Shanto

The Backstory of Shanto

'What is Shanto?', you may ask. It's a... decently long story.

When I was a kid, I used to make plenty of stories and comics. I was never really a good author, but my favourite and arguably best work was Ahmed's Adventures, which followed the life of a boy named Ahmed Zakeri. I'm much too busy nowadays, but I want to revisit Ahmed one day. Anyway, the one thing that most of my stories had in common was that they were set in the same universe.

A lot of them were set in a city I named Salt Lake City (not to be confused with the real-life SLC in Utah). Salt Lake City is the capital of a country named Cornaland. And Cornaland is in the northwest of a continent called... Shanto.

Basic Description

I've drawn a bunch of maps of Shanto, and this is what it looks like:

The biomes of Shanto

And these are all of Shanto's countries:

The countries of Shanto (country names and capital cities on the right)

I first made Shanto around 2019/20 as a setting for my stories, but I didn't fully flesh it out (pretty much all of them were set in Cornaland, so yeah). Around mid-March this year, I realised that I wanted to work on Ahmed's Adventures sometime soon, and I kinda forgot where I'd left all those comics. I decided to redo Shanto from scratch, and here I am now.

Back when I was a wannabe author, I only really defined 3 countries, all in Shanto's northwest:

• Cornaland, the Columbia-like mountainous country
• Palina, a Mediterranean, plain-covered peninsula southwest of Cornaland, and
• Tadear, an arid land of red deserts and barren canyons, with mountains in the north.

Here they are:

Note: When I made up Palina and Tadear years ago, they weren't called Palina or Tadear. I gave them new names when recreating them, because I forgot their original names. However, Cornaland still uses its original name.

The north of Shanto is dominated by the Cornish Highlands in Cornaland, the Taridese Desert in Tadear and the following countries east of it:

Dheḥda, Saré, Terrazura and Aridia.

Northeast of Aridia is a mountainous peninsula nation called Dagerrah. Dagerrah is notably wetter than Aridia.

The countries east of Tadear. Did you know that when I first made Aridia years ago, it was way bigger, covering everywhere east of Tadear? Yeah, I carved 4 countries out of it, and it looks much better now.

Northeast of Dagerrah, is an island country that I named after myself. It was originally called Adnanese Guyana, but I renamed it to Adnayana. Adnayana is the northernmost and easternmost country of Shanto. For whatever reason, I didn't make a scale for the Shanto map, but I think of the Tropic of Capricorn to be just south of Dagerrah (Shanto would be in the same part of the world as Australia). Thus, Adnayana is a tropical island.

The island nation of Adnayana - this may be hard to see (unless you zoom in), but it has hundereds of tiny islands to its east. Adnayana is slightly smaller than Cornaland.

South of Aridia is the region of Azulia, dominated by the Azure Sea (to the west) and the three Tealese seas (in the land of Dahabah). The dominant country in Azulia is the island of Kododu, a wealthy nation. Southeast of the Tealese seas is the hermit kingdom of 'Inja. 'Inja isolates itself from every other country, and it's authoritarian - think of it like North Korea.

Azulia - a temperate and wet area, in sharp contrast to the bone-dry Aridia. South of Azulia is the steppe country of Suhul, which is similar to the real-life Mongolia.

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I'll update this website over time. For now, sayonara!

By Adnan Mohamoud - 2026