Polyhaemates
Polyhaemates, literally multi-blooded or many-blooded was a Symmerian term for the offspring of mixed Symmerian/non-Symmerian marriages and couplings. It gradually grew to encompass subjects of the Symmerian Empire who could trace their ancestry back to multiple different ethnic groups within the Symmerian Realm.
After the conquests of Orestes II the Symmerians gained control of large swathes of Syara, Ruvelka, Mansuriyyah, and Shirvaniya, prompting the intermixing of Symmerian nobles and officials with the local populace. Neither encouraged nor discouraged, inter-marriages were originally the domain of minor Symmerian nobles marrying into the families of prominent local officials, seeking to expand their own influence and wealth. As the Symmerians made little effort to incorporate the people they conquered into their society and culture, offspring of these marriages typically retained cultural and social attributes of both their parents and extended family's background. Early Polyhaemates were most commonly made between Symmerian hetairos (companions) and the royal families of Ruvelka's various petty mountain kingdoms.
Polyhaemates as a term arose sometime in the 2nd-1st Century BCE and was originally a pejorative. Polyhaemates typically were unable to gain mainstream acceptance into the inner circles of the Symmerian Royal Court and thus limited in influence and prestige. As early as the 1st Century CE however the term Polyhaemates became more generic and the stigma attached to the term gradually faded as increasing numbers of Symmerians and non-Symmerians began intermixing and producing children. By the mid-1st Century CE Polyhaemates became increasingly more common within the upper levels of Symmerian rule. Phanodemos, an early Polyhaemates who served as Archon and strategos (general) of Boreas (modern day Górska during the Borean War, was of mixed Symmerian-Scitarian, Ruvelkan, and Qatna descent.
By the time of the Symmerian Recession, Polyhaemates had become the norm of the Symmerian nobility, to include the Basileus (Deinokrates I, son of Alexarchus, was born to the Karvelebi Princess Minara). By the 5th Century however the term had already lost much of its meaning. The high rate of intermarriage and the tendency for Symmerian nobles to take multiple spouses and sire multiple children led a to widespread "cross-contamination" between the different ethnic groups of the Empire. So proliferate was it that the Symmerian playwright Dionysophanes (b. 302, d. 371) wrote "The companions of the King call for their ancestors and half of Siduri answers". Echestratos, a Strategos during the Symmerian-Hannashka Wars, claimed descent from the Seyhad, Qatna, Ruvelkan, and Vartax, while Peolpidas, who fought in the Zobethos Civil War, was of Nordic ancestry after his grand father had wed a Nordic druid.
The Symmerians believed that the soul was carried in the blood, and that the blood of different peoples contained specific conditions and qualities unique to their people. Nordic people, for example, for known for their light skin and size, Ruvelkans for their hardiness, Mansuri for their swiftness, and Hayren for their ferocity. Claims of bloodties were therefore sometimes used to boast of possessing said qualities. Some Symmerian philosophers even argued in favor of organized breeding to produce the desired traits in children in what is likely the first suggestion of eugenics, though such an idea never appears to have actually been tested or practiced.
The conquests of Serikos, Quenmin, and Knichus saw the term Polyhaemates return to prominence due to the more disparate appearances between western and eastern Sidurians. The term once again took up a negative connotation during the Slavokratia, with cries of treason leveled against Symmerians and Syarans who had sired children with the invading Slavs of Eracura, but the Slavicization of Syara in the centuries that followed once more brought the term into obscurity, where it eventually faded from common use.