Hey all, I’m playing a Dark Sun setting that borrows lore from the various iterations and there is one contradicting piece of lore I’m curious on. Ebe, the home city of Borys we know was swallowed by the sea of silt. In 4e they outright state that Ebe and Ur-Draxa are one and the same. However in the older lore I could swear I heard somewhere that Ebe was part of the silt archipelago and that Ur-Draxa was built where no city existed before. Can anyone confirm this?
I believe that there is some Information on that in the Prism Pentad novels of Troy Denning. Its already some time ago that I read them…
There’s an online supplement for the Silt Archipelago which shows High Ebe at the very bottom of the island chain where Euripis is located. Low Ebe is directly beneath it and swallowed by the silt sea (minus gibbets with undead executed dwarves) IIRC.
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Much appreciated, I did some digging for the silt archipelago and finally managed to find the supplement along with a few others on siltskimmer. If the site isn’t already linked to by Athas.org I feel it should be or at least deserves a shout out.
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In 4E, Ebe is the nation and Ur Draxa was the capital city of Ebe.
On the Timeline of Athas has this entry:
The great cities of Ebe, Waverly, and Arala were swallowed by the expanding Silt Sea, though later it receded from Waverly. The nearby city of Bodach was spared, but became surrounded by silt.
The “nearby city of Bodach” probably means nearby Waverly, but it could also mean that Ebe is near those 2 ruins as well.
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The “nearby city of Bodach” entry is about how Bodach is surrounded by “lakes” of silt, but is itself not under the silt.
I actually really like the 4e solution of making Ur Draxa Ebe. It makes sense. The sea of silt swallows Ebe, but Borys ultimately rebuilds the city using tithed resources from the sorcerer-monarchs, renaming it Ur Draxa, the city of the dragon.
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It is unfortunate the 4E designers were either poorly familiar with much of previous Dark Sun lore, or otherwise indifferent to it. I would pay handsomely for a well-researched and thoughtful Dark Sun publication, even from later editions, that would factor in such minutiae from older sources. Alas. I suppose we must do it ourselves.
Certainly, the preponderance of old lore on Ebe points to its original situation somewhere in the western portion of the Sunrise Sea (the Mediterranean of the Green Age core continents). This is backed by our own cartographic work on this site, which routinely situates the city there. See the maps below from two of our more studious map makers (I much laud their efforts). You can see the island city-state below, both situated in the southeast of the map on the northern part of the future Silt Archipeligo:
I would argue this situation for the city of Ebe is fairly well established. However, the cultural base of “Ebe” is complicated by several factors. Now firstly, I for one am strongly of the school that the future sorcerer-kings, in the course of their roughly 2,000 year campaigns in the Cleansing Wars, almost all developed a syncretic follower base. Each of their campaigns beings world-spanning, I imagine the cultural base of their original followers was much different than the one they ended up leading when they finally settled in the Tyr Region, as I imagine they were ordered to do by Borys. This is why the oba was in 2nd edition originally depicted as a beautiful white woman, though Gulg seems to be composed primarily of blacks (or at least that was the stock population), and why even Nibenay seems to be depicted as a white man with curly locks, and yet rules a city composed of a core populace that is obviously a parallel to the Khmer Empire (Cambodia). This may not have been the case with all of them, but it was for many. Androponis was not originally a native of the influential Balican (Greek) culture, and this is likely why he adopted a more Balic (Greek) name.
In the case of Borys of Ebe, his future people, the Draxans, are of an obviously Oriental background (I am a devout Orientalist IRL, deal with it 
). This does not fit with Ebe’s situation, which is more in the purview of the dominant Balican and wide-ranging “Tanysh” culture. Rather, it seems to me the more Oriental cultures developed largely on the other side of the Sunrise Sea, in the Anattan continent. I at least am placing the source-cultures there, and there seems a general mood in our community to accept this. More clearly, cultures resembling medieval India, the Khmer Empire, the Mughal Empire, and even Thailand seem to be in the west-central and southern portions of the Anattan continent.
I present all this, because as we surely all remember, Borys’ tomb-citadel north of Tyr was depicted as an enormous stone juggernaut, and clearly had the cultural milieu, at least on the surface, of medieval India. Yet Borys’ wraith-knights within did not themselves bear names, appearances, or styles appropriate to medieval India. This is because, I conjecture, the juggernaut motif was upon the time of its construction a more modern convention, understandable to the army and people Borys at that time led, though Borys himself and his senior lieutenants (perhaps themselves magically granted long life by their master) seem rather clearly not of this base culture. But Borys adopted it anyway.
I speculate that through much of the Cleansing Wars, Borys routinely, but not exclusively, drew upon the greater Anattan culture for manpower. This would help explain the juggernaut motif. It would also help explain the obviously Oriental slant to the people of the future Ur Draxa, who seem to be a very loose parallel to a Thai or even early medieval Chinese society… or perhaps even Indonesian.
“Ebe” does not sound Oriental, but seems more Greekish, and so perhaps was part of the Greco-Roman (Balican-Tyrian)/Tanysh cultural milieue. His own appearance however is worth considering. What Borys actually looked like during the Cleansing Wars is best described in Crimson Legion. When the wraiths placed him in Borys’ expected stone sarcophagus, when they think Rikus is Borys (partially because he looks a little like him), Rikus eventually breaks out of the sarcophagus and afterwords looks upon the stone lid, which depicts Borys as he was in such ancient times:
The mul struggled out of his sarcophaagus, his injured shoulder and leg aching terribly as he stepped over the coffin’s cracked cover. The carving on it represented a bald human with features so rugged and blocky that he might have been a dwarf, if not for his round ears and long bushy beard. His eyes were sunken and wild, with a heavy brow covered by a thick line of hair. Though the dark orbs were made of stone, they seemed almost alive with ire and hatred.
In his hands, the man held a long bastard sword identical to the Scourge of Rkard. His body was covered by a full suit of plate armor, save that the visored helmet hung a little above the warrior’s shaven head. In the forehead of this basinet was set an orange opal. Unlike the gems of the other sacophagi, this one remained dark.
Crimson Legion, 171
Now, it is a given that not all the cultures presented in Dark Sun were unabashed lifts from real cultures. But given Ebe’s situation in the world and with the subtle hints of Borys’ appearance, he would seem to more closer to a Carthaginian warlord, which would in turn mean Phoenician. I would accept this, and perhaps we might find the cultural base of Ebe to have been along the coast of the Sunrise Sea far to the south of Balic. This seems appropriate to me.
I speculate that earlier in the Cleansing Wars, Borys conquered a significant portion of the Anattan continent to fuel his war machine, and to a degree eventually adopted many of its cultural motifs. A kind of cultural syncretism would have undoubtedly taken place, though his mighty personality likely retained his core cultural mores and imagery. Thus he wears “traditional” steel plate, and wields a bastard sword.
All this said, the 4th Edition Dragon Magazine article that places Ebe in the center of the Sunrise Sea, though a thoughtful concept, is to me ultimately poorly researched, and I reject it. Most of the Champions seem to have had their origins in the Core Lands near to the Pristine Tower, including several from the island city-states of Waverly, Bodach and, of course Ebe.
But though Eben blood may have mixed there, I believe that most of the future “Draxans” would have come from the 13th Champion’s powerbase in the Anattan continent. By the end of the Cleansing Wars, it seems that Ebe itself was clearly no more, and that the newly created Dragon drew his people from somewhere in Anatta when he created the City of Doom in the center of the Ring of Fire. Wherever he took them from, it seems to me it was certainly not from Ebe, which had by then long since ceased to exist.
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