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I was assuming Catholicism would be the dominant strain, with most of the missionaries coming from Roman Africa and Egypt. Apparently the camel had been introduced in the century before the time frame for missionary activity, greatly improving the scope for trade and communication between West...

Suppose for whatever reason that Christian missionaries successfully evangelize in the Senegal-Niger watershed in the time period stated in the thread title. The empire of Ghana coalesced during this time period and commanded great wealth from trading in gold, copper, and salt. Does...

You're probably right about the need for an earlier POD, but maybe not that early. The late 19th century saw massive foreign investment in the Argentine economy along with the birth of trade unionism. Italian and Spanish anarchists were present in Buenos Aires and (if the wiki article is...

With a POD no earlier than 1910, was there anyplace in South America where trade unionism could develop along anarcho-syndicalist lines as it did in Catalonia during the 1930s? What would be an ideal political crisis to cause, if not the whole takeover of a nation, then at least the creation of...

The Teutonic Order was invited by the Duke of Masovia to end the nuisance raids of the Old Prussians. If the Lithuanians, bolstered by the forces of the Prussians, are able to demand tribute to end the raids then perhaps the situation stabilizes enough that no crusading orders are ever invited.

IOTL the Lithuanians expanded from their base on the Baltic periphery to the Black Sea in an amazing run of vassalization and annexation. What if instead of expanding into the lands of the former Kievan Rus, they incorporate the neighboring lands of Prussia and Livonia, which from the 13th...

My own first attempt at a Mesoamerican powerbar would be the following: Amaranth and beans (for protein) mixed into a base of queso de tuna (high-carb jelly made from the fruit of the prickly pear cactus) wrapped in a roasted maguey leaf for preservation. I didn't add fat because a don't know of...

I'm not certain of the veracity of the sources I've uncovered (mainly nutrition blogs, unfortunately), but apparently the Incan armies were sustained on the march by "war balls", a mixture of quinoa and fat. What other "powerbars" existed in other pre-industrial ethnic groups and civilizations...

If I recall correctly the Aztecs founded several small colonies before and during the Triple Alliance period; perhaps this was involved in the construction of chinampas at Lake Xochimilco? I think it's reasonable that Teotihuacan could have done something similar except that most of their...

Does anyone know if chinampas had been invented by 400 CE? Lake Xaltocan, the nearest large body of water to Teotihuacan, could have supported this very productive type of raised-bed agriculture but I can only find references to chinampas from the Aztec period. The lake was apparently brackish...

As far as I know, the internal revolt of ca. 550 CE seems to have been critical to the decline of Teotihuacan. Monuments were toppled, jade ornaments collected and smashed, and most tellingly, images of the rain god (possibly Tlaloc of later Aztec mythology) were defaced on murals throughout the...

Forcing and imperial agenda upon the land, literally, is perhaps the greatest missing link toward the survival of Teotihuacan. The city was located on a high valley in the drier northern portion of the Valley of Mexico, and at 120,000 residents had probably maxed out the agricultural potential...

One interesting thing about the art of Teotihuacan is that there are few instances of individuals being glorified, unlike say for the Maya with their murals and stelae of kings. This may suggest a weak or absent tradition of kingship for the city, with rule more along the lines of an oligarchic...

I'm an idiot. How do I move this to the proper forum?

Located in the Valley of Mexico and in existence from approximately 100 BCE to 750 CE, Teotihuacan was once the largest city in the Americas, with a population of perhaps 150,000 residents and an area of over 30 square km at its zenith in 450 CE. Some of the greatest monumental architecture of...

When I consider this topic, one person that comes to mind is Kamehameha I of Hawaii. He went from ruling a single district on the Big Island of Hawaii to reigning over the entire island chain by the end of his life. When it comes to uniting a single ethnic group in one lifetime, who do you think...

First, what type of ships would be used to transport infantry, cavalry, siege equipment, etc. and what was the carrying capacity of each type? Second, for a great naval power like Athens, what would it spend on its navy and how quickly could it scale up in preparation for war?

I think a deeper problem is that the senatorial elites of Carthage didn't want to spend any money on the military, even refusing to contest naval dominance with the Romans after the war. Hamilcar Barca and his son Hannibal pleaded for aid in two wars and were repeatedly rebuffed. The...

By the time Carthage and the Iberians come to blows, the Carthaginians will likely have expanded and consolidated their North African holdings beyond what they were OTL, giving them an expanded cavalry arm with more Berbers and Numidians than historically. On the other hand, they likely wouldn't...

From the little I know, it seems that Carthage didn't keep the army well supplied with men an material in Sicily for most of the war, plus their navy suffered humiliating defeats at the hands of the Romans, who didn't even have a navy at the beginning of the war. If the Romans are crushed at sea...