Introduction
I feel like it is worth noting the way certain things are going to be written in this timeline, as there will be a little bit of a learning curve in terms of anthroponyms, hydronyms, and toponyms, as well as certain pseudo-historical aspects that beg explanation. First and foremost, as far as naming is concerned, I will be writing names out as they were said at the time, to the best of my knowledge. The reason being of course, that, at least in my mind, to write them out the way that we would in English today, or any modern language for that matter, would be to do so in a language that will never be spoken in the timeline. Certainly, I have to write the timeline itself in English and not some conlang for it to be intelligible to you the readers, but this doesn’t mean that we can’t adopt a certain degree of “local color” in seeing the names as they were at the time, and as they will evolve as time goes on. This of course requires an enormous amount of research on my part that goes together with the research to detail the historical/geographical context of the events I will be positing, particularly when the names of individuals that belonged to ethnic groups that did not leave us extensive written records are being dealt with. This can involve a degree of conjecture on my part, given that the degree to which I or any other researcher can reconstruct the sounds of ancient languages is limited by the data that we have. So, while I have poured at least a week’s worth of research into compiling an etymological onomasticon of Archaic Irish names for example, my reconstructions, while the best effort I can give, are not necessarily precisely historical. Furthermore, it is important to note that in any language, names of people and places may come and go with time, and for those more sparsely attested languages, it is rather probable that a large inventory of names came and went entirely unattested, and so it is with a great deal of conjecture and artistic license that I have gone about constructing whole series of names for different languages.
Such conjecture and artistic license extends to certain languages of the period, which similarly came and went entirely unattested, or only sparsely attested. Such languages as Thracian, Dacian, Illyrian (itself probably a group of languages or a dialect continuum), Paeonian, Scytho-Sarmatian, Vistula Venetic, Venetic, Liburnian, Pre-Irish, Lusitanian, Celtiberian, Sicanian, Siculian, Elymian, Etruscan, Pisidian, Carian, Sidetic, Lycian, Mariandynian, Paphlagonian, Isaurian, Lycaonian, and Cappadocian, and a host of others, may require some con-langing on my part to reconstruct names of people and places for the period. Likewise, the development of certain well-attested languages of the period might be altered by the course of events within the timeline.
This conjecture and artistic license may also extend to certain persons whose names did not make it into the historical record, which may include soldiers, government officials, or even members of royal families. Finally, it may also extend to religious and cultural practices and matters of economy and finance. Certainly, I will be sticking to the historical record as best that I can, and I tend to pour over certain subjects for hours before writing a sentence about them. However, as I am sure many of you are aware, there are wide holes in the historical record that require filling for the purpose of writing alternate history.
So, without further a due, I will now jump into the abyss of your criticism…