And here, finally, is that map I mentioned:
The POD is that Alexander the Great [1] doesn't die in 323 BC. Or actually it's that Hephaistion doesn't die in 324 BC, which prevents Alexander's dramatic downward spiral. Alexander lives another 23 years, dying in 300 BC of disease and leaving his empire to his adult son. Obviously, what we see here isn't what Alexander managed to conquer. This map shows us the situation in (what we would call) 640 AD... nearly a thousand years after the POD. Over the centuries, the
Oikomenem [2] has dwindled at times, grown at others, faced crises and changes, battled secession and absorbed new regions. At one point, halfway through its life-time, it fell apart into warring states for a brief period of intense civil war / succession struggle.
It has survived all these things. It has evolved. As its founder intended, this great empire has witnessed the merging cultures and traditions. philosophies from East and West have been joined to each other. The old cults have been displaced or absorbed by the imperial cult of the Light Eternal, which preaches that all deities are mere avatars of a universal divinity. The chief mortal agent of the Light in the physical world is the
Vanaksis. [3] The central position of the Chyselephantine Throne and its occupant in religious matters has in many ways been a glue that has kept the Oikomenem together in spirit, even when it was divided in practice. Since the Conquest, there has not been a time when a scion of the Argead dynasty was not at the head of this empire. The royal
Pharram [4] is the very legitimacy of all political and religious matters.
Not that we must assume matters have remained unchanged! Far from it: the wild interaction of countless peoples within a vast - and usually peaceful - domain has led to immense leaps in science and technology. The central government was interested in promoting cultural cross-pollination from the outset, and also invested heavily in good infrastructure and general safety for the populace. Alekshandros IV began funding philosophical schools, which gradually evolved into academic centres of learning and scientific schools. Over nine centuries after the Conquest, the tech level of this world is quite similar to what we saw in OTL 1900. Needless to say, some fields have advanced more quickly, while others lag behind, thus yielding a bit of schizo tech. Some things are at a level we saw in 1870, while others approach the advancements of the OTL 1920s. (Nevertheless, considering that it's 'only' the equivalent of 640 AD, we may conclude that this would has advanced
quite rapidly.)
Of course, nothing lasts forever. As the millennium approaches, a sense of fatalism grips the Oikomenem. For centuries, people have believed in the creed of "a thousand sunlit years". Now, those thousand years are nearly over. The Oikomenem hasn't faced an existential thread for over two hundred years. Skirmishes with the Kimmerians [5] over Tourika have ended in a negotiated armistice. The armies are becoming more of a bureaucracy than a real fighting force, and conspiracies thrive at court. Enemies abroad keep eager watch, hungry for a chance to tear away parts of the Oikomenem and thus enlarge their own fiefs. The Vanaksis, Philaleksos Argeades - the fourth of that name - is aged and of ill health. He barely governs, and it is whispered that his ambitious concubine Demetria wields all the real power. She has placed her own sons from her first marriage in positions of great power. The heir to the thone, the Megaradis of Vharata, is estranged from his father and resides in distant Palipoutra. When Philaleksos dies, the succession will be thrown into greater ambiguity than has been seen in the past five centuries.
Even in the halls of imperial power, overlooking the Neilos River in royal Aiguptos, the dry wind carries a cool current. Summer is ending. The breath of coming winter in the air.
---
[1] Or as they know him in this ATL:
Alekshandros Kataktis. (That is: 'Alekshandros the Conqueror'.)
[2] A word derived from 'oikoumene'.
[3] This title was derived from '(v)anax', an archaic Greek term for 'high king'. It's used in the Iliad, and Homer-fanboy Alexander eventually adopted it as his title. The intended implication is that he is sovereign of the entire world, and king over all other kings.
[4] Literally 'glory', but the world could be translated as 'authority' (in a political context) or 'aura' (in a spiritual context). The concept is comparable to the Mandate of Heaven.
[5] Being of a romanticist bent, Alexander used the Homeric term for the region - "Kimmeria" - during his brief campaign against the Scythians. This exonym stuck, and the empire that later arose in the region even refers to itself by the derived name
Kihmerriyar.
---
---
Some more general notes: this is for a long-term project I've been working on for a long time.
A Thousand Sunlit Years is meant to be a timeline based on the above ideas, describing the thousand-year history of the Oikomenem, from its inception to its ending. I have no worries about kind of spoiling the ending here, because that's meant to be known from the start. It's all about exploring the concept of a 'China-like' culture arising in Western Eurasia, with its own analogue of the Mandate of Heaven. I'm basing this on a number of theses that I want to illustrate by way of the TL, such as:
- A vast multi-cultural empire that explicitly aims at being cosmopolitan will aid the development of knowledge, science and technology simply by virtue of existing;
- The presence of such an empire will force potential rivals to consolidate ("empire begets empire"), which will lead to a rivalry of powerful states;
- No empire lasts forever, and success is ironically the root of decline (since only challenges keep a culture vital and dynamic).
The above hopefully explains why the map shows several large empires, and why I predict such a high tech level. All the surrounding states have extensive backstories as well, but I'd like to keep some mystery intact.