dChan - Q Origins Project Archive

https://gameofthrones.fandom.com/wiki/Cultures_and_peoples

:The modern Ghiscari of Slaver's Bay:

Some of the ancient bloodlines and traditions of the Ghiscari Empire lived on in their colony-cities in Slaver's Bay, which were conquered and ruled by the Valyrians for the next five thousand years, until reasserting their independence after the Doom of Valyria. The great cities of Astapor, Yunkai, Meereen, and New Ghis became the central hub of slavery and the slave-trade in the known world: capturing slaves in war and raids and breeding them during peace, and exporting them to the Free Cities and other lands.

The modern Ghiscari do not actually have a very strong ethnic or cultural connection to the ancient Ghiscari, though their rulers like to boast that they do. After the Doom of Valyria, the peoples of Slaver's Bay tried to re-assert their independence by championing their descent and cultural heritage from the old Ghiscari Empire now that their Valyrian overlords were gone. In reality, however, five thousand years of domination by the Valyrians took their toll, and present-day Slaver's Bay only has certain scraps of culture and traditions which date back to the Ghiscari Empire itself.

Even the present-day languages of Slaver's Bay owe more to High Valyrian than they do to the Old Ghiscari language. Much like the local peoples in the Free Cities, once the Valyrians were gone they developed their own romance dialect of High Valyrian; however the Low Valyrian of Slaver's Bay is quite different from the dialects in the Free Cities, because it contains many borrowings from the older Ghiscari languages, i.e. "Mhysa" in Slaver's Bay Low Valyrian is a direct borrowing of the word for "mother" in the ancient Ghiscari language. Still, in terms of basic structure, the language is really a derivation of High Valyrian with some Ghiscari influence, and the language of the old empire is largely extinct.

The region's current inhabitants are really a mixed race, descended from the small surviving Ghiscari population which intermingled with dozens of other enslaved peoples under the Valyrians over the centuries, many of them brought in from far away regions.

Similarly, Kraznys mo Nakloz has the more or less most common "Ghiscari" appearance, but the other Good Masters of Astapor are a wide range of ethnicities.

As a result, even the aristocratic classes among the slave-masters have a very diverse ethnic background. The current slave populations are even more diverse, some brought in from the far corners of the known world. Slavers frequently raid across the Summer Sea to take captives from Sothoryos, Naath, and the Summer Islands, and in some cases their descendants remained enslaved in cities such as Astapor for generations. The slavers will also basically slap chains onto anyone they can catch, often through piracy, so at the same time it is not unusual for other slaves in the same area to be blonde-haired and blue-eyed descendants of slaves taken from Lys or the other Free Cities. Moreover, over the centuries some slaves have won their freedom and risen in social rank, while the aristocrats from the losing sides in wars were sold into slavery, etc., jumbling up the ethnic mixture in the region even further.