The Gulf Between East and West

boredatwork

Banned
I'm guessing a lot of trade along your new second med, as well as a powerful trading city-state/empire nucleus at those "Iranian" straits.

The hittites/Assyrians of this world, not having persians to worry about, could well last longer.

Hmm, no persians, no prince of persia, no persian architecture, no persian girls to date in college... bummer.
 
I'm guessing a lot of trade along your new second med, as well as a powerful trading city-state/empire nucleus at those "Iranian" straits.

The hittites/Assyrians of this world, not having persians to worry about, could well last longer.

Wouldn't the Romans just smash up the Hittites/Assyrians, like a mugger smashing a granny?
And then consolidate their power, with the Second Med as their eastern border?

:)
 

boredatwork

Banned
Wouldn't the Romans just smash up the Hittites/Assyrians, like a mugger smashing a granny?
And then consolidate their power, with the Second Med as their eastern border?

:)

Maybe, no idea.

Of course, with a whole second med, who knows what powers might arise along those shores. Perhaps the romans get smashed by the Sarmato-Greco-Chaldean Triple Dynasty.

Or perhaps, with no persians to struggle against, the hittites & assyrians expand eastward.

Or perhaps the Egyptians expand to mesopotamia, and put all of the Oldest continent under Pharonic rule.

Who knows?

Pick one that amuses you and go with it, they're all equally justifiable (or not).
 

Hendryk

Banned
What makes you so sure that it'll be Chinese? This is a sea trip away from Mesopotamia, after all, and there's also access from the Indus delta.
Well, the assumption seemed to be that it would happen at the height of the Han dynasty, when Chinese influence reached all the way to central Asia. Han settlers would have an organized state with established supply lines to back them up, whereas the other contenders would be starting from scratch. I'm talking of the eastern shore of that new sea, of course; further south and west, I have no doubt other regional powers would make their presence known.
 
So, assuming an ASB does sink Central Asia beneath the waves, the climatic shift should give Xinjiang and Mongolia the same kind of weather that Ukraine enjoys, meaning it can now be opened to sedentary settlement. Within a couple of centuries, Han colonists will have displaced the local nomadic populations and given China permanent control over the whole region.

Besides the fact that it wouldn't be anything like the Ukraine*, a) it took heavy amounts of gunpowder to seriously displace the herders there, who after all will also be seeing huge booms in their herds from the increased light grass cover and b) the Ukraine wasn't a real breadbasket till the crop technologies of the 17th century rolled around - Kiev was on the southern border of the Kievan Rus settlement zone and the Rus main breadbasket was the forest-steppe transition zone rather than the steppe or coastlines until much later.

I'd say you'd have an interesting set of Han/heavily sinifed Turk trading cities lining the east coast of the new sea and non-settled nomad lands and mountains in between it and China proper, which while very much part of the Sinosphere and occasionally a Chinese empire would have a similar dependent/antagonistic relationships with the imperial core as Guangxi does.

*Full Circulation sea hooked up to the unstable Indian ocean, weather systems being dumped directly off the Siberian cold pocket and no moderating influence or watering from the European maritime weather systems - it'll be like Iran's Caspian coast or Georgia with a thin fertile heavily wooded strip on the east side and much drier interiors. Plus its going to lack the Ukraine depth of highly fertile soil carried down from European Plain.
 
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