Early PODs world unrecognizable

Yun-shuno

Banned
I think I while back we had a thread on Sargon, and I have queried about early Egypt.

My question is do such early PODs mean the world is unrecognizable?

If that's so how recent does a POD have to be-that your not just making stuff up as you go along.

And may I ask is that really true surely one can imagine a pod of no Sargon, or Egypt aborted?
 
Even if a POD happens deep in prehistory, as long as you respect the limitations of geography, physics, chemistry, biology, geology, etc., then your timeline is fine and you're not "just making stuff up".
 
At that point, I think it becomes far more of a creative exercise than most TLs, with the writer essentially painting an entirely new history. I think "different, unrecognisable, but strangely familiar" is probably what will happen. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. You just need to make the "familiar" part not be blatant parallelism of real history and make sure everything has a cause and effect.

Who would replace them? Pre-I do European gynocrats, basques?

Isn't the matriarchal tendencies of early Europe far overstated anyway? Matriarchy is a poor word to describe those sorts of societies, be they the hypothetical pre-Indo-European ones or more recent examples in Africa, parts of Asia, etc., simply because no true matriarchy exists and probably never has, according to mainstream anthropology.

For India you have plenty of choices, though. Even if southern Indian languages tend to have large amounts of Sanskrit/Indo-European loanwords (though Tamil has less).

But one of the hazards of early enough PODs is you pretty much are forced into making your own languages (or looking up long-dead ones), at least for naming places and people. There will be different movements of people, different successful/unsuccessful groups, etc. For pre-Indo-Europeans, there's the Basque and related groups, probably a Finno-Ugric group speaking a language related to Sami in most of Sweden/Norway and probably Finland too (but the Baltic Finns migrating to Finland/Estonia would be different than no Indo-European migrations). Also there's a bunch of non-Indo-European languages scattered around the Mediterranean, some well-enough attested like Etruscan. It's a shame no one's deciphered Linear A or Indus Valley script.
 
I read somewhere once that any PoD before the 30 years war (so 1648) is likely to result in something very foreign, but anything after 1648 will give us something that can in some way be relatable, at least if we carry it to the modern day. (I'm sure ATL 1399 would be recognisable in a PoD of 1398!).

Of course, by recognisable I mean something along the lines of "England, France, China will be big and important, while Luxembourg won't have much impact on the world stage" sort of thing, not "USA is world's biggest user of oil in 2015" (which can be easily changed by a PoD in 1647 that causes the USA to never form)

- BNC
 
Who would replace them? Pre-I do European gynocrats, basques?
As other said the preindoeuropean societies like the Etruscan and the
Basques or uralo-finic tribes.
In this world, ancient history would probably be pretty much the same until the not fall of the Minoan culture (which it wouldn't have to happen since the Greeks won't exist to invade it) and the Phoenicians expansion in the Mediterranean. I think it also butterflies away the hitties and its competition against Egypt.
The unreconizable aspect will come eventually as there won't be an Alexander to conquer Persia, or a Rome to destroy Carthage or Medieval Germanic kingdoms, and perhaps no discovery of the Americas and no colonialisms. A very different world would rise and no-one can assure it'd be an Eurocentric one
 
The unreconizable aspect will come eventually as there won't be an Alexander to conquer Persia, or a Rome to destroy Carthage or Medieval Germanic kingdoms, and perhaps no discovery of the Americas and no colonialisms. A very different world would rise and no-one can assure it'd be an Eurocentric one

Here's we have to be careful not to presume the world would be overly static. Why not someone else to destroy Carthage? Why not someone else to destroy Persia? Why not someone else to discover the Americas? The forces of history really do combine at times to make incredible events--Alexander the Great, Islam, the Mongols, etc. I'd throw in Pizarro, too, because of the insane amount of luck that man had. With an early enough POD that butterflies all that, I'd expect those particular events wouldn't happen, but I'd assume similar events that defy basic logic would still happen. And since we can't really see them coming (only maybe predict them by the situation they arose in), they'd be basically 100% original on the part of the author. Would people accept them? If they're well-written, yes, and with an explanation of what allows it to happen. But that's where you're branching into something far different than the usual feel of a TL.
 
My question is do such early PODs mean the world is unrecognizable?

Yes
If that's so how recent does a POD have to be-that your not just making stuff up as you go along.

In the end you are always just making stuff up if you write a timeline. You can reasonably extrapolate the next couple of years or even decades what would happen after a POD, but go far enough away, like for example a century after the POD, you are too faraway to make any reasoble predictions and you start making stuff up.
 
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