The Thisbo Exodus – What Really Happened? The traditional history of the Thisbo peoples of the Southern Continent is preserved in a series of long epic poems. These poems describe the emigration of the Thisbo from the African continent under pressure of Ranamemi invasion, in a single mass exodus involving “ten thousand ships with a thousand in each” (according to the Lay of Dallaba). While it is undoubtedly true that the Thisbo did emigrate from Africa to South America to escape the Ranamemi invasion, little of the details of the Thisbo epics can be accepted as true.         First some background: at the dawn of the time of the Great Ranamemi Migrations, ethnic Ranamemi peoples inhabited mostly the Indian subcontinent. To their east lay Saambu lands, to the north, the Udank, and mixed peoples related to the present-day Dunnek to the west. To the southwest, in Africa and parts of Arabia, were the Thisbo. Peoples related to the Kadane made up an insignificant population living on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, and in Anatolia and Mesopotamia.         Africa has always enjoyed a milder climate on Zyem than on Earth. The great Saharan Desert, stretching from east to west coasts across the northern edge of Africa on Earth, is on Zyem represented only by isolated pockets of desert, interspersed with savannas and oases of trees. In ancient times, such as those we now consider, the land was even more temperate, and unbroken lines of trade routes and small cities could be found from the northern Mediterranean coast to the southern tip of Africa.         Thisbo civilization was ancient by the time of the Ranamemi Migrations, and, thanks to the lack of a desert barrier, had covered the African continent with several large nation-states. Imagine if the Egyptian civilization (which arose about the same time the Thisbo did, around 3100 b.c.e) had not been confined by desert to the Nile Valley, but had spread throughout Africa, and then (relatively peacefully) broken apart into the Six Kingdoms of pre-Classical China.         The Thisbo of this time had little interest in the world outside their own lands. The continent was large enough to supply every need, and the rest of the world seemed crude and barbarous to them. While coastal shipping and fishing were well-developed, the Thisbo had few, if any, ocean-going vessels, and certainly no developed maritime commerce.         Meanwhile, the Ranamemi had been developing their own civilization, starting in the Indus Valley. After many centuries, population pressures had grown severe throughout the Indian subcontinent. There was no central authority among the Ranamemi at this time, and so the Great Migration began first as the uncoordinated emigration of scattered tribes. The Migration met resistance from the Saambu to the east and from the Udank to the north, and so most movement tended towards the west.         Most of the peoples of these western regions (ethnic Dunnek or Kadane, for the most part) were pastoralists and nomads, while the Ranamemi were agriculturalists. Likely the Ranamemi took over unused grazing lands before the scattered native populations even realized what was happening. We may assume that this phase of the Migration was gradual, random, and for the most part peaceful, with Ranamemi tribes moving ever westward and slowly displacing existing populations. This likely took several generations to accomplish. The Kadane began their own migration during this time.         Eventually, the Ranamemi had occupied a broad swath of lands from Portugal to India. They had likely encountered the Thisbo living in Arabia during this phase of the Migration, and there is some evidence that the growth of Ranamemi nation-states began in this region, under pressure from the more civilized and organized Thisbo they encountered. At any rate, once the idea arose, the Ranamemi lands developed several large nation-states.         Sometime during this time of transition within Ranamemi lands, the Ranamemi began to move into the Thisbo lands in Africa. We have noted that they had probably already encountered Thisbo living outside of Africa, and evidently displaced them as they had done so many other peoples. We can believe that the first forays into Africa were of the same character: random, disorganized, scattered actions by independent tribal groups. There appears to have been no organized response by the Thisbo to these incursions.         The initial incursions by the Ranamemi were made along the east coast of Africa, a region which at that time had no strong central authority governing it. There is evidence (in the form of burned villages) that this phase of the Migration was not as peaceful as before. Many of the Thisbo of this region apparently fled east by ship from the Ranamemi invasions, for pockets of ethnic Thisbo can be found in various places along the coasts of the Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean.         As the eastern parts of the African continent took on more and more Ranamemi, the more powerful Thisbo states in the central and western regions of Africa began to clash with them. At this time, the powerful Ranamemi king Ashokata united all the Ranamemi in Africa into a single nation, and the gradual peaceful Migration transmuted into a military campaign. The Ranamemi goal became total conquest of the continent, and the Thisbo belatedly began to realize this fact. While some of the Thisbo states attempted to repel the invaders, they were a collection of sometimes-fractious countries facing a single, determined enemy, and the outcome began to seem inevitable.         Thisbo epics tell of the search for a new homeland, and we can assume that this holds at least a kernel of truth. Surely some explorers set out to look for refuge, and one of them must have discovered the southern continent to the west, following the Northeast Trade Winds or the Brazil Current, and returned to tell their rulers about it. Archeological remains date the first Thisbo presence on the southern continent to within a few years of the beginning of the Ranememi Invasion.         At first, the Exodus of the Thisbo to South America was probably a gradual and random affair, organized city by city, some reaching the conclusion that Africa was doomed sooner than others. Eventually the rulers of the larger Thisbo states turned their resources to constructing fleets for the Exodus, but this was towards the end of the Thisbo presence in Africa. The entire Exodus seems to have taken about 75 years, and continued right up to the end. The picture in Lay of Dallaba, where Lord Dallaba watches from the stern of the last ship as his city goes up in flames and the arrows of the Ranamemi conquerors fall around him may not be an exaggeration.         What is almost certainly an exaggeration is the image of thousands of ships with immense crews. We have already noted that the Exodus was gradual, taking place over many years. While ten thousand ships may possibly have made the journey, they surely did not do so all at once. We can picture a scenario of convoys of ten to twenty ships setting out together as far more likely. Nor is it likely that these ships held a thousand men (plus families, plus animals, plus farming supplies!). The Thisbo had no history of large-scale ship-building, and the archaelogical evidence suggests they never developed ships of that size; those that have been found in the waters off the coasts were more likely in the range of crews of 50 to 100.         It thus seems unlikely that the claim is true that the “whole Thisbo people fled the pitiless foe”. The best estimates put the Thisbo population in South America approximately a generation after the Exodus at around 800,000, so those who actually made the trip would be somewhat fewer, this out of a total population in Africa estimated as somewhere between 5 and 15 million. Although the present-day people of Africa consider themselves part of the Ranamemi cultural world, it has long been recognized by linguists that their dominant language, Ranathisbo, had its origin in a Creole of Ranamemi and Thisbo, and geneticists point to strong Thisbo traits in their makeup. Thus we may assume that most of those making the Thisbo Exodus were of the ruling classes and their retainers, and that they left the bulk of their people behind to serve and coexist with their new Ranamemi masters.         Once in South America, or Thisbona, the Thisbo set about rebuilding their civilization. Emigrants from the southern regions of the west coast of Africa would have followed the Brazil Current and reached the coast of Peru, or the Southeast Trade Winds and reached the southern coast of Brazil. Emigrants from the northern regions of Africa would have followed the Northeast Trade Winds and ended up in the northern parts of South America, mainly the northern coast of Brazil. These may also have hit the Guinea Current or the North Equatorial Current, which would have carried them into the Caribbean or even the southern tip of North America.         Evidently most of the emigration took place from the south, because the first Thisbo states in Thisbona are to be found in Peru and southern Brazil. Only small settlements can be found to the north in Thisbona, and none at all in the Caribbean or North America (the pockets of ethnic Thisbo found among the Saambu of the Caribbean are now considered the products of later migrations). It is likely that disease and the large populations of Saambu found in Central America, the Caribbean and the Gulf regions either eliminated any Thisbo incursions or discouraged their formation in the first place.         Within a few generations, the Thisbo had firmly established themselves in Thisbona, draining swamps, quarrying stone, building bridges, aqueducts and fortified cities. Their isolation, and their descent from only a few ruling families that had made the trip across the sea fostered the growth of only a few large, autocratic states. Thisbona today has only three independent states on its lands, and that number has changed very little since the earliest days. Lacking a strong maritime tradition and with little incentive to explore beyond their own lands, the Thisbo abandoned ship-building, even for coastal trade or fishing. When a fishing economy eventually did arise again in the Yucatan regions, they had to learn their skills from the indigenous Saambu.         The Thisbo never did cross Central America into North America in all the long years of their isolation in Thisbona. It was the Kadane people who eventually found the Thisbo. While the Kadane admired their cultured southern neighbors and sent many of their children to Thisbo schools and universities for education, for many years, the Thisbo remained remarkably incurious about their Kadane neighbors. Perhaps their experience with the Ranamemi remained a cultural memory and inclined them towards isolation. They also considered the Kadane their cultural inferiors. They never established trade with the Kadane, and the only action on their part for generations was an attempt to seize some lands in the Gulf of Mexico for farming colonies (the so-called Tobacco War, although the main crop they grew there was rice).         But the isolation of both Kadane and Thisbo was eventually broken, ironically again by the Ranamemi, when explorers from the Old World found the New in 1871. The Kadane quickly embraced the old World and established trade relations and scientific and technological ties, ushering in a period of rapid economic growth. Almost despite itself, Thisbona has shaken off its isolation and entered into closer engagement with the rest of the world, too.

© 2003, Terrence Donnelly