Notes on Various Peoples of the Hyborian Age

Aquilonians. This was a more or less pure-blooded race, though modified by contact with the Zingarans in the south, and, much less extensively, with the Bossonians of the west and north. Aquilonia, as the western-most of the Hyborian kingdoms, retained frontier traditions equalled only by the more ancient kingdom of Hyperborea and the Border Kingdom. Its most important provinces were Poitain in the south, Gunderland in the north, and Attalus in the southeast. The Aquilonians were a tall race, averaging five feet, ten and three fourths inches in height, and were generally inclined to be rangy, though in the last generations the city dwellers inclined toward portliness. They varied in complection largely according to locality. Thus the people of Gunderland were uniformly tawny-haired and grey eyed, while the people of Poitain were almost as uniformly dark as their neighbors the Zingarans. All were inclined to be dolichocephalic, except a sprinkling of peasantry along the Bossonian borders, whose type had been modified by admixture with the latter race, and here and there in the more primitive parts of the kingdom where remnants of unclassified aboriginal races still existed, absorbed into the surrounding population. The people of Attalus boasted the greatest advances in commerce and culture, though the whole level of Aquilonian civilization was enviable. Their language was much like the other Hyborian tongues, and their chief god was Mitra. At the height of their power their religion was of a refined and imaginative type, and they did not practise human sacrifice. In war they relied largely upon their cavalry, heavily armed knights. Their pikemen and spearmen were mainly Gundermen, while their archers were supplied from the Bossonian marches.

Gundermen. Gunderland was once a separate kingdom, but was brought into the larger kingdom, less by conquest than agreement. Its people never considered themselves exactly Aquilonians, and after the fall of the great kingdom, Gunderland existed for several generations in its former state as a separate principality. Their ways were ruder and more primitively Hyborian than those of the Aquilonians, their main concession to the ways of their more civilized southern neighbors being the adoption of the god Mitra in place of the primitive Bori – a worship to which they returned, however, upon the fall of Aquilonia. They were, next to the Hyperboreans, the tallest of the Hyborian races. They were fine soldiers, and inclined to wander far. Gunderland mercenaries were to be found in all the armies of the Hyborian kingdoms, and in Zamora and the more powerful kingdoms of Shem.

Cimmerians. These people were descendants of the ancient Atlanteans, though they themselves were unware of their descent, having evolved by their own efforts from the ape-men to which their ancient ancestors had sunk. They were a tall powerful race, averaging six feet in height. They were black haired, and grey or blue eyed. They were dolichocephalic, and dark skinned, though not so dark as either the Zingarans, Zamorians or Picts. They were barbaric and warlike, and were never conquered, although, at the end of the Hyborian Age, the southward drifting Nordics drove them from their country. They were a moody, brooding race, whose gods were Crom and his brood. They did not practise human sacrifice, for it was their belief that their gods were indifferent to the fate of men. They fought on foot, mainly, and made savage raids on their neighbors to the east, north, and south.