alternatehistory.com

Hello All,

After years of lurking, and hours of very enjoyable reading thanks to the imaginative minds of many here, I've finally been inspired to register and make what I hope to be an entertaining contribution.

I was inspired by this idea while I was watching some National Geographic special on ancient discoveries in science; one of the features was Eratosthenes's surprisingly accurate calculation of the Earth's circumference.

Armed with that knowledge, what if historical events allowed the ancient powers that be to note that incredible size, compare it to the known world of the time, and deduce that there's still much of the planet left uncovered?

Through some hopefully not too implausible points of divergence, and a little bit of luck thrown in, this is my attempt at having the ancient Greeks reach South America before the year 0, and exploring how the political world could have developed up until the current year under this vastly different timeline.

I hope you enjoy it.

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Part I

276 BC: Eratosthenes born in the Ptolemaic Empire at Cyrene, in what is now Libya, Africa.

252 BC (OTL ends here): Antiochus II, ruler of the Seleucid Empire, never divorces his wife Laodice, and accordingly never ends up marrying Bernice, sister of the ruler of the Ptolemaic Kingdom at the time, Ptolemy III.

246 BC: Because Antiochus II never has a child with Ptolemaic royalty, no confusing questions of dynasty arise that led to the events of the OTL Third Syrian War between the Ptolemaic and Seleucid empires. Instead, the two live in relative peace.

240 BC: Eratosthenes performs his famous shadow experiment to calculate the rough circumference of the Earth. He notes that this calculation is significantly larger than maps of the known world. As in OTL, this calculation is widely noticed and praised among the scientific community. Ptolemy III takes special notice, not being occupied by war with the Seleucid Empire.

235 BC: Extra resources on hand in the absence of a major war a few years earlier, Ptolemy III commissions an expedition to chart the African coast further west, past the Strait of Gibralter.

233 BC: Ptolemaic explorers chart most of the northwesterly coast of Africa. An oceanside camp, Akro, is established off the coast of what is modern-day Mauritania, after interaction with local tribes, probably the Barfour, revealed the presence of substantial quantities of gold and other metals further inland to the east.

222 BC: Ptolemy III dies, is son Ptolemy IV takes over. The oceanside camp of Akro has grown significantly from its importance as a trading post between the Ptolemaic Greeks and African city-state precursors to the Ghana Empire lying further east.
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