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

[Salvador79]

@Shevek23
Such situations are likely to occur throughout what we know as Former Yugoslavia, as the Hushatru push Westwards.

If they're cornered, they'll either assimilate or get conquered sooner or later, or they're retreating into really marginal lands. In the later case, like with more purely Amaloxian groups, they'll revert to less complex social structures.

What keeps them from simply weaving a new selective narrative, one which includes some women and men while excluding others? The need for everyone to fight wil have to end at some point, before the group gets decimated or some of them convince the others that other options are better than war.

This is a thin line or a tight rope to walk, narratively. But if you want, you could write a guest contribution on a post-Lakainashoping/post-helkhvou group in Serbia or a post-L./post-Withput group in slovakia...?!!!

 

[kholieken]

Most occupations under discussions : Warrior, Priesthood, Governing is very much small elites among populations. Rather than truly equal gender roles, it might be carried on as "family tradition" inside family. some border society might have Amaloxian priestess caste and non-Amaloxian warrior caste; other border society could governed by aristocracy where in some fmily women rules and inherit in other family its male that rule and inherit; in other society multiple rank could emerge where foreign male dominants barons rule over Amaloxian landowner who rules over mixed peasant. There could by many variation,just like Indian caste, rather than one simple equal society.

 

[Salvador79]

Most occupations under discussions : Warrior, Priesthood, Governing is very much small elites among populations. Rather than truly equal gender roles, it might be carried on as "family tradition" inside family. some border society might have Amaloxian priestess caste and non-Amaloxian warrior caste; other border society could governed by aristocracy where in some fmily women rules and inherit in other family its male that rule and inherit; in other society multiple rank could emerge where foreign male dominants barons rule over Amaloxian landowner who rules over mixed peasant. There could by many variation,just like Indian caste, rather than one simple equal society.

Yes, that sounds about right. And it would continue the pattern of heterogeneity which characterises much of TTL's Central Europe.

 

[Salvador79]

Cont.:

Was my conception of the Hušatru faith inspired by Islam and Manichaeism? Islam yes insofar as the development among a fringe group of desert-dwellers with developed commercial networks, or the quick expansion and development of a universal ummah, which overthrows all existing social structures, is concerned. Islamic ideals of moderation, or rules for fair trading and economic interaction, on the other hand, are neither part of it, nor is its strict monotheism. I did not think of Manichaeism, but given its Zoroastrian roots (among others), yes, insofar as it’s a rather syncretic religion from the start, light is a central symbol of the good and divine, and you should not ingest the wrong kind of things, but the analogies end here, I think…?

When I said that the Hušatru de-emphasised the various traditional deities of whatever local pantheon, this is true, but it is also an over-generalisation. Like OTL’s Zoroastrianism, they elevated two deities to the prominent positions of life-giver / source of light on the one hand (Šauru), and great betrayer / confuser / source of darkness and sterility on the other hand (Naranaunđix).

One ritual has already been mentioned by the myth. It is a communal ritual which soon represents a vital element of general gatherings and assemblies of the faithful. It is indeed one in which a drug is consumed – a mixture of ephedra, hemp, and poppy; my search for a word was stunted by the fact that “haoma”/”saoma” phonetically betrays the Indo-European roots of Indo-Iranian –, and those with the greatest religious charisma (for the Hušatru have no institutionalized priesthood over a long period of time) get to drink of the strong, first brews from the muzzled vases (for which the BMAC is quite famous), while ordinary folk get later, weaker extractions. Similar rituals are found across the world, and as far as they are a part of Vedic religion IOTL, they most likely originated from the contact between Indo-Europeans and the BMAC in the formation of the Indo-Iranian culture. The official reason for the sacred drug consumption is that it enables one’s soul to come nearer to the souls of the light and communicate with them. Certainly, such a ritual sets the mood for bold decisions and pushes aside petty calculations and bickerings between clans.

The *haoma ritual is something which I imagine began as a real, small scale religious ritual among the first believers. As soon as great masses of Wolgosu joined the movement – and the movement became a conquering avalanche –, it was transformed into the framework of a new type of super-tribal gathering.

The conquering and proselytizing character of the Hušatru movement is not just owed to the fact that they were simply able to do so. I thought of two other factors contributing to it: on the one hand, we have a large oppressed and marginalized group, for whom the adoption of the Hušatru faith equaled their common revolt, after which they created rather loose new social structures which bore no trace of a typically urbanized delineation-and-defense logic, and instead officially condoned what they had done, and thereby perpetuated it: when the righteous are governed by the wicked, they should throw off their yoke and take the place of their former masters in ruling the land, and they should help others do the same elsewhere, and for that help, they would be rewarded in said other places, too. On the other hand, there is the dynamical doctrine of the cult itself: it seeks to convert as many people as possible to the light, not just because it feels good if others share your faith, but also because

a) every corner of the world, including your own, is suffering from the sterility, the chaos and the wickedness caused by the prevalence of dark souls, just like every corner of the world would be enjoying greater peace, fertility and justice if the forces of the light have triumphed in many places;

b) the more pure souls and the less dark souls are all around you, including those who are just dying and sending their soul back into the heavenly “pool”, the better your chances are that your own babies will receive good souls, and

c) when the forces of the light are powerful enough to confront the forces of the dark directly, a great redeemer will come, riding on a winged camel which Šauru has given him, and he will slay Naranaunđix the great serpent-dragon, and set an end to the reign of darkness forever, after which the world is going to be a paradise of abundance, peace and justice without end.

(Yes, this sounds a bit like the story of the Saošyant, whose legend may or may not have influenced Judaic expectations of a messiah.)

Because I’ve earlier been asked about government structures (albeit those of TTL’s present): the Hušatru, for all their atrocities they commit against the Amaloxians and others, are, on the other hand, also the closest that this TL has, right now, to a proto-democratic movement. In their early phase of revolts and conquests, part of their attractiveness was that, when you joined them, you would become an equal among equals, and you could express your opinion and influence the decisions of assemblies like everyone else could (well, apparently it wouldn’t be quite that way in practice, but it’s still more participatory than anything else anywhere), and if you managed to partake in a successful conquest, you could rise from being a nobody to being a well-off and powerful person very quickly.

The political structure of a Korý reflects this fluidity and dynamics. It is the recognition that, when the Hušatru conquests have succeeded from the Iron Gates of the Danube to the steppes East of the Caspian Sea, the realm is way too big for every faithful to just come and gather in one place, even if their donkeys are faster than the breeds our timeline has. There are several Korýos, but the one in Derý in the Hatumaua / Danube Delta is soon becoming the greatest of them. (Again, there was a reason why caliphs moved to Baghdad.) Local communities send one of their own to the Korý, which comes together every year for a few weeks, resolves conflicts, elects military leaders, decides on new rules / interpretations / “laws” and the like. Between the assemblies, the local communities are basically operating completely on their own, unless there is a war, which is quite often the case. In that case, their military leadership is the institution around which centralization tendencies could be said to occur, but I suppose they are rather feeble, and in the first centuries of their existence, as long as they can still expand, groups are doing their own thing, unless other groups consider what they’re doing as against orthodoxy and a sign of their digression towards the evil. The coming of the Iron Age is giving decentralization a second air, too. When the expansion phase is over and the Hušatru realm consolidates and digs in after having received the first serious defeats, the movement will inevitably fracture. As I`ve said, the idea of a world-spanning Korý is alive, nevertheless, and will cause re-unifications and internal conquest campaigns at various points later on. But as we move towards what IOTL was the Classical or Axial Age (and what doesn’t have to be anything comparable ITTL…), the Hušatru will diverge and localize to some degree.

 

[Salvador79]

A few more thoughts on Asia and the Hušatru:

Great Aratta is spared from the first waves of Hušatru conquests because they move Westwards. But sooner or later, because Aratta really isn't a uniform polity but a highly heterogeneous bundle of highland states, whose ruling groups at times even struggle against each other until a new one has gained control over the prosperous and populous irrigated lands of Aratta proper, one or two of the Elamitic polities is going to convert. At first, there might be over-zealous converters, and like any real zealots, they may even be successful for a while, but in the thicket of entrenched polities who have had centuries of time to adapt to the innovations of the Hušatru, internal frictions will consume them. But a more realistic converted Elamtic polity is going to happen sooner or later, too, and when they take over control over all of Great Aratta, then the highlands are nominally Hušatru, too. Only, that conversion is going to work a lot differently from the conversion of the Wolgosu, or the conquests in the Hatumaua basin; it's a pragmatical decision, and it isn't even accompanied by a revolutionising of social structures. It basically means iconoclasm, cleaning up the pantheons, new burial rules, people wearing hats... but not much more. With the conversion of Great Aratta, an entirely different brand of Hušatru has come about - a moderate, pragmatic one, which will inevitably have a very ambivalent and loaded relationship with the Wolgosu and the Korý of Derý and its successor states.
If this happens, then the Eastern branches of the *BMAC, whose commercially minded culture is the anathema of a true early Hušatru, are the next to fall in line - probably even more pragmatic than Great Aratta.

Such moderate Hušatru polities, which are not really zealous in the business of making converts across the world, would form a sort of safety cordon for Meluakkam - a safety cordon Meluakkam direly needs, because for all we know about the Indus Valley Civilization, they weren't exactly focussing on their military, their towns weren't seriously fortified... so either this changes dramatically - which I believe is difficult without transforming the culture beyond recognition -, or they get lucky for another millennium beyond OTL. Which is what I'd try out here. Another millennium of Meluakkam's states to plant waves after waves of new colonies (for the planned grid layout of their towns does look like most of them were planted colonies in the first place, too) across much of the Indian subcontinent, like @Vinland's map has shown. At some point in time, military conflict with outsiders (and from within, too, perhaps) appears inevitable, and that inevitably means huge transformations and the end of a socio-political model which had been immensely successful in its expansion across previously non-agriculturalised territories, either because of conquests, or because they change in order to be able to defend themselvevs. But at that point in time, they're so many, and they're all over the place, so that invaders will more likely go down the way of the Saka, not that of the Indo-Aryans.

Now, the alternative to a conversion of Aratta as described above is a defiant cultural innovation, a coherent and adequate cultural, religious, social, political, economic and military reaction to the Hušatru challenge. That is, of course, also a possibility. As the frequent mentioning of "Sungaru" and Kemetic civilizations in this thread by me may have given away, though, I've thought that such answers would more likely occur at an even greater distance from the epicentre of the Hušatru revolution, along the Nile and in Southern Mesopotamia. They have even more time to react; they're not as reliant on human technology for survival as Aratta is with its qanats. And, frankly, there's my preference for some historico-narrative justice at play here. IOTL and in almost any timeline I've read here, the fate of Mesopotamia and Egypt after the Bronze Age is almost invariably that of being trampled upon by wave after wave of foreign empires who use the region as their breadbasket, recruiting ground etc., while often not giving a crap about the ancient culture, traditions etc. of the people whose lands they've just won. Which is why I was sure, from the start, that these regions are going to be the first ones to develop a viable answer to the Hušatru challenge, one which mobilises their large populations, utilises their sophisticated political structures, aims to protect their complex and highly interwoven economic structures, and reaffirms their own cultural differences (and, in their eyes, superiority) from / over the "uncivilized" Hušatru upstarts.

 

[Salvador79]

Writing Systems

As you may have noted, this timeline has no Phoenicians as we know them. The Egyptians know some "Fenchu" who live in Retjenu, but they're not the ones controlling Mediterranean trade. This role goes ITTL to the post-Šariu city states of the Western and Central Mediterranean. What this may well butterfly is the invention of an abjad or alphabet because the Šariu already have their own widely known script.

Let's go with that idea. For although alphabets are quite a practical thing, history doesn't always bring forth what is most logical or practical, and it's not like alphabets are unequivocally the greatest. And although most of us will have grown up learning to read and write alphabetic scripts, the idea of graphemes corresponding to phonemes is not such a straightforward or easy one at all, and not only for six-year-olds, including all the implied concepts, and especially since no language I know manages to achieve this without making lots of abstractions from phonetic variations which are not taken into account. Even syllables are not that clear-cut, but they're much easier to grasp. But let's leave that aside - my point is that, maybe, abjads and alphabets are not such an inevitable development.

All alphabetic scripts deciphered so far across the world are derived from one source: Proto-Sinaitic/Proto-Canaanite script, and its two better-known descendants, the Aramaic and the Phoenician abjads. (Wikipedia gives two more: Meroitic and Rongorongo. While Rongorongo isn't deciphered and, for all we know, might just as well be syllabic or even no representations of language at all, I am rather sure Meroitic was inspired by Demotic. So, it all comes down to Proto-Sinaitic/Proto-Canaanite.)

In this timeline, Egypt maintains a much greater control over its neighbors throughout the turbulent times of the Bronze Age Collapse. Instead of tampering around with just of handful of Demotic glyphs, the literate population of Retjenu is going to use the real thing. The "international" trade on the Mediterranean, on the other hand, is going to be based on the Šariu script, which is ultimately, very indirectly, derived from Sumerian cuneiform.

That leaves all writing systems in existence at 1200 BCE as logosyllabic - including the BMAC-script-derived one which the Hušatru are spreading across much of Eurasia.

And so it shall remain! IOTL, abjads and later alphabets didn't only win out because they were practical; they at least also needed the breakdown of the older (logosyllabic script-based) writing culture in the much more severe Bronze Age Collapse of OTL, as a blank slate in many places upon which one could start writing anew, with a different system. Now, such a break does occur ITTL in Europe / Tanaya, or at least its Eastern half, where the (not extremely literate) Hušatru sweep Neo-Amaloxian aside. But farther South, it doesn't happen, and so the developments of scripts is a lot more gradual. And it never frees itself of the logosyllabic principle.

What does that entail?
I've seen people state that logosyllabic scripts would make communication across linguistic borders easier. Well, not really. It's not a purely logographemic script.
I've seen other people state that it would reduce literacy to an even smaller elite because learning hundreds and thousands of signs is allegedly a lot more difficult than learning around 30. Well, not really - what you gain in decoding with alphabets, you lose in a second step, synthesising, which isn't as hard when learning logosyllabic scripts.
But could there be other consequences? How adaptive are logosyllabic writing systems in representing languages which are changing over time? Do they cause morphological and phonetic conservatism in literate societies? Do they make complete changes of the writing system necessary from time to time? (It occurred in Chinese history, but then again not as often as one may have thought.)

Any thoughts on the matter?

 

[Vuu]

Seems that the instant a civilization becomes advanced enough, they start moving away from pictograms, and start simplifying. Only the most stubborn ones don't do that (China being the only one OTL, because there is no such thing as a Chinese language - for all centralization it did, that was a massive failure)

Eventually people will just stop bothering with all the characters and start using them more and more for phonetic value. Maybe they keep using logographs a little longer, and there are more holdouts, but in ethnically homogeneus countries such scrips quickly become a liability. Heck, as China gets further Mandarinized, I say that bopomofo will eventually completely replace the current system, possibly even before the end of the century

The cueniform based one might end up like Hangul - remiscent of it's neighboring script(s), but conveying phonetic values inside one word-block instead of just the character being a representation itself

 

[Salvador79]

Seems that the instant a civilization becomes advanced enough, they start moving away from pictograms, and start simplifying. Only the most stubborn ones don't do that (China being the only one OTL, because there is no such thing as a Chinese language - for all centralization it did, that was a massive failure)

Eventually people will just stop bothering with all the characters and start using them more and more for phonetic value. Maybe they keep using logographs a little longer, and there are more holdouts, but in ethnically homogeneus countries such scrips quickly become a liability. Heck, as China gets further Mandarinized, I say that bopomofo will eventually completely replace the current system, possibly even before the end of the century

The cueniform based one might end up like Hangul - remiscent of it's neighboring script(s), but conveying phonetic values inside one word-block instead of just the character being a representation itself

I don't quite agree here.
Logosyllabic scripts are not really the same as "pictograms" (that's the kind of thing that indicates whether you're standing in front of a gentlemen's or ladies' restroom, or if you should turn left or right from this lane). Their signs have phonetic value, too, mostly syllabic one (as the term logo-syllabic script already indicates).
Egypt was an ethnically homogeneous civilization and they used logosyllabic scripts for more than two millennia; with cuneiform, this can be said to have been practiced for three millennia. Maybe they were not advanced enough for your taste.
I am not convinced either of the intrinsic superiority of alphabetic scripts, or of their inevitability.
Without OTL's Bronze Age Collapse and the reorganisation of the entire Eastern Mediterranean, I am not sure "Proto-Sinaitic" would be considered to be something more than barbarian scribblings, probably like the Ordos runes, by people who just didn't understand how writing should really work...

 

[Roger II]

Logosyllabic scripts are generally hybrids-you might see some words spelled out, some words written logographically, some partially("phonetic complementation"-in English if we had a logogram for "To fly" it might be written TO FLY-ew for "flew"). Also, what of a straight syllabic script? How common are those?

 

[Roger II]

IIRC there were some forms/regional uses of cuneiform with a pretty restricted range of logograms btw, that hit the 80-120 sign limit that's common to syllabaries.

 

[Salvador79]

All of these variants are possible. Although i find graphemes for grammatical morphemes (like tense, Mode, number, case etc.) quite practical...

 

[Salvador79]

I am very sorry I have to backtrack on my promise to write an epilogue for this timeline, situated in TTL's present. I planned to do a little piece of conversation, two students planning their holiday trip. There is no way I can write this properly - the more I began to reflect, the more things became questionable. And the most frustrating by-product of this endeavour was that a number of choices I had made for the narrative presentation of the timeline became less and less plausible to me. Writing the piece as I had half-conceptualised it in my mind in the spring seems lacking substance to me now, while corroborating it would require me making lots of choices for three millennia which no longer bear any relations to the prehistorical world this timeline has focused on.

So, instead of finishing that epilogue, I have decided to present you with the questions and doubts that have crossed my mind in the past few months, and which throw the narrative frame of the timeline very much into question.

Naturally, with a PoD roughly 7,000 years ago, the world is going to be a dizzyingly different place - to some extent, this has always been clear to me -, but when I tried to flesh out a few details of the present, various concepts which I had implicitly assumed to be cultural universals probably aren't, and other concepts which I had never spent any time thinking about became open questions, too, with no hints as to which path towards the present to choose. But perhaps you disagree? I am curious to hear which of these concepts you think would still look similar to our world even in a TL where an Amaloxian civilization has shaped South-Eastern Europe and its environs for millennia, and after its collapse, a proselytising world religion like the Hushatru faith comes to dominate much of Eurasia. I'll shortly outline how I had initially planned the epilogue, then reflect on two parts - at first, those which do not necessarily question the narrative choices I had made for this timeline, and then those which do.

Obsolete sketch for an epilogue

Two female students sit together over a couple of fig beers under the starry sky of Nabwt; the two are good friends, they have written the final exams of their Akhet trimester and are now planning a holiday trip during the weeks before classes resume in the Peret trimester. Like many modern Egyptian students ITTL, they love wintersports, but they're loath to go to the Outer Tjehenu mountains again (the Atlas, which ITTL's present is a peripheral province of the Egyptian state), on account of the slopes being much too crowded there and, with all the elderly Egyptian tourists, things being rather corny there, also, they've been there often since they were kids. Instead, they discuss the two more exotic and adventurous options of Mehetnefer (Norway) or Hedj (the Alps). Pros and cons are discussed: Mehetnefer is considered beautiful and cheap, but one of the two is rather prejudiced against "some pale people" (who are evidently rather traditionalist Hushatru believers speaking a Pulvelic language) behaving disrespectfully towards women and generally violently especially when high on drugs. They agree on the Hedj, which they say is not exactly the secret destination it used to be, because the days of terrorism are a distant past now (probably 40-50 years ago). The "new regime" and the once-rebellious indigenous groups are mentioned only briefly, but since one student alludes that the other could probably use what she has learnt in Hadjeamin's seminar to read signposts etc. in both languages (which the other student rejects as ridiculous), the allusion would be clear that some Alpine valleys are inhabited by bearers of a post-Amaloxian culture.

Questionable assumptions which do not directly challenge the narrative of the TL as it has been posted

As I planned my writing, more and more concepts became questionable to me.

1) Is it likely that individual leisurely tourism becomes a thing?
While travelling is a very old concept, it has been tied with professional occupation, commercial activity, or sometimes and later religious pilgrimage over millennia and in various cultural spheres. Individual leisurely tourism as we know it is a phenomenon which arose shortly after industrialisation set in, and builds on those older patterns of human mobility, but varies them under such influences as the age of exploration. As living standards sharply rose, it became a mass phenomenon. Some kind of leisure time industry is likely to develop in societies which are highly labour-divisive/specialised and where a great part of daily activities are rather rote and dull, at least as soon as people can afford some kind of leisure activity to balance it. If living standards develop synchronous to OTL near the line of the present, but other influences like the age of exploration are lacking, would it still develop, and would it look recognisable? (Or would the kind of travelling students undertook much rather take the form - which IOTL exists, too - of "studying abroad" for a while? Or...)
2) Wintersports for Egyptians?
That's one thing I am still rather confident about. Lying in the heat of the sun on sandy beaches is a leisure activity that counterbalances what wealthy people in cold and cloudy regions like North-Western Europe experience in their everyday lives, it's not something I'd expect to become a kind of standard when various of the most developed regions of the world are hot and dry to begin with.
3) Two young females travelling alone together?
Another thing I see no problem with. If anything, patriarchal possessive relations towards females and subsequent restrictions of their free movement and behaviour should be less self-explanatory ITTL.

But then, there were questions which I found dug deeper and undermined my narrative construction to a much greater degree.

Questionable assumptions which challenge the narrative of the TL as it has been posted

4) Would living standards in TTL's present be roughly equivalent to OTL?
This was an underlying assumption throughout the timeline: higher education is an institutionalised mass phenomenon, there is multi-modal entertainment media etc., but the tourism epilogue would cast a sharp light on this and throw the whole construction into question. A more continuous technological development in Europe, but also an earlier exhaustion of resources, a less dramatic Bronze Age Collapse, all this could point towards either faster or slower overall economic development when compared to OTL. Now, this could easily be helped by adjusting the time frame (the year in which this seminar takes place) - if only I knew in which direction... To answer the question, I'd have to flesh out the three missing millennia, but this would be both highly complex and have nothing to do with the focus of the TL, so I'm only left with uncertainty here.

5) Would Europe in 2018 CE ATL still bear the marks of the Hushatru conquests and would identifiable "indigenous" groups still exist?
Since the cultural differences between Hushatru on one side and Amaloxians as well as semi-Amaloxianised or at least culturally similar Tanayan groups on the other side go very deep, and since the onslaught of the Hushatru into Tanaya / Europe would be slowed down by non-steppe territory, dense population, and internal divisions throughout the 1st millennium BCE, I think it makes sense to assume that post-Amaloxian remnants could endure for a long while, especially if they have some renaissances in between, alternating with new retreats into isolated fringe positions - think of how long Berber groups endured. Still, three millennia is a lot. The assumption making this even slightly plausible was that parts of Europe would become a bit of a backwater, much like the Balkans, as a border territory between the Islamic and Christian worlds, experienced from the 14th to the 19th century. The longer I look at this assumption, the less sense it makes to me. TTL has brought a lot more development to much of Europe a lot earlier, and while the Hushatru conquests might be a shock and cause centuries of chaos, defensive fights, marginlization etc., I may have overstretched things by assuming it would go on like this throught the two millennia of CE, too. Many plausible ways for Tanaya to recover and blossom again, under whichever cultural mix suits the day. So, while the anti-eurocentric guy in me winces a little, I think my Euro-screw here would require a justification based on fleshing out three millennia, which, again, I can't and won't do.

And, perhaps the most damaging reflection on the quality of my narrative framework - and I can't say I hadn't been warned by some of you beforehand.. -:
6) Would Egyptians still define themselves as such and be recognisable to us from OTL in TTL's present?
I have tended to reply: Yes, because I saw good potential in the earlier and fiercer competition in TTL's Eastern Med for the Double Kingdom to develop a strong bluewater navy, a viable approach for colonising far-flung territories, and an adaptive socio-political ideology. I still stand by this - as I have alluded to, I think Egypt would be in a perfect position to lead an alliance of the "civilized" against the proselytising, aggressively conquering Hushatru, and come out of such a confrontation of civilizations as undisputed leader and overlord of many states and statelets throughout the region.
What I am no longer so sure about is whether such an Egypt would be recognizable to us. While it makes sense to assume that, valuing one's cultural heritage, the Nile Valley would always remain a special place to many Egyptians, their population centres could, depending on the degree of their success, very easily have shifted what we call Italy, or Spain, or somewhere in the Americas... (just like the centre of population gravity of the post-Anglo-Saxon world is in North America now, not in Britain, nor in Northern continental Europe). While this might seem irrelevant at first (it would not preclude a university in Nabwt), it does throw into question reflections based on what I have had the students and professor refer to as "our culture", especially references like "Kemet" (black earth) - basically any geographical names identical with OTL make little sense...

In short, I think I can say almost nothing about TTL's present, unfortunately.
And I am sorry for not having considered that before I started writing the timeline.
Comments and discussion still welcome, though

 

[xsampa]

Nice not-epilogue! Instead of wrapping things up, you have opened the timeline to more questioning. Did you have any ideas in mind for what would happen to China or the Indus?

 

[DaveB]

Interesting questions. It’s been a while, so I’m not sure, but I don’t believe you put anything in the TL that defined the TTL present in which the seminars were taking place as being concurrent with the OTL present? If so, you would be free to define the TTL ‘present’ as being whatever period you decided that technological progress and development of society would most closely approximate the OTL present, i.e. the in-TTL date might be anywhere between the equivalent of 1500 CE and 2500 CE (or even wider, or perhaps best, not defined at all?).

I agree though that reconstructing millennia of an ATL is not easy!

 

[245]

hows Africa and the Americas?

 

[Shevek23]

....1) Is it likely that individual leisurely tourism becomes a thing?

This ties up to question 4. Basically, the essential gimme for the framing device is that a society in which universities of our modern type more or less exist. Characteristics nitpickers might attack if so inclined include a) diversity of student body--why is it coed? b) mission--couldn't a different model of "higher education" exist in which there is no concept of a universal meeting of minds and instead specialized institutions have their separate systems, of apprenticeship and so forth--the whole university model can be seen as a peculiar cultural outcome of OTL, typical of the western end of the Old World influenced by Classical Greek culture (so it is somewhat common to both Christendom and the Islamic world, but not so much to the traditions of Eastern Asia in my perception.

Mind the way my own perception of the core processes of history works, I did not find it bizarre that a TL that butterflies away Classical Hellenism quite thoroughly should nevertheless develop colleges where similar patterns to OTL exist--all fields of knowledge its purview, a universal mixing of all classes and strata of students of one society, the right of students to politely talk back and question, the expectation of some kind of critical dialectic rather than rote transmission of received wisdom...all of this seems plausible to be paralleled to me, provided the society reaches as stage where, as in question 4, the broad pattern of technology and global interrelations is roughly parallel to the 20th century or later.

Others may sharply disagree, but to me it seemed plain that the more or less familiar classroom situation you embedded the account of the past in (rather than for instance embedding it in religious rites or scriptures) demands a "modern" times that broadly resembles OTL post WWII in a distant perspective. There should be automobiles, airports for large passenger planes, railroads, major dam projects, the New World will have been contacted on some terms in the past 400-1000 years; petroleum is being heavily exploited, alternatives--nuclear, solar, etc--being actively developed. Something very much like capitalism exists, or me being a lefty who believes socialism and perhaps communism is viable, something along those lines. Egalitarianism, populism, radical notions along the lines that there are no races (conceivably to me this TL might not have put so much emphasis on "race" as a hierarchy organizing concept in the first place) and that women can do anything men can do and vice versa, and that men and women can associate as friends and colleagues without inevitably ripping apart their professional lives under sexual tensions...all this packaged stuff almost surely exists and is dominant to the extent it is OTL if we have the classroom setting as you described it. As an essentially Marxist determinist (but probably I mean by that something anti-Marxists don't understand I could) it seems plausible to me that in broad strokes, a world pretty much like ours in terms of technology deployed would require social revolutionary evolutions creating class and political sociology much like OTL, and that would tend to create something akin to OTL academia. I'd listen to counterarguments, but at the end of the day, if you present me a picture of a modernistic seeming university class setting, I will picture a world as described above, with some mix of more or less constitutional monarchies, democratic republics, various tyrannies masquerading as one or the other, revolutionary socialism of some kind and again tyrannies pretending to be that too, in the matrix of a global capitalist system and a very Promethean industrial economy. I can well believe that such a global situation can arise from any cultural basis whatsoever; we can stir the Neolithic cultural base of baseline cultures all we want, swap in Han in Africa and Bantu in China, make up whole other Neolithic societies--and plausibly get your classroom just the same. Vice versa I will not be accused of lacking imagination that it could be otherwise too; it could--but I am arguing from "canon evidence." Given that we have your classroom setting, it has certain essential bases, and those bases can arise from any human baseline of cultures. (Getting the details plausible is much more of a challenge--asserting global capitalism will arise is not the same thing as claiming it could arise anywhere or any time! I'd insist the conditions must be right, and arguing about those is where controversy comes in).

Given then that the broad substrate form of civilizations necessary to create your classroom situation must parallel OTL modern times in some degree, you are justified in appropriating all kinds of stuff from OTL from plastic fast food utensils (maybe not forks, spoons and knives, to be sure) to airports much as we know them to yes, tourism.

...If living standards develop synchronous to OTL near the line of the present, but other influences like the age of exploration are lacking, would it still develop, and would it look recognisable? (Or would the kind of travelling students undertook much rather take the form - which IOTL exists, too - of "studying abroad" for a while? Or...)

I think the rise of global capitalism, an essential part of the substrate of "more or less like modern world 1950-present day" will necessarily involve something akin to the OTL European Early Modern "age of exploration" followed by "age of successively more successful hegemony and conquest and subjugation of the rest of the globe" then rapidly followed by "age of rebellion against this hegemony" to arrive at a capitalist-developed multipolar modern global system. Obviously part of my believing this is involved with my rejection of the notion that capitalism is the omega goal of human civilization; I view it as a kind of exploitive mode that cannot be sidestepped though its onset might be much delayed. Inherently violent and polarizing at the same time it builds tremendously strong ties to a global system, there is no path to modern technological levels omitting it, and no such thing as a peaceful and consensual global capitalism either, it will always involve severe exploitation and polarization and thus major global violence in several forms.

If you wanted to sell the idea your university students are post-revolutionary and there is some sort of largely or entirely post capitalist socialist order in some form, I'd buy that. But my sense is not that!

2) Wintersports for Egyptians?
That's one thing I am still rather confident about. Lying in the heat of the sun on sandy beaches is a leisure activity that counterbalances what wealthy people in cold and cloudy regions like North-Western Europe experience in their everyday lives, it's not something I'd expect to become a kind of standard when various of the most developed regions of the world are hot and dry to begin with.

I think this demands that at some point the Egyptians either colonized or otherwise forced hegemony of some kind on peoples who live in snowy places--which they would have several opportunities to do--or alternatively entered into alliance with a society including such places. That the Scandinavian Atlantic coast might have been under Khemic colonial rule the way Namibia was under German rule is easy for me to envision for instance.

So, at some point Khemics labored in the midwinter freeze like mad polar bears, and from this the tourism evolved. Or an Alpine including regime was a friend for a long time resulting in reciprocal culture exchanges.

3) Two young females travelling alone together?
Another thing I see no problem with. If anything, patriarchal possessive relations towards females and subsequent restrictions of their free movement and behaviour should be less self-explanatory ITTL.

Agreed, and it also follows from my views about a basically parallel to OTL global capitalist substrate, which implies a social-democratic Enlightenment type reaction and product. Put the two together and it seems pretty certain they can do this quite casually.

....
4) Would living standards in TTL's present be roughly equivalent to OTL?
This was an underlying assumption throughout the timeline: higher education is an institutionalised mass phenomenon, there is multi-modal entertainment media etc., but the tourism epilogue would cast a sharp light on this and throw the whole construction into question. A more continuous technological development in Europe, but also an earlier exhaustion of resources, a less dramatic Bronze Age Collapse, all this could point towards either faster or slower overall economic development when compared to OTL. Now, this could easily be helped by adjusting the time frame (the year in which this seminar takes place) - if only I knew in which direction... To answer the question, I'd have to flesh out the three missing millennia, but this would be both highly complex and have nothing to do with the focus of the TL, so I'm only left with uncertainty here.

All you have to do I think is be vague about how much time has elapsed between the final events the class focuses on (which are tightly set in our calendar) and the period in which the class is taking place. We know the time span of the Amaloxian arc in our calendar...but do we know when this class is meeting? 1000 CE? 2000 (aka, contemporary with OTL)? 3000? We really don't have to nail that down.

It doesn't matter so much when the industrial revolution kicks off, what matters is allowing enough time within its own internal phases. But we are framing the story from a chosen snapshot of time. We can leave most things up in the air as far as timing goes. Just don't tell us when that chosen snapshot is and people can agree to disagree on the plausible pattern of time between the end of the Amaloxian period and the classroom setting.

Given that it looks and feels like modern uni, presumably the world as a whole is somewhere in modernity in terms of technology and class distribution of access to that between 1950 and 2050; we can fight over just where in that analog range or whether there are dimensions that cannot be collapsed into jiggering forward or backward. But broadly speaking some classes should be able to access the same types of services they can OTL in modern times.

5) Would Europe in 2018 CE ATL still bear the marks of the Hushatru conquests and would identifiable "indigenous" groups still exist?

If you committed in your canon to asserting extended continuities that seem too long extended, you can always revise a little bit to clarify later iterations are intermediate and later buried under future transformations that don't necessarily carry them forward.

Or they could also plausibly either last longer for reasons, or the classroom might be precociously early in time. I am not troubled by this!

...
6) Would Egyptians still define themselves as such and be recognisable to us from OTL in TTL's present?

As above. One can envision a particular type of development in which aspects of ancient Khemic identity are valued and iconified, while others are quite massively revised, in which the Nile centered core remains the center of a broader Greater Egypt. Perhaps there is a crisis in which non-valley residents assert their identity as worthy of the narrower Khemic heritage. Also they could hive off, create rival Khemic-descended power centers, and by political leapfrogging and naval maneuvering around them, founding colonies and so forth, project a Nile-centered power base globally while surrounded by rivals they share a lot of basic stuff with.

 

[vandevere]

A possibility concerning Question #6...

If we assume Kemet doesn't fall over these millennia, then maybe it could have two capitals. One would be wherever the political center is. The other, which would be the spiritual capital, could still be situated on the Nile.

In short, it would be much like how, in otl, America seems to be the capital of the Western World-at least for now-while Rome, at least for the Catholics, is still the spiritual capital...

Apart from that, I don't really know all that much about the era you have been writing about...

 

[Salvador79]

Nice not-epilogue! Instead of wrapping things up, you have opened the timeline to more questioning. Did you have any ideas in mind for what would happen to China or the Indus?

Glad you're not angry
Indeed I did have ideas for China and the Indus, but they were always vague, and now I'm even less sure about them.

China without horse nomads around the corner, and even with donkey nomads and camel caravans arriving only in the last third of the 2nd millennium BCE at the fringes of what we call China, is certainly a China with a different state formation. In the 3rd millennium BCE, various hierarchical city states developed both in the Yellow River and in the Yangtse River valleys. IOTL, in spite of China's rugged terrain and ethno-linguistic and cultural diversity, up until and including Qin, waves of massive imperial expansion, which also brought moments of cultural convergence, emanated only from those states who formed along the Yellow River and its tributaries. The fact that they were the first to acquire horses, and that they were confronted over millennia with nomadic neighbors who also had horses, and that they were always the first to absorb new technological impulses from further West in Eurasia through what we call Dzungaria and the Tarim Basin, is unlikely to be coincidental. ITTL, all of this is changed. Just like along the Yangtse (Shu and Chu), the Yellow River valley and its tributaries will see great (well, for their time) city states / kingdoms arise, and tribal federations as a less formally hierarchical alternative, too, just because population, economic development and social complexity increase. The first contact with "the West" is going to be made as late as the middle of the 2nd millennium BCE, though, and it's not raiding horse nomads, but trade-minded *BMAC people on camels. Camels and donkeys are going to speed things up across *China, and they're quite well suited to peripheral regions like Tibet, too. So the sort of conflicts between settled agriculturalists and donkey-backed nomads which sped up the trend towards military centralisation much earlier IOTL is going to appear ITTL, too, but only in the 1st millennium BCE, and not so long exclusively centered around the Yellow River (donkeys are perfect mountain animals and thus likelier to cross geographical barriers Southwards faster).
In short, I think the various and greatly different civilizations which IOTL we lump together as "China" get more of a level playing field, and they may well remain distinct from each other and never be seen as one culture. In an earlier update, I mentioned the imperial state of "Namquý" being in existence around the times of Old Maat philosophers, i.e. roughly the 18th century CE. That would be a maritime empire centered in what we call Southern China, around the Pearl River, where Austro-Asiatic, Kra-Dai and Austronesian languages are spoken, but no Sino-Tibetan ones. I'm not entirely sure about this course of events, because there's a lot of uncovered time in between, which I imagine to be a rivalry and coexistence, sometimes conflicting, sometimes peaceful, between a handful of states/cultures/civilizations which never leads to a Qin-like conquering spree, or if it does, then only at such a late stage that the occupied and oppressed peoples will have developed such a distinct sense of, well, distinctness and such strong internal powers that they will rebound and throw off the yoke later without the idea of a "Huaxia", "Tianchao", "Jiangshan", "Shenzhou" or "Sihai" ever developing - also because their patterns of unification, war, alliance, and interaction include just as much neighboring people not included in OTL's concept of China. I would think that, throughout the 1st millennium CE likely, some notion of "we are all neither *Dravidian, nor *Hushatru, nor like the simpletons of the North" could emerge, like a fuzzy concept of a subcontinent; maybe "Jiangshan" covers that best, as it stresses what divides and unites them (rivers and mountains), but I'm not even sure about that. (In that case, it could well include all of what we label "Indochina", too, but that depends on India, of course, see below.)

As far as the Indus and India are concerned, I have already stated that by the time of the fall of the Amaloxian queendoms, the Dravidian-speaking bearers of what we know as the IVC have expanded all across the Gangetic plain right down to the delta, and along both coasts and yet more river valleys, and they're cutting down woods and pushing indigenous groups further and further into peripheral regions. And I have committed myself to the existence of an empire named Privittmanila controlling much of South Asia in the 18th century, and to a Dravidian language being the global language of science. The latter means I believe in a scientific, technological, and economic advantage, likely coupled with supreme military power, too, residing with the Indian subcontinent throughout a significant period in the last half of the 2nd millennium CE. Again, things might turn out in an utterly different way. What made me try this path was how impressed I really am with the IVC. They were a huge civilization stretching over a large area, they were clearly well-organised without giving too many hints with regards to a hierarchical make-up of their society (and, no, I'm not convinced of priest-kings, either, even after reviewing more overviews of archaeological findings). I tentatively follow the (controversial, because it extrapolates from much later Indian social structures and subtracts what could be viewed as Indo-European influences - not a reliable method, if you ask me, but since we know so little about the IVC, it's at least a hypothesis) idea that their apparently rather peaceful and not overtly hierarchical system was based on horizontal occupational delineations religiously glorified as innately different but equally valuable destinies, which would mean occupational and thus economic / labour-related questions stood at the heart of their political identity and actions. Sounds like an approach which could take them really far - especially since much of the subcontinent they expand into is inhabited by hunter-gatherers. Their high emphasis on production and exchange and the great coherence all their colonies had shown over the course of at least seven centuries IOTL could be an indicator of a comparatively great degree of cohesion over an area which is incredibly huge for BCE times. Starting from such a base, with a shared script and language, probably even with early standardisations for trade, probably resulting in early advances in mathematics, looks like it positions them well for the Common Era years if they manage, at some point, to develop some sort of defensive capabilities, too, and take to the seas. There would certainly be terrible conflicts and downfalls and crises, too, and in an earlier update I've already alluded to the Old Maat Egyptian perception that *India had been, in their near past [i.e. in the 15th-17th centuries probably] a place of ever-changing political structures and polities, so this shouldn't be imagined like a four millennia lasting IVC wank (indeed, by the 1st millennium BCE the parallels to what we know of them from OTL should have largely disappeared), but it positions the subcontinent, which was an economic powerhouse throughout much of OTL's history, too, quite favourably. (Which still doesn't mean it can't be, for example, riddled with horrible internecine warfare in the ATL present, or ruined by some totalitarian dictatorship, or whatever. It might as well be a nice socialist democracy. Or whatever else. All I'm committed to is that it's seen as the birthplace of TTL's "science" and/or "philosophy" and that its early modern history is one of eminent global importance.)

hows Africa and the Americas?

I have not thought too much about them, to be honest.
An imperially powerful Egypt, at least at times, likely means its control over the Mediterranean Coast all the way to Gibraltar, as well as control up the Nile into Ethiopia, and along the Red Sea to Somalia. Cultural influences will spread far and wide from there, which could mean a lot of things. The Bantu expansion might happen according to OTL schedule nonetheless because its nucleus is really far away and it spread primarily through regions which are also not quite close to Egypt - the first contact zone probably being along the Great Lakes. Absorbing *Egyptian influences can only speed things up, so things could go in all sorts of directions in Africa, but likely a little faster than IOTL. The only thing I've mentioned about early modern / modern Africa is the existence of a somewhat aggressive or troublesome religious group in the Sahel called Gafarists. Of course, with the Indian Ocean the undisputed Lake of Political and Economic Powerhouses in the first millennium BCE and CE ITTL, the East African seaboard is going to see a lot more and more direct influences.

As for the Americas, I've always consciously attempted to leave them out, in order to manage complexity. If you ask me about them, I'll probably agree with @Shevek23 that they'll be discovered at some point in the first or second thirds of the 2nd millennium CE, whether from Asia, from Europe or from Africa, or from two or even all three of them, I don't know. I see a definite possibility for them to remain more of a backwater than IOTL for much longer and never bringing forth a global superpower like the US. They could, but they might just as well remain more peripheral.

 

[Salvador79]

If you committed in your canon to asserting extended continuities that seem too long extended, you can always revise a little bit to clarify later iterations are intermediate and later buried under future transformations that don't necessarily carry them forward.

That looks like a good solution to me.

In broad strokes, I fully agree with the outlook you derived from your Marxist perspective. It still leaves the question of which details take which shape (e.g. tourism, or learning cultures) quite open, or else AH wouldn't make much sense, would it.

 

[Salvador79]

@vandevere,
I like your suggestion, too.

Thank you all for saving my narrative framework from my own doubts As always, it has been a great pleasure discussing with you!



By the way....
If I find the time to write it (which I'm not sure I will, as always), my next project might be in the Post 1900 section and focus on the first half of the 20th century and on Russia (and to a lesser extent Germany), and if you know me, you know it's not going to be dystopian, which would be in sharp contrast to OTL during that period...