How to take inspiration cultures without copying them?

Question

I'm currently creating a setting with a large culture that takes a lot of inspiration from Zoroastrianism and the Ancient Near east and Mediterranean.

It's going pretty good I'd say, but I've realized that all of my cultures, barring linguistics and rituals specifically relating to magic, are one-to-one identical with the real world cultures I've taken inspiration from. In every way. From their interactions to their clothing. I've taken too much inspiration, you could say.

I've tried to look up guides online about this, but most of them relate to cultural appropriation. Which is a valid issue (I'm not gonna debate this in the comments because it's not the point of my post btw) but that's a separate discussion, and partially irrelevant to me as I'm working off of cultures that don't really exist anymore, like the Minoans, or exist now but in much different forms, like Achaemenid Iran.

In the case of Iran I make sure not to use any aspects relating to modern Islamic Iranian culture, for example.

But still my question remains, the peoples I've created are far too similar to their analogs for my liking. This is supposed to be fantasy not historical fiction.

Please don't give me the same "just mix and match" solution, I've tried that and I don't like the results personally.

Answer 1

Much of what looks like copy/paste of a culture are things which can be described superficially. The real roots of a culture are harder to pin down. Those roots are what you want to capture the essence of a culture without feeling like a copy.

For any superficial aspect of the culture ask "why is this the way it is?" But don't just ask it from your perspective. Ask it from the perspective of someone from that culture. Then, when there is an answer to that, ask why that is the answer for why it is the way it is. Again, do it from their culture. At some point, the native member of that culture will start to struggle with answering "why." It may become too tedious or too nuanced of a topic. That's the point where you are at a kernel of the culture which can be used without it feeling like copy/paste.

Then, build the culture up from those kernels, which you may take from multiple societies if you desire. The result will feel more organic. And, if you do it very well, the native members of those societies will be impressed at how you captured them. (if they aren't impressed, you may need to do a bit more work!)

Answer 2

You need to mix and match features of different cultural models so that you aren't, and are seen to not be, copying a single culture. The trick is to pick the right features to create a cohesive whole, this isn't necessarily a matter of avoiding traditions that seem to be in opposition to each other, many cultures have paired rituals that appear to be in opposition to each other; for example the Bedouin find no fault with killing a stranger who doesn't announce their arrival but also venerate outsiders guesting in their camps. The key to creating a cohesive culture from a number of different sources comes from justifying those tensions and from having rituals/traditions to deal with most/all aspects of everyday life that make sense as a cultural whole and also in the physical environment and technological context in which those practices started.

Answer 3

TL:DR - change something

I mainly world build for role playing games, so this is a technique I use myself a lot. It has a lot of advantages! You can get a lot of detail quickly, and people meeting your world for the first time already have some familiarity with it.

I start with a rough idea of the kinds of traits I want the culture in my world to have and then pick a real world culture that fits the bill. Then I change one thing. Make a bronze age culture iron age, polytheistic to monotheistic, patriarchal to matriarchal, whatever. (In a high fantasy setting just adding magic is usually enough to thoroughly transform any real world historical example). Then I work through all the consequences of that change. The (usual!) result is cultures that are recognisable enough for my players to use their familiarity with the real world, different enough that they are surprising and unique, detailed enough I can tell interesting stories, and didn't take eight years and a PhD in Anthropology to come up with.

One other thing that is important to consider is that cultures do not exist in isolation. The cultures around them shape them. Caesar's Romans never met Sengoku period Japanese - what if two similar cultures had been neighbours? (And what, if anything, do we have to tweak in both cultures to account for the time difference between them?)

Answer 4

Exclusion helps

Take essentially any culture that is dominated by one or another thing and remove its influence entirely. Like generally arabic cultures for example, they're hugely dominated by the influence of islam, just imagine how different they'd be if they weren't? The resulting culture would be as different from its source as night and day. Now you can't just leave an empty space where there once was something as big as something as religion, or land ownership customs, or whatever the heck you exclude, so naturally you need to fill it with something else.

It could be something as simple as believing the world was hatched from an egg that was laid by some great beast. How would such a belief change things? Well, you might get buildings with high egg-like domes within which another floor could be built into. You could have the priesthood where hats that symbolize their belief, a hat that looks like the top of an egg, or you could even have jewelry become more oval or have the crowns of your rulers have more rounded and heighty tops after having been influenced by such as thing, or have a preference for shields to be more egg-shaped over round ones(kite shields already are sort of like this with an extended bottom tip, just make its tip more round/shorter). Egg-laying creatures might get held in higher regard over others, and whether or not eggs would still be included in a person's diet would hugely depend on whether they believe the eggs from 'not as great' creatures to be sacred.

You can have hugely different cultures if you simply remove one aspect about it and put another aspect or in its place. Of course, it'll also be up to you to actually account for how an altered, excluded, or otherwise replaced aspect will affect the culture of your world.

Answer 5

Cultural copying, transmission and evolution has taken place plenty of times, so finding similarities between cultures is not unusual. The Abrahamic religions all influenced each other. They underwent several periods of divergence and convergence due to the cultural and political interactions between them. Chinese culture influenced Korean and Japanese cultures. Indian culture influenced SE Asian cultures, and many of the European cultures share significant portions of their culture with their neighbors.

I would say, if you worry that your cultures are too copied, do a quick thought exercise. Develop the base culture you transmitted, then focus on a unique place, item or characteristic that only exists in this other culture's area. Then develop some lore about that item and think about how it would evolve over 100's of years. Christianity diverged from Judaism over a single man. It then developed in the sea of sin that is Rome, causing an aversion to vices, and were persecuted in its initial years to create a martyrdom worship. Now, the Christian and Jewish communities are pretty different, based on a coule minor tweaks early on.