Heritage vs Origin

I'm trying to understand the relationship between the Heritages listed in the wiki and the Origins availble in character creation.

For reference, the sub-origins available in character creation are: Rahoum, Marzum, Saramat, Irzal, Raziya, Zalawi, Amunat, Ifru, Tessere, Koumbasi

The heritages from the wiki that I'd associate with the Sirdabi caliphate are: Amunati, Salawi, Irzali, Rahoum, Tessouare, Razmani (am I missing any?)

Setting aside Koumbasi, since they are a somewhat independent emirate, that leaves the origins of Marzum, Saramat, and Ifru which I'm fairly unclear about.

Seems that origins are more-so meant to be geographic rather than cultural, does that sound right?

Would people from Marzum mostly be of Sirdabi heritage?

Saramat has a nice Wiki entry which describes Sarmatiyyans, but they are missing a heritage entry, so it took a bit of digging to figure out they exist.

I couldn't find much about Ifru, would people from there be called Ifrans? Or is it more of a region with a mix of the surrounding Tessouare, Razmani, and Amunati people living there?

Apologies for the question dump, just trying to wrap my head around all this lore. :D

Origins are directly tied into geography, but there's an element of culture in them as well since people are bound to be culturally influenced by where they're from. Heritage, for its part, is a blend of culture and straight-up genetics. Here's how I described origin in the character generator guide on the wiki: "This is generally either the place where your character was born and raised, or where they have lived for some time -- essentially, it's wherever they consider home." Another possible aspect of origin is the place a person consider themselves a "citizen" of, wherever that's applicable.

Just to come up with a real-world example: Someone of Chinese heritage whose family has lived in California since the 1800s would likely consider their "origin" to be the United States, though their heritage is Chinese. This person might still be culturally influenced by their Chinese heritage, or they might be very typically American instead and retain very little influence from their Chinese heritage. Alternately, a Chinese graduate student who has come over to the U.S. just to attend university would consider their own origin to be China (even though they might actually end up living in the U.S. for some time), and their customs and beliefs would probably still be very much Chinese. So even though "the United States" and "China" are both simple geographic locales, they're also heavy influencers of a person's culture, sometimes moreso than that person's genetic heritage. And which place one considers "home" depends a lot on the individual person and their unique circumstances.

In short, origin is really kind of a blurry concept that can be a little bit different for each individual, and how you want to interpret it for your character is pretty flexible! 

Khalduno wrote: The heritages from the wiki that I'd associate with the Sirdabi caliphate are: Amunati, Salawi, Irzali, Rahoum, Tessouare, Razmani (am I missing any?)

Technically it's just Sirdabi instead of Rahoumi, even though Rahoum is the original homeland of all ethnic Sirdabi. The Sarmatiyyans are also Sirdabi in genetic/heritage terms, they've just been out of Rahoum for a very long time. Maybe there should be an option to choose Sarmatiyyan Sirdabi vs regular Sirdabi? I'm not sure! The Sarmatiyyans would consider themselves distinct from "regular" Sirdabi, but they all would have considered themselves People of the Sirdab at one point, since in pre-Azadi days all of them would have made pilgrimages to the original pagan version of the shrine.

Other native heritages of the Sirdabi caliphate would include Bissenke (the dominant ethic group of the Emirate of Koumbasi, and also commonly found in Tessere and Ifru especially) and Eladjit (the dominant ethnic group of the Emirate of Eladje, but they're not yet listed on the wiki heritage page).

Marzum: Native heritages are chiefly Sirdabi and Yehani. The territory encompassed by the Sirdabi province of Marzum was a Yehani kingdom in long-ago days, so there are still a fair number of Yehani there in addition to ethnic Sirdabi. There is actually also some Elukoi blood in Marzum, though much diluted, probably largely to the point of being unrecognizable. The Marzum Despotate was founded after the original Yehani kingdom was conquered by the legendary Elukoi heroes Ro and Karibad, leading an army consisting partly of Elukoi but mostly of (pre-Azadi) Sirdabi warriors. Marzum still has a lot of cultural cachet not just for Yehani but all other followers of the One God, as it has a lot of storied history for those peoples. You can think of Marzum as kind of a mix of Yemen and parts of the Biblical "Holy Land".

Saramat: Native heritage is chiefly Sirdabi (both local Sarmatiyyan Sirdabi and "regular"), with some Irzali in the northeast.

Ifru: Native heritage is chiefly Tessouare (Tessere and Ifru together are the heartland of Tessouare culture), with Sirdabi mostly in the cities and Razmani living in the more rugged interior areas. There are also people of Bissenke and Milombo heritage living primarily in the south of the province, where the Hazari Desert peters out and the boundaries of the province become a little blurry. The adjective pertaining to Ifru is "Ifari".

I think that's it! Also please don't apologize for having tons of questions; I am genuinely excited to have somebody interested in the lore and asking questions about it!

Thanks Mistsparrow, that clears things up nicely! Really love the real world parallels, it provides a great scaffolding to build lore around while still allowing a ton of creative freedom. I take it the Elukoi are inspired by the real world Greeks? I'm also happy to help adding info to the wiki, though I just tried creating an account for it and I couldn't get past the CAPTCHA (though I think I got the answers right).