Tiar-Shi Sphere

The Tiar-Shi Sphere is one of the larger historical Sangheili civilizations, born out of the merger of two large Sanghelios empires, Tiarang and Shiida. Once a prominent political entity and the rival to the Crimson League in the Urs system, the Tiar-Shi Sphere is now more splintered and never became as predominant within the Covenant as the meta-culture of the Crimson League.

History
While its constituent polities, Tiarang and Shiida rose to prominence during the Wars of Iron and Blood, the Tiar-Shi Sphere itself was formed in the early centuries of the consequent space age. As a primarily Kaepran polity with some holdings in Vaardma, Tiar-Shi was dominated by the Kharsim ethnic group, though the Nurias played a large role, along with various smaller populations existing as vassals and dependencies. The official lingua franca of the Tiar-Shi Sphere was Zhakhan, which had long been a tongue of high culture and administration in Tiarang.

In its heyday, the Tiar-Shi Sphere was an industrial powerhouse, and more centralized than the Crimson League. They expanded their territory through conquest and later economic domination of smaller polities. They controlled sizable surface holdings on Sanghelios itself, though their territory on the homeworld was smaller than that of the Crimson League. In addition to this, the Tiar-Shi Sphere had invested considerably in off-world holdings throughout the Urs system and later beyond, expanding its influence throughout the Sunlit Worlds in the pre-Covenant era, forming the astropolitical region later known as the Tiar-Shi Belt.

Owing to its centralized nature, the Sphere was famed for having the largest and most standardized standing military at the time of the War of Beginnings, but this — combined with various cultural and political aspects — also made them less flexible and responsive to changes, such as those that came with the Writ of Union. Although the group survived well into the Covenant, its central government lost much of its power and cultural influence, and many of its former constituents drifted from its grasp. Likewise, reforms and cultural change in the empire's former heartlands on Sanghelios led to many of the original cultural aspects of Tiar-Shi being retained better in some off-system colonies that had remained more isolated when the winds of change brought on by the Covenant swept over Sanghelios and the wider Urs system.

Today, the largest remaining common polity within the cultural sphere of Tiar-Shi is the Tiar-Shi Commonality, a loose grouping of worlds located near the Sangheili core sphere unified by their historic cultural ties.