Not My Heifer Brainstorm (Results of Alternate Indo-European Migrations)

Well, this is how the modern printing press came to be.

Is it? I had no idea! I thought I was being innovative.

On another note though, I’m pretty sure I want there to be two separate spheres of silk production ITTL in antiquity - one in China, one in Iberia. The Iberian silk will be produced from the cocoons of the Giant Peacock Moth starting around 1500 BC.
 
If you honestly didn't know, it's still creative, even if it has been done.

So, some ideas I've been bantering around in my head the passed few weeks...

1. Anshanite/Sumerian colonization of the Indus River Valley from the Indian Ocean after the collapse of the Indus Valley Civilization.
2. Simultaneous Hurrian migration into Northern India via Afghanistan after migrations on the Iranian Plateau.
3. Hurrian-speaking Kingdom in Central Anatolia developing after an earlier collapse of the Hattian Civilization as opposed to an Indo-European one.
4. Amorite dominance in Western Syria leading to the development of an Amorite maritime civilization that colonizes Cyprus, Cilicia, and possibly Crete before 1500 BC.
5. Amorite emporium is set up on the site of Tanis in Egypt during the final years of the Old Kingdom.
6. Canaanite migration into Lower Egypt resulting in a Canaanite Dynasty briefly arising during the First Intermediate Period after the collapse of the Old Kingdom, only to be supplanted by a more successful Amorite dynasty based out of the emporium that is only able to maintain a hold on Lower Egypt. Upper and Lower Egypt develop separately as rivals for the next few centuries.
7. Lower Egypt becomes a maritime power, focused on controlling Cyprus, but after a series of wars is unable to wrest it from the control of the Amorites in Syria and so turns its attention toward colonization of the Western Med, specifically Libya, Tunisia, Sicily, and Algeria.
8. Upper Egypt develops a taste for controlling trade to India after the end of a period of Sumerian cultural and political dominance in the Persian Gulf around 1450 BC and begins colonizing Yemen, Socotra, Djibouti, Somalia, and Oman.
9. Development of silk-weaving in Iberia (in a Para-Tartessian civilization, specifically) around 1500 BC prompts further Egyptian interest in the Western Med, with colonies going as far as the eastern and southeastern coasts of Iberia.
10. Indo-Europeanization of not only the Tarim Basin, but Qinghai.
 
All are good points. How would the Indo-Europeans interact with tribes in Mongolia

I don't really know. Given the date of the migration of Indo-Europeans this far eastward, perhaps Mongolia ends up more Indo-European? I had thought about that very much, in all honesty. I wanted to keep the Altai Mountains as a sort of barrier between Indo-Europeans and other "Altaic" peoples, although I suppose Indo-European migration into the region could push the speakers of Pre-Proto-Turkic, which is believed to have originated in the Altai Mountains, further out onto the Mongolian Plain and get them to head east over time. I like the idea of a heavily "Turkic" (I guess Para-Turkic?) Manchuria/Korea very much.
 
Honestly what would be interesting is to see an Elamite diaspora form a semi-thalassocracy as they make the Arabian Sea into their. Are Nostrum. The first cities settled would be somewhere around the *Mussandam peninsula from where they expand across the Strait of Hormuz, to *Oman, to *Makran, till they reach roughly *Gujarat.
 
Maybe we could have room for some more obscure OTL groups to triumph over their "ancient civilization" counterparts? Something like the Austroasiatics colonizing Bengal? We could get an Asian equivalent of the Bantu expansion, but with a group that spent OTL in Guizhou...
...which brings me to my proposal: A Hmong empire (or Kulturkreis at the very least) extending through South China, with offshoots as far afield as Assam or Bengal :^)
 
Honestly what would be interesting is to see an Elamite diaspora form a semi-thalassocracy as they make the Arabian Sea into their. Are Nostrum. The first cities settled would be somewhere around the *Mussandam peninsula from where they expand across the Strait of Hormuz, to *Oman, to *Makran, till they reach roughly *Gujarat.

Hmmm... there used to be a bunch of copper in the Musandam Peninsula, didn't there? This actually runs parallel to an idea I was mulling around in my head for a period after the collapse of the Possession of Khanang in which the Sumerian (Khanangan) heartland is united again by a Philip-like figure and much of the Persian Gulf is conquered by an Alexander-like heir or potentially grandchild (an Ashoka to Chandragupta?) around the time of the collapse of the Indus Valley Civilization ITTL. This would result in extensive intermarriage between Sumerian and Anshanite nobles, and after a breakup of this "empire" we could see various competing Sumerian or Sumerian-influenced successor states calling for settlers from both regions, with the Indus River/Gujarat as a sort of adventurer's frontier.

Maybe we could have room for some more obscure OTL groups to triumph over their "ancient civilization" counterparts? Something like the Austroasiatics colonizing Bengal? We could get an Asian equivalent of the Bantu expansion, but with a group that spent OTL in Guizhou...
...which brings me to my proposal: A Hmong empire (or Kulturkreis at the very least) extending through South China, with offshoots as far afield as Assam or Bengal :^)

These are pretty cool ideas. Admittedly, I haven't done a LOT of research into the development of Austroasiatic, and to my knowledge the reconstruction of proto-languages for branches like Munda and Khasic are still in their infancy, although if I recall correctly they are now both classed as eccentric branches of Mon-Khmer that didn't begin to arrive in their present locations until Late Antiquity, with Mon-Khmer languages having made a push into Southeast Asia starting around 1000 BC. I have done absolutely ZERO research into the reconstruction of Hmong-Mien, so if material is available for me to come up with names for monarchs and relevant offices and philosophical concepts, I rather like the idea of a Hmong Empire or at least a larger Hmong Kingdom, something on par perhaps with OTL Cambodia.

EDIT: Just glancing at Wikipedia, it would seem that Porto-Hmong-Mien is very well reconstructed, but it is only dated to 500 BC. That's fine, though. We can wait for that long for the butterflies to get that far out. So, maybe we WILL see a Hmong Empire ITTL. Maybe not...
 
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any ideas for central and South Africa? how about Siberia and the Turkish groups? maybe for Japan, the Yayoi never went to Japan and the native of the place still have control of the island.
 
any ideas for central and South Africa? how about Siberia and the Turkish groups? maybe for Japan, the Yayoi never went to Japan and the native of the place still have control of the island.

Do you have any? Lol

So, I want to try and shy away from touching Sub-Saharan Africa TOO much before about the same time regular contact with Europe/Asia started IOTL simply due to the fact that African language families generally remain very poorly understood, without very many proto-languages reconstructed that I can work with. Reconstructing the history of African language families is difficult for a few reasons, namely that many parts of Africa are notoriously dangerous and underdeveloped, which means that there isn't much of an interest locally in understanding linguistic history (more immediate things like food, shelter, power, etc. are more important), and it's not always that safe for foreigners from Asia, Europe, and the Americas to go bantering about Africa. However, another factor that makes it very difficult is the lack of written history, which can be problematic depending on how drastically languages have changed over time. For example, the Volta-Niger of Nigeria, Benin, Togo, and Ghana, to my knowledge are largely tonal and isolating. Reconstructing Old Chinese is hard enough using the Oracle Bones, but if it weren't for them and China's extensive literary tradition in Middle Chinese, then it's entirely possible that we never would have been able to sort out HOW exactly Sinitic languages relate to Tibeto-Burman languages, if we would have been able to at all. That kind of material isn't there for Africa obviously, so... yeah. That's to say nothing of the various "Nilo-Saharan" languages. Who even knows what's going on there...

Now, in terms of South Africa, as in modern South Africa and possibly Zimbabwe and Mozambique, I was interested in colonizing them prior to the Bantu Expansion into the region, potentially from an Indo-European Persian Gulf, from India (with whoever eventually inherits it), or maybe a more maritime Egypt. I don't know...

I'm fairly positive that the Yayoi are never going to Japan ITTL, at least not as the Yayoi, because their cultural development will have been butterflied away at that point. I was thinking that the movement of Para-Turkic-speaking peoples into Manchuria as spurred by the Indo-Europeanization of the Altai Mountains could push Koreanic peoples up into Siberia so that Japonic peoples can inherit Korea, at least for awhile, before it is Para-Turkified. What to do with Japan, though. I know that I'm pretty interested in keeping China balkanized, so maybe one of the kingdoms begins settling Japan some time in the 1st millennium BC? Just an idea. It would be fun if we could get Austronesians up there, but all the literature on Formosan languages and their reconstruction is in Chinese. What would be even more fun, if I could really pull a rabbit out of my ass, is to get Eskimo-Aleut speakers down to Japan, but I'm not sure how I could do that and also have them not end up marginalized like the Ainu.
 
Hmmm... there used to be a bunch of copper in the Musandam Peninsula, didn't there? This actually runs parallel to an idea I was mulling around in my head for a period after the collapse of the Possession of Khanang in which the Sumerian (Khanangan) heartland is united again by a Philip-like figure and much of the Persian Gulf is conquered by an Alexander-like heir or potentially grandchild (an Ashoka to Chandragupta?) around the time of the collapse of the Indus Valley Civilization ITTL. This would result in extensive intermarriage between Sumerian and Anshanite nobles, and after a breakup of this "empire" we could see various competing Sumerian or Sumerian-influenced successor states calling for settlers from both regions, with the Indus River/Gujarat as a sort of adventurer's frontier.

A Mauryan dynamic would be really cool, with the arid northern plains and increasingly lifeless plains of Northern Gujarat serving as a Wild West as Baktria did for the Greeks in the centuries leading up to Alexander's conquest.

These are pretty cool ideas. Admittedly, I haven't done a LOT of research into the development of Austroasiatic, and to my knowledge the reconstruction of proto-languages for branches like Munda and Khasic are still in their infancy, although if I recall correctly they are now both classed as eccentric branches of Mon-Khmer that didn't begin to arrive in their present locations until Late Antiquity, with Mon-Khmer languages having made a push into Southeast Asia starting around 1000 BC. I have done absolutely ZERO research into the reconstruction of Hmong-Mien, so if material is available for me to come up with names for monarchs and relevant offices and philosophical concepts, I rather like the idea of a Hmong Empire or at least a larger Hmong Kingdom, something on par perhaps with OTL Cambodia.

EDIT: Just glancing at Wikipedia, it would seem that Porto-Hmong-Mien is very well reconstructed, but it is only dated to 500 BC. That's fine, though. We can wait for that long for the butterflies to get that far out. So, maybe we WILL see a Hmong Empire ITTL. Maybe not...

A greater Hmong region which reaches into the Indonesian archipelago and 'locks down' a region of the world as the Indo-Europeans did in Europe would be interesting.
 
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A Mauryan dynamic would be really cool, with the arid northern plains and increasingly lifeless plains of Northern Gujarat serving as a Wild West as Baktria did for the Greeks in the centuries leading up to Alexander's conquest.

In my notes I have this period as extending from 1680-1450 BC, following the conquests of one Šenešundu, the son of Šemšenkhutsen. This will be the last big hurrah for the Sumerians, sort of the way the Hellenistic Period was for the Greeks (for awhile, at least), as settlement of Anshan, Oman, the Indus River, and Gujarat is going to bleed the Sumerian cities of their menfolk and leave them open to conquest by the Indo-Europeans, who by this time will be fully established in Northern Mesopotamia.

A greater Hmong region which reqches into the Indonesian archipelago and 'locks down' a region of the world as the Indo-Europeans did in Europe would be interesting.

That does sound pretty cool. The trouble is that Mon-Khmer migration into Southeast Asia from Yunnan will have already been a thing for some 500 years, and if I'm not mistaken the Hmong-Mien urheimat is in Guizhou. We would have to find a reason to a) give them a population explosion substantial enough to take over Southeast Asia like that and b) an impetus to move into the region instead of just proliferating throughout Southern China and absorbing the local Vietic and Tai-Kadai-speaking peoples.
 
Do you have any? Lol

So, I want to try and shy away from touching Sub-Saharan Africa TOO much before about the same time regular contact with Europe/Asia started IOTL simply due to the fact that African language families generally remain very poorly understood, without very many proto-languages reconstructed that I can work with. Reconstructing the history of African language families is difficult for a few reasons, namely that many parts of Africa are notoriously dangerous and underdeveloped, which means that there isn't much of an interest locally in understanding linguistic history (more immediate things like food, shelter, power, etc. are more important), and it's not always that safe for foreigners from Asia, Europe, and the Americas to go bantering about Africa. However, another factor that makes it very difficult is the lack of written history, which can be problematic depending on how drastically languages have changed over time. For example, the Volta-Niger of Nigeria, Benin, Togo, and Ghana, to my knowledge are largely tonal and isolating. Reconstructing Old Chinese is hard enough using the Oracle Bones, but if it weren't for them and China's extensive literary tradition in Middle Chinese, then it's entirely possible that we never would have been able to sort out HOW exactly Sinitic languages relate to Tibeto-Burman languages, if we would have been able to at all. That kind of material isn't there for Africa obviously, so... yeah. That's to say nothing of the various "Nilo-Saharan" languages. Who even knows what's going on there...

Now, in terms of South Africa, as in modern South Africa and possibly Zimbabwe and Mozambique, I was interested in colonizing them prior to the Bantu Expansion into the region, potentially from an Indo-European Persian Gulf, from India (with whoever eventually inherits it), or maybe a more maritime Egypt. I don't know...

I'm fairly positive that the Yayoi are never going to Japan ITTL, at least not as the Yayoi, because their cultural development will have been butterflied away at that point. I was thinking that the movement of Para-Turkic-speaking peoples into Manchuria as spurred by the Indo-Europeanization of the Altai Mountains could push Koreanic peoples up into Siberia so that Japonic peoples can inherit Korea, at least for awhile, before it is Para-Turkified. What to do with Japan, though. I know that I'm pretty interested in keeping China balkanized, so maybe one of the kingdoms begins settling Japan some time in the 1st millennium BC? Just an idea. It would be fun if we could get Austronesians up there, but all the literature on Formosan languages and their reconstruction is in Chinese. What would be even more fun, if I could really pull a rabbit out of my ass, is to get Eskimo-Aleut speakers down to Japan, but I'm not sure how I could do that and also have them not end up marginalized like the Ainu.
so there won't be any African migration? how about the niger-congo language? how about the horn of Africa? how about Greece and the Italian peninsula? and yes, having a austronesia japan would be awsome.
 
so there won't be any African migration? how about the niger-congo language? how about the horn of Africa? how about Greece and the Italian peninsula? and yes, having a austronesia japan would be awsome.

Not really, no. The Volta-Niger languages are a branch of the larger Niger-Congo family. So, no cigar here. I would like for things to be different of course, but oh well. It’s kind of hard to butterfly all of the known languages of Sub-Saharan Africa just because.

Now, Greece is going to be settled by “Anatolian” speakers, who were apparently already present in the Balkans by the time of my POD with the Suvorovo-Novodanilovka Culture that had migrated in from Ukraine. It has been hypothesized by some Italian linguists recently that Etruscan is an eccentric Anatolian language that migrated up the Danube during the 4th millennium or perhaps a mixed language between Anatolian and something indigenous to the Balkans or Northern Italy. ITTL, there will be no migration of Graeco-Aryan-speaking Indo-Europeans coming in to disrupt the dialectal continuity of the Danube and so the split between “Etruscan” and the “Anatolian” languages of the Balkans won’t be as severe... but still definitely noticeable. That is to say, Italy will eventually be “Anatolinized”.

Now, as far as an Austronesian Japan, I admit it would be awesome, but... how do we do it? I can’t do it with Formosan languages, cuz I don’t read Chinese, and the other Austronesian languages are far and away from Japan.

By the way, @Shahrasayr - I’m really digging this Hmong-Mien thing, but what if they just corner Southern China instead? I want China to be Balkanized anyways, so it seems pretty cool to me to have the Han Chinese North and the Hmong-Mien South.
 
That does sound pretty cool. The trouble is that Mon-Khmer migration into Southeast Asia from Yunnan will have already been a thing for some 500 years, and if I'm not mistaken the Hmong-Mien urheimat is in Guizhou. We would have to find a reason to a) give them a population explosion substantial enough to take over Southeast Asia like that and b) an impetus to move into the region instead of just proliferating throughout Southern China and absorbing the local Vietic and Tai-Kadai-speaking peoples.

A simple (and possibly naïve) solution would be the great influx of *Altaic speakers to migrate southwards and force large amounts of the sedentary East Asian peoples to move.

I remember reading somewhere by the time of the Mongols the nomadic peoples of Mongolia had come to see the Chinese as completely antithetical to their way of life, as vermin who had cast off their claim to humanity and ate what mere beasts of burden and prey should eat in their harvests.

Obviously that is 2000+ years from now but the seeds of thoughts have to be sown at some point. The Land north of the Yellow River is also as prime for pastoralism as agriculture. If the Han are forced to move south to either become conquerors over the southern peoples or even assimilate to form a new identity that could very well trigger a domino effect that will result in the Hmong migrations.
 
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By the way, @Shahrasayr - I’m really digging this Hmong-Mien thing, but what if they just corner Southern China instead? I want China to be Balkanized anyways, so it seems pretty cool to me to have the Han Chinese North and the Hmong-Mien South.

That might also be cool. It is at the end of the day your TL and either option will keep me hooked.

One option might be the Hmong-Mien acting as 'mountain lords' that form tribal states in their mountains while they allow the other ethnicities, such as the Tai-Kadai peoples as well as the Mon who most likely haven't migrated to Burma yet as a an agricultural caste.
 
You know what'd be great for a start? A map of the new population movements. Maybe color-coded for each group. People here love maps, and it'd help to keep everything in memory.
 
A simple (and possibly naïve) solution would be the great influx of *Altaic speakers to migrate southwards and force large amounts of the sedentary East Asian peoples to move.

I remember reading somewhere by the time of the Mongols the nomadic peoples of Mongolia had come to see the Chinese as completely antithetical to their way of life, as vermin who had cast off their claim to humanity and ate what mere beasts of burden and prey should eat in their harvests.

Obviously that is 2000+ years from now but the seeds of thoughts have to be sown at some point. The Land north of the Yellow River is also as prime for pastoralism as agriculture. If the Han are forced to move south to either become conquerors over the southern peoples or even assimilate to form a new identity that could very well trigger a domino effect that will result in the Hmong migrations.

Getting rid of the Han is out. Lol

I already have a number of ideas in my head for the development of a series of Han states, but if I’m not mistaken, Han expansion is what pushed Hmong-Mien peoples into Southeast Asia in the first place, but I honestly think I like the idea of a series of Hmong-Mien-speaking states in Southern China assimilating the Vietic and Tai-Kadai. Maybe we could get more Mon-Khmer speakers into Burma/Bengal that way as there is a considerably larger migration of Tai-Kadai into Southeast Asia.

@Max Sinister, we’re working on a map. @Euskadi Herria originally was going to do it, but he has been having laptop problems, so I’ve sent a message to @Gwrtheyrn Annwn about it. Hopefully he’s still interested, because he was offering back in October, but I got a little autistic with the instructions
 
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