I loved B_Munro’s entry # 8139 of May 27, 2018 (Map thread XVII page 407), which hypothesises life in a world where the Assyrian empire lasted until the middle of the 20th century. So, with great respect to you, Sir, here is my cover version which, just to be different, I have set in the 14th century!
The Neo-Assyrian Empire (In Akkadian - Māt Aššur) was an iron age Mesopotamian empire, in existence between 911 and 609 BC, which went on to become the largest empire of the world at that time.
Alongside Akkadian, Aramaic (Syrian) became the official language of the empire and they perfected techniques of imperial rule, many of which became standard in later empires. It was, according to many historians, the first real empire in history! The Assyrians were also the first empire to arm its soldiers with iron weapons and they used tactics that made them unbeatable.
Under King Adal-Nihari, Assyria overcame all their Near East, Eastern Mediterranean, Anatolian and Caucasian rivals by defeating Babylon, Elam, Persia, Urartu, Lydia, The Medes (of Iran), Phrygians, Cimmerians, Israel, Judea, Phoenicia, the Chaldeans, Canaan and the Kushite Empire of modern day Somalia and Ethiopia.
Following the death of Ashurbanipal in 627 BC, the empire began to disintegrate due to a brutal, unremitting, series of civil wars and the Assyrian Empire entered a period of instability caused by the revolt of Shin-Shar-Ishkun against his brother Ashur-Etil-Ilani. This was the moment when the Babylonian ruler Nabopolassar decided to lead a revolt against Assyrian rule.
The Babylonians successfully expelled the Assyrian forces from their territory and then joined forces with Cyaxares, King of the Medes, to final overcome their Mesopotamian foes. Nabopolasser and Cyaxares then made an alliance with the Scythians and Cimmerians to destroy Assyria once and for all and they were joined by the Chaldeans!
Cyaxares swiftly conquered Tarbisu and decisively defeated the Assyrian army at the Battle of Ashur. He then joined up with the Babylonian army and led a combined offensive on Nineveh in 612 BC.
At the battle of Nineveh, the Assyrian King Sin-Shar-Ishkun was killed and his son Ashur-Uballit replaced him. He relocated to Harran with his remaining troops but the Medes and the Babylonians besieged the fortress in 610 BC and took it the following year, forcing him to flee once again with the remnants of his army.
During the same year, Egyptian and Assyrian forces left the Egyptian city of Carchemish and attacked the Medes and the Babylonians, now garrisoned in Harran, but the offensive failed and it ended any hope of an Assyrian revival.
The Assyrian army, and remnants of its administration, continued to hold out around Carchemish until the end of the sixth century BCE but after that it disappeared forever
BUT WHAT IF ……………………………………………. THE NEO-ASSYRIAN EMPIRE HAD NEVER COLLAPSED?
In an alternative timeline (ATL) the Second Great Age of the Neo-Assyrians began with the accession to power of Antares, a renegade Caphtorite General (i.e. Minoan from Crete) who was in service to the Assyrians and took charge of the army when Assur-Uballit fled Nineveh in 610 BCE.
Antares (‘Rival to Mars’) rallied the troops and stormed the Median-Babylonian camp of Cyaxares inflicting critical damage on them. Antares then took control of the joint Assyrian-Egyptian army coming up from Carchemish, finished off Cyaxares’s coalition and re-took Nineveh (now in a ruined state) before the years end. He then vowed to destroy Babylon once and for all.
By the end of the following year, Babylon, ‘the Gateway to the Gods’ was totally destroyed and the Assyrians went on to push the Medes much further east thereby removing any chance of a recovery by them.
Under Antares reforms, the Assyrians re-conquered all the lost territories in the Levant region and he came to be regarded as the savior of the Akkadian race. Antares was given the honorific title Shūtur-Eli-Sharrī ("Surpassing All Other Kings")!
Over the next two decades, Antares re-conquered all the Middle East and Anatolia and drove any fledgling Athenian colonies in the Aegean much further west principally into Magna Grecia (i.e. the Mezzogiorgno region of Italy), the Provence region of France and the Valencia region of Spain but also into Britain and Ireland where they established the colonies of Albion in the South East of England (alternatively known as the Trojan League) and helped unify the Irish tribes into the Tuatha De Danann.
Over the next one thousand years Antares successors cemented their superiority in the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East with a new capital, URUK, built on the ruins of ancient Babylon, 54 miles to the South West of modern Baghdad.
In this alternative timeline there was to be: -
· No Athenian golden age
· No Peloponnesian wars
· No Alexander the Great
· No Rome
· No Rise of Christianity or Islam
Following climatic change, brought about through heightened seismic activity, the Assyrian Empire was forced to migrate westward as desertification of the Assyrian homeland, the Nile Valley and Arabia took hold!
Over the next thousand years the second Great Neo-Assyrian Empire, along with its new Etruscan allies and the Sarmatians, grew to include Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro, Southern Serbia, Albania, Macedonia, Greece, Cyprus, Bulgaria, the Wallachia region of Romania, Turkiye, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Syria, Iraq, the Lebanon, Israel, The Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, The United Arab Emirates, the Yemen, Oman, Iran, Egypt, Cyrenaica and the Sudan.
They also established client states in OTL Slovakia, Hungary, Vojvodina, Moldova, the Odessa region of the Ukraine and the Crimea, with the Lazyges, (LAZ-EE-JESS, singular – Lazyx LAZ-ICK) a Sarmatian people forming the state of JAXAMATIA (in the Danuban valley) and another off-shoot of the Sarmatians forming a state of their own in the North Caucus range; ROXOLANIA.
The third age of the Neo-Assyrian empire began in the year we call 388 AD, when the Etruscans of Italy were assimilated into the Third Great Assyrian Empire and a new, regional, capital was established in Ruma (OTL Rome).
The Rasna A.K.A. Etruscans of OTL Italy formed the Tyrrhenian League which covered all modern Italy apart from Piedmont, Liguria, Lombardy, Venetia and Emilia-Romagna. They also covered Corsica, Sardinia, Tunisia and the Tripoli region of Libya! They became a vassalage of the Neo-Assyrians and dominated trade throughout the Western Mediterranean. They were only hampered from expanding into North Africa by the arrival of The Injaja (OTL Morocco and Algeria), an Afroasiatic people from the Atlas Mountains.
Of equal strength and power were the descendants of the Messalina Greeks that had settled in the Provence region of modern France (OTL Marseille) and expanded across Gaul to form a Graeco-Celtic fusion empire. It covered all of France, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, North Rhine-Westphalia, The Rhineland, The Saar, the western half of Switzerland, the Italian regions of Piedmont and Liguria and the Spanish provinces of Navarra, Aragon and Catalunya. They called their empire Imperium Massalia-Galatia ‘IMG’ although the term Hellenic Gaul or even Graeco-Gallia was more often used!
Refugee Phoenicians, allied to the Greeks, relocated further south into Iberia and took control of the rest of Spain (plus Portugal) to form The Tartessian League and they were joined by exiled Spartans from the Peloponnese to form the Union of Tartessus and Sparta-Ispanica. Their combined forces were able to stop the Assyrian, Etruscan and Sarmatian Alliance gaining access to the Atlantic!
North of the Etruscans in OTL Italy lay the Venetic Union covering Lombardy, Venetia and Slovenia and north of that was Rhaetia covering Austria and the Eastern half of Switzerland. Once again, these two peoples formed an alliance to halt Etruscan, Assyrian and Sarmatian advances.
Moving even further north; Alemannia covered Baden-Württemberg, Bavaria and Hessen while Niedersachsen, Brandenburg, Thuringia, Saxony and Saxony-Anhalt plus the Czech Republic and Upper Silesia formed The Harmandir Imperium, dominated by the Germanic Saxons and Slavic Boiohaemun.
Elsewhere Schleswig-Holstein and Mecklenburg-Pomerania plus Denmark and the Scania region of Sweden formed Jutenmark while the rest of Sweden plus Finland, Karelia and the Kola peninsula formed Bjarmaland. Norway, Iceland, the Faeroes, the Shetlands and Scotland north of the Great Glen, came under the control of the Rujani of Holmrygir, a thalassocracy of powerful seafaring explorers, merchants and mercenary warriors
The Pomeranians of OTL Poland (except Upper Silesia) formed Bamborska (alt. Lusatia) while Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and the Pskov region of Russia united to form Krivichea. Belarus and the Ukraine (minus the Odessa region and the Crimea) formed the Dregovich Union whilst the rest of Russia (west of the Volga) came together as Sarskoye.
East of the Volga River (known in this ATL as the River Ra) lay the steppes of Scythia which in the 14th century fell to the Kök Türük (The Celestial or Blue Turks) who invaded Europe under the leadership of a most fearsome Turkic warlord; Bumin Qaghan who established the fearsome Qaghanate that threatened to engulf all of Europe!
In this ATL, the British islands developed very differently from our own timeline! Phoenicians landed in the South West of England and united with the indigenous Cornovii to form Belerion , while Greeks did the same to the South East, London, East Anglia and the East Midlands to form the Neo-Trojan Empire of Albion. The various Celtic peoples of OTL Wales came together as The Land of the Red Dragon (Greek: Gi tou Kókkinou Drákou, Welsh: Tir y Ddraig Goch) although the colloquial term Draconia was more popularly used.
The West Midlands plus the North West came together as the Apollonian League while Yorkshire, the North East and Scotland united under the banner of The Brythonic Union although the Scottish Highlands to the north and west of Loch Ness, where never really under their control! The whole of Ireland, however did unify as Tuatha De Danann
With the Median-Persian army being pushed back much further east into Asia, it was feared the Indo-Gangetic civilisations of the Indian subcontinent would be swamped by the joint Iranian armies of Cyaxares (Pron. Sigh-Axe-Aries), but it was not to be!
Hindu and Buddhist kingdoms from Ganges valley rallied and defeated Cyaxares and his successors (the Parsa-u-Madai) pushing them all the way back to modern Pakistan (and the Kashmir) after which a truce was declared and India (as we know it) came to be dominated by just two great states.
The first and foremost was THE GUPTA EMPIRE that spanned Himachal Pradesh, The Punjab, Uttaranchal, Haryana, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Orrisa and West Bengal. The second great Empire of India was VAKATAKA which covered modern Maharashtra!
South of the Krishna river (i.e. Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Kerala and Tamil Nadu) was a mish-mash of minor Hindu states while Gujarat in the west was able to retain its own, very individual character, and even came to dominate trade in the Indian Ocean, but they were never strong enough to escape the machinations of the Guptas or Vakataka’s and they were always at their mercy.
South East Asia (Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam) came to be dominated by NOKOR-PHNOM which covered Southern Thailand, Cambodia and South Vietnam. It was a confederation of Austronesian peoples speaking the Mon-Khmer language and its capital Vyadhapura, (near modern day Prey Vang in Cambodia) became the cultural centre of trade, arts and commerce in the region.
The only other empire of note in Asia just so happened to be the most powerful – THE HAN-CHAO (Empire) of China. It covered all modern China except for Xinjiang, Qinghai and Xizang (Tibet).
Han-Chao was isolated and cut off from the rest of the world so was unaffected by the rise of the Neo-Assyrians in the Middle East but as the Assyria, Etruscan and Sarmatian civilisation developed, trade duly flourished as the demand for silk, exotic spices and jewellery were much in demand and eventually, through the famous Silk Road (Sīchóu Zhī Lù) the Han people opened to trade with the rest of the world and relations were generally cordial.
The only other power of note in Asia was BOD-CHEN-PO or the Greater Tibetan Empire covering modern Xizang province of OTL China which emerged when that country went through its golden age in the 4th and 5th centuries AD
Africa was not dissimilar! The Injaja had stopped the Neo-Assyrians occupying the Maghreb and Axxum had done the same in the horn of Africa but apart from The Sao Confederation (around Lake Chad) virtually no other civilisation rose to dominate the Dark Continent although Djenné-Djenno (in modern Mali) did come to be the cultural heartland of Western African trade with its myriad of states running from Senegal to the Cameroons. However, it was never a single polity and the various peoples within only ever had tenuous links with one another.
South of the Congo no people or nation ever achieved anything resembling a European or Asiatic state and, at best, could only be described as no more than a tribal unit even though some of them lasted for several hundred years!
In this ATL, HESPERIA (OTL the Americas
The Neo-Assyrian Empire (In Akkadian - Māt Aššur) was an iron age Mesopotamian empire, in existence between 911 and 609 BC, which went on to become the largest empire of the world at that time.
Alongside Akkadian, Aramaic (Syrian) became the official language of the empire and they perfected techniques of imperial rule, many of which became standard in later empires. It was, according to many historians, the first real empire in history! The Assyrians were also the first empire to arm its soldiers with iron weapons and they used tactics that made them unbeatable.
Under King Adal-Nihari, Assyria overcame all their Near East, Eastern Mediterranean, Anatolian and Caucasian rivals by defeating Babylon, Elam, Persia, Urartu, Lydia, The Medes (of Iran), Phrygians, Cimmerians, Israel, Judea, Phoenicia, the Chaldeans, Canaan and the Kushite Empire of modern day Somalia and Ethiopia.
Following the death of Ashurbanipal in 627 BC, the empire began to disintegrate due to a brutal, unremitting, series of civil wars and the Assyrian Empire entered a period of instability caused by the revolt of Shin-Shar-Ishkun against his brother Ashur-Etil-Ilani. This was the moment when the Babylonian ruler Nabopolassar decided to lead a revolt against Assyrian rule.
The Babylonians successfully expelled the Assyrian forces from their territory and then joined forces with Cyaxares, King of the Medes, to final overcome their Mesopotamian foes. Nabopolasser and Cyaxares then made an alliance with the Scythians and Cimmerians to destroy Assyria once and for all and they were joined by the Chaldeans!
Cyaxares swiftly conquered Tarbisu and decisively defeated the Assyrian army at the Battle of Ashur. He then joined up with the Babylonian army and led a combined offensive on Nineveh in 612 BC.
At the battle of Nineveh, the Assyrian King Sin-Shar-Ishkun was killed and his son Ashur-Uballit replaced him. He relocated to Harran with his remaining troops but the Medes and the Babylonians besieged the fortress in 610 BC and took it the following year, forcing him to flee once again with the remnants of his army.
During the same year, Egyptian and Assyrian forces left the Egyptian city of Carchemish and attacked the Medes and the Babylonians, now garrisoned in Harran, but the offensive failed and it ended any hope of an Assyrian revival.
The Assyrian army, and remnants of its administration, continued to hold out around Carchemish until the end of the sixth century BCE but after that it disappeared forever
BUT WHAT IF ……………………………………………. THE NEO-ASSYRIAN EMPIRE HAD NEVER COLLAPSED?
In an alternative timeline (ATL) the Second Great Age of the Neo-Assyrians began with the accession to power of Antares, a renegade Caphtorite General (i.e. Minoan from Crete) who was in service to the Assyrians and took charge of the army when Assur-Uballit fled Nineveh in 610 BCE.
Antares (‘Rival to Mars’) rallied the troops and stormed the Median-Babylonian camp of Cyaxares inflicting critical damage on them. Antares then took control of the joint Assyrian-Egyptian army coming up from Carchemish, finished off Cyaxares’s coalition and re-took Nineveh (now in a ruined state) before the years end. He then vowed to destroy Babylon once and for all.
By the end of the following year, Babylon, ‘the Gateway to the Gods’ was totally destroyed and the Assyrians went on to push the Medes much further east thereby removing any chance of a recovery by them.
Under Antares reforms, the Assyrians re-conquered all the lost territories in the Levant region and he came to be regarded as the savior of the Akkadian race. Antares was given the honorific title Shūtur-Eli-Sharrī ("Surpassing All Other Kings")!
Over the next two decades, Antares re-conquered all the Middle East and Anatolia and drove any fledgling Athenian colonies in the Aegean much further west principally into Magna Grecia (i.e. the Mezzogiorgno region of Italy), the Provence region of France and the Valencia region of Spain but also into Britain and Ireland where they established the colonies of Albion in the South East of England (alternatively known as the Trojan League) and helped unify the Irish tribes into the Tuatha De Danann.
Over the next one thousand years Antares successors cemented their superiority in the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East with a new capital, URUK, built on the ruins of ancient Babylon, 54 miles to the South West of modern Baghdad.
In this alternative timeline there was to be: -
· No Athenian golden age
· No Peloponnesian wars
· No Alexander the Great
· No Rome
· No Rise of Christianity or Islam
Following climatic change, brought about through heightened seismic activity, the Assyrian Empire was forced to migrate westward as desertification of the Assyrian homeland, the Nile Valley and Arabia took hold!
Over the next thousand years the second Great Neo-Assyrian Empire, along with its new Etruscan allies and the Sarmatians, grew to include Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro, Southern Serbia, Albania, Macedonia, Greece, Cyprus, Bulgaria, the Wallachia region of Romania, Turkiye, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Syria, Iraq, the Lebanon, Israel, The Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, The United Arab Emirates, the Yemen, Oman, Iran, Egypt, Cyrenaica and the Sudan.
They also established client states in OTL Slovakia, Hungary, Vojvodina, Moldova, the Odessa region of the Ukraine and the Crimea, with the Lazyges, (LAZ-EE-JESS, singular – Lazyx LAZ-ICK) a Sarmatian people forming the state of JAXAMATIA (in the Danuban valley) and another off-shoot of the Sarmatians forming a state of their own in the North Caucus range; ROXOLANIA.
The third age of the Neo-Assyrian empire began in the year we call 388 AD, when the Etruscans of Italy were assimilated into the Third Great Assyrian Empire and a new, regional, capital was established in Ruma (OTL Rome).
The Rasna A.K.A. Etruscans of OTL Italy formed the Tyrrhenian League which covered all modern Italy apart from Piedmont, Liguria, Lombardy, Venetia and Emilia-Romagna. They also covered Corsica, Sardinia, Tunisia and the Tripoli region of Libya! They became a vassalage of the Neo-Assyrians and dominated trade throughout the Western Mediterranean. They were only hampered from expanding into North Africa by the arrival of The Injaja (OTL Morocco and Algeria), an Afroasiatic people from the Atlas Mountains.
Of equal strength and power were the descendants of the Messalina Greeks that had settled in the Provence region of modern France (OTL Marseille) and expanded across Gaul to form a Graeco-Celtic fusion empire. It covered all of France, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, North Rhine-Westphalia, The Rhineland, The Saar, the western half of Switzerland, the Italian regions of Piedmont and Liguria and the Spanish provinces of Navarra, Aragon and Catalunya. They called their empire Imperium Massalia-Galatia ‘IMG’ although the term Hellenic Gaul or even Graeco-Gallia was more often used!
Refugee Phoenicians, allied to the Greeks, relocated further south into Iberia and took control of the rest of Spain (plus Portugal) to form The Tartessian League and they were joined by exiled Spartans from the Peloponnese to form the Union of Tartessus and Sparta-Ispanica. Their combined forces were able to stop the Assyrian, Etruscan and Sarmatian Alliance gaining access to the Atlantic!
North of the Etruscans in OTL Italy lay the Venetic Union covering Lombardy, Venetia and Slovenia and north of that was Rhaetia covering Austria and the Eastern half of Switzerland. Once again, these two peoples formed an alliance to halt Etruscan, Assyrian and Sarmatian advances.
Moving even further north; Alemannia covered Baden-Württemberg, Bavaria and Hessen while Niedersachsen, Brandenburg, Thuringia, Saxony and Saxony-Anhalt plus the Czech Republic and Upper Silesia formed The Harmandir Imperium, dominated by the Germanic Saxons and Slavic Boiohaemun.
Elsewhere Schleswig-Holstein and Mecklenburg-Pomerania plus Denmark and the Scania region of Sweden formed Jutenmark while the rest of Sweden plus Finland, Karelia and the Kola peninsula formed Bjarmaland. Norway, Iceland, the Faeroes, the Shetlands and Scotland north of the Great Glen, came under the control of the Rujani of Holmrygir, a thalassocracy of powerful seafaring explorers, merchants and mercenary warriors
The Pomeranians of OTL Poland (except Upper Silesia) formed Bamborska (alt. Lusatia) while Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and the Pskov region of Russia united to form Krivichea. Belarus and the Ukraine (minus the Odessa region and the Crimea) formed the Dregovich Union whilst the rest of Russia (west of the Volga) came together as Sarskoye.
East of the Volga River (known in this ATL as the River Ra) lay the steppes of Scythia which in the 14th century fell to the Kök Türük (The Celestial or Blue Turks) who invaded Europe under the leadership of a most fearsome Turkic warlord; Bumin Qaghan who established the fearsome Qaghanate that threatened to engulf all of Europe!
In this ATL, the British islands developed very differently from our own timeline! Phoenicians landed in the South West of England and united with the indigenous Cornovii to form Belerion , while Greeks did the same to the South East, London, East Anglia and the East Midlands to form the Neo-Trojan Empire of Albion. The various Celtic peoples of OTL Wales came together as The Land of the Red Dragon (Greek: Gi tou Kókkinou Drákou, Welsh: Tir y Ddraig Goch) although the colloquial term Draconia was more popularly used.
The West Midlands plus the North West came together as the Apollonian League while Yorkshire, the North East and Scotland united under the banner of The Brythonic Union although the Scottish Highlands to the north and west of Loch Ness, where never really under their control! The whole of Ireland, however did unify as Tuatha De Danann
With the Median-Persian army being pushed back much further east into Asia, it was feared the Indo-Gangetic civilisations of the Indian subcontinent would be swamped by the joint Iranian armies of Cyaxares (Pron. Sigh-Axe-Aries), but it was not to be!
Hindu and Buddhist kingdoms from Ganges valley rallied and defeated Cyaxares and his successors (the Parsa-u-Madai) pushing them all the way back to modern Pakistan (and the Kashmir) after which a truce was declared and India (as we know it) came to be dominated by just two great states.
The first and foremost was THE GUPTA EMPIRE that spanned Himachal Pradesh, The Punjab, Uttaranchal, Haryana, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Orrisa and West Bengal. The second great Empire of India was VAKATAKA which covered modern Maharashtra!
South of the Krishna river (i.e. Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Kerala and Tamil Nadu) was a mish-mash of minor Hindu states while Gujarat in the west was able to retain its own, very individual character, and even came to dominate trade in the Indian Ocean, but they were never strong enough to escape the machinations of the Guptas or Vakataka’s and they were always at their mercy.
South East Asia (Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam) came to be dominated by NOKOR-PHNOM which covered Southern Thailand, Cambodia and South Vietnam. It was a confederation of Austronesian peoples speaking the Mon-Khmer language and its capital Vyadhapura, (near modern day Prey Vang in Cambodia) became the cultural centre of trade, arts and commerce in the region.
The only other empire of note in Asia just so happened to be the most powerful – THE HAN-CHAO (Empire) of China. It covered all modern China except for Xinjiang, Qinghai and Xizang (Tibet).
Han-Chao was isolated and cut off from the rest of the world so was unaffected by the rise of the Neo-Assyrians in the Middle East but as the Assyria, Etruscan and Sarmatian civilisation developed, trade duly flourished as the demand for silk, exotic spices and jewellery were much in demand and eventually, through the famous Silk Road (Sīchóu Zhī Lù) the Han people opened to trade with the rest of the world and relations were generally cordial.
The only other power of note in Asia was BOD-CHEN-PO or the Greater Tibetan Empire covering modern Xizang province of OTL China which emerged when that country went through its golden age in the 4th and 5th centuries AD
Africa was not dissimilar! The Injaja had stopped the Neo-Assyrians occupying the Maghreb and Axxum had done the same in the horn of Africa but apart from The Sao Confederation (around Lake Chad) virtually no other civilisation rose to dominate the Dark Continent although Djenné-Djenno (in modern Mali) did come to be the cultural heartland of Western African trade with its myriad of states running from Senegal to the Cameroons. However, it was never a single polity and the various peoples within only ever had tenuous links with one another.
South of the Congo no people or nation ever achieved anything resembling a European or Asiatic state and, at best, could only be described as no more than a tribal unit even though some of them lasted for several hundred years!
In this ATL, HESPERIA (OTL the Americas
