Battle of Qarqar: 9th Century BC

My second favorite Infinite Earths TL.
King Shalmaneser III of Assyria slaughters the armies arrayed before him, goes on to level Israel and Samaria, then Tyre and Sidon, eradicating Monotheism. Captured Phoenician ships carry the Assyrian armies to the Phrygian flank and secure the empire's rear. Later, Shamshiadad V obliterates the Greek cities of the Aegean. Tyre and Sidon attempt a revolt that leads to their destruction, leaving alphabetic scripts only on a few potsherds on the Coele-syrian coast. Before the First Assyrian Empire falls it drives the Medes and Scythians east to pillage India and China (Tujue, the Turkish marcher state in China, is the inheritor in 1678 AD of their barbaric empires). All future empires remember and emulate the Assyrian tyranny. The current (Sixth) Assyrian Empire reigns in efficient terror and murderous glory from Persia to the shores of Italy.. Its cruel priests trade gangs of slaves between their basalt ziggurats, and read the entrails of those slaves fortunate enough to be sacrificed...a Phoenician custom they adapted (unlike coinage).The deadly efficient war machines of Asshur's dark lords press against Kanavashya and other Indian kingdoms, and against the human-sacrificing Nerwa of Gaul, whose tall ships scour the Atlantic in search of slaves. And the Ice is coming back, bringing famine and plague in its wake. Technology is about late Iron Age-early Dark Age.
The Assyrian Empires don't seem to be more ASB than OTL Roman Empire, so maybe Assyria could have done a number on capitalism, democracy, monotheism, literacy, science and technology, like this. Even the coming Ice Age might be non-ASB if you "date" this TL at 2012, since I have heard suggestions that we should be heading into an Ice Age now, that the Little Ice Age was the start, and that only the Industrial Revolution and forest clearing of the 19th-21st Centuries raising CO2 levels in the atmosphere stopped it.
So is "Nergal" plausible, or could even Assyria not be enough to hold back Progress?
 
Assyria drove progress, massively. It is a Western myth that modernisation processes are nice. Granted, they don't need to be quite as nasty, but the idea that nice countriews modernise while evil ones are somehow atavistic is worse than silly. A longer-lasting Assyrian Empire would have a strong impact on what we think of as progress. I doubt it would last that much longer, of course, but by the end of OTL's one we had the spread of Aramaic as a lingua franca, significant increases in literacy, and, if the mainstream interpretation of the prophetic books and early Greek texts are correct, cultural exchange at a much higher level than it was before. Much like the roman Empire, the HRE, or China, the impact is involuntary. The Assyrians would have to deliberately try to counteract it (and the best way to do that, really, would be not to have an empire, which would be a deal-breaker).
 
Assyria drove progress, massively. It is a Western myth that modernisation processes are nice. Granted, they don't need to be quite as nasty, but the idea that nice countries modernise while evil ones are somehow atavistic is worse than silly.

The Assyrians' brutality is also overrated. They were brutal in conquest, and you certainly didn't want to piss them off. Domestically -- especially during the Neo-Assyrian period -- not so much. Several of the Neo-Assyrian kings were patrons of the arts, and Nineveh during the Iron Age was the world's largest and most civilized city. And if you lived in a vassal city whose king was smart enough to pay tribute and cooperate, you were far more likely to be able to take advantage of imperial markets than to be impaled in front of the city gate.

Assyria was also, at the early stages of its history, surprisingly democratic -- before the city of Ashur became imperial, both it and its Mediterranean trading colonies were ruled by a city senate and a king of limited powers. It became absolutist later, and was certainly so by the Iron Age, but government by senate may have survived at the municipal level -- Neo-Babylonian cities were run this way, and I doubt they came up with it on their own. The Iron Age Phoenician cities, some of which were quasi-republics, may also have got the idea from Assyria through cultural diffusion, but as far as I know there's no proof of this.

I'd recommend The Might that Was Assyria by H.W.F. Saggs, which is the best source on ancient Assyria I've read (although it can be a bit quirky in places). I'll also put in a shameless plug for my Assyrian Republic scenario of a few months back.

Anyway, as to the main POD: If Assyria wins decisively at Qarqar, it might conquer Egypt about a century and a half before it did in OTL, and if it plays its cards right, Egypt might experience a prolonged period of Assyrian cultural influence rather than a relatively short and low-impact one. Once Egypt is conquered, though, the desert would form a natural boundary. I also doubt that Assyria would get as far as the Aegean, because it wasn't a maritime power and showed no interest in naval warfare. On the other hand, there might be a reverse "Sea People" migration of Phoenician refugees if the Assyrians are annoyed enough to destroy the Phoenician cities rather than returning them to vassalage, and we might see the Phoenicians overwhelm Greece and Italy or at least colonize the western Med more densely.
 
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