Elder Scrolls: Geon Ashsmith - Hook Gate Sketch

This is a page from one of the many folios of the artist Geon Ashsmith. A Dunmer traveler who studied at the Imperial Academy, and before that was fostered in the Hall of Ivy in the Aka Fell Citadel in eastern Keizaal. He aquired patronage from the Society of Thanes, an association promoting cultural programs in Keizaal with the express purpose of strengthening ties between the two former provinces. He went across Tamriel painting several landscapes and a few portraits of several noble houses. 

'Hook Gate Sketch' depicts the gate leading from the Hook District to the Noble district in the imperial capitol of Saarthal. The Hook District is considered the merchant center for the larger population of Saarthal and most of the wealthy business owners are residents in the affluent Noble District.  

The city itself was designed and constructed at the beginning of the second age by the Great Emperor Volk Sharp-Tooth. Though for the majority of his life he ruled from Solitude, he spent the last ten years of his reign in the Imperial Palace. Upon his death a statue a hundred feet high was commissioned and placed at the top of the grand stairway leading from the Imperial Council Building all the way down to Talos Bay.

Saarthal was chosen to be the Capitol after the Third Daedric Invasion destroyed the Imperial Island in Cyrodiil. The economic and political power base having moved centuries earlier, Emperor Volk decided that with the new age the first settlement of man would be rebuilt. It then, and now, is the largest, and most densly populated city in the entirety of the empire. It is one of the Three Sisters, coastal cities in Keizaal that are the nexus of trade. 

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Map of Saarthal