This may be old news to most of you but I have been browsing at the Imperial Library and came across the following

http://www.imperial-library.info/content/guide-akavir

and that got me thinking,

Tamriel - this is based on western Europe in terms of culture and most of the human races.

Now Akavir (bear in mind that its east of Tamriel)

The Monkey People of Tang Mo - I think they represent the Indian sub continent (India, Sri Lanka etc). This part of the world has been associated with Monkeys. There is even Monkey God in Hindu religion. They don't really invade other counties but they defend their country when invaded. They are also mainly pacifist (read Ghandi etc)

The Snow Demons of Kamal - This is obviously represents Russia.

The Tiger-Dragons of Ka'Po'Tun - They are China/Japan. Tiger/Dragon things has been associated with those countries for ages. I love the following line What this means is that China wants to take over Asia then it wants to invade Western Europe! One may think this is farfetched but some right wing political commentators do think this!

The Serpent-Folk of Tsaesci - They are Arab/Middle east. You do associate snakes with that part of the region. Also this line . Western Europe (Tamriel) has the most contact with Arab/middle east throughout history. All the wars and culture exchanges. Another line . During the middle ages, Arabs were the strongest power in Asia but now the table has turned in favour of Japa/China.

If you read the article, you can find more evidence.

I am not saying there is 100% mapping from Asia to Akavir but you can sort of see how that lore devs at Bethesda were sort having fun

The vast majority of this is guesswork based on nothing at all. Russia is hardly the only place that's cold, India is hardly the only culture with monkeys (and hardly pacifist), Tamriel is hardly western Europe. The Tsaesci are the only culture we have any visual parallels for, and those have all been Japanese.

First off, I just want to say that you did a good job of putting this all together, and come across as a reasonable bloke. This is a thousand times better than most of these trans-fictional culture mapping posts. However, I think this is something that a lot of people are sick of hearing. As you said, this is "old news" and not "100%" accurate.

Also: good on you for browsing TIL, it can be a good bit of fun.

Each characterise on its own does not make much sense but when you combine them with others they sort of take you somewhere. However I don't mean anything by my original post. When I read that article, for some reason the above came into my head and it somehow made sense with my limited understanding of TES lore. So I thought I will post

You say " we have any visual parallels for" Tsaesci. Is this in game or is there any links I can see please?

Go take a gander at cloud ruler temple and the stuff running around in it.

edit: but really, trying to make parallels between RL and Akavir works just as well as parallels between RL and Tamriel, that is, not very well. It certainly doesn't give you any ability to predict outcomes. A more fruitfull exercise would be comparing Akavir to Tamriel. Do the Kamal have parallels with the Nords? Do the Men of Tamriel compare to the Tsaesci? Do elves have anything in common with the goals and ambitions of the Ka'Po'Tun?

That's exactly it. All we know about most Akaviri races are the vague descriptions in Mysterious Akavir, which might actually be a creation myth rather than actual history. Hence, we don't really have enough info to make any inferences about them.


Cloud Ruler temple and the Blades armor, mainly. There is also a description of a Tsaesci temple in the Infernal City. Katanas, tantos, and wakizashis are said to have originated in Akavir, furthering the parallel.