WI: No Bronze-Age Collapse, No Greek Dark Ages

Polish Eagle

As the title says. Whatever the cause of the 12th-century BC Bronze Age Collapse, it doesn't happen. No disintegration of the palace economy, no Sea Peoples, and a (for the moment) surviving Hittite Empire, with all the increased trade and cultural exchange this will all entail.

What effects would this have on the next thousand years?
 

Marko

I am not sure but I think the POD requiered would fall under ASB . Since it would have to change rain patters in central Europe, in addition you would have to butterfly the earlier success of the Bronze Age in the Balkans and central Europe since research shows that one of the problems was a mindboggling level of deforestation for the furnaces. You would have to change the complete Bronze Age to avert the colapse, it was just a disaster waiting to happen and the societies weren't stabile enough to stand on their own once the troubles began.
 

altwere

I believe that the Hittites were starting to use iron. What if that knowledge spread earlier. It might in itself cause social problems.
 
Derek Pullem

Derek Pullem

Donor
Marko said:
I am not sure but I think the POD requiered would fall under ASB . Since it would have to change rain patters in central Europe, in addition you would have to butterfly the earlier success of the Bronze Age in the Balkans and central Europe since research shows that one of the problems was a mindboggling level of deforestation for the furnaces. You would have to change the complete Bronze Age to avert the colapse, it was just a disaster waiting to happen and the societies weren't stabile enough to stand on their own once the troubles began.
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Do you have a source for this - it sounds unlikely
 

altwere

I'd never hear that, but it wouldn't surprise me. Also could the weather patters be caused by a little ice age episode?
 

Marko

Derek Pullem said:
Do you have a source for this - it sounds unlikely
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I' ll have to go back to the university library to look for it but I distinctly remember that part while I was writing a paper on the Thraco-Cimmerians (or actually what they weren't :D) several years ago.
 
Daeres

Daeres

For one thing, the Ancient Greek spoken in the equivalent of the classical era would be rather different; Mycenaean Greek is indeed a form of Greek, but it's of a different family to almost all of the dialects that appeared post Dark-Ages. It's the equivalent of speaking Dutch rather than English, and over time I suspect the differences would become just as magnified.

I suspect that Linear B and its developments would not last forever; whilst it's quite possible for logo-syllabic scripts to function for a long period of time, alphabets were often introduced by three things; invasion/conquest, the presence of a highly prestigious culture utilising an alphabet, and inclusion in an Imperial administration utilising an alphabet as its administrative script of choice. It seems likely that one of these things would eventually happen to Greece.
 

yourworstnightmare

Banned
Barbarossa Rotbart said:
No. Rember that without the Dark Age the Greek did not become illiterate. And remember that in OTL the Greek modified the phoenician script by liking the letters to the sound of the Greek language, which was a new concept.
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Still, if Greek culture continue to fly high, would they want to integrate foreign stuff into their alphabet? Probably not.
 

Superaquaspiderbatman

Banned
Yeah, I think we're talking past eachother :) What I meant was, that an "alphabet" would still be around; "alphabet" meaning the broad sense of the word: A set of characters that can be put together to form words and sentences. That's what I meant by "a very, very different alphabet": We'd still have writing, even if the letters we'd use would look completely different from OTL.
 

altwere

Many if the oldest writting system had signs for sounds which would have been able to be used as an alphbet. Remember that all of the Bronze age empires were very conservitive and it was usful to make reading hard.
 
Daeres

Daeres

Yeah, I think we're talking past eachother :) What I meant was, that an "alphabet" would still be around; "alphabet" meaning the broad sense of the word: A set of characters that can be put together to form words and sentences. That's what I meant by "a very, very different alphabet": We'd still have writing, even if the letters we'd use would look completely different from OTL.
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That is not an alphabet. The word you're looking for is 'script', and alphabets are a kind of script.
 

Barbarossa Rotbart

Alphabetic scripts were a phoenician invention develloped from the Egyptian hieratic script, but phoenician script and its aramaic successor did not have symbols for vocals (only for consonants). The Greek introduced them after adapting the phoenician script for their own needs.
All other scripts at that time were either syllabographic or logographic scripts and stayed that way.
 
Daeres

Daeres

*le sigh*
So...only "scripts" derived from OTL Greek are "alphabets"?

I think "nitpicking" is the word here..
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'Le sigh'? If I wanted to get that as a response I'd have posted on 9gag.

No, an alphabetic script is one in which a character represents a single phoneme at a time.

This is by contrast to say, a logographic script in which a character represents concepts and names directly, or a syllabic script in which a character represents a syllable. An example of the former is very early Cuneiform, and an example of the latter is Linear B.

Alphabetic scripts are not all descended from Greek, as they did not originate the concept. The Greek alphabet is sourced from the Phoenician, which in turn is likely to have inspired the Aramaic alphabet.

As Barbarossa Rotbart said, all alphabets are scripts but not all scripts are alphabets.
 
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