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  1. "Certain accursed ones of no significance": What if Mehmed the Conqueror converts to Hurufism?

    Hurufism was a fifteenth-century Iranian kabbalistic sect which held (among other things) that the cosmos was literally a book written in the Language of God, of which Persian was the closest human language, and that their founder Fazlallah Astarabadi had been granted the divine inspiration to...

  2. WI/AHC: Jiang Qing’s trilateral Confucian state becomes the system of government in China

    Jiang Qing (unfortunately pronounced similarly to Mao’s infamous wife) is a decently well-known Confucian thinker in the modern PRC, who has some radical ideas for a Chinese government more rooted in tradition. To quote a NYT editorial by Jiang: In modern China, Humane Authority should be...

  3. WI: The printing press is invented in Europe a hundred years earlier?

    What if the printing press was invented in Europe in the fourteenth century, not the fifteenth? Obviously this depends on how important you think the printing press alone was as an agent of change and innovation, but what impact would it have had on the Renaissance? Would the Reformation be...

  4. WI Indian Buddhism survived?

    Indian Buddhism began to decline when the monastic community became increasingly isolated from the laity in the mid- to late first millennium, ceding ground to Hindu and Jain groups who appealed much more to lay communities. By the time of the Turko-Islamic invasions in the twelfth and...

  5. How long could Kush/Nubia stay pagan?

    The conversion of the Nubians to Christianity in the sixth century was fairly easy because the Nobadians and other Nubian groups, who had overrun the old Egyptianized kingdom of Kush, for some reason chose not to patronize the old Egyptian-Kushite royal religion of Isis and Osiris. This was also...

  6. Could Timur have conquered North China?

    In 1405, Timur—the last great nomadic conqueror—died on the way to his last campaign, that of restoring Mongol rule in China. His armies were largely unbeaten on the field, having devastated western Eurasia from Russia to Delhi. He also had as his client Bunyashiri, a legitimate Toluid prince...

  7. WI: The Inca Plan went through and the Incas were crowned Kings of Argentina?

    What if the Inca Plan went through, and Colonel Dionisio Inca Yupanqui was crowned constitutional King of Argentina?

  8. AHC: Social differentiation based on eye color

    With a POD of 3000 BC, have a society differentiated by eye color. Inspired by Jane Elliott's experiment.

  9. AHC: Ottomans build a fleet of galleys with all-silver anchors, all-silk ropes, and all-satin sails

    After the calamity at Lepanto, the Ottoman court in Constantinople was debating how the Ottoman fleet should be rebuilt. The sultan was pessimistic, saying that "to complete five or six hundred anchors and the other implements for two hundred new ships – cables, ropes, and sails – that would be...

  10. WI: Muhammad stopped receiving revelations after his first five years of ministry?

    So the Qur'an would consist only of the forty-eight early Meccan Surahs, according to Noldeke's chronology. This means: Almost no discussion of what Islamic law should look like, with most of the content general moralizing Almost no discussion of Christians and Jews Almost no discussion...

  11. DBQ: Is it ASB for Christianity to be South Korea's largest religion?

    Modern South Korea is majority Chondoist, mainly because Chondoists led the non-socialist independence movement against Japan (while Buddhism was significantly discredited due to Japanese collaboration) and were later propped up by Americans and the military regime as a religious bulwark against...

  12. AHC: Have Ottoman populations recover from the Little Ice Age as fast as Western Europe's

    From The Climate of Rebellion in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire, a widely acclaimed monograph that finds the causes of the Ottomans' loss of their sixteenth-century position as Europe's single greatest power in the Little Ice Age: Over a period of months or years the disasters of the...

  13. DBWI: Annexations became taboo following WW2?

    Looking back on the recent Second Russo-Ukrainian War and Putin's annexation of the Donbass, here's a fun WI. What would have happened if the Great Powers decided that territorial borders should remain relatively fixed, with only independence/unification/minor readjustments allowed, at the end...

  14. DBQ: Would a non-Centraliterran-dominated world have the same idea of "human virtues"?

    Most modern literati and legal experts, both in Centraliterra and the West, agree that the main justification for the state's existence is that it provides a way to promote the human virtues. Of course, the definition of what virtue is has changed a lot over the centuries—for example, wives...

  15. DBHC: The Judaeans survive into 2019

    Judaism is probably the most important extinct religion out there, seeing as it’s the parent religion of Christianity and Islam. Kinda ironic that it was ultimately extirpated by its children. Judaism was exterminated in Europe and the Roman Empire by the seventh century; in Arabia and Persia...

  16. How accurate is Julian the Apostate's (satirical) assessment of Alexander and the Roman emperors?

    In a satire (the translation is a bit old but meh) in 361, Julian the Apostate features Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Augustus, Trajan, Marcus Aurelius, and Constantine participating in a contest before the Olympians. The Olympians are voting on which of the six emperors were the worthiest...

  17. WI/AHC: The Greco-Mesopotamian pagans of Ḥarrān survive into the twenty-first century

    The pagans of Ḥarrān (ancient Carrhae) are usually considered the last organized remnants of Late Antique paganism to survive, mainly because of the city's remote location on the border between the Roman and Persian/Arab empires. Following the Islamic conquest, they managed to convince the...

  18. OTL, the last cuneiform text was written in 75 AD. Have cuneiform survive until 1075.

    POD should be after Alexander (by Alexander’s time, cuneiform was largely limited to being taught in priestly academies in Babylon). Ideally without drastically changing the course of history.

  19. WI: China remains a civilization of mass human sacrifice

    From Gideon Shellach, “The Qiang and the Question of Human Sacrifice in the Late Shang Period”: Human sacrifice was an important part of Shang [the earliest Chinese dynasty] rituals... In the known oracle bone inscriptions, at least 14,197 human victims are mentioned. From “Human Sacrifice...

  20. AHC: Ethiopian reconquista

    With a POD after 700 AD, have the Christians of Ethiopia conquer Muslim Egypt and evict all Muslims from the territory before 1607 AD.
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