In the early centuries of the first millennium A.D. (our reckoning), a great migration of peoples began from the East to the West of the Eurasian land mass. One of the displaced groups was the Ranamemi, a people who originated in the region of the Indus Valley. They drove to the West, displacing the Kadanë on their way, and eventually migrated into Africa. The Thisbo reacted violently to this, and began a battle to the death. It appears that they mis-judged the tide of history, however, for the Ranamemi advance seemed unstoppable. For various reasons, the Thisbo chose not to try to accomodate the invaders. Instead, they built an ocean-going fleet and around 400 A.D. they left Africa, heading west across the Atlantic. They eventually reached South America, where they landed and eventually established an empire.
After this, the Thisbo vanished from history. They turned inward. Although they remembered the old world, they made no attempt to reach it again, preferring to concentrate on their own affairs. The rest of the world forgot them, too. Not even the Kadanë, who reached Tihzanthi in the north around 750 A.D., knew they were there. It was not until the 1700's that the Kadanë discovered their neighbors to the south. The Thisbo reacted with seeming apathy: after a few failed attempts to exert their power over the Kadanë (notably the Tobacco War of 1783), they turned back on themselves. Today they are not hostile, but neither are they eager for contact.
The Thisbo pride themselves on having the oldest continuous culture on Zyem, but it is a decadent one, stagnant and ossified. In times past, they were ruled by a single oligarchy, but today there are three different countries in Thisbona (South America). All are totalitarian states and officially atheistic.
The Thisbo language is an inflected one not unlike Russian or Greek. Their orthography is unique in that it is wholly pictographic, with no correspondence between the sounds and symbols of their language. These pictograms can be used in varying degrees of realism: in books, they are stylized, like Egyptian demotic, but it is the pride of Thisbo sign-painters and muralists to create actual scenes whose elements also "spell out" the content of the picture.
Not all the Thisbo fled Africa upon the arrival of the Ranamemi. Those who remained intermarried with the new inhabitants. The result is a people called the RanaThisbo. Their language, a Creolized blend of Thisbo and Ranamemi, is called by the same name.
© 1997, Terrence Donnelly