Reddit Reposting, Episode Mystique (VII): Equestrian pre-history and demographics · 2:24am Aug 1st, 2022
Ok, it’s Number 5 on Reddit. I trust you can guess the pattern. Since I’m reposting this in 2022, this is all about Equestria before its first unification. Notably, this scenario couldn’t work for the pre-history of ANG, as it requires flying pegasi. I also felt like I did more copyediting of this post than earlier entries in the series. My apologies that it’s a wall of text essay instead of being broken up with headers. The original on Reddit had ponymotes to add visual cues.
One quick meta note before getting started: I’ll be too busy to be very online this coming week [or at least I won’t have my dual monitors for heavy editing], so posts will be paused until August 9. I may post something tomorrow or Tuesday if I have unexpected downtime.
In the opening of the traditional Hearthswarming Eve story, the prologue is “Earth ponies grew food, and in payment for providing weather, the Pegasi demanded some of the food. The Unicorns also demanded payment for magically raising the sun and moon. None of the tribes cared what happened to each other.” This was the general state of the ponies that founded Equestria before they recognized the value of cooperation as friends rather than as transnational business partners. However, this, like all pageants and stories passed on to one’s foals, obscures the more complex truth about pony life in those days. Namely, it gives the impression that all ponies of each type were united into a single tribe.
While there was some truth to ponies of the same type having nominal leaders, most ponies in pre-Equestrian times were in single-race bands that were largely independent. The ponies featured in the Hearthswarming pageant were unusually large herds in close proximity to one another, so they were forced to adopt the tripartite agreement for food production. In most other parts of what would become Equestria (except small mixed-race villages that independently discovered similar methods), unicorns were largely self-sufficient. The earth ponies made continuously-disputed contracts with nearby unicorns to provide meteorological and solar services.
Because of the need to coordinate the sun’s movement over an area much greater than even the largest territory, unicorns were the one race that actually stayed loyal to their hierarchy, with the clan that would later have Princess Platinum’s leadership as the first among equals, since they were the clan who controlled the sun. Unicorns with astronomical cutie marks would migrate to the lead clan to assist in the raising and lowering of the sun, causing the Canterlot clan to be far more populous than pretty much any other permanent settlement of any breed (earth pony cities would often divide and set forth for new lands when their population grew too large). Due to the necessity of having a permanent settlement to coordinate solar motion, Canterlot is one of the very few places to have been in more or less continuous occupation since the pre-alicorn era. Its large population also led the unicorns of that area to experiment with mixed-race food production on a large scale because relying solely on methodologically-talented unicorns and using the general population for farming did not scale to a city with Canterlot’s demographics. During the time leading up to the windigos, the Canterlot area was at its peak population due to the need to incorporate sizable populations of all three races. Modern Canterlot, with its 90% unicorn permanent population, has—at most—half the estimated population of ancient Canterlot.
Earth ponies outside the Canterlot area lived in independent farming communities that were largely peaceful to one another. There is not much evidence to support that they had any meaningful large-scale leaders like the unicorns or even nominal race-wide leaders like the pegasi. Instead, any region of earth pony villages had an informal leader that was chosen based on whichever pony had the most mutual respect at the time, [2022 update] much like how IRL horse herds choose a boss mare.
Outside of Canterlot and some isolated villages, earth ponies got their weather controlled by local unicorns with meteorological cutie marks. Earth ponies constantly suspected the unicorns of greed, leading to many disputes and battles. If an earth pony village had had enough of a unicorn’s high prices, they’d kidnap them into slavery until another unicorn came along with the promise of a fair price—free ponies do provide better quality weather, after all—or the nearby unicorn settlement was successful in their rescue raid. However, if the meteorology unicorn was also greedy with other unicorns, it was not at all unheard of for the unicorn village to let an earth pony settlement know that they could have some free weather control if they wanted to claim it.
Largely absent from these discussions have been the pegasi. Pegasi mainly subsisted on raiding other pony settlements outside the regions where they learned economic cooperation. The origin of the derogatory term “buzzard” and their warrior culture both came from this arrangement. One suspected origin of earth pony and unicorn cooperation was the mutual defense against pegasus feeding parties. Due to the inherent instability of procuring food from robbery, pegasus culture focused on keeping its population down. The main method of population control was cultural: pegasus mares did not look to have foals or find the perfect stallion until they were no longer capable of being a raid leader, so they had a much shorter fertile period than mares of ground-based ponies. In fact, infertility at retirement was common, so pre-Equestrian pegasi had a small and stable population.
Pegasus leadership dynamics did not share the stability of their population size. Unlike the unicorns—where the leader of the Canterlot tribe was the first among equals—pegasi nominally had a strict chain of command. In practice, the leader of all the pegasi was about as powerful as the Holy Roman Emperor or the Emperor of Poland: any nominal leadership titles could exercise little to no real power over other pegasus groups. This is because of their innate nature to challenge each other for leadership, and splintering is the polite alternative to starting a leadership fight (which would usually cause a power vacuum for somepony else to enjoy rather than give either pony victory).
This list should be a table, but Fimfiction's limited formatting options preclude proper data display.
- Scenerio %E/%U/%P
- Modern Equestria (near-equal assumption) 35/30/35
- Modern Equestria (uneven distribution) 40/25/35
- Ancient Equestria 60/30/10
- Ancient Canterlot (metro area) 55/25/20
It is only in cooperative societies that pegasi can make up a significant percentage of the population. Most of Equestria’s growth since the [2022 update] first unification is from the pegasus population increase.
After Equestria was founded, the ponies decided to spread unity everywhere they could. This decision was mutually acceptable but was spearheaded by the unicorns due to their centralized governing structure necessitating concern for and knowledge of bands of ponies outside their region. Earth ponies would travel with the unicorns to convince earth pony villages to convince them of the benefits of unity. The only resistance came when converting pegasi: although it was easy enough to convince them of a stable food supply, some local leaders did not like their nominal commanding officer actually using the position for business after so many generations of the chain of command being strictly for show.
Finally, my tangential idea for today’s thread is about mapping and navigation in pre-Equestria. Pegasi had a conception of the world that we would consider to be a topographic map. Earth ponies and unicorns knew their way around better than pegasi because they would know routes other than a direct flight to go between places. Unicorns, however, also used captured pegasi and surveying equipment to construct their own maps that focused on the direct distances between places to aid in steering the sun.
P.S. The location of the cave where the pact of friendship was signed is suspected to be in the basement of the Castle of the Two Sisters. The pair of alicorns moved into the existing seat of Equestrian government, and their castle then grew organically out of the old Equestrian governing compound.
