Pretty much the title. I was just thinking of Morrowind today, and recently I've been reading Chariots of The Gods and looking into what it is questioning and realized the similarities between the Dwemer and Mayan. Both civilizations just vanished into thin air, both were very advanced ancient races, and both have long, unpronounceable names for places. I think I like Morrowind even more now.

From their appearance, I'd say they are babylonians.

Also, the incans dissapeared suddenly as well.

The races from TES aren't really anologous to any specific race, they're more like a hodge-podge of different races, along with some made up stuff. Ever see a statue of the Dwemer? They look like the reliefs of ancient http://www.cais-soas.com/CAIS/Images2/Achaemenid/Artefacts/Sculpture_Relief/Persepolis_Persian_and_Median_Nobles.jpg.

This is why I love TES in general. The games are just so filled with lore and references.

Not really... the dwemer are quite unique... but if youhad to compare it with civ's on warth many Atlantis comes pretty close...
Also dissapeared suddenly and could be higly advanced compared to the other civilizations at that time..

And Maya's didn't dissapeared... they were overthrown by the Spanish.. same goes for the incans...

In my eyes the argonians would be the aztec-like civilization while the Khajiit are the egyptians...

I don't think it was the Mayans that disappeared without a trace. I beleive it was the Inca...

No, the Incas were crippled by an internal civil war over succession between two brother-princes, which was exploited by the Spaniards who executed the winner of the succession war, Atahualpa. He agreed to convert to Christianity before they executed him, so rather than being burned to death, they strangled him, and then burned him. The "mercy" of the barbarous Inquisition. Whoever said that the Incas "disappeared without a trace" is wrong.

The Mayans were the ones who "disappeared without a trace", but modern theories point to a long 200 year drought bringing down the collapse. There are many ecological explanations for their collapse, most of which are rather Malthusian - they simply exceeded the capacity of their environment to sustain their civilization. Bear in mind, however, that this was not the entire Mayan civilization that was wiped out, only a portion in the southern lowlands. Of course, the whole hullabaloo over the Mayans is that they had built such a wonderful civilization, achieving great heights, before a sudden and swift decline and what we as modern society would look back upon as the "end of their cultural advancement."

However, the strength of the Mayan civilization was that it's central political structure was the decentralized city-state. So you can kill Montezuma and you can kill Atahualpa to destabilize their respective empires, but the Mayans were not so easily conquered by the Spaniards. They were not the same kind of regal, empire building civilization they once were, but the Mayans just didn't all disappear without a trace. They simply could not sustain their civilization, it taxed the environment beyond that critical point. People don't realize that we still have Mayan people in the world today.

So no, the Dwemer as a body of people do not refer to actual Mayan history - possibly the misconception of the Mayans certainly influenced the Dwemer creation, though.

I found that Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond offered a novel way of looking at the development of empire compared to the Americas and the Eurasian-African landmass. The Eurasian landmass has a much wider band of arable land, allowing expansionist building both east and west, providing area for hundreds of kingdoms to sprout up. However, if you note that the map of the Americas has very little land around it's tropical and subtropical regions, which prohibits many empires and civilizations from building themselves up. Which is why there were only three big civilizations in that area.

Babylonian and Sumerian influences, methinks.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Milkau_Oberer_Teil_der_Stele_mit_dem_Text_von_Hammurapis_Gesetzescode_369-2.jpg

No, wait, it's from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_hammurabi.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumer.

EDIT: @durandal: OMG, I have Guns, Germs, and Steel too! I think it is on my bookshelf somewhere, but I'll be darned if I can recall anything I read in it three years ago.

Dwemer = Dwemer.

Mayans = Mayans.

I can tell that from the names.... <_<

The Daedric ruins have long unpronounceable names too. And you act like the Mayans are the only group of people who vanished. While they werent an entire civilization, the people at Roanoke Island did the same thing... Just sayin' disappearance ain't enough info for culture correlation.

I even remember Brian S saying that the Dwemer language sounds like someone speaking Russian with peanut butter in their mouth.

If you want to talk Maya, read 1492. There are still Maya all over the place today, but something brought down the cities. And it probably wasn't so anything as simple as a bad drought. You don't say that earthquakes destroyed the Roman Empire after all.

One of the creepiest historical facts I have ever heard is that following the collapse of Mayan civilization, their glyphs became indecipherable to modern interpreters, as if the fall was so traumatic that the entire language was corrupted and people started writing in patois gibberish.

Non of these races just 'vanished' into thin air. A whole race of people don't just disappear in real life. It was their empires that vanished as they were overthrown by the Spanish yet the people lived in with some being 'culturaly assimilated' and others killed but many Mayan, Incans etc live on to this day.

Plus I can't see many similarities between the Dwemer and Mayans, for one their cultures are drastically different. Look at the building styles and the Dwemer ghosts, they don't look the same at all. If you mean the technological advances then you could say the same for many empires who were particularaly advanced for the time when compared with Europe. For one the Chinese.

A bad drought isn't a simple event. A 200-year long drought would make stonework impossible, because there isn't enough water for masonry. It would cause violence, if people had to fight to survive. Food production would halt. In the modern world, we have the infrastructure and the technology to last through drought fluctuation. But would the Mayans be able to? Their agricultural technology relied heavily on an abundance of water - rainfall is what the Mayans relied upon, not existing bodies of water, that's how they survived in their desert climate.

You'll see the same thing happen in the American west in a few years. Civilization won't collapse, of course, but water will be the limiting reagent. It's already happening.

It's entirely probable that the drought theory is incomplete. But people point to evidence of the long drought as causing every other problem that afflicted Mayan civilization at the time. The theory concerns itself with the root cause of collapse.

My point was, notice how none of the major Western civilizations was ever destroyed by natural forces? But if there was a severe thunderstorm on record when an ancient culture fell, it was always the weather.

Whether it was meant to be or not, I found this very, very interesting.

The only earth-civilization I can remember that would have dissapeared without a trace would be Atlantis... So i keep with my statement that the Dwemer are highly based uppon them ^_^

The Mayans didn't disappear, they merged with other civlizations. By the time the Spanish arrived, the Mayans had long passed their civilizations' zenith. Ring samples from trees worldwide indicate interruptions in the weather patterns around the time that the Mayans saw the decline of their power. Famine likely had a lot to do with it. In terms of mechanical inclination, the ancient chinese are closest to dwemer for me, superb for their technological advancements in terms of comparison to the rest of their ccntemporaries. The dwemer also share the affinity the ancient chines had for looking inward and isolating themselves from their counterparts.

I wonder if it's coincidence, but I suppose none of them really vanished, it's just that nobody knows what happened to them...

He was pointing out in that book that types of plants that allowed a high amount of food production per acre were much more prevalent in other places, and that the larger creatures able to be tamed and worked were few. Apparently you can't make a llama do everything you need it to, but you can castrate a llama and use it like a guard dog against woodchucks, muskrats, and coyotes.

Actually, Jared Diamond argues in Guns, Germs and Steel that Roman civilization was pounded pretty hard by a lengthy cooling period we call the "Little Ice Age". Shortened growing seasons caused crop failures, eroding the empire's economic base, at the very same time even worse failures and outright glacial growth were pushing tribes from Central Asia to migrate to warmer regions. So invasions from without, combined with less ability to support soldiers, combined with a lot of other factors, pressed that civilization beyond what it could bear.



These are important arguments, but even more important was the relative latitude distances between Eurasia and the Americas. Eurasia has really wide bands having the same climate, meaning a crop or an animal domesticated in one place could be planted in many, many other places. This created a very wide band of competition for arable land, ensuring that nobody could conquer the entire thing for any length of time, such that wars of conquest were common. Any group that gained an advantage would quickly export it to other groups, by hook or by crook.

In the Americas, in the other hand, the much smaller climate bands (due to the north-south stretch, rather than the east-west stretch of Eurasia) ensured that each group was specialized to its own area. Conquest would therefore be much less of a threat, since each group would find itself at a disadvantage trying to produce food in their neighbors' territories. Maize was a fine crop, and resulted in a fair degree of development in Mesoamerica, but it took literally centuries for strains adapted to cooler northern climes to arise. At any rate, any (agraian) civilization was destined to be fairly local in scope, and therefore much more vulnerable to local disasters.

At any rate, none of this has anything to do with the Dwemer. My theory about them is that, when various factions fought over the Heart, they fought over the timeline, in a scene similar to that time fighting scene in Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey, or a joke Dr. Who sketch I once saw. The Dwemer's timeline just plain got lost in the shuffle, is my theory.

Please elaborate. I thought I was just making a superficial comment there, but you have seen something I did not.



Moreover, those Central Asian tribes put pressure on the Germanic tribes at the outskirts of the Roman Empire, becoming the "barbarians at the gates" as it were.

The Roman Empire collapsed in a similar vein as the Mayans, actually. In two stages. You have the fall of Rome itself in 476, and the continuation of Rome found in the Byzantine Empire, which fell in 1453. The southern lowlands of Mayan civilization collapsed first, with the theorized climate changes affecting their ability to sustain their population; the rest of the civilization was absorbed by the Spaniards. Neither case is an example of an empire vanishing, however the crucial difference is that the Roman Empire did not entirely cease it's cultural and technical advancement after the fall of Rome, although it certainly put a damper on things. What we got from the Byzantines were Greek fire which remained a military secret, a metaphor for draconian laws that we disparagingly call "Byzantine", and the Hagia Sophia. I can't think of much else that the Byzantine side accomplished after Rome fell. While the concept of the "dark ages" is certainly out of date, there is a kernel of truth in that Europe rather stagnated for almost a millennium.

If the Mayans had been left to their own devices, it's entirely possible they too would have made a comeback. But a thousand years changes people, and they wouldn't quite be the same. Just like we aren't the Romans or the Greeks, even if we have inherited their history, traditions, and lingual roots. This is what I find the most interesting myself. It's a very post-modern concept to reject "periodization" and these distinct labels we have put upon our ancient ancestors. To call myself an American, and to call Thucydides some ancient Athenian/Greek who existed off in "era of time" with a neat beginning and end, it's rather disingenuous. So you have to be wary of the idea of collapse. It's an indistinct position of relativity, because no one ever just drops off the face of the Earth like the Dwemer. If we were to go far enough in the future, when their recorded history is far, far greater than our own short records, whose to say that the entire record of "Western civilization" won't be tracked from the original Mediterranean naval and trading empires like the Minoans all the way up to our own time, with no distinction made for inventions of nationality? We might be considered one entire group of people, who continuously passed on a kind of cultural story-DNA, told differently but always with the original narrative in the background. It gives me pause, at least, to consider that I am connected to thousands of years of history in such a way.

Sorry to hijack the lore forum with history.

As has been stated, they aren't 100% anologous to any one real-world culture, although there are several simmilarities between TES races and earthly cultures. Dunmer Ashlanders seem a mix of American Indians and Mongols (While House and temple Dunmer seem simmilar to medieval European mashing of Church and State). Nords are simmilar to Scandanavians, but again not exact.

Some of the simillarities are glaring, though. Using the thread's example, Dwemer and Maya both were advanced for their time, disappeared into thin air, and for whatever reason people don;'t believe either the fictional or real culture were made up of fallible mortals. Which always confuses me, people don't ever seem to think that maybe the Dwemer just [censored] up and died, or that maybe the maya were simply starved out, killed by disease or invaded (since that combination is what took out most native empires in the New World).

Dwemer aren't the Mayans, just as the Dunmer aren't the Gaels or Assyrians. The Dwemer are perhaps both the Mayans (or any other architecturally and technologically superior ancient race that disappeared) and whatever Bethesda wanted to put in that was entirely of their own creation.

The Mayans had gods, where the Dwemer, if they had gods, saw them as traits (Reason and Logic). The Mayans had many different city-states, and the Dwemer had kings (although they seem to have been mostly ceremonial, like the High Kings of Ireland). There are as many differences as there are similarities, and although some of these can be said to be inspired by other countries and civilisations than the Mayans, the others can only have been inspired by Bethesda.

It's a myth that Mayans disappeared without trace. The golden age of Mayan civilisation ended without explanation, but the Mayans themselves are around even today, and were resisting the Spanish even in the 1700s.

Dwemer themselves resemble Assyrian civilisation, compare;
http://www.imperial-library.info/dwemer/dwemer-z-image.jpg
and
http://www.colonialvoyage.com/viaggi/London20.jpg

The first picture could be from many early European civilisations. It clearly has similarities with Assyrian, although has Gaelic robes (the trim gives it away), Germanic weaponry, and Persian armour.

their squinty eyes must've made them partial to giant robots