Bassarion Korax
Banned
[INCOMING TEXT DUMP]
I've provided as much information and reference as there basically exists on the internet, though if you want any summaries or information that's unclear from all that(it's not the easiest material to read and understand, for sure) then I can try to answer it. I've spent a long time reviewing the Ket and Yeniseians, for projects as well as simple interest. It becomes far more interesting than most people realize, especially their historical significance. You could call me a amateur Ketologist!
Well, I definitely appreciate it. It would be fun to pursue the possibility of a larger Yeniseian presence in Central Asia, and potentially the Middle East. I'll take a look at the material and see what I can do with it.
Sorry I couldn't reply more earlier, though. I'll have to expand upon some of the ideas I previously proposed, as well as some new variables considered.
Don't sweat it
Beer-cake making is just a slightly unusual cultural development that could be played with and modified in a number of ways to make unique dietary and social elements. Seeing how important alcohol and food storage has been throughout history, it's unfortunate that it is underestimated and underdeveloped. Your PoD and changes made creates a situation rather amenable to doing more with a rather novel aspect of early civilization. I'm rather surprised somebody hasn't done more with it before. The ability to ferment grains into alcoholic substances and use that as a preservative for food is easily applicable here, with a sufficiently high alcohol content placing cultural significance to breadmaking, and simultaneously solving food storage issues frequently encountered among the rural and urban lower populations of early civilization. If you consider how much alcohol is a social, cultural and even spiritual phenomenon among society, being able to adapt it into early yeast usage from beer to beer-gruel to alcoholic foods would be a rather original feature of Sumerian civilization, perhaps spreading to other forms of horticulture and brewing in time. Dry goods with alcohol exist via micro-encapsulation. By allowing the yeast to ferment in the bread and rise within natural heat instead of furnaces, you maintain both the dormant yeast for rehydration(complete with nutritional value), and incidentally allow the yeast to micro-encapsulate the ethanol if oil is added. In this way, dry alcoholic goods and seasonal fermentation could be developed in Mesopotamia, and then be spread further via cultural or societal diffusion. Interesting and maybe even strange results may occur: beer sediment breadmaking, alcohol-infused dairy goods, and literal sweetbreads with sugars in bread from decomposition of alcohol with spit(sounds weird I know, but it's been done before).
That does sound interesting, so I will have to some more reading on it. I guess I had read about the spiritual significance of alcoholic drinks in Eastern Europe in Antiquity in the past. I'm wondering how this stuff would taste, though? I'm not really a beer kind of guy. Even the "sweet" beers still taste like moldy bread juice to me. Also, would this be applicable to more seasonal climates? Cuz you mentioned allowing the yeast to rise with natural heat, which I don't think is applicable everywhere.
In terms of Semitic development, I did have a potential idea concerning their advent, expulsion and the collapse of Old Egypt, although it's slightly roundabout. If you start getting butterflies from that early on, North African affairs have to be considered with the environment of the time. Lake Megachad still exists, and part of the reason for it's demise- beyond the cyclical Saharan rainfall shifts and modern global climate change- is overgrazing for millennia and the extirpation of grassland-maintaining species that help prevent aquifer loss and excess infiltration. The region may act as a moderately populated region native to Chadic pastoralists and able to support a diverse environment for much longer if these alterations are prevented. If they can be by lower pressures upon the lake and more efficient land use, the region could easily maintain it's endemic wildlife much longer and even support civilizations that will enable further connectivity of Central and Sub-Saharan Africa with the rest of the Old World.
If Egypt is collapsed by Indo-European and associated migrations(I would love to see how that turns out culturally) and you have Semitic or Afroasiatic peoples moving further into Africa from the Levant or Egypt itself, I wouldn't be surprised if certain Semitic peoples migrate westwards to the Megachad region and settle in this attractive region. The diseases they may bring through contact with wider Eurasian populations and more urban settlement may impact native populations in a not devastating, but negative way. If you maintain conflict between the later Afroasiatic population and the Chadic populations, it may promote further societal development while limiting overpopulation and overextension of resources. Domestic grains such as watermelons, beans, sorghum and lentils would probably be introduced and naturalized further, as they adapt well to drought and flood cycles in semi-arid climates. The further use of agriculture to help create sedentary animal husbandry could promote the formation of early state entities in the region. Most fascinating would be what ends up happening to the second Afroasiatic migration into the region. It would no doubt create unusual linguistic and cultural features as an introduced group in the region. The closest equivalent to this idea in real life would be the Na Dene cultures, particularly the Navajo and Southern Athabaskan peoples, as a secondary migration of peoples into a region populated earlier by natives of a common origin. It would be one hell of a altlang, for sure.
Alright, now I had read that the science was inconclusive as to how drastic the effects of pastoralism had been on the environment in the Sahara. Given that the PoD is about 3500 BCE, the Indo-Europeans will not make it into the Kur River Valley (Azerbaijan) until about 3000 BCE, and to the Iranian Plateau by about 2900-2800 BCE, it might be kind of a tall order to butterfly away what happened to Lake Megachad. Do you have a time frame for how long this environment existed? I have found some decent resources on Proto-Afroasiatic, but what worries me about connecting North Africa to Sub-Saharan Africa is the poor documentation of Sub-Saharan African languages, such as the so-called "Nilo-Saharan" family as well as the Niger-Congo, Mandé, and Songhay families. Because writing is a relatively recent phenomenon for Sub-Saharan Africa, none of these languages were recorded before the Modern Era, and because of the continued social and political instability in Africa (which I don't see improving any time soon), studying these languages and reconstructing their ancient pasts is both difficult and dangerous, which leaves very large holes in our understanding of their evolution and their interaction with each other. Apparently, "Nilo-Saharan" is not a widely accepted classification, and is therefore composed of multiple unrelated families whose internal relationships are ALSO pretty poorly understood at the moment. So, unless it's considered acceptable for me to just pull whole language families out of my ass that bear superficial similarity to OTL African languages, I am wary of touching Sub-Saharan Africa until the Modern Era.
For my part, I had thought that the collapse of Old Egypt would look something more like the collapse of Rome, which would mean a large influx of Semitic-speaking peoples who would be linguistically and to some degree culturally assimilated to Egyptian civilization. Architecture and clothing would change somewhat, and probably the pantheon on some level, but many of the institutions would remain similar as the ruling Semites tried to impose themselves on the Native Egyptian population. We can use largely Semitic names for the dynasts however, seeing as that seems to have been common practice (the French still use a wealth of Frankish names, and their monarchs had Frankish names right up until the end of the monarchy). However, if Lake Megachad lasted longer, then your idea for pushing agricultural Afroasiatic-speaking peoples like the Egyptians and perhaps the Berbers further into Africa would definitely be interesting. Again though, I would have to essentially make up language phyla, and that feels kind of... cheap.
Although the Afanasevo appear sometime slightly later than the PoD, your surmisation is probably realistic. Although various groups of the Botai may split off or remain unassimilated, any secondary waves may influence that substratum anyway. Horse varieties could vary and spread across Central Asia earlier. Paradoxically, the use of Botai horses as stout labor, diary and milk beasts rather than for riding could lead to more sedentary or higher density settlements in Central Asia, or completely new breeds designed for riding unrelated from those of OTL. The later arrival of modern horses from the Middle East and Iran could form a social revolution in a Central Asia structured this way. Either the contemporary horses are treated differently to the Botai ones(much like taurine and zebu cattle, or even like mules, horses and donkeys), and enable a transition back into a highly mobile, even faster nomadic society no longer reliant upon seasonal encampments, or alternatively this more sedentary Central Asia uses horses to connect regions and allow massive improvements in communication. Both outcomes are simultaneously possible, too- more prosperous regions like the Amu Darya and Syr Darya reamin connected settlements, while pastoral hordes remain like IOTL across the steppes, but having larger group sizes due to more efficient Botai-style grazing and herding. One possiblity is the greater cold tolerance of the Kazakhstan-originating Botai horses becomes exaggerated when someone brings them further north, resulting in Arctic horses like the Yakutian Cattle and Yakutian Horse(which are only 800 years old).
I like the idea of more sedentary civilizations in Central Asia, and I was following a similar train of thought on the matter, except without the Botai horses being a factor. I would like to see a more agricultural and politically stable Afghanistan specifically. The initial Indo-European migration into the Middle East I wanted to come from crossing the Caucasus Mountains into the Kur River Valley and entering the Iranian Plateau. I wanted this specifically to push Mannaeans, Kassites, and Gutians into Upper Mesopotamia to destabilize the Semitic element in the region so that I could have a little bit of fun with writing the Gutian civilization from scratch, but also to push the Elamites eastward so that they might eventually enter India through Balukhistan after successive waves of Indo-European migration from the northwest. The second wave of Indo-European migration would come from the northeast though, as the Indo-Iranians did IOTL, and I think that would get started around 2600 BCE. So, it's certainly possible that a Botai element could survive in Central Asia long enough to have an impact on the social order. I like this idea of horse stratification - the older Botai horses for heavy labor, milking, and maybe even wool - and the newer horses for riding. On the note of getting the horses further north, maybe this is where the Yeniseians come in?
European domesticates such as cattle, sheep and goats existed at this time, and were used for making cheese from around 8500 years ago in Southern Europe. Over the next 1000 years that would spread to Central Europe and southern Britain. The irony of the situation is that cheese-making actually discourages lactose tolerance to milk- the bacteria long since broke down most of the lactose sugars. The concentration of lactose in raw cattle milk is up to 5%, whereas in cheese it is less than 0.5%. The reason why Southern Europe is less lactose tolerant than Northern Europe is that the region never developed cheesemaking before the Indo-Europeans arrived, and thus could drink raw milk only. The Indo-Europeans used raw milk as a staple in their cattle herding, and spread this genetic heritage with them. Old European cattle breeds were used mostly for meat and labor purposes, while sheep and goat herding was dominated by meat. Herd sizes kept pastorally simply weren't statistically large enough for dairy females to be a constant reliable food source, and group sizes weren't enough that you could specialize large numbers of people to managing hage herds in forest terrain best suited to fallow herds, not dairy management. After Indo-European arrival, raw milk consumption didn't explode overnight. It only becomes even a negligible part of common diets when enough forest is cleared and manpower is gained in the Bronze Age to allow large-scale agriculture and sedentary livestock maintenance.
I had no idea about that, so that is somewhat depressing. I love to add milk to my cooking, and no heavy cream? What about all the creamy desserts of Europe? I feel like I could be creating a dystopian hell...
In terms of genetics, I had read somewhere (I think the blog that I linked) that Corded Ware peoples were somewhat darker (perhaps more along the lines of Albanians) than people in Germany today, which could be very interesting in terms of redistributing phenotypes. The Indo-European migration into the Middle East is going to be essentially on par with what it was into Europe IOTL, so it could be interesting to see lighter-skinned peoples in Anatolia, Iran, and Central Asia and somewhat darker Europeans.
If you let cheesemaking spread to Northern Europe as the world warms further and it becomes more efficient, then you have absolutely no need for lactose tolerance in Europe, and the region remains primarily hunter-gatherer and deeply forested. I wouldn't guarantee a lingua franca even forms in a region as divided, diverse and wild as that. Finno-Ugric peoples could move west and south easily, but completely extinct language groups could remain in many regions(I don't know enough about that subject to tell you what exactly). The possible closest analogy IOTL is West and Southern Africa, which remained hunter-gatherer and pastoralist within relatively unmanaged terrain, and despite that large political entities and foreign trading networks formed. I love your idea for a Semitic thalassocracy, and I'd imagine they work like Arab traders did with West Africa, perhaps spurring Swahili-style trading networks across Southern Europe, and the creation of native state-like entities. Slave trading may be a very substantial feature- there's lots of divided, small and primitive tribes to take prisoners from, and a range of river valleys and natural routes to take the captives southwards for easy trade via the Mediterranean. The high strength, foraging ability and natural prowess required simply to survive in a hunter-gatherer lifestyle may make them incredibly useful elsewhere within agricultural societies. I also wouldn't rule out Turkic or other groups migrating westwards along the contiguous Eurasian Steppe during a warmer interval to settle a relatively empty Eastern Europe, especially if civilization in Anatolia, the Caucasus or Southeastern solidifies more, as trade along the Dneiper, Volga and Danube rivers becomes more important.
So, not ALL Indo-European migration is butterflied here. The Proto-Anatolians are still in the Balkans, and Greece, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Albania, and former Yugoslavia will be Indo-Europeanized, and probably at least Northern Italy as well. A second wave of migration will hit Europe as well starting in the 2nd millennium BCE with horse nomads from the Pontic Steppe whose particular branch of Indo-European is on an increasingly isolating trend that will result in an analytic tonal language being spoken on the Pannonian Plain by the end of the 1st millennium BCE. Of course, this language will probably be replaced by something else later, but the point of mentioning that was that I think that it's feasible for the Uralic-speaking Corded Ware people of Central Europe at least to begin living a more agricultural lifestyle at an earlier period, but they might not go on the same campaign of deforestation that was undertaken by the Indo-Europeans during the Bronze Age.
As far as the Semites expanding across the Mediterranean, I didn't want to get rid of the Semites entirely or just butterfly them all into Arabia, so, I think it will make for a good story. I had this idea of an anti-climactic showdown between the Insular Semites and an Indo-European-speaking power, perhaps in Italy or Greece (I lean towards Greece though, with the Semites being centered on Crete) resulting in the eventual destruction of the Indo-European power through the subversion of the Semites. Think if Rome had incorporated Carthage into the socii system, and the Carthaginians had never forgotten their reduction at the hands of Rome and plotted for a century or more to bring the Republic/Empire down on itself. Just an idea, though. We'll have to see. I mentioned the idea of a Turkic Manchuria and/or Korea, but you're thinking Eastern Europe, huh? That could be fun. Turkic languages are really sexy sounding to me, but there was a lot of interaction between Turkic peoples and Eastern Europeans IOTL. You don't think that would be cliché?
Another idea I had for East Asia was to make sure that China remains balkanized for much of its history, and to have a William the Conqueror-type figure conquering Japan, which would mean that the Japanese might have a claim to a throne somewhere in China and might try to expand their territories there as the English did in France IOTL.
As a side note, any thought or consideration of butterflies or interactions of the New World?
Ooooo... I have mulled over many ideas for this department. One of them would be colonization happening via the Canaries, perhaps as a Phoenician-like civilization sets up permanent settlements there, or maybe some group of exiles from the more civilized Mediterranean do. Maybe they get blown off course attempting to charter Africa or attempting to find the mouth of the Niger River or something or other (trying to get access to that West African gold) and end up establishing a relationship with the Maya. I also have entertained the idea of East Asian settlement of the West Coast, perhaps religiously motivated, idk. I have read some really, really cool ideas about getting Polynesians to the Galapagos Islands on here that included a sort of semi-domestication of seals and/or marine iguanas that I thought were awesome, but I'm not sure how to make that happen, as Polynesia is kind of remote.
A giant, Basque-speaking, empire consisting of most of mainland Europe up to the Vistula and Dniester. Like China, the Basque Empire is ruled as a series of dynasties that periodically reunify despite intermittent Warring States periods. Eventually consolidating with its core territory in the North European Plain. While the Basque Empire might be taken over eventually by Uralic migratory tribes as the Roman Empire was by Germanic tribes, these would assimilate into the Basque system. The Basque superstate also builds a great wall along the Vistula and Dniester to funnel invaders into strategic chokepoints in the Balkans.
I've never heard that one before. A Vasconic-speaking Empire could be fun, although I think getting it over to the Vistula or Dniester is kind of a tall order, especially if these parts of Europe remain more heavily forested and less develop ITTL. Your post gave me an idea for a united, Vasconic-speaking state in Iberia however that might be ruled in a similar manner, though. Maybe this empire is responsible for the discovery of the Americas via the Canaries?
EDIT: Discussion of alternate evolution of pandemic diseases (the ones that hadn’t already evolved at this point) is also welcome here. I was interested in GoT’s greyscale for example, which took me down some interesting paths for ideas for epidemics.
Last edited: