Xenoarchaeology I: Skiamun and Martian Hieroglyphics

Fig. 1: Statuette of King Nersidiler, Late Period, one of the youngest known artefacts to be inscribed with Martian hieroglyphs. He wears a false-eye-crown on his pseudocranium. The left arm is broken off, fragments indicate he may have been holding a ceremonial staff or, more menacingly, a mace.

“And thus spoke Pharaoh: Oh courtiers, I do not know any deity you could worship other than me. So, High Priest of Amun, fire on the clay to bake bricks and build me a tall pyramid, so that I may catch a glimpse of the God of Musa. But I am indeed convinced he is among the liars.”

- The Holy Quran 28:38

 

Given their ongoing and not at all diminished popularity, you would imagine there to be tons of volumes written about the great ruins which litter Mars. Be it the Great Sphinx of Cydonia, the mysterious globe-spanning canals, the rock-hewn basalt cities of Tharsis or the ushabti megaliths, these structures continue to fascinate and perplex both the xenologist as well as the layman. But due to the difficulty of study and their sheer undecipherability, technical literature is sparse and the market is instead filled with atrocious pulp novels on the matter.

Herein lies an attempt to comprehensibly chronicle the rise and decline of at least one of these ancient civilizations, the old Kingdom of Usukanni, which inhabited the vanished river system of the Oxia Palus and Margaritifer Quadrangle. Not only is it one of the few ancient civilizations of Mars we can study with historical methods, for its writing system has recently been deciphered, but it is also one of the oldest and longest-lived of the Skiamun cultures. The study of Usukanni’s archaeological remains will not only aid in understanding these vanished people, but may also more generally offer clues for the emergence of intelligence on the red planet. For not only were the Skiamun the first (and perhaps because of that also the most advanced) intelligent species on the planet, but the appearance of intelligence in others, such as the Anaks, the Ushabti and the Tolkan, may in some ways be directly linked to them.

The Quest to read Martian Hieroglyphs

Deciphering the Martian hieroglyphs of the Usukanni had long been deemed impossible, for not only is the language and its culture long extinct but also the species that spoke said language. Today, the only sapient creatures left on Mars are the Ushabti and most of their societies have been left in a sorry state, likely following the deterioration of the planet. Most of them carve out an arduous nomadic existence, herding flocks of bennus or djihauti across the sparse northern planes and living in small tents made of hide. Some exist in an even more primitive, troglodytic state, being hunter-gatherers that house in caves. They have no writing whatsoever and whatever tales that date back to when the Skiamun roamed Mars are now drenched in mythology and superstition.

But these creatures too used to know civilization and indeed, some of their oldest must have coexisted with the latest of the Skiamun. And some may have preserved that memory, thought one Louis Fourier. Studying, talking and almost living with the Ushabti of the Margaritifer Quadrangle, he observed that one tribe, the Tamd, live in fact a sedentary existence, building small huts made of stone bricks or even inhabiting the ruins that were hewn into the hills by previous Ushabti civilizations. They still practice a form of agriculture, using wells connected to underground aquifers as a form of irrigation. And they have their own writing, which is sporadically used by their shamans and village elders. Though sometimes used to write letters between tribes, these are most often carved into animal bones and then thrown onto the ground in order to read the will of ancestral spirits. Fourier studied the Tamd writing and concluded that it was an alphabet, using only a few dozen letters with fixed phonetic meaning. What makes this discovery profound is that, if alien linguistics follows any patterns similar to those on Earth, the Tamd writing system, by virtue of being an alphabet, must already be a quite advanced one that went through multiple phases of simplification, instead of being a recent, primitive invention.

Based off this assumption, Fourier and a team of xenoarchaeologists studied the ruins of the vanished Aram Chaos Ushabti culture, which some of the Tamd were inhabiting, in hopes of finding the predecessor of this writing system. And they were successful, for among reliefs, carvings and shards of pottery could indeed be found sigils and signs which resembled those of the Tamd alphabet. However, though they were clearly transcribing an earlier form of the Tamd language, only about one third to one half of the alphabet’s letters could find earlier predecessors among the ruins. Once it was clear that it was the vowels which had no ancestors, the earlier Arami script revealed itself to be an abjad, a form of writing which only writes down consonants, the vowels being merely implied. This was strange. Ushabti do not communicate with their mouths but instead by modulating the spiracles on their chest and abdomen, which leads to all of their languages being very heavy in what we would call vowels. Why then would their earliest forms of writing only employ consonants?

Fourier and his team originally just ascribed this oddity to alien psychology. Perhaps vowels were so universally consistent among the early Ushabti that only the consonants were worth writing down. Rival archaeologist Herbert Marsh had a different idea, however. He made the bold claim that the Arami abjad was adapted from an even earlier writing system that was invented by creatures with different vocal capabilities, with the evolution into an alphabet being an adaptation to Ushabti biology. These pre-ushabti creatures, he figured, must have been the “Skiamun”, the tripodal creatures which the modern Ushabti called the underworld gods. And these “gods” must have been one and the same as the fossilized remains found in the buried tombs of the Usukanni and Cydonian cultures. However, there was not enough data from those cultures to confirm such a connection and thus Fourier and Marsh were engaged in an intense debate for a few years, which ended one day with a sudden depressurization of their lecture hall. Since then, their students have been continuing their fight, sometimes with use of small arms laser weaponry. 

Fig. 2: Copy of a Late Period relief on the Nersidiler Palette, showing a Skiamun (presumably Nersidiler) about to hit an Ushabti with a mace. Images such as this are used as evidence by proponents of the theory that Ushabti began their existence as a form of cattle that was then gradually domesticated into sapience by the Skiamun as a form of slave labour, explaining their reverence as gods. Notably though, the individual here is seen already wearing a form of clothing, which would speak against it being a simple animal.

After securing funding, Troy Herman Andrews aimed to finally put the debate to rest and organized the largest xenoarchaeological expedition that has ever been witnessed to date. The Andrews Expedition surveyed over 100 Usukanni sites from north in the Ares Vallis all the way south into the Argyre Basin. Their achievements were astounding and started a xenoarchaeological mania back on Earth. Andrews’ greatest achievement was finally being able to test Fourier v. Marsh, having now secured and catalogued various additional examples of Martian hieroglyphs, which were before only known from a handful of heavily eroded tomb inscriptions. The most important discovery was that the Usukanni employed two different writing systems, the classic and quite artistic hieroglyphs used on monuments, and much simpler hieroglyphs used to write down more menial texts, such as documents or letters. The latter script, which one of Andrews’ teammates quite appropriately christened “Hieratic Martian”, bore an undeniable resemblance to Arami abjad. There indeed was a connection. The question that remained was if the Ushabti saw and appropriated the hieroglyphs long after the Skiamun extinction as a form of cargo cult or adapted this writing system and possibly even language from the Skiamun directly while they were still alive, which could allow us a passage into reading the deeper past.

Fig. 3: The evolution from Martian hieroglyphs into the Tamd alphabet, using essentially the same sentence (click to enlarge).

Based on archaeological strata, Andrews’ expedition was able to differentiate three distinct aqueous periods (when Mars still had oceans) along the Ares Vallis: A prehistory, a Monumental Period and a Late Period. In the latest prehistoric strata begin appearing singular glyphs inscribed on square-cut bone fragments, likely used for ritualistic purposes, which resemble the later hieroglyph signs. Proper hieroglyphic writing is used throughout the entire Monumental Period, whose tombs only preserve bones of Skiamun and their domestic animals. The first known fragments of Hieratic Martian are found in the Late Middle Monumental, though its origin likely stretches back further. Towards the end of the Late Period, burials of Ushabti are often found in the same horizons as those of Skiamun, which indicates that in the latest stages of this civilization, the two species have lived in the same communities or at least areas (if this was a friendly co-existence or more like the relationship between men and cattle is another debate). One of the youngest known giant tombs of the Late Period has inscribed in its walls a short hieroglyphic text, below which is inscribed what appears to be the same text, but in a precursor to Arami abjad. The tomb had been abandoned mid-construction and in one chamber were found tablets which may have been blueprints. These came with hieratic sketches of the tomb's later hieroglyphic texts, including the apparently bilingual one. From these fragments could finally be gleaned a direct evolution from the Skiamun hieroglyphic and hieratic script to the Arami abjad of the Ushabti. While it is debatable if the inventors of the Arami abjad were Ushabti themselves or if the system was made by Skiamun (perhaps even for them), this was profound evidence for a continuity. The ancestors of the Tamd must have developed their language in an interlingual context with their “gods”, preserving some of the original phonetic meaning. Understanding the Tamd language, which had been extensively studied by ushabtiologists like Fourier, could therefore form a basis for also understanding the Usukanni language and writing. The ancient history of Mars could finally be conquered through historical methods.

Biological and Geographical background

Skiamun (Psittacanthropus challengeri) were members of the class Pedicambulata, likely sharing a common ancestor with the similarly intelligent Anaks. Unlike most pedicambulates, their scolecodont beaks were monodont and their mineral eyes, which had formed into stalks, had shifted towards the sides of the body. This, along with very well-developed chest-eyes, allowed them to see well in both an upright and horizontal position. Like all antitrematans, they were hermaphrodites that laid leathery-shelled eggs. Like many other periostracans they must have possessed a syrinx-like organ in their throat, which, like in  birds, allowed for a wide range of sounds that could be employed in language.

Fig. 4: A Skiamun in nude, shown with an extended phallus and speculative hairs along the back.

When normally striding, Skiamun tripodally knuckle-walked, not unlike apes, as is evident in their anatomy and their own art. For this purpose, many cultures developed a type of flat-topped knuckle-rings, often made of fractarian wood, which might be called “hand-sandals”. When needed, they could also stand, sit or even jump on just their single hindleg. Tombs of nobles are rarely found with “hand-sandals”, which might indicate that their status allowed their knuckles to rarely touch the ground, perhaps being carried by servants. Their knuckle-walking nature has often led to speculations that, like humans, they evolved from arboreal ancestors. But the related Anaks walk on their flat fingers, which makes this unlikely. The closest known possible fossil relative to both, Coryphodontavis, was a rather heavy-set, herbivorous animal that likely lived on the ground, probably curling its hands into fists to keep the rake-like claws sharp. Its biology and habit may be more comparable to that of Earth’s chalicotheres, which may indicate a similar origin for Skiamun. An actual transitional form between these archaic beings and their intelligent relatives is still missing, however.

A debate exists currently whether or not Skiamun had fur like other pedicambulates. Data from mummies is lacking here. In their own artwork they depicted themselves as smooth-skinned, but this may have been an artistic convention, a beauty ideal or reflect a cultural custom of shaving. The discovery of finely crafted combs in some tombs indicates the presence of hair on the body in at least some form, unless, of course, these people wore wigs and pelts made from the hairs of domestic animals.

Fig. 5: Topographical map of the dried up river valley that once used to be the Usukanni Kingdom. In yellow are ruins and names of major settlements, in red ancient monuments.

The area in which the Usukanni culture developed was a great river system which began in the Argyre Basin (then a great lake or inland sea) and flowed north all the way into the Great Boreal Ocean, specifically the former bay of Chryse Planitia. The river’s former delta is coincidentally where the Mars Pathfinder mission landed. In the south, the rivers and lakes were fed each summer by the meltwaters of the surrounding tundra, which up north led to controllable annual floods, very much like those of the Nile valley on Earth. In ancient times this formed an excellent breeding ground for a sedentary culture, the mighty Ares vallis river being the lifeline and connector of what was about to become a truly great civilization.

 Click here to read Part II