I don't know how you could create a history with a PoD that far back. Take out Rome and the Western world would be so radically different. China and India probably wouldn't change too much (at least up until the Europeans starting mucking around over there), but there would be a monumental impact on Europe, Africa and western Asia.
Indeed! However
There's a really great timeline on exactly your POD, called Xamm Anim. It went through a few incarnations as its creator, Monopolist, did a lot of fantastic work. Here's links to the
3rd and
4th versions. Check them out!
Hope this helps!
Cheers,
Ganesha
I haven't following Xamm Anim, so I can't say how good a timeline it is. I have been of late following
The Weighted Scales: The World of an Aborted Rome, by Errnge. Here the focus is not on Carthage, but on what might happen if Rome were eliminated (here, by Gaulish invaders). As it happens Errnge also has an aversion to wanking any given Hellenistic age power so Carthage will assuredly not become the center of a mighty Mediterranean empire--it does however survive well into the second millennium CE (the timeline has an alternate Common Era, but one that starts just seven years before (IIRC) our own). Not only Carthage but every other wannabe imperial power gets frustrated or diverted so there never is any global overarching empire whatsoever, just more or less big kingdoms that last for a while then shrink or fall.
Now there's no objective way of measuring whether this is good AH or not; I don't think Errnge indulges in any really implausible howlers and events do seem to evolve plausibly by cause and effect. He has certainly set himself a monumental task, having to evolve a whole alternate Europe (and already in his timeline, centuries yet before the Common Era would retrospectively be set, India is quite seriously butterflied, so it would be more like a whole Alternate Old World before we get to 1500, and by then the Carthaginians (!) have discovered the New World, so it's a whole alternate Earth. He's only a few centuries on but there are "flashforwards" to a story in Italy around 1500, and I think he's doing a fair job.
I should note that years ago when Errnge was trying to start the original version of this, I was quite a naysayer--I wasn't against his POD or concept but it did seem inevitable to me that
someone would consolidate a Mediterranean empire, and I argued that case. Carthage was my favorite suspect of course. I had people slapping me down for both assumptions. So I lost interest and only recently have come back to see what Errnge did with it all, and am obviously impressed.
So, it would seem that timelines of such depth and scope are indeed possible, although obviously anyone can cavil at how good a job the authors are doing.
As for Carthaginian Empire, that is apparently a bit cliche (there is after all an old Poul Anderson Time Patrol story about it, called IIRC "Deleneda Est") and if anything more conservative than what Errnge is doing. If the Carthaginians were to manage a Med Empire, presumably a lot of their policies would more or less echo what the Romans did, and so it becomes a matter of figuring out what Phoenician words correspond to familiar Latin and renaming everything; also for fun making up Punicoid languages to correspond to the Romance ones. Obviously just doing all that (which is plenty of work in and of itself, even for a linguist of the stature of a Tolkien) is a gawdawful amount of work to do right; to instead develop a plausible cause-and-effect chain of events that would take into account the deep differences between Carthage and Rome (remembering that others disbelieve Carthage had the potential to fill Rome's sandals at all) and how likely it would be to be completely different--well, that's even harder. But at least with a broad Empire spanning the Med world developments would still be broadly similar. Going down a plausibly different path where there is no such empire--Errnge has certainly taken on a big job!
Carthaginian Empire is easier, if perhaps less realistic.