On Asshai, Rivers, and Oceans

[LmL]

Going back to my number crunching on Asshai's population:
If we assume a minimum area of ~200 sq. miles, and a minimum population of ~2 million, we get a population density of 10,000 people per square mile, with those figures.  To put that in perspective, lets compared to New York City, circa 1900, when it had a population of ~3.5 million, and had just annexed all its burroughs, giving it an area of 468 sq. miles.  ~7,500 people per square mile.  Asshai beats NYC in the industrial age?  Surely that must be wrong!  Well, consider that, in 1900, it was still pretty easy to find vast tracts of land all across the continent for virtually free, so people were constantly leaving the major cities to go to small towns and farm. And, when we consider how small Rome was, and that it had a population of 1 million... lets just say that living in Asshai would have been incredibly spacious, compared to living in Rome (and if you ever want to talk about a city where public buildings make a dent in your carrying capacity, its Rome).  Of course, we don't know if Asshai covered a significantly larger area, but I think it didn't; we'd hear about how long it went along the river, rather than how far wide it went away from the river, as the main way of describing how big it was.  And we don't know if it had a larger population, either.  More wild guessing and number crunching is needed!
 
So, lets go back to Rome for a bit.  If Rome had an area of 5.3 square miles, and everyone was living inside the area protected by the Aurelian Walls (not that they were around when Rome was at its highest population), it would have had a population density of ~190,000 people per square mile.  Thats... just brutal, so I'm going to accept that, when it was at its peak, Rome covered an area larger than Aurelian would later wall off.  Lets assume Rome had suburbs around it that were counted in the 1 million population figure.  No idea how big those suburbs are, but lets be generous to the Romans: We'll treat Rome itself as a perfect circle, radius of 1 (the unit of measurement will be 'radius-of-a-perfectly-circular-rome).  We'll then surround that circle with another circle, to represent the suburbs, and this larger circle will have a radius of 3 radii-of-a-perfectly-circular-rome.  Why 3?  Because thats the radius you would get if the suburbs extend out as far from the edge of Rome as Rome itself.  So, pulling out the circumference calculator, we find that Rome and its suburbs are almost exactly 9 times as big as Rome by itself. (you'd get the same basic result if Rome were a square surrounded by 8 equally sized squares, like the center of a tic-tac-toe game)  Is this right?  I don't know, but it does let us take that oppressively crowded ~190,000 people per square mile down to a much more bearable ~21,000.  That sounds much fairer, as we're now in the same general neighborhood as actual NYC, and our guesses for Asshai.
 
Of course, that means that it is entirely possible that Asshai had a population, not of ~2 million, but of ~4 million.  Given that we were estimating ~2-3 million earlier on, that doesn't sound that unreasonable either.  Especially if Asshai is the forefather to Valyria, which is GRRM's 'super rome with magic and dragons and better than rome in every way' city.
 
But hey, more blood sacrifices!  Though I imagine that the Bloodstone Emperor probably spun it as urban renewal and clearing out the slums.

Azor "Guiliani" Ahai. Broken windows / broken stone policing. Heh. Occupy that shit.

Kidding aside, we should be thinking of Asshai / GEotD as Atlantis. It was a previous high point of civilization. We are meant to think that most of their knowledge and learning and magic was lost. Asshai is case in point - it's the largest city in the world. The Great Empire of the Dawn was was almost beyond comprehension because we just can't know what kind of magic / science / technology they had. But it's safe to say it was beyond anything existent today.

[House Cambodia]

Late to the show - this theory perfectly correlates with my developing hypothesis. In my own thread I've posted this:

Quote

He uses oceanographic evidence to demonstrate how the Breaking of the Arm brought not only warm water to eastern Westeros and western Essos, but also caused massive environmental changes to the most populous part of Planetos, the cradle of civilization at Asshai. It fits in with my theory perfectly, namely that Gaia hit back at the root cause of the planetary imbalance as I've previously described. Whereas the atmospheric effect of a volcanic eruption can last some years, the change in currents is permanent and would cause long-lasting desertification, thus disallowing the remnants of the civilization a chance to recover.

Here are short extracts that summarise my hypothesis

Quote

My original contribution to this picture is where I believe that GRRM has working in James Lovelock's Gaia theory, with a twist of the known laws of nature being pervaded by equally rational but unknown (to us) laws of magic. For anyone unfamiliar, I'll just extremely briefly summarise Gaia: it's the idea that the Earth's ecosystem has a natural balance, and that when that balance is upset, the Earth will right itself.

Quote

In the beginning, Westeros was populated by the Children and giants, who lived in harmony with nature - the trees and animals. It wasn't a vegetarian Eden - there was conflict between Children and giants, but a balance was maintained that put no stress on the environment - and, crucially, the weirwood trees, for millennia. 

Meanwhile, contemporaneously in the far east of Essos, the earliest prehistoric legends have the human Essosi practising fire/blood magic, which in my view was instrumental in developing civilization in Old Ghis or earlier if Asshai can be considered as having had 'civilization'. Civilization was built on militarism, slavery and exploitation of the environment. In short, magic and violence went hand-in-hand in Essos.

If the OP is still around and attached to his theory, I invite him to consider it in the light of my madcap ideas (well mine together with other 'big picture' environmental/climate change theorists)

http://asoiaf.westeros.org/index.php?/topic/139666-the-endgame-a-thought/&page=4

[DominusNovus]

Hey there.  Glad this is all getting some new attention.  Its late here, and I've stayed up way past when I should have.  I just want to suggest that, assuming Planetos follows Earth ecosystems in general principle (and there's no reason to assume it doesn't, even considering magic), then the idea of a balanced ecosystem is impossible.  Modern ecologists absolutely reject the notion of the balance of nature, even though its a quite appealing concept.  When one considers that an ecosystem is just like an economy - countless individuals all making individual choices - it becomes almost self-evident that its not balanced; after all, there's no such thing as a balanced economy.

[House Cambodia]

56 minutes ago, DominusNovus said:

Hey there.  Glad this is all getting some new attention.  Its late here, and I've stayed up way past when I should have.  I just want to suggest that, assuming Planetos follows Earth ecosystems in general principle (and there's no reason to assume it doesn't, even considering magic), then the idea of a balanced ecosystem is impossible.  Modern ecologists absolutely reject the notion of the balance of nature, even though its a quite appealing concept.  When one considers that an ecosystem is just like an economy - countless individuals all making individual choices - it becomes almost self-evident that its not balanced; after all, there's no such thing as a balanced economy.

I don't know if that's true or not, but what I've been speculating is that GRRM has imbibed the gist of Lovelock's Gaia theory and it's reflected in his world! I'm reading the author's earlier works and I'm gratified to see that he was somewhat obsessed with the notion of planetary 'balance'.

[LmL]

10 hours ago, House Cambodia said:

Late to the show - this theory perfectly correlates with my developing hypothesis. In my own thread I've posted this:

Here are short extracts that summarise my hypothesis

If the OP is still around and attached to his theory, I invite him to consider it in the light of my madcap ideas (well mine together with other 'big picture' environmental/climate change theorists)

http://asoiaf.westeros.org/index.php?/topic/139666-the-endgame-a-thought/&page=4

I agree with the idea that the breaking of the Arm of Dorne permanently altered the ocean currents and thus the climate of Planetos. There are several reasons to think this:

1. Connecting hot and cold oceans which were previously cut off from each other would indeed alter the ocean currents and thus the climate. Ocean currents are the only reason Europe is not like Canada or Siberia.
2. There are several potential clues about rising sea levels, such as at the 1,000 islands, Iron Islands, and the Arm of Dorne.
3. Lots of drying out in the east: Red Waste, Shrinking Sea, Silver Sea --> three lakes, the "coming of the Dry Times" spoken of by the Jogos Nhai, etc. 

Now of course my theory is that the Long Night was brought on by an impact event, and I believe the Hammer of the Waters was in fact a meteor strike. What I think is interesting and perhaps relevant here about that is that we have this story of a killer storm & tsunami striking Storm's End (Durran Godsgrief legend). If there was any kind of violent collapse of the Arm, whether by meteor strike or earthquake, you would indeed get a tsunami up the Narrow Sea, and I believe this is what the Durran tale recounts. Durran supposedly invoked the ire of the gods by stealing a goddess from heaven, and I believe that is simply one way of describing the theft of the moon (goddess) from the sky. The moon was stolen, bits of it fell as meteors, and as a result we got a storm from hell. 

[House Cambodia]

Whatever the precise mechanism, it's interesting the the Long Night and associated climate changes profoundly affected Essos. Have you worked out a timescale and structure that can fit the major events in Westeros, south Essos and north Essos? I'm interested in tracing the decline of pre-Men peoples in north Essos and comparisons between the Fisher Queens, Sarnori and the Great Empire of the Dawn.

[LmL]

As for timeline, I tend to sort things into before and after the Long Night, as that seems a logical boundary event - primarily because anything along the lines of a prolonged darkening of the skies would bring worldwide famine and species die-off, food chain collapse, etc. All political institutions would fail, and society would revert to anarchy. Thus it would act as a cultural and genetic bottleneck. For this reason I suspect that most "Age of Heroes" stories, which are about the people who founded great houses of Westeros, are events which came in the aftermath of the Long Night. That's when new local warlords and kings would be setting up new power bases and establishing new orders (like the maesters / citadel and the great houses). 

The same should be true of Essos - we only have two high civilizations, both shrouded in the fog of myth, which seem likely to have existed before the Long Night, and those would be the kingdom of the Fisher Queens and the Great Empire of the Dawn. Ghis may have gotten started before the LN but I suspect it was just after. Either way, we see the rise of many new civilizations after the Long Night - Valyria, Yi Ti, Ghis, and Sarnor. The Rhoynar seem to have a memory of the Long Night, which indicates they go back this far as well, although they have no memory of a high civilization, and it seems the Rhoynar flourished in the aftermath of the Long Night. 

[LmL]

You'll notice that Durran sets up his kingdom after the storm comes and destroys everything. Same for the Grey King - he sets up a nation after stealing the fire of the gods and "slaying the sea dragon which drowns while islands." Bran the Builder is supposedly the founder of the Stark line and the builder of Winterfell. He's also tied to Storms End (built right after the LN) and the Wall (same). 

[House Cambodia]

Yes, I concur with those timelines. Do you think the Rhoynar were descendents of the Fisher Queens - maybe a previous exodus that inspired Nymeria millennia later?

[Maester of Valyria]

On 14/06/2016 at 0:41 AM, House Cambodia said:

Yes, I concur with those timelines. Do you think the Rhoynar were descendents of the Fisher Queens - maybe a previous exodus that inspired Nymeria millennia later?

That does seem likely: it would make sense for the Fisher Queens to either set up a vassal state/colony etc along the Rhoyne, and this would have likely inherited a fair amount of the old Queendom's power when it fell. Although I do think that Nymeria's migration was borne out of necessity and not historical inspiration.