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Zul's Ethnicity and Age


sonic-nancy-fan

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I've been trying to determine Zul's ethnicity as I don't believe it is specifically stated. I had reasons to believe he is Egyptian, Indian, or Turkish.

 

Roland states, "That room belongs to the Egyptian bloke after the Ankh. Name's Zul al Zan." Roland was either referencing how Zul is the leader of the The Underground's Egypt branch, or Roland was stating that Zul is Egyptian. Given how Zul says, "I've had just about enough of sunny blond Anglo-Saxons taking things that don't belong to them", and in The Zul in New York Caper, Zul wants the stolen Egyptian artifacts to be returned to Egypt, him being Egyptian would make sense. The names 'Zul' and 'Alzan' are both of Arabic origin, "he doesn't like loot found in Muslim territories going to the West", and Islam is the majority religion in Egypt, so Zul is likely Egyptian.

 

However, Islam is practiced in India, and Zul's skin tone is almost the same as the thug from India.

 

And, Zul's store house of goods was located in Turkey.

 

The most arguments I can make vote for him being Egyptian, but I really don't know. As you can probably tell, I've been debating this with myself for a while XD. So now I've got to ask, what is Zul's ethnicity?

 

Also, what is Zul's age approximately? I'm assuming he is older than Nigel who is probably 22-23ish due to Zul having already been an accomplished archaeologist, but I don't actually know how old Zul is (and I don't want to start another inner debate with myself lol).

 

 

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snf;

 

Voila!

 

"First of all, bear in mind that Zul categorically isn't his given name. It's an alias he took - and our suspicion is that it traces back to the name of a marauding villainous sheikh in some pulp novel or silent movie. Using it is his way of teasing people like Roland's syndicate baddies: it amuses him to think they see him as a larger-than-life cartoon bandit.
Regardless, he himself would say that the main thing about him is that he's anti-colonial. He's not necessarily Egyptian, or even in favor of Egypt as an independent state (as opposed to part of a larger Arab or post-Ottoman pan-national entity); he mostly doesn't want rich Brits and Americans to have stuff that's rightfully not theirs, and he has a certain romantic bias toward keeping antiquities in or near their place of origin. At the same time, though, he's notoriously willing to sell Egyptian antiquities to, say, private Turkish collectors. If a trade gives him some money and puts treasures safely out of the hands of people he doesn't like, he's generally okay with it.
As far as his ancestry goes: it's hard to be sure (since he lies a lot), but Roland's best guess would be that he's descended from an Indian merchant family that relocated to Muscat (in modern Oman) in the 19th century. It's not clear where he got his archaeological training, but he's believed to have corresponded with Sir Mortimer Wheeler (and, for that matter, Ruddy) in the late `20s under the name "Dr. Rahul Malik," and at the time he displayed real familiarity with both contemporary archaeological techniques and academic politics in and around Oxford and University College London.
All that said, he's probably happiest in Alexandria and Beirut, when he's not out in the field somewhere. If that makes him Egyptian or Lebanese in his heart... well, why not? He certainly has fake documentation to back it up. ;)
He's in his early to mid-30s."
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That was a beautiful response. Thank you so much. I know more about Zul than I ever expected (especially since I expect that even in the next game, he'll still lie a lot). :)

 

He already gave himself the title of The Pirate of the Sand Seas, and now he made up his own name. This man is hilarious :D Plus, whenever I looked up the origins of the name Zul, it kept telling me that Zul was generally a female's name, so that is kind of funny as well.

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