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Right, so the Scythians were paid. They weren't integrated, but were provided with land and loot to secure their loyalty.

"Civilized barbarians on the periphery" are often the most dangerous to the imperial core, because they're both (1) able to incorporate and utilize many of the technological and administrative advances that enabled the imperial core to become so strong, and (2) not part of the imperial core or...

So, what, is America the New Rome? Is the EU? Was the Soviet Union, and now modern Russia? Turkey or Greece? The Arab League?

Shared philosophy doesn't necessarily mean either political unity or mutual recognition. Judaism and Islam share the vast majority of their core theological concepts, for example. I don't dispute that there was a shared underlying philosophy in Hinduism before colonialism. I'm disputing the...

Well that's not true at all. Early Christianity spread so well across Europe and the Middle East before the collapse of the Western Roman Empire because it happily syncretized with existing polytheisms. Unlike Buddhism, which largely did not displace those polytheisms, early Christianity...

Would they even do so?

The only way the CSA could surpass the USA if it it somehow took over the USA's northern industrial base and, consequently, the Great Plains and West Coast. Any modern industrialized state that covers most of North America is going to be a great power, for a huge number of reasons. Now, I have...

No, my idea is that it would happen regardless due to any number of potential contemporaneous unifying figures. A unifying figure was very probable and, once united, their success to at least some degree against the Romans and Persians was inevitable; that it was Muhammad who led them was not...

The weakened condition of both the Roman and Persian empires were caused by factors external to politics of the Arabian peninsula; for the sake of this discussion, they are "inevitable" in that they would have occurred even if Muhammad had died in childbirth. That created the space for...

I'd suspect that yes, an Arab expansion would still occur even if Muhammad died as a child. The economic, technological, and geopolitical factors that enabled the military expansion weren't caused by Muhammad alone - there were other prophets and political figures in Arabia who could have sought...

An independent (read: no 1893 coup) Hawaii would be much better It would avert the Teller Amendment, which was a Congressional declaration that America will not hold Cuba after the Spanish American War. It was only passed in Congress due to the interests of sugarcane growers in Hawaii who were...

I don't see it. Sun Yat Sen was a revolutionary nationalist, but that doesn't necessarily make him a protofascist. See Fascism and Sun Yat-Sen by A. James Gregor (U.C. Berkeley): I don't think that revolutionary nationalism would necessarily transition to fascism in a WW2 context.

I think it's important to compare early Christianity with Buddhism for a comparison, here. Both Buddhism and early Christianity expanded through syncretism with local polytheisms. See e.g. Brigid the Irish deity transitioning to Saint Brigid, or the Christian adoption of European polytheistic...

Yes. But this applies only to "a person who has been a Jew and has voluntarily changed his religion." Jews who simply cease to practice Judaism without converting to another religion remain eligible.

The commonality between chulent / hamin or jachnun is "a slow-cooked food that can be eaten in Saturday morning whilst still warm after being placed on hot coals the night before." This is because it's a hot food that can be eaten Shabbat morning. According to Jewish religious law, it is...

But why

Yeah, combining the Germans and French populations into a single ethnic group is the only way to really do it.

So the OTL Romans, in doing their interpretatio Romana, believed that the Jewish god was, alternatively, Dionysus or Saturn. And Jesus was likewise conflated by the Romans with Helios / Sol Invictus. A henotheistic Judaism is probably out of the question by the Roman era. But a henotheistic...

Blind guesswork by Greek philosophers doesn't count as "discovering atomic theory [and] biological evolution." Some of them theorized some ideas that resemble modern atomic theory and biological evolution, but they didn't actually discover any of that.

Probably all the racist laws which distinguished local Algerians from other French people.