Out of Asshai Theory

Wow, I love these essays- thank you for posting them!! As Morrigan mentioned above, I have some ideas much along these lines- but this redditor has them fully developed and has caught some things I never did.



While I have come across similar observations before regarding the black stone structures (especially from LmL), I don't remember anyone else suggesting that the Empire of the Dawn had Asshai as its capital. This is a veeerrry interesting idea, and quite well supported in the essays (for example, that Asshai and the Five Forts were most likely built by the same civilization, which must have been technologically advanced, quite large since Asshai is the largest known city, and both border the lands said to be the Empire of the Dawn). Also, the observation that the black stone structures in Westeros - the Seastone chair and the Hightower- are both on its western coast help support the idea of an Empire in Eastern Essos that had some outposts in western Westeros.




I am totally on board with dragons (and dragonlords) originally coming from Asshai. Even in AGOT, Bran sees dragons stirring in Asshai well before Dany's dragons are hatched - suggesting that either the dragons in Asshai "awoke" before hers, or that the Asshai'i dragons never went extinct in the first place (more likely, IMO). The cliffs around the river Ash seem to be their natural habitat on Planetos.

While I have never included Asshai in my theories, I otherwise have rather similar ideas regarding the Gemstone Emperors as ancestors of the Valyrians who arrived there after the LN when the Empire fell apart. In fact, I think it's quite likely that many of the legendary founders of various Houses in Westeros (i.e Garth the Green, the Grey King of the Ironborn, Bran the Builder) were also survivors of what I will call the Doom of Asshai. They all lived for a long time (too long for regular people) and have strong magic skills associated with them. This would also explain why, thousands of years later, some members of great Houses still have magical gifts that we don't see among the common folk.

The only area where I disagree is that the LN forced these Founders out of Asshai. I propose instead that they had already left, for various reasons, much like the Targaryens left 100 years before the Doom of Valyria. Why do I say this? Because we have no records of the LN in Asshai, no records of the death of the world's greatest civilization and no Valyrian-looking humans in present-day Yi Ti. It seems that, much like in the case of Valyria, no one escaped the Doom of Asshai to tell about it. A handful of members of the civilization that had already emigrated shared some of their magic/technology with their new countrymen, especially in Valyria, but aside from this the civilization of the Dawn disappeared completely.




I agree on the Daynes being descendants of the Gemstone Emperor, but am less convinced about the Hightowers. IIRC, not all of them have Valyrian features, and I believe they also intermarried with the Targaryens quite a bit, which could have introduced these features into their family. They do have a strong link to sorcery, this is true, and they live in an old Empire structure...
I wonder if not all the Asshai'i looked like present-day Valyrians. Maybe they had quite a bit of diversity, depending on their various gifts; after all, Garth Greenhands wasn't Valyrian in appearance and neither was Bran the Builder. Maybe they could access magic in all its forms, and their appearance reflected this. In which case the Hightowers could still be descendants of this original Empire, without necessarily having been dragonriders. This idea is particularly appealing to me b/c it could explain something else: If these ancient peoples' appearance reflected their magical gifts, and these gifts presumably affected where they chose to settle... and if these people lived for thousands of years... maybe some of them settled in the far North?