, looking amused. 'Spa snasatiy nu hyat vaken gezr?'".
I didn't include these examples in consideration because I'm not a linguist and I have no idea how to reverse engineer them into whatever languages they came from. Also, the "sp" and "sn" sounds don't exist in Farsi (I know this because they don't exist in Urdu either). So those definitely came from another language...
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
Works Cited:
1 - Daevapedia Fandom Wiki: Daevabad
2 - Wikipedia: Indo-European Languages
3 - Wikipedia - Map - Distribution of Iranian (Iranic) Languages
Daevabad Language Adaptation Headcanons - Djinnistani
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 āthe common tongueā, if at all.Ā
I love when a character is competent and respected in their own right but also everyone knows that theyāre basically someone elseās collared pet, and that someone else is even worse than they are
Thanks to you Shannon Chakraborty now one of my favourite fictional characters is a homophobic religious zealot who majors in finance. You will pay for this.
gotta love the lifetime criminal who fakes religious ceremonies for fun, only to wind up a sort-of religious figure herself. She does not give up crime at this point
Did yāall know that bones can take hundreds of years to decompose in sand? And that the Dasht-e-Loot is a real desert in Iran that is recorded as having some of the hottest temperatures on the planet?
anyway Kingdom of Copper Spoilers ahead :)
āWith rising horror [Dara] looked again at the crumbling bricks [ā¦] It was the well down which heād been callously thrown centuries ago to be drowned and remade, his soul enslaved by the Ifrit now casually spinning his helmet on one fingerā (Chakraborty 24)
IM FUCKING SCREAMING DID THEY FIND HIS SKELETON DOWN THERE?!!! DID DARA SEE HIS OWN SKELETON?!?!????!
I understand why Shannon didnāt give us a Dara POV in City of Brass. I fear it would have read too much like pushing a ālove triangleā 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 whatās going on. His perception is SEVERELY messed up by propaganda, bias, nostalgia, DEEP indignation, and the sheer passage of literally 1400+ years.
I imagine his POV would read something like this: āwhat the fuck is happening? what the fuck is happening? ooh! A Nahid! What the fuck is happening? Iām gonna kill Ali Iām gonna kill Ali Iām gonna kill Ali I hate him so much Iām gonna kill-ā
Realizing that Zaynab, Aqisa, and Dara are actually the perfect trio to recover slave vessels/hunt Ifrit mainly because the comedy potential is off the charts. These three are basically doing blind/deaf/mute baking but on a globe trotting scale
Zaynab: has the rizz to get humans to cooperate, but canāt actually talk to humans directly.
Aqisa: can talk to humans directly. Doesnāt know anything about slave vessels and doesnāt know what to ask.
Dara: knows a lot about the slave vessels, but has negative rizz and even less knowledge of how the world works. Also a known war criminal
god but everyone needs to read the daevabad trilogy
it's got everything! it's high fantasy set against a rich, islamic-golden-age backdrop. it's both political and action-oriented without getting too into the weeds with politics or so into action that it becomes shallow. the relationships are deep and mature and complicated, and don't fall into cookie-cutter cliches. the characters are deep and mature and complicated, and even the very worst of them has vestiges of goodness: the Evil King was once a good man who tried to foster cooperation among the warring tribes of his city, who genuinely did -- and does! -- care about the well-being of the people he rules.
but he always puts the city first, and that means that some people get crushed underfoot, and he becomes more and more willing to crush in order to protect order, and...
even his worst enemies admit that he was not a bad man, at first. he had good intentions. at first. and arguably, even still. he just got twisted, too caught up in the brutal politics. it's not for nothing that his eldest son -- a genuinely good man -- shows strong signs of becoming like him. because, as he was taught, "daevabad comes first." before yourself, before family, before love, before compassion. you don't have to be an evil man to do evil things. and at the end -- without spoiling anything, did muntadhir descend to "evil" depths? it's a hard question to answer. he did what he believed was best for daevabad. it was horrific, but it was undeniably effective. it worked. right or wrong, good or evil, it worked.
and the ultimate villain of the series was brutally abused and imprisoned and controlled, and turned to ever-darker paths in her desperation to be free and in control of her own destiny. she is what she was made to be, and even at the very bottom of things, she still loves. she still has the capacity for love and heartbreak and the desire to make things right, by her own twisted definition of right. she is a shining example of "the ends do not justify the means." she was willing to descend to any depth to fulfill her vision for daevabad, but those depths destroyed that vision. but she still had sympathy. she suffered, horribly, and she deserved better than the lot she was given at the start -- she's sort of a greek tragedy: if she could have walked away, disappeared into nothingness with her son, she would have been free. but she couldn't. not just because ghassan was holding her brother prisoner, but because she couldn't let it go. she had to make him pay.
and it's hard to blame her for her hate! he tortured her little brother to keep her under his thumb, he was obsessed with her, he trapped her in a gilded cage! her hatred is completely justified! in another world, she's the hero of the story, bringing her legacy back to its proper glory. but she descends ever-deeper into darkness in pursuing her revenge, until it consumes and controls her, and she becomes the villain.
it's not a simple tale of good-versus-evil. there is good and evil in both sides, in every character. the closest you get to an unambiguously good character is ali, but even he can be judgmental and short-sighted, too obsessed with what is Moral to notice the harm he's causing. and that's not a criticism! it makes him a well-rounded and full character. he's flawed. he's real.
and even so, it's a positive story. things get unspeakably terrible, but they come through it all the clearer. the happy ending is earned, and so, so deserved. it's a satisfying ending, where there's a lot of awful shit, but there's also a lot of goodness and kindness and love. nothing and no one is either wholly good nor wholly bad. but things are getting better, at the end, and there's a bright future ahead of them. it's a perfect ending for the story.
it's such an intricate and mature story of politics and magic and faith and fear and rage and hope and courage and love. it's phenomenal, everyone needs to read the trilogy.
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