The Book of the Holy Mountain - An Alternate Seminar in Alternate Pre- and Ancient History

[Vinland]

Thanks for the feedback on the map! As you've no doubt put together, Southeast Asia was the most difficult part of the map to put together (not least due to my lack of expertise on the region), and I agree that changes need to be made. As an informational note, I modeled the region by working backwards from OTL in four waves of migration: Hmong-Mien -> Austroasiatic and Austronesian -> Kra-Dai -> Sino-Tibetan and Dravidian. You've convinced me now that I overestimated the extent of the Kra-Dai wave of this time.

What is that dark thing in southern Japan?
I see that you are going for estensive Austronesian presence on the Chinese mainland and Kra-Dai already spoken in the Chaopraya basin.

The dark red in southern Japan is Austroasiatic, based on my cautious assertion that something other than Japonic or Ainu occupied the southern part of the islands before the Japonic migrations. Ainu-derived toponyms end about halfway down Honshu, but this is long before the Yayoi are first attested. Not to mention that if the Yayoi were Japonic, then their egress from the Korean peninsula may be much delayed or averted altogether without horses. I chose Austroasiatic for this pre-Yayoi group due to the presence of loanwords that could have come from Austroasiatic or Kra-Dai, and due to a 2015 Automated Similarity Judgement Program study by Gerhard Jäger that lumped Japonic in with Austroasiatic. I doubt that they're related, but Austroasiatic seems plausible as a substrate.

Excellent map, @Vinland , although I've noticed something that needs to be improved:

• Austronesian should be extended to Fujian province.
• Thailand used to be Austroasiatic (Mon-speaking Dvaravati), as well as Myanmar (either Khasi or Palaung-Wa) or even most of OTL Northeast India.
• Hmong-Iu Mien was used to be spoken largely in both Hubei and Hunan, even in Jiangxi and the coastal Hakka-Chaozhou (Teochew) region.

PS:
@Salvador79 , please correct me if my suggestions were actually wrong.

I agree with your second and third points, but the first I'm less certain about. I'm convinced of hypotheses that at least some of the later Baiyue spoke Austroasiatic, which I showed with a scattered presence, but the homeland of Kra-Dai is generally placed in Fujian or Guandong. Do you think that Austroasiatic presence in Fujian should be scattered remnants or relatively strong (i.e. "solid color") despite it being near the center of Kra-Dai expansion?

I hope @Vinland doesn't take this the wrong way, because I think it's a wonderful map that adds vividness and extra detail to this great TL, but I had some moments to spare and quickly improvised a patch for the "Austro-Asiatic situation". I'm far less well-versed when it comes to the other point @ramones1986 brought up, but this is a close approximation of how I think this particular part of the world looked at the time, linguistically:

View attachment 403115

Essentially, I think the rough areas corresponding to Thailand and Myanmar were indeed still almost entirely Austro-Asiatic, and that there was a greater Austro-Asiatic presence in North-Eastern India as well. (But I personally think that some esimations, which hold that Austro-Asiatic completely dominated North-Eastern India at the time, are a bit overblown.)

Thanks! That looks a lot better, and my revision of the map will look quite similar. However, I suspect the Austroasiatic speakers will have been driven entirely from the Ganges Basin by Dravidians, with holdouts only in mountainous regions less-suited to agriculture. I think it's even possible that Dravidian agriculturalists would have set up states (if only city states) in the basin by this point.

 

[Salvador79]

@Vinland,
Agreed on the Ganges basin, except perhaps for swampy regions in the delta.

 

[ramones1986]

I agree with your second and third points, but the first I'm less certain about. I'm convinced of hypotheses that at least some of the later Baiyue spoke Austroasiatic, which I showed with a scattered presence, but the homeland of Kra-Dai is generally placed in Fujian or Guandong. Do you think that Austroasiatic presence in Fujian should be scattered remnants or relatively strong (i.e. "solid color") despite it being near the center of Kra-Dai expansion?

My personal bet would be in Guangdong.

 

[Salvador79]

I'll certainly write something about Dravidian City states and other groups, and on what Great Aratta does in the face of the hushatru.

 

[Vinland]

The revised map. Thanks to @ramones1986 and @Skallagrim for their advice on Southeast Asia and China. Let me know if further revision is needed.

 

[Vuu]

Interesting Japan, though that is OTL. Many conflicting information whether or not there was a massive Austroasiatic influence (to the point that AI analytic systems identify Japanese as an Austroasiatic language)

 

[Salvador79]

Cont.:

The mere existence of a thalassic Waethic-speaking civilization spanning along the Atlantic seabard from the *Iberian peninsula to the two Waethic islands should not induce us to assume that that the Waethic world was governed by some sort of confederal empire, or that it was a big centripetal thalassocracy, or indeed homogeneous at all. The Zanik, as the petty kings who ruled from their stone forts were called, only controlled those coastal, riverine or resource-strategic areas who were so important to long-distance trade as to yield enough profit to be able to share the fruits of controlling it with a great followership. Their seats of power were the nuclei of the first towns in the Waethic space, and it was only here that a few people were reading and writing their languages in a script which was clearly based on Linear Šariu Amru (and thus indirectly derived from cuneiform), but adapted to the phonology and morphology of the Waethic languages.

This script was not the only thing which this thin elite had borrowed from the Šariu – other cultural imports were as diverse as

the Taqla (in Amildganu Waethic: takalak – the Šariu’s standardized weight and an alloy quality of the pieces of silver-gold-alloy which the Šariu, and increasingly also their Waethic partners, used as a form of currency, and the methods to control said quality

and the cultic revolution which conceived of the spirits of the deceased – whose veneration was a cultural trait the Waethic horizon shared with both the Semitic Šariu and the Tjemehu of North Africa – as no longer bound to specific places, but roaming in a universal yonderworld, an ethereal sphere or dimension of their own, often visualized on cultural artefacts as a ship in the sky ("mamunz" in Amildganu Waethic, "neqeshqi" in Shariu), from where they can watch everyone in any place and bless them with their consent or confuse and damn them with their rage.

Beyond the vicinity of these stone fort towns, life in the Waethic-speaking West was still, in many places, as economically simple and subsistence-oriented, socially as clan-based and religiously as localized as it had been for many, many centuries.

When the Bronze Age came to an end in the Eastern Mediterranean and Danubian towards the turn of the second and first millennia (somewhat later than IOTL altogether and more as a wave of shocks than in one single turmoil), and Šariu networks broke down (those who represented their backbone settling down and digging in in well-defensible forts on islands and steep cliffs along the Western Mediterranean, which would over time grow back into city states), this was a severe shock for the Waethic Zanik, too. Petty kingdoms collapsed, more primitive structures returned here and there, but in other places, the new trend towards iron weaponry and tools was soon picked up, and from there, a second wave of Zanik polities would establish itself and restore a renewed thalassic culture.


Quite a lot on the Waethic cultural sphere – next part is, finally, going to be on more details of the Hushatru faith and why I’ve designed it that way. Also, a bit on writing systems in the past and present of this timeline, and what they had to do with TTL’s cultural divergences.

 

[Shevek23]

Something I wonder about--the denoument seems to be that for a long and significant period, an "Amazon" female-supremacist complex exists in southeast Europe, and ultimately is overwhelmed by a delayed but trimuphant male-supremacist society that is rather terroristic (beyond the norm of a patriarchal civilization that is!) in its treatment of the former Amaloxian peoples out of fear presumably that failure to dominate with an iron hand will lead to a turning of the tables back against them. The upshot is that the world converges on the more or less patriarchal norms of OTL, with no large exceptions of note persisting anywhere. It may differ from OTL in that there are memories and bastion remnants here or there, perpetuating the Book of the Holy Mountain and otherwise making for subtle flashes of Amaloxian color; meanwhile thanks to the stunting of the OTL Indo-European expansion, the Old World map in terms of linguistics is a bit mixed up, with groups we know of only as historically lost or small remnants occupying a much larger swathe and the OTL Indo Europeans confined to a much smaller range, particularly they never get to India or even the Persian plateau at all.

One thing I was looking for though was the possibility that somewhere on the Amaloxian periphery, the clash of male and female supremacy might resolve in a truce leading to a blending, the formation of a stance holding that both women and men should be expected to be able, on an individual basis, to fill any role, to form armies for instance comprised of both, for traders and artisans to be either, and for political leadership to quite deliberately intermix both so as to disarm fears of persons coming from one side or the other that they will be repressed. I could see that such a society might be regarded by both sides as more outrageous and dangerous than their diametrical opposite and suffer a disadvantage in being hunted and harassed by most established powers! But vice versa I think such a society would in the most objective sense enjoy a solid systemic advantage--if we have a gender-inclusive ethic, that says gender is not determinative of ability and anyone plays any role according to their individual gifts, the total human resources of the society ought to be put to the best use--especially if it comes with a highly democratic ethic as well. Over time, they might defuse the hostility of some of the people they front on and perhaps their ethic even spreads.

It just seemed to me that the whole Amaloxian arc clung very strongly to the reveresed gender polarization and subordination axis, as though conflict is assumed to be embedded in human nature, and at some point, if we have a world where a major and for a time durable and influential civilization complex is deeply committing to unrelenting female superiority, and yet borders on other societies where male supremacy such as we generally know it is the practice, somewhere in the interface the tension might be resolved by people wondering "why not both?" which of course undermines the polarizing concept of supremacy to the point they add "who needs supremacy? Why not equivalence and equality?" and that this abstract ideological experiment manifests in the form of people in specific circumstances somewhere who conclude men and women both need all the help they can get from each other and cannot afford haughty airs getting in the way of flexible, ad hoc or systematic cooperation. And it serves them well enough to buy then survivial in the border zones, and opportunity to expand when either side fluctuates in strength, and opportunity to present themselves as the less bad alternative to the opposite polarization when one side gains sway over the other.

I suppose I should disclose I was rather hoping the remarkably distinct ATL society explored would seek to merge both genders in combined strength from the beginning, or that this alloying phenomenon would propagate through the Amaloxian zone to become the new norm, give them a new lease on life, and allow them to stand as well as the Khemics to modern times. To say that a female-dominated society is possible is bold and experimental, but to consign it to ultimate doom and mere relics and odd bastions if even that seems to have rather unfortunate implications, that are rather, well, Old Maat! To be sure if someone were to suggest my fandom for the achievement of a gender balanced and democratic ethic were Whiggish, I might have to shrug myself.

Was there in fact any such result anywhere, lurking around in your footnotes?

 

[Skallagrim]

I call thee Whiggish, @Shevek23!

Of course, it's only right to shrug that off, although it may actually be a somewhat valid assertation in this case. After all, why do you say that the ultimate doom of this ATL female-dominated society has "rather unfortunate implications"? If I were to write about any society in history, and give it a few thousand years "extra time" beyond its OTL demise, absolutely nobody would say I screwed over that particular society in my scenario. Quite the opposite! Why is it, in this particular case, suddenly an "unfortunate implication" that things end, as all things must? (Ah, of course that last sentence rather betrays that I am just about the most un-Whiggish person you can find, when it comes to historiography.)

I think @Salvador79 gave the Amaloxians a fair shake (to put it mildly), and that they had a good run. They won't last forever, at least not in their powerful, established form (I imagine what remains, in the end, as a bit akin to the Druze or the Samaritans of modern-day OTL)... but in their heyday, they dramatically altered the destiny of entire continents. They changed the future of Eurasia (and by extension, the world) to a degree that's beyond the scope of nearly all TLs. I would hardly call that peanuts.

The idea of a "balanced" society seems reasonable, and it's not unthinkable that such ideas could arise. Why not? Nothing Salvador79 has written rules it out, as far as I recall. The chances for such a development are at least significantly higher than they were in OTL for most of history-- and that's all due to the lasting mark the Amaloxians left on history. On the other hand, I do think that assuming people would do "what makes sense" is fundamentally a Whiggish impulse.

(How often do we not ask, when watching the news "Why don't these people stop doing this stupid, hateful/destructive/short-sighted thing?" To a clinical observer, it's obvious that they're being senseless. But do they stop? Hell no. People can, in most cases, only see what actually makes sense from a distance. When you're "on the ground", in the midst of things, emotionally involved... you don't do what makes sense. For that reason, I do not expect historical developments, either in OTL or in this or any ATL, to be based on what makes sense.)

 

[Shevek23]

Things that people actually do make sense in the proper context of understanding their motivations and reasons for decisions they make. That's why liberal societies have to be on the lookout for falling into the trap that led to the Third Reich's sticky end, because the snowballing of various people onto that doomed and wicked bandwagon made sense to the people who did it at the time. It will seem to make sense to people like ourselves too...if thee or me is immune because of our enlightenment and foresight, do we have the wit, foresight, and social leverage to switch our compatriots off the doomed track we foresee? Are we in fact crying wolf when it is not there...yet?

What I thought was unfortunate was twofold: 1) raising the fortunes of women in complex, post-gatherer-hunter societies is a zero sum game implying the subordination and mistreatment of men--in short, polarization is intrinsic to the species somehow and attaining balance is a utopian chimera; and 2) given the need for polarization and subordination of one sex or the other, it is male dominance that must win out in the long run. These would be unfortunate implications. Whether that is the case in this TL is still open ended, somewhat, though the summary of the ATL modern period suggests that any such balanced societies as I suggested are peripheral.

None of this means this is a bad TL. A case can be made for clause 2) above, given clause 1) and even that premise has some strong arguments for it. Both boil down to the observation that putting women in the way of certain kinds of harm impairs the reproductive recovery rate of the society, since the majority of men can be killed of (or poisoned by metal fumes, if one wants female smiths for instance, so the smiths are impaired and die younger--but if male, they still can father children for a while anyway, whereas a woman with the same poisoning either miscarries or bears poison-impaired children, arguably worse than not having any offspring at all). But kill off or otherwise damage the effective fertility of a like percentage of women and the reproductive rate is going to drop, and below a certain critical number that leads to spiraling depopulation further putting the group at a disadvantage until they die out or fail socially and the remnants are absorbed into some other society with more pragmatic values leading to higher growth rates. I have addressed this before upthread, arguing that not just drawing on both sexes for this or that functions but synergystic improvements in overall point of view leading to greater collective astuteness and flexibility can offset some degree of reproductive impairment--more of a triumph of intensive care to preserve more lives against adversity balancing or even outweighing lower birth rates. But my belief that this is possible rests on some clearly questionable assumptions about the value of alternate points of view and doubling the surge "man" power for a given extreme demand. I don't take the overwhelming triumph of male supremacy OTL as proof that either female supremacy or a balance/egalitarian value set is impossible, but it certainly does put the burden of proof onto me.

 

[Vinland]

Things that people actually do make sense in the proper context of understanding their motivations and reasons for decisions they make. That's why liberal societies have to be on the lookout for falling into the trap that led to the Third Reich's sticky end, because the snowballing of various people onto that doomed and wicked bandwagon made sense to the people who did it at the time.

This is a key point you've brought up: people do things that make sense to them at the time, within the context of a pre-established worldview and events, but which do not necessarily make sense to outside observers such as ourselves, with different worldviews and (perhaps) a clearer understanding of events before and after. While I agree with this point, I don't think that it works in your favor. We can say now that Germany's descent into fascism led to genocide, the ruination of their country, and wars that they never could have won. But for a conforming, non-Jewish German dealing with the trauma of a ruinous war, economic collapse, and the long-cemented antisemitism of European culture, it probably seemed a sensible route. As @Skallagrim put it, they're "on the ground," and too personally involved to see things clearly. The Amaloxian elite behaved in much the same way (if for more sympathetic reasons).

Amaloxian history is a cycle of ascent, collapse and invasion, then expulsion and resurgence. Although internal factors were at play in the collapse phase, civilizations typically have a hard time perceiving these factors as they work. This would be especially the case in Amaloxia, which for all of its sophistication probably lacks academic theories of politics, economics, and history. So instead of identifying and rectifying these internal issues, they blame their obvious enemies: the invaders. This is more-or-less equivalent to blaming patriarchal society, as their primary foes generally came from strongly patriarchal cultures. I also suspect that the idea of a patriarchy would be far more obvious to the Amaloxians because their own model serves as a contrast, whereas our society perceived patriarchy as the default model or the "background" until the development of feminist theory. The Amaloxian response to their trauma is fundamentally reactionary: dig in, strengthen their model, and make it even more distinct from the outside world (although we do see that this is not uniformly the case in the Neo-Amaloxian Queendoms, where some prize lineage over sex). This approach had unfortunate consequences, but it was not necessarily irrational given that outsiders had invaded before and overturned their model for as long as they held control. It is not in the interests of a patriarchal model to make accommodation with a matriarchal model or vice versa, given that this would entail the elite of the either society surrendering some of their power. Additionally, "model overturn" as I've used it here is a byword for large-scale sexual violence and consignment to oppression - not unrealistic consequences of military conquest. The models could not integrate or compromise because it ran contrary to the interests of the side with the most leverage, and because the introduction of patriarchal models would carry an intolerable human cost. The Amaloxians knew this. As for the doom of the Amaloxians and their model, I think that it was not inevitable, but it was highly likely considering most of the surrounding civilizations were patriarchal. States in this era eventually decline and are submitted to external conquest, which in this case means model overturn.

Another matter is how an egalitarian model would arise at all, if they cannot make an accommodation with patriarchy. An egalitarian model has only recently become popular in the real world after centuries of development of liberalism, human rights, and feminism. It would also be desirable for myriad reasons, and yet it's still receiving strong pushback because so much of society is invested in the patriarchy and because so much of the patriarchy is part of the background, as I said earlier. The Amaloxians matriarchal elite is similarly invested in their own model. Furthermore, they lack data and moral philosophy that would promote a more egalitarian society. If anything, their philosophical traditions seem very conservative. One could also ask why slavery in the United States was not abolished at the country's founding, since mainstream mores have (I'd hope) come to deem it a moral abomination and economic theory tells us that it will stunt an economy in the long run. But invested elites, different dominant mores at the time, and the societal structures built around it conspired to keep it alive.

All that being said, I do think there's hope for egalitarian models outside of the timeline's focus. I assume that the Waethic and Nearer Tanayan cultures survive to present day, and that Indo-Europeans do not dominate Europe. Based on what I know of the Basques and Etruscans, these societies may be patriarchal, but afford far more rights and freedoms to women than Indo-Europeans. As such, they may develop "true" egalitarianism earlier. That's up to Salvador, though.

 

[Mike Louis]

Should any Amaloxian successor states emerge after the Bronze Age collapse, the power and influence of the clergy will be reduced which will allow for slightly easier lives for Amaloxian men. A new monotheistic Amaloxian faith could arise out of efforts by the Amaloxians to figure out why their various realms had declined and then fallen. This new faith could empathize ethical piety (for example the chief Amaloxian deity had permitted the Amaloxian realms to be conquered by their enemies due to lax living) while disdaining “unwomanly” behavior such as commerce and trade [1] (the Amaloxian successor states will at first will be autarkic due to aristocratic influence and the lack of cash money). As the successor states stabilize and trade begin to revive, Amaloxian men start to fill the roles of merchants, moneylenders, and traders in Amaloxian societies. Once this TL moves towards its equivalent of the Industrial Revolution, Amaloxian societies will slowly become more equalitarian as Amaloxian men who would make up both the banking and merchant classes will demand more political rights as banks, corporations, and industry will exert their influence on the various Amaloxian realms. [2]

[1] This potential new faith will have prohibitions against usury and debt slavery

[2] A men’s rights movement will emerge in Amaloxian societies as the bankers and businessmen want some official voice over how the taxes they pay to the government are spent.

 

[Salvador79]

First of all, because this is not endorsed by everyone in "the West", @Augustine Sedira, let me clarify that I fully endorse the ideal of gender equality, or of society moving beyond prescribed gender conceptions generally. The reason why I did not write my TL towards the achievement of that ideal in the Late Bronze Age or Iron Age already, @Shevek23, is not because I think it is utopian or utterly impossible, but because_I_was not able to conceptualise and write a way towards such developments which wouldn't be an unrealistic wank. I have come to realise, after two previous timelines, that when I'm pursuing an elaborate divergent goal with my timeline, my writing quality suffers (I wanted democracy to emerge from Rome's 3rd century crisis, hence Res Novae Romanae, and I wanted a successful egalitarian and political Early Radical Reformation to succeed somewhere, hence A Different Chalice. Both are probably not as good as they could have been if I had been more open-minded). Hence, I wanted my Amaloxians to start as a female-centered society, but I didn't want their path to be set as leading towards a gender-equal society. I still wouldn't know exactly how to achieve that, and while I find your suggestions highly interesting, I think @Vinland shown in his excellent post why that path is not quite straightforward.

Let me just add one more aspect, besides the non-rational residue in human behaviour @Skallagrim has pointed out and the absence of specialised academics who could analyse the flaws in their society`s gender structures and suggest improvements:
actually it's an extension of that last point. I did envisage Amaloxia, especially neo-Amaloxian Tawrix, to have been, at times, the home of a few people we might call "philosophers", and maybe I'll write a little more about the "Vitalist" theory I have mentioned at some point briefly.
So, there are Amaloxian philosophers. And maybe they could see through the problems both matriarchal and patriarchal societies are faced with.
But even if they did - and let's assume for the moment that they did, it's no problem for me to include this aspect into the TL and the conception of Vitalism -, then
a) those philosophers would have to come up with a viable, plausible and attractive alternative for the organization of society's division of labour under the conditions of the Late Bronze Age
b) and even if they did, their influence on actual social practice would be limited (just compare the influence Plato or Aristotle had on actual Greek political developments - it's rather the other way round: political structures and tendencies and interests influence what kind of philosophies you get; I hope this not just the Marxism of my youth resurfacing here...).

But let's focus on a), because while a debate on b) is going to lead us away from history, considering a) seems interesting from my point of view.

Why do I posit it?

Every society with a high degree of division of labour needs some functioning way of allotting work (and its compensation). Heck, even hunter-gatherer societies, who have the lowest degree of division of labour we can imagine, are being categorised by ethnologists into "patrilinear", "matrilinear" and "bilateral" as well as into "patrilocal" and "matrilocal" societies. Because even when you have very little to inherit and only questions like in whose longhouse or village a young couple is going to start their living, people apparently like clear-cut rules, so siblings won't quarrel over to who gets mother's / father's pretty obsidian knife and it's clear from day one who's going to live near the parents and look after them when they get old.

Now, Bronze Age societies have incredibly more controversial questions of the sort "Who should do X?" to answer; more controversial both because there's a lot of surplus production to allot and because personal charisma and personal relations between people who know each other won't really apply anymore. Virtually every single society I know of has intricate social mechanisms to regulate questions of "Who should do X?", and in none of them, "Whoever feels like doing X" is the general answer. Modern societies have come up with highly abstract mechanisms:

• qualification certificates issued by institutions (either some type of school or university, or some sort of association of professsionals) who, in turn, may only issue such certificates because they hold other, superior, certificates themselves (etc. etc.);
• and complex, allegedly "free" (that, already, is a highly complex concept, and a controversial one at that) markets, from commodity markets over labour markets to credit markets and even information markets;
• and welfare states to remedy at least the worst allocation outcomes of the before-mentioned markets.

Given such mechanisms, it's easier for us to dispsense with what we consider outdated or traditional answers to the question "Who should do X?".

No Bronze Age philosopher could have come up with ideas for all these mechanisms. In their absence, she'd have to propose some other mechanism to sort out "Who should do X?" if she insists that gender should no longer be taken into account when answering that question. The Late Bronze Age, both OTL and TTL, did develop other such social mechanisms, too - but neither of them is quite egalitarian, on the contrary: the differentiation between a priestly and a worldly nobility, free commoners and an underclass of slaves or serfs is one such differentiation; the absolute power of divine kings or queens to sort out any such questions is another; occupational associations like guilds are yet another one. Any of these mechanisms can be utterly gendered (like purely agnatic or enatic inheritance rules within the nobility, or men- resp. women-only guilds), but they can also be gender-neutral. I have already mentioned that one big difference between classical Amaloxia and neo-Amaloxian queendoms is that in the latter, the differentiation of "anāpašik - lakatta and their noble lineages - priestesses - the rest" is already relativising gender roles because, while succession of the anāpašik is purely enatic, boys from noble lineages already live much better lives and enjoy greater power, including military command, than female commoners.

But I'm sure this isn't what you like - and it isn't what I like, either. It's just: Abandoning one part of the answer to "Who should do X?" only happens when your society has found other, better answers, or at least thinks that they have. Our concepts are not quite available to them - Bronze Age palatial economies weren't even "market economies", and neo-Amaloxian queendoms had a lot less in the ways of institutionalised learning structures than their classical predecessors. How can workable answers to that question, which would satisfy the standards of egalitarianism which I believe we two share, @Shevek23, arise from this environment?

That is not to say, as others have pointed out, that gender equality, either as a concept or as a reality, cannot be achieved earlier ITTL than IOTL.
In the time period that I've covered, though, I believe the closest that we have is this:

• the insular societies in the Eastern half of the Nearer Tanayan cultural mega-horizon (the post-Halauχ societies) are likely to practice bilateral inheritance and succession by this point (I don't know if the Minoans did IOTL, they were certainly not a prototypical patriarchy; ITTL, Amaloxian influence should have pushed the balance farther)
• across Khestiu / Antaolia, where Amaloxianic-speaking groups live in small statelets who have never been part of any Danube-centered Amaloxian super-state, a variety of cultures persist throughout the 2nd millennium BCE, in which prestigious and important roles are reserved for both men and women. (The stress is on "reserved", though: this is not modern individualism, and it is certainly not our contemporary concept of "gender equality", for they consider it clear what men and women are supposed to do respectively, only it's not that the cool roles are all reserved for men and the women are left with the shitty ones, or vice versa. But that's just another roll of the "tradition" dice.
• Also, Great Aratta still has a lot of open questions and potential. Elamic society IOTL was also not prototypically patriarchal to begin with; here, too, cognatic succession, a number of female rulers, and other important social functions occupied at times by women are all in the cards. The same is possible for Southern Arabia and Nubia, but I know too little about these regions to venture into more elaborate speculations. Specialists in these fields are explicitly invited to express their opinions, though...!

So much for gender roles today! Thanks for the impulse for this discussion, @Shevek23!

 

[Salvador79]

The Hušatru faith - what I drew upon, how I molded it, why I did it this way, and what follows from this

Here is more on the Hušatru faith.
Let us first consider the context of its emergence:
It emerges in a surviving *BMAC in the 15th century BCE. By now, the *BMAC has expanded way beyond Bactria and Marginiana, planting colonies both to the North-West and the North-East along camel-back trade routes which link Southern Asia with both the Sinitic civilizations of the Yellow River in the East and the neo-Amaloxian outposts in the West. Its cultural make-up is still predominantly marked by those traditions we know as BMAC, too, but ideas and new traditions from various corners of the world have seeped in, created syncretisms, and begun to cause conflicts. Importantly for the genesis of the Hušatru faith (which is bound to call itself differently by its own members, but let's leave that aside for I can't find any word in the supposed BMAC substratum in Indo-Aryan which could express it), the neo-Amaloxian philosophy of Vitalism has become known in the *BMAC, too, by now. Also, the *BMAC's powerful neighbor to the South has been and still is Great Aratta, so a variety of "Elamitic" cultural influences is going to be important, too. And the *BMAC knows that the steppes to their North are inhabited by people not unlike some of their own ancestors (the Kelteminar culture), whom they consider primitive, and who speak a variety of languages, a group of which are Indo-European ones. The initial tenets of the Hušatru prophet have nothing to do with them really, but when he finds no substantial backing among his own kin, he turns to such groups to help him, and that gives the whole faith a new twist.
Socio-politically, this *BMAC is a collection of merchants' polities; whether they espouse single-ruler structures like those of Aratta or rather oligarchic ones like those of the Tawrixian neo-Amaloxian Lalangkazaloping colonies, or a mixture of both, we don't know. Also, they're bound to be ethnolinguistically heterogeneous. Speakers of various Elamitic varieties are found both among the elite and among lower strata of society, while other groups, especially of steppe descent, are confined to the latter.
Inspirations, change, discontent, and inequality are the nutrients for our new religious movement.

What are its basic tenets, dogmas, rituals, and practices?

All creatures receive, at some point, souls which do not die when their carrier-bodies die. This is a synthesis which IOTL Zoroastrianism (which emerged in roughly the same region) formulated, too. Preceding and surrounding cultures have ideas of ancestral spirits and demons, and of an afterlife (be it in groves, or under the earth, or across the sea), but that doesn't necessarily mean they see the two as linked. Like OTL's Zoroastrianism, the Hušatru faith does, though.

And these our souls or spirits are either partaking of, to put it bluntly, the good side: life, light, order, justice, knowledge, deliverance from suffering.
Or they're on the dark side of evil, chaos, death, confusion and guilt.
Again, such a heavy emphasis on morality is something which preceding and surrounding religions did not exhibit, neither IOTL, nor ITTL, and it is a central innovation which TTL's Hušatru has, again, in common with OTL's Zoroastrianism.

The Hušatru movement de-emphasises all traditional panteons. Again, like OTL Zoroastrianism, they don't declare them to be non-existing, but they divide the often ambiguous divine characters of various preceding mythologies into great spirits of the light and great spirits of the dark. And they stress that it is one's soul's desire and capability to pursue the good and not the evil which decides upon one's fate, and not some divinity's intervention.

The Hušatru believe that humans are special insofar as our souls only descend from their celestial sphere into our bodies upon our first birthday (i.e. when many babies begin to make their first quasi-verbal utterances) - a day of big celebration, of course. What kind of soul you have received, only time would tell, the Hušatru prophet had taught: your race, class, lineage etc. do not matter. (That idea was later, well, slightly modified or at least relativised, as we have seen, in order to legitimise the exploitation of the Amaloxians, for example.) This is one half of the faith's recipe for widespread appeal in times of stark inequality and conflict; lots of religious groups throughout history have tried to capitalise on such a momentum.

When someone who has lived past their first birthday has died, their soul must be able to ascend to the skies, where it is being weighed (the concept of soul-weighing is more popular far to the South-West of the *BMAC, in Egypt, for example, but indirect contacts and cross-fertilisations even across far distances are not something which is out of the question with such a mobile culture) according to its contributions to order or chaos, light or dark, and then rejoins the legion to which it belongs. In order to allow for the ascension of the soul, corpses are supposed to be left out in open, exposed places. (Sky burials predate Zoroastrianism, maybe they were already practiced by the Kelteminar and other groups dwelling in the extremely arid regions where the hot dry air preserves things, where fuel is scarce and there's not much of a soil to bury people in. Obviously a problematic dogma when you've moved to a wet and densely populated place like the Danubian basin.)

Infants are not supposed to have souls, so they can be simply be buried in the desert in jugs (as has been found to have occurred in OTL's BMAC).
A number of animals, on the other hand, is thought of as having some sorts of souls of their own, though. Only they cannot choose between good and evil; some animals inevitably have good souls (goats, camels, some birds etc.), while others inevitably possess evil spirits, and among the latter, there are not only such mythical creatures like serpent-dragons, but also another group of birds is counted, which is why the Hušatru wear hats or other head-garments to prevent bad birds from messing with their thoughts. (Usually not a bad idea in hot sunny climate.)

Another piece of trivia about this ascension to the sky: the Hušatru also believe that if a human is depicted somewhere, then a fragment of its spirit remains vaguely attached to that earthly piece, and that makes its ascension into the heavens difficult, too. (The sky being such an important religious place is possibly a steppe influence.) Therefore, the Hušatru want all depictions of humans (figurines, statues, depictions on the trumpets which are so typical for the BMAC) smashed. (The smashing of the trumpets is one thing which alientated most other *BMACers from the Hušatru faith.) Behind such iconoclasm is, beyond theological considerations, very often the social impulse of the downtrodden because it's usually the elites who have themselves depicted and have others pay hommage to their idols...


More on this on Monday, if you're interested... But comments are already welcome!

 

[Roger II]

Interesting. Some possibilities for the Hushratu:

1) They could modify their burial practice to "as long as tehre is some direct connection to the sky"(hence a neolithic or beehive tomb with an oculus the sky can be seen from is ok) as they move into wetter and drier areas.

2)do dogs have good souls? I know in Zoroastrianism dogs and otters are semi-sacred.

Also, how do they feel if it's a depiction of a human, but it's of a fictional human or a "imperfect" or "unrealistic" or "Egyptian" depiction of a human, hence a general or non-specific picture.

 

[Salvador79]

Interesting. Some possibilities for the Hushratu:

1) They could modify their burial practice to "as long as tehre is some direct connection to the sky"(hence a neolithic or beehive tomb with an oculus the sky can be seen from is ok) as they move into wetter and drier areas.

2)do dogs have good souls? I know in Zoroastrianism dogs and otters are semi-sacred.

Also, how do they feel if it's a depiction of a human, but it's of a fictional human or a "imperfect" or "unrealistic" or "Egyptian" depiction of a human, hence a general or non-specific picture.

1) That is plausible. Another Option is a temporally limited and controlled exposure (where no Worms or other animals of the earth can eat the corpse) before an inhumation if the Interpretation goes that the soul has ascended after this-and-this time.
2) Dogs evidently have good souls no honestly, an animal they domesticate won't be declared evil...

As for imperfect depictions, I supose there will be schools with divergin opinions on the matter...!

 

[Roger II]

Schism between DOg People and Cat People in 3...2...1.

 

[vandevere]

Schism between DOg People and Cat People in 3...2...1.

Not necessarily. I grew up with both and there are plenty of folks I know who have both...

 

[Vinland]

Neat stuff! Do I spot a bit of inspiration taken from Manichaeism as well as Islam?

It's interesting to see how Hushatru theology has already been reinterpreted among its Indo-European neophytes. While the orthodoxy holds that human beings can choose either evil or good regardless of what soul they possess, the Amaloxians were hunted down for being "containers for evil souls," implying that they were treated more like animals than humans. I suppose it's understandable that they would view their oppressors in this way, though.

Another part of Hushatru theology that strikes me as pretty "yikes" is hunting animals to extinction because they are designated as evil. Not just because animals are great and obviously not evil (aside from wasps), but because that practice seems likely to result in ecological catastrophe at some point. It's easy to imagine a pastoral society like the Indo-Europeans deciding that keystone species such as wolves are evil because they threaten animal herds. Hunting wolves to extinction would quickly lead to disaster as herbivores reproduce and consume unchecked.

 

[Shevek23]

Far from envisioning the arising of a gender free for all relating to tasks and roles from some academic bosom, my notion of who would hammer it out, where, and why is pretty much the opposite--it happens on the outer fringe of Amaloxian domains, someplace where the priestesses and other women of dignity are humiliated to be assigned or to be heiresses to, where things are highly marginal, and they are up against other marginal populations of a more traditionally male-dominated society. Being just barely getting along, some kind of crunch, such as the invasion of some third parties obnoxious to both, shove both into a corner somewhere where they can hold out...but tacit cooperation between two former polar enemy groups in the face of a third that both despise and fear evolves, over time, into more and more active and conscious cooperation. The same crisis that puts two former antagonists into a tight squeeze trying to survive i the same bastion has largely cut off both from their wider and deeper connections; both remnant populations are adequate to sustain the essentials of their separate traditions, on a rude level, but it is becoming increasingly common for the male supremacist group to borrow some Amaloxian warrior women to augment their defense against an assault on their side of the mountain, and for the Amaloxians to reciprocally borrow some fighting men from the other group to shore up their defenses on the other side when it comes under attack. There is increasingly more and more contact between the two groups, as they share economic goods, military intelligence and diplomatic inititiatives. It is observed by both that the sorts of tactics they can carry off with combined forces are superior to what either could accomplish alone; in desperation it seems only common sense that absolutely everyone should be trained up to fight, and if this means Amaloxian men become unruly and pick up notions from the other men, and women of the other group also grasp at opportunities to learn new things and assert themselves when men are in council--this just makes them look more human and reasonable to the other side, whose support each side needs. It might take hundreds of years for them to fuse with dual and parallel institutions fusing into a council form of state, for ideology to celebrate strengths of both and most of all strength of both working together, for new myths based on new metaphors to weave their way into the unified, married pantheon. Fused together, both are heretics to the larger groups that spawned them, but with certain advantages stemming from combining forces of both sexes, they manage to expand their grip on largely unwanted tough mountain or otherwise marginal terrain and form the common backdoor side of many major powers. They have a tough time expanding, but it is also tough to conquer from them.

So--no armchair revolutions, no victories of deep philosophical thought. Frontier, marchland pragmatism is what does it. A frugal civilization variant that cannot afford to waste the potential of half its population and has not got the numbers to rely on specialization, a people so embattled everyone is called on to fight when some outsider decides to attack. These are the circumstances I vaguely envision.