Early Uzda exhibited one of the most striking systems of familial organization encountered yet in anthropological studies, one which is to the best of current knowledge unique in the world.  Families in Uzda grew through agglomeration: in a marriage between two partners (marriage between more was not unheard of, and the process I am about to describe generalizes quite easily, which cannot be said of other systems), rather than one joining the family of the other, or both setting off on their own, the families of each merged into one.  If they were wealthy (and it was unheard of, in stratified Uzda, for only one to be wealthy), it was common for the families to abandon their previous homes and move into a single, much bigger home, that could accomodate everyone.  Constructing these homes in such a way that everyone could enjoy a quantum of privacy, yet without abandoning the goal of having a true family home, provided Uzdan society with an early passion for the architectural and engineering arts, as well as communality and concord, laying the groundwork for the style of building, and of living, exhibited by the Artificer of Graves and its workshop.

Uzdan families, having no clear patriarch, matriarch, or archon of any sort, exhibited a perilous sort of self-steering organization.  Frequently someone would emerge at the helm of family and express the general will, but one could never really tell who that would be; sometimes a four-year-old would be, to all appearances, the pants-wearer of the house.  King Yurghan I was one such spokesman. though records are unclear as to how old he was when he led "his" family of goatherds into a city.  Of course, just because such an executive power could emerge from the oddest quarters, and because of the tendency to analogize from family to state organization, the empire was in greater danger of falling into revolutionary instability than it might otherwise have been.  The Low Imperial period, in particular, was a riot of factionalism.  None of the factions, however, claimed to have a quarrel with the empire as such.  Rather, each of them spoke of themselves as the true representatives of the imperial "family" (and indeed, by that point it is probable that under a strict accounting there would only have been five or six families living Uzda itself, which is possibly why Jacinu moved the capital).

This manner of familial consolidation carries in its train, of course, certain consequences.  The Uzdan language had a frighteningly complex vocabulary for expressing familial relations, and there was a similarly complex set of taboos as to who could marry or have children with whom.  In practice, however, these taboos were frequently ignored, and people were aided in avoiding censure by the fact that many different relations could obtain between any two people depending on how one went about linking them up, and actually checking all of them was such a time-consuming task that it was a special trade unto itself, whose services were expensive.  The natural consequence of all this is, of course, borritism, something about which it never seems to have occurred to the Uzdans to wonder why it did not occur in other societies, such as the strictly exogamous populace of Orin, in so many ways Uzda's opposite.  The other natural consequence, however, was a high degree of unity, especially in small villages, and it is probable that the early edge over their neighbors the Uzdans had in the pre-imperial period owes to the fact that the soldiers were not merely fighting on behalf of the state, but on behalf of their family, which was the state.

Cites:

Artificer of Graves

Borrits

Chronology: Early, Later, and Last Periods

Yurghan I

Jacinu

Unconquered Orin