Saru Sea

Saru Sea
The Saru Sea on a satellite map
Type	Sea or Ocean
Settlements	Capital cities on the Saru include: Deugyeu, Grø Mithabej, Jute City, Moraun, Pyösonon, Riges, Yisma, Cúfti

The Saru Sea, also simply called the Saru, is one of Sahar's many seas which may be considered part of the Asura Ocean. It is better-defined than many of the other open bodies of water one Sahar, bounded on most sides by land. It meets the island of NAME in Osteria in the south, and the western coast of Baredina to the west and north. Part of its eastern bounds is marked by the west coast of Ystel, but the north-east boundaries are not clear. Typically they are drawn to include Jute or to use it as the border. Sometimes the Sañu Strait and waters east of Jute are included, which then allows the north of Ystel and the south of Lahan to be considered borders of the Saru.

The Saru is often subdivided into northern and southern halves due to the strong difference in the climates of the regions surrounding it.

Names & Etymology

The Saru has many names in many different languages.

Saru

One of the more internationally and cross-linguistically popular name is saru (Nevesh: /säru/), a name shared by the Second Neviran Empire. The most widely accepted etymology for saru among modern-day linguists is that its origins are unknown, but that it originally referred to the sea and was later expanded to apply to the empire that conquered its shores.

Another theory posits that saru originated as the name of the Empire itself and was later used to describe the sea. This etymology is supported by some historical accounts, including both poetry and less artistic texts, which refer to the fertile Neviran coasts as gāl-sarūm ('grain-sea'), a term that seems to have encompassed both the water itself and the shoreland. One of the most popular poems still widely known today and used widely throughout the Neviran education system is Gālas jeźek ('The Two Seas'), by Imperial poet Zikat Haqassa:

and with old age I shall sail the other [of the two seas]
Follow the wind as it sighs through the grain
and pushes the sails of the mill
Where heavy yellow grainheads bowing in(to) gentle waves
cast the water golden
Ancient hands too cold for sharp-thin wires, metal hooks and brine-rough ropes
will thresh the land's caviar (pearl millet) into baskets salt-stained white
and bake bread with the harvest of my children's water-green farm
Warm on the rolling hills under the endless sky
of the sea of grain (gālas sarūmdas)

— Zikat Haqassa, Excerpt of Gālas jeźek (The two seas), c. 1456, translated from Classical Neviran

Yet earlier records exist referring to the coasts of modern Nevira as variations on the epithets involving the /särum/ root: sarūmadovus yumanai (the land of millet), sarūmdas laije (the grain coast), sarūmbul (grain place).