Paraphernic Wars

The Paraphernic Wars or Exegetical Wars were a series of conflicts that took place across the Ancient Tarsian Empire over the course of the 9th century BCE, leading to its weakening, and the wider Antiquity collapse. The wars mainly concerned the 'paraphernes' or 'pairi-hvarenas', cultures that had arose surrounding the exegesis, reverence, or reliving of Tanumanic hvarenas following Ancient Tarsia's imposition of early Pastism and the Tanumanic canon over the Austral world. Competing paraphernes fought bloody conflicts over their divergent interpretations, abetted by partial authorities in the Empire, and steadily led to the collapse of civil order; in the wake of the destruction the dams arose as the only guarantors of order, and assumed a role such that during the Low Antiquity they steadily carved out for themselves the White Order.

Background
The Tarsian world-empire was established by the 14th century BCE, but its philosophical idea of Artism was not totally imposed over the rest of this realm, which practiced genealogical religions and other native traditions in varying states of syncretism. The paraphernes were an early feature of Ancient Tarsian society, but into the 12th century BCE they began subsuming the genealogical traditions of southern Carsa and other practices to create cults and corporations that dominated big parts of life. As a response to this the Pastic clergy began a more stringent policy on the hvarenas and the compilation of the canon in general in the 11th century BCE. The related struggles and policies were always back-and-forth but a spiritual malaise across the Tarsian world meant that devotion to the paraphernes reached increasingly violent levels, aggravated by climactic shifts and agricultural crises.

War of the Tenth Book
The first main conflict surrounded which hvarena should be the tenth in the Tanuman, the Tale of Za-ahura or the Tale of Hu-vakhsh. This lasted from 899 to 881 BCE and ended in the defeat of the Hu-vakhshites, with Za-ahura becoming the 10th hvarena, as recognized today.

First War of the Three Maidens
Rifts within the Za-ahurites soon appeared as they fought over the primacy of the three main female characters in Za-ahura's story. This lasted from 879 to 877 BCE and ended indecisively, but saw the steady rise of organised forces in the conflict.

War of the Exegesis
The dispute over the Three Maidens was only put on pause by a dispute over the proper reading of the tale of Za-ahura according to Tanumanic narratology. The Za-ahurites' backers in the clergy proposed long-winded philosophical readings, opposed by the popular paraphernes who stressed nothing but mystical devotion to the maidens. This resulted in large revolts, backed by individual princely governments opposed to dam power. The war lasted from 877 to 870 BCE, ending in the clergy's concession to popular practices, but also aggravating its own militarisation. It also caused the devastation of large parts of northern Tarsia.

Second War of the Three Maidens
From 861 to 845 BCE the Za-ahura cult clashed again over the issue of the Three Maidens. This period also saw an ephemeral resurgence of the Hu-vakhshites, who were divided between those that wanted to reinstate it as the tenth epic and those that wanted only any sort of re-admission to the canon. Both were left largely unresolved when a splinter faction of Za-ahurites that favoured one 'Long Epilogue' wiped out the main forces (and many governments) amid a major famine, seizing control of a large area of Tarsia.

Selbanash War
The center of violence now shifted to southern Carsa, where anti-paraphernic fanatics attempted to build up a force to defeat the Za-ahurites, and decided to start by crushing the Sarian's ancestral cult of Selbanash. Communal violence over the matter began as early as the 870s, but it was from 850 to 830 BCE that large armies clashed and devastated a Saria already suffering from various natural disasters. The orthodoxists were defeated, and most of them fled to Danalia in modern Izacia, which proved relatively stable.

War of the Convocation
The new Tarsian emperor in Tarsia proper, supported by Za-ahurites, tried to redress religious tensions by establishing a convocation of paraphernes to sort out doctrinal differences. This only caused a large conflict from 822 to 803 BCE in which the emperor himself was killed in 812 BCE, and after a long attempt to reestablish the convocation that ended in failure, the empire disintegrated and reached its conventional endpoint in modern historiography.