I´m considering to work, after I`ve finished my current TL "A Different Chalice", on a world map (or at least Eastern Hemisphere map) with a number of explanations based on what we`ve been discussing in this thread.
Here are some of the hypotheses I´ve drawn so far- please comment! - and a few yet totally open questions.
Hypotheses:
1.) The Eurasian steppes will be inhabited by sedentary agriculturalist urban societies along the rivers and by herders in the large spaces in-betweens. Cultural horizons will not spread as quickly across space ITTL as they did IOTL on this "continental cultural highway".
2.) Political, economic, military and cultural hegemony will remain, at least far into the 1st millennium BCE, with the long-established urban civilizational centres (Egypt, Mesopotamia, Indus-Ganges, Oxus, Yellow River), who experience longer continuity.
3.) Like OTL´s civilizational centres, they will be primarily caught in ongoing centre-periphery conflicts with surrounding herding and marginalised groups.
4.) From these civilizational centres and others, innovations like bronze-working, wheels, donkey-domestication, syllabic script, iron-working, minted currency, mills etc. will slowly disseminate.
5.) With them, cultural concepts will come to influence the periphery, e.g.:
a) a "Maat"-like worldview and attitudes towards the decesaed spreading from Egypt across Northern Africa and much of Europe
b) counter-cultural concepts to a), like that of Moses, following suit
c) something similar, with a few analogies to Vedic traditions but also clear divergences from it for which I´d draw on our knowledge about Southern Indian and Adivasi folk religion, developing in the fertile plains of the Indian subcontinent and spreading from there to South-East Asia
6.) Without Kurganised influences seeping in from the West, proto-Chinese chalcolithic civilization along the Yellow River doesn`t form into unified Chinese Kingdoms / Empires / Federations until much later. Instead, lots of warring (or not so warring) states.
7.) Generally, much less territorial states when compared to OTL, and much more political systems akin to OTL´s South-East Asian Mueang model: more powerful city states exercising hegemony over less powerful ones, in overlapping concentric circles on several levels. At the heart, powerful states like Egypt, alt-Akkad/Babylon, or alt-Northern India. On the outside, non-agriculturalist indigenous societies.
Open questions:
- religious developments
- order of technological innovations, plausible divergences and their effect on overall development
- major clashes between civilizational centres since when?
- discovery of the Americas? when and by whom? (Canaanite traders?)
