Jabrosky
Banned
So I'm thinking about dropping nagas into a certain South Asia-like region of my world.
In this setting, nagas (Ophiophagus dibrachium) are large-bodied elapid snakes that share their closest evolutionary kinship with the king cobra (O. hannah), but they have evolved not only human-like intelligence but also resurgent arms. When slithering from place to place, these forelimbs (which resemble those of monitor lizards but with two fingers and one opposable thumb each) retracted within "pouches" in their thoraxes. Though the nagas are the aboriginal inhabitants of their home subcontinent, many of their patriarchal clans have formed symbiotic relations with humans migrating in from the southwest, who've come to regard them as representatives of the Brahman Naga (i.e. a supreme rain deity with the form of a giant rainbow-colored snake).
But how would humans communicate with these nagas? I want to keep the nagas' anatomy more on the snake-like side aside from the intelligence and secondarily evolved forelimbs, and I've read that snakes hear not through ears like ours but from vibrations through their skull. Thereby they wouldn't communicate with humans through vocal means but with something that would send potent vibrations. At the moment I'm going with special wooden trumpets called "Snake Singers" (Naga Gayaka), which produce a low humming buzz (you've heard the sound before under a different name, but I like to have people guess in their own words), but I haven't tested the effectiveness on that on the snakes around my neighborhood.
Also, how do you think nagas like mine would convince early humans they're godlike? The nagas in my world are equivalent in intelligence to humans, but before the humans came along in their part of the world to build cities and temples for them, they were more or less nomadic hunter-gatherers without the gathering. I'm leaning towards the nagas intimidating humans with their venomous bite, or maybe having helped the earliest human colonists get around the subcontinent.
On a final postscript, my nagas have always cannibalized each other in inter-clan squabbles, and that tradition has rubbed onto their human acolytes in the form of religious/military rituals.
In this setting, nagas (Ophiophagus dibrachium) are large-bodied elapid snakes that share their closest evolutionary kinship with the king cobra (O. hannah), but they have evolved not only human-like intelligence but also resurgent arms. When slithering from place to place, these forelimbs (which resemble those of monitor lizards but with two fingers and one opposable thumb each) retracted within "pouches" in their thoraxes. Though the nagas are the aboriginal inhabitants of their home subcontinent, many of their patriarchal clans have formed symbiotic relations with humans migrating in from the southwest, who've come to regard them as representatives of the Brahman Naga (i.e. a supreme rain deity with the form of a giant rainbow-colored snake).
But how would humans communicate with these nagas? I want to keep the nagas' anatomy more on the snake-like side aside from the intelligence and secondarily evolved forelimbs, and I've read that snakes hear not through ears like ours but from vibrations through their skull. Thereby they wouldn't communicate with humans through vocal means but with something that would send potent vibrations. At the moment I'm going with special wooden trumpets called "Snake Singers" (Naga Gayaka), which produce a low humming buzz (you've heard the sound before under a different name, but I like to have people guess in their own words), but I haven't tested the effectiveness on that on the snakes around my neighborhood.
Also, how do you think nagas like mine would convince early humans they're godlike? The nagas in my world are equivalent in intelligence to humans, but before the humans came along in their part of the world to build cities and temples for them, they were more or less nomadic hunter-gatherers without the gathering. I'm leaning towards the nagas intimidating humans with their venomous bite, or maybe having helped the earliest human colonists get around the subcontinent.
On a final postscript, my nagas have always cannibalized each other in inter-clan squabbles, and that tradition has rubbed onto their human acolytes in the form of religious/military rituals.
Myth Weaver
Sage
