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?