From the Adventures of Luke Skywalker: The Lost City of Tatooine

The Lost City of Tatooine

Author: David West Reynolds

Medium: Short story

Publication date: July 1999 in Archaeology's Dig

Timeline placement: 3 BBY

 

A little known and very rare short story featuring a 16-year-old Luke Skywalker and an ambiguously aged Biggs Darklighter, who according to the illustrations is already sporting the full mustache he'll have three years hence in A New Hope. Luke has finally saved up enough money to buy his own landspeeder, and he and Biggs are joyriding through the Douz outpost on their way to the city of Metameur to gawk at spaceships like a couple of yokels. They decide to take a dangerous shortcut through the Desolation Canyons, though a racist mechanic warns them that that's Sand People territory. They might also run across the fabled lost city of the Ghorfas, a race who lived on Tatooine in ancient times but was exterminated by the Sand People, but all explorers who have gone looking for it have never returned.

 

Entering the canyons, Luke and Biggs are immediately caught in a sandstorm. Luke pilots the landspeeder to safety, and when the storm passes they find that they have run across the fabled lost city of the Ghorfas. Turns out it wasn't that hard to find at all. It was actually super easy, barely an inconvenience.

 

Luke and Biggs examine the ancient tombs and discover that at some point the Sand People started burying their dead here as well. There is a clear transition between the old Ghorfa art and architecture and the more recent Sand People construction, and Luke realizes that the Sand People didn't exterminate the Ghorfas—they are descended from them! 

 

Luke and Biggs study the carvings on the city walls and learn the history of the Ghorfas. When early settlers came to Tatooine, they used their technology to suck up all the water from the Ghorfas' wells, forcing them to abandon their city and become the nomadic Sand People. Of course, we know from playing Knights of the Old Republic that Tatooine was actually transformed into a desert planet by orbital bombardment by the Rakata, and the Sand People became nomadic wanderers thousands of years before humans settled there. It's possible that the Sand People still maintained some reservoirs that were plundered by colonists, or that the lost city of the Ghorfas was the only remaining permanent settlement when its inhabitants were forced to abandon it. The story itself seems to suggest that all of Tusken Raider society as we know it originated from brutal colonization, but since the Rakata colonized Tatooine long before humanity did, that can still be true, from a certain point of view.

 

Also KotOR suggests that the Sand People may somehow be genetically related to humans, something never brought up in any other source dealing with Tusken history, so who knows what to believe.

 

A party of Tuskens comes across Luke's landspeeder but he and Biggs escape in it with ease. Later, Luke tells his aunt and uncle about what he discovered, but Uncle Owen tells him that the past is best left alone. 

A very cool and interesting story, and blessedly short as well. High marks. Also so obscure that Pablo Hidalgo just plumb forgot to include it in The Essential Reader's Companion. Physical copies of the Dig magazine it appeared in seem to be very rare and expensive, but it's been archived by fan sites and is easily found online.