So, Dracula was Romanian? I can never remember, just know he's Transylvanian.
Map Thread XV
- Thread starter rvbomally
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People tend to consider him as being Hungarian if you go by monster movies. If you mean Vlad the Impaler, then he is a Vlach, who the Romanians later evolved from to a great extent.
Count Dracula in the novel openly says he's Slecny, but Vlad the Impaler was indeed a Vlach.
You are thinking about Huns. Part of why they burn down houses. Makes the people and their valuables leave on their own accord.
Can confirm, that is what Huns do.
Sidenote: misspelling of Huns as Guns makes me want to do yet another timeline based around Huns, but this time, they get ISOT'd guns from WWII when they attack the Roman Empire.
I leave for a few days and now we're supposed to have favourite kinds of parasites?
Don't be a square. You know how people feel about those in the Map Threads.
Emperor-of-New-Zealand
Kicked
I mean, it's impossible not to see the positives of a tiny fish that swims up your urethra.
I think we should keep the talk about parasites we like for more carnal purposes off the table.
The PoD, to be exact, is in 973 BCE. Rehoboam, son of Solomon of Israel, dies during birth. Solomon is forced to have a different heir, and decides to have a kid from one of his wives from Tyre. Butterflies ensue, Israel is larger, and things diverge from there. As for development, things are actually the quite opposite, believe it or not.
Hmm. I am always a bit uncomfortable with "far future with unspecified technology" scenarios: IMHO, more than a few centuries down the line from where we are now (barring civilizational collapse) things will be so different that to assume state systems and international relations anything at all like today is imprudent. But to each their own intuition of futurity.
This is three quarters of a millennium before the (probably) legendary travels of St. Brendan, more than eleven centuries before the settlement of Iceland. Nothing I know indicates the Celts of the time were prepared for deep sea journeys. Please inform me if you know otherwise!
OK, so the Celts _aren't_ part of the Jewish Empire at this point, I expect. And that "hundreds of years" indicates a fairly regular sailing back and forth, which certainly seems to indicate some mighty precocious naval development. Indeed, it's puzzling why this then _stops_. Some sort of horrendous dark ages/barbarian invasion back home? And don't the Israelites/Carthagianians/whatever ever figure out where the Celts are going over hundreds of years and put their own oar in?
I don't have that much trouble with the _Celts_ being poor colonizers. They were always poor at sustained state-buildings, so colonial efforts probably would be small-scale and the initiatives of local Great Men, and would fail often - not so much because of the locals, but because the locals would be no help at all. Corn farming hadn't spread north of Mexico yet by 250 BC, so they would be encountering hunter-gatherers, which while not much of a threat would not exist in numbers great enough to be enslaved, and would not have corn to steal. Indeed, since barley and wheat often had trouble with local infections and such, they might not be able to establish themselves at all: the only thing they could trade for would be, I think, furs.
Central America and the Andes would be different, of course, but it's hard to say whether they would get as far as the Andes, and the already existing state societies (Mayas, Olmecs) would be fairly tough nuts to crack for a pre-gunpowder society which thought a first-rate way of fighting was to strip yourself naked and charge right at the enemy. Disease advantage? Well, that's harder to say. The Old World as a whole is always going to be much richer in disease than the New, but local levels of disease are going to vary: Africa, for instance, is vastly richer in nasty stuff than, say, cold and thinly populated Siberia. Although coexistence with animals (horses, pigs, sheep, etc.) gives Europeans a disease reservoir better than anything the Americans have, in a largely pre-urban Celtic state still not part of the Israeli empire, with travel connections to Greater Eurasia still quite poor, the disease environment is probably rather less rich than that of 1400s Europe. Central American contacts with the Celts are quite possibly much less deadly disease-ridden than OTL. Or do the Celts ever get that far?
(I'm not sure a few hundred years of intermittent fur trade is going to give that much of an advantage to North American Indians. Settled central American/Mexican groups are in a better position to pick up new tech and technique. Hunter-gatherers usually don't adapt to farming that quickly unless pressured into it, often by settled neighbors. They might pick up on pastoralism faster, sheep, cattle, etc. I will note that eastern woodland Indians, unlike Plains Indians, never really became enthusiastic horsemen).
Again, I'm not quite getting why Europe essentially abandons the Americas for half a millennium or more when the technology for regular travel clearly exists and is known.[1]
Come to think of it, it might be better to get rid of the Celts entirely and have the Americas contacted by the Chinese: they're a lot less closely connected to the Mediterranean cultures than the Celts, so their discovery of a new continent might remain unknown in Europe a lot longer. The Chinese also (OTL, anyway) have never been that enthusiastic about overseas contacts, and a Pacific route gives them a straight shot down the coasts to Mexico and the Andes. Of course, this doesn't give you the tech transfer to East Coast tribes you're looking for, and probably wouldn't happen early enough to give them a millennium of lead time on European invasions.
Or perhaps keep the Israelites out of the western Med for a long time and screw over the Carthaginians, so although European-American contacts continue, they remain scattered and intermittent with small Celtic kings setting up small colonies here and there but failing to fundamentally change the demographic balance, and giving time for tech and agriculture transfer to percolate.
Much depends on the disease environment, and how much agriculture (and high population densities) has spread. If the Americans have been snuggling with their pigs and cows for a millenium or so, they may have developed enough disease resistance to retain large populations even in the face of European imported illnesses. (I'll note India and much of China were places where the disease barrier went the _other_ way: many Europeans who went to India to enrich themselves merely enriched the soil). Quite a bit of North America, and parts of South America might still be, say, the South African Cape or New Zealand rather than India.
How much of the Olde World was nuked? The fact that the Chinese held onto territories in North America long after would seem to indicate they got off lightly. How long did the North American "colonial" period last, and how extensive an area was held by American states? Again, I find iffy the notion that after 700 years of tech development beyond nuclear arsenals the world would be at _all_ recognizably related to the immediate post-atomic period, but leaving that aside, Isreal has become a power again...after how may years? If they don't get back on their feet within a century, they're unlikely to form again at all. It would be like the Western Roman Empire reforming in 1176: heck, I suppose it could be done if you messed around with the Hohenstaufens, but it would be the former Empire in nothing but name. Or were they neither destroyed nor colonized, but simply diminished and weakened for an era?
(Bold/italic added by me)
Here's a better map to show what Europe looks like, at least loosely based on my original ideas (I've since fleshed things out a bit more, but not by much
Er, Chinese to the east? Not Persian? And isn't the blue blob what you were referring to as Germans in this response here?
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Excellent Judaiwank, what's up with the group east of the Celts (?), be they Slavs or otherwise? Also is Kuwesh like the alt-Kongo?
The big bold/italic names are the names of the continents.
The group east of the Celts are Germans,
Superpowers? Which are superpowers?
I really like answering these questions, feel free to send me more if you have any! It helps me really get into the lore of the world.
Does anyone live in that big state between the Jews and the Polynesians (well, Melanesians, mostly) in Australia/Lacoyah?
Sorry if I seem overly critical!
[1] BTW, I fear I'm really being anal-compulsive here, but it occurs to me that I don't known whether saying "imperialism happened" or "colonialism happened" are really useful statements: the Spanish conquest of Americas, for instance, had causes, motivations, and results extremely different from the the Scramble For Africa, and happened almost four hundred years earlier. And then there was Mongol expansionism, Ottoman conquests, the Russian conquest of Siberia...Imperialism in the OTL model is of course contingent, but vigorous expansionism happens all over the place - it just tends to stall out after some limit or other is reached.
Upvoteanthology
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You do. :/ It took me, like, half an hour to write a response to this. Sometimes it can be a bit overboard.Sorry if I seem overly critical!
But the state systems in this timeline aren't really anything like they are in our world, that's why it's so hard for me to explain the logistics of how everything works. Plus, it's not that tech is on a future level, it's more that the way things developed slowed down and sped up at different points in time. There was a technological revolution very early on, which allowed the Celts to have technology to travel across the ocean, but after the original nuclear war things plateaued very heavily. The level of the tech of this world isn't really undefined, it's basically just recovered after a nearly post-apocalyptic situation.
They absolutely didn't have the viable technology to travel anywhere near North America in our world. However, in 200 BCE in the timeline, it's nearly 800 years after the PoD. The Celts at this point have adopted a system of governance very close to Israel's, meaning it's more federalized and less... well, tribal. They also have a geologist who was miles ahead of any geologist at this point in our world, and who focuses his life's purpose on building a single ship able to make it across the world and back (I figure this wasn't just for science, either; maybe they believe there was some mythical land/heaven to find, like Tir Na NOg). After new land is discovered, it takes literally a century for trade to pick up again, and for technology to catch up to the point where even the shakiest of journeys are able to be made.
The way the Celts and the Jews ran their colonies in North America is very reminiscent of the ways the ancient Greeks ran their colonies in the Mediterranean. It wasn't that technology just suddenly stopped progressing, it's that their neighbors (the Romans in OTL, the native Americans in ATL) caught up with them and took them over. At this point in the ATL, the Celts and the Jews were also so busy focusing on internal issues (Israel was actually taken over by Persia, and the Celts were having a few civil wars), and they also didn't see any benefit in taking over the natives again. There was enough trade to keep diseases from being a big issue to either side, and it was always constant, but colonialism wasn't the focus any more.
Yeah, I wrote about a group the Celts called the Welinnorauyo, who were arguably the most civilized society outside of Central America in that point in time. They existed in OTL, lived in Florida, and were civilized enough to the point where they made pottery and built towns (the term Welinnorauyo comes from the fact that the color of the ceramics is yellow-red). I feel like, with hundreds of years of settlement and trade, the natives would eventually at least be able to raise a military force against the Celts, especially because while a trader ship or two could be sent every couple of months, an entire navy couldn't possibly be viably sent across the Atlantic. I'd say foreign pottery would become a point of interest to the upper class back in Feni (the main Celtic empire), as well as any extra bronze or iron sources they could get their hands on. And, of course, furs. Here's a map of the colonies, if you cared for one:
There are contacts between the Celts and the Zapotec, but they never outright colonize them. There's a lot of trade with them through ports in Cuba. As for diseases, there is a smaller-scale exchange of diseases. By the time trade begins to pick up in the 100's BCE, many of the natives died from disease brought on by Celts and Jews.
Yeah, that's a fine sentiment. However, like I said, many of the civilizations they're trading with are already to the point that they're society-building, meaning that they adapt somewhat familiarly to the techniques they pick up from Greece. I wrote about the initial slaughtering of the Welinnorauyo a bit, and when the leaders of the societies that were being colonized saw the blood shed by their civilians, they focused a lot of their manpower on adapting and advancing their tech. By around 200 AD, they're in the Iron Age. What you're saying does give me a couple ideas on the differences between Native American and European society, though.
Hopefully I already explained that trade doesn't stop. If you'd like to read more, I wrote a bit about it here in the past.
:| They actually do discover it independently to Europe, and decide to colonize it (the Chinese are less unenthusiastic about colonization) a little bit. In addition, contact between Asia and Europe is also much more frequent, so both sides ramp up their game at similar times.
Carthage never exists in this timeline.
I'm sorry, I'm really exhausted. If you want me to answer any more questions, I suggest we take this discussion to PMs. I'm happy to talk about it more.
Ah. Well, if I'm being inadvertently offensive - and it's something I worry about a lot - I'd rather not continue.
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