WI: Surviving Elamite civilization

Mr. Flay

Gone Fishin'
Basically, try to get the Elamites as a surviving people, in language and somewhat in culture, all the way up to modern times.
 

ATP45

Banned
Basically, try to get the Elamites as a surviving people, in language and somewhat in culture, all the way up to modern times.
1.Make Elam superpower,and you get modern Elam state.2.Make Elam power like Iran - and you get modern islamic state of Elam.3.Convert them to christianity,and you have small minority in Iraq,like assyrians.
 
1.Make Elam superpower,and you get modern Elam state.2.Make Elam power like Iran - and you get modern islamic state of Elam.3.Convert them to christianity,and you have small minority in Iraq,like assyrians.

Honestly, an enduring Elamite Empire that finds a way to avoid messing around with Assyria, would completely butterfly Islam and Christianity... The Jews will not develop anywhere the same way that they did without Cyrus the Great, which cannot occur with a goal to keep Elam a viable state.
 

missouribob

Banned
Basically, try to get the Elamites as a surviving people, in language and somewhat in culture, all the way up to modern times.
I feel like so much of world history would be butterflied it's hard to do this. The best I can do is lean on my go to scenarios.

A. An Elamite Empire arises...somehow...
B. World history is butterflied, an empire in China industrializes.
C. Said industrialization spreads to the Persian Gulf were a Neo-Elamitie Empire is in control. A wise and great leader sees the potential of machines and uses them to expand his nations control.
D. ???
E. Your scenario is met.
 
I feel like so much of world history would be butterflied it's hard to do this. The best I can do is lean on my go to scenarios.

A. An Elamite Empire arises...somehow...
B. World history is butterflied, an empire in China industrializes.
C. Said industrialization spreads to the Persian Gulf were a Neo-Elamitie Empire is in control. A wise and great leader sees the potential of machines and uses them to expand his nations control.
D. ???
E. Your scenario is met.

Well equally ancient cultures have survived to an extent... Iranians for instance survived despite considerable outside pressure.
 

missouribob

Banned
Well equally ancient cultures have survived to an extent... Iranians for instance survived despite considerable outside pressure.
True...I guess but IDK I don't consider pre-Islamic Persians to be the same as modern Iranians. I guess you could be pedantic like that with other cultures but if you really break it down it seems like we are building national mythos more than we are describing historical "cultures" that have survived. I mean even looking at America, compare 2017 and 1776 and they are completely different places. I guess we could get an entity that claimed Elamite status in an ATL but beyond that would be ASB.
 
True...I guess but IDK I don't consider pre-Islamic Persians to be the same as modern Iranians. I guess you could be pedantic like that with other cultures but if you really break it down it seems like we are building national mythos more than we are describing historical "cultures" that have survived. I mean even looking at America, compare 2017 and 1776 and they are completely different places. I guess we could get an entity that claimed Elamite status in an ATL but beyond that would be ASB.

Well cultures change. It is also somewhat ridiculous to act as if a claimed culture is not theirs, especially if they have reasonable claims.
 

Deleted member 97083

The Iranians borrowed a lot of culture and habits from Elam at that time. Cyrus the Great was born in the conquered Elamite city of Anshan.

The Assyrians devastated Elam allowing it to be partitioned by Babylon and the Medians, but what really killed Elamite language was that it was very easy for Elamites to assimilate into the similar Persian culture during the ascendancy of the Achaemenids. Like Etruscans becoming Roman. So they did and Elamite faded away.

If instead of the Persians, it was the Babylonians, or ironically even the Assyrians, who ruled the whole of Elam, assimilation would have failed and Elamite language could persist.
 
3.Convert them to christianity,and you have small minority in Iraq,like assyrians.

This is doable but hard. The Elamites couldn't have been large numbered by AD times, and the later you get the fewer there are. Not to mention the churches in those parts would've been yet another way they'd be increasingly assimilated into the Aramaic-speaking population.

Maybe a heretical branch or a schism of Christianity? Or they convert very early on (early 2nd century at latest) and eventually have their own small church?

Come the modern age there would be a few hundred to at most a few thousand Elamite-speakers left, with a few thousand more who are culturally Elamite but speak Aramaic, Persian, Arabic, or whatever.
 

missouribob

Banned
Well cultures change. It is also somewhat ridiculous to act as if a claimed culture is not theirs, especially if they have reasonable claims.
At what point is a culture not yours though? To revert to my previous statement America in 2017 is such a different place than America in 1776 or 1800 that I feel like if I was a truly neutral observer I'd be able to say, "Yes those 2017 AD people in North America follow the same culture as 1776 Americans."

At what point does a culture become its own culture and split from its ancestor culture?
 
1.Make Elam superpower,and you get modern Elam state.2.Make Elam power like Iran - and you get modern islamic state of Elam.3.Convert them to christianity,and you have small minority in Iraq,like assyrians.

Any surviving Elamite kingdom would butterfly Christianity and Islam away. History would be totally different.
 
I think he's banking on any OTL surviving Elamites converting to Christianity. Which is pretty unlikely but maybe we could have Elyamais survive as a entity, although I dunno if that really counts for the OP.
 
I think he's banking on any OTL surviving Elamites converting to Christianity. Which is pretty unlikely but maybe we could have Elyamais survive as a entity, although I dunno if that really counts for the OP.

Even if Christianity or some another similar religion is exist, why Elamites would convert to that voluntarely? And there is anyway too much butterflies that we could even speculate about Christianity.
 
I should clarify-as in hypothetical OTL survivors(say, if it turned out that Elamites did in fact remain a distinct group longer than thought).
 
Even if Christianity or some another similar religion is exist, why Elamites would convert to that voluntarely? And there is anyway too much butterflies that we could even speculate about Christianity.

Same reason any other group would convert to Christianity?

I should clarify-as in hypothetical OTL survivors(say, if it turned out that Elamites did in fact remain a distinct group longer than thought).

They are mentioned in the Bible in Acts 2:9 as a group distinct from Medes and Mesopotamians, so seems as though they clearly existed as a group of enough importance at the time (1st century AD) to warrant being mentioned in particular.

Further, Arab sources allude to their distinctness centuries later, and that's the last we hear of them.

By the time of Islam it's much too late, though, maybe the 3rd century or so you could still have a distant chance at keeping Elamite ethnicity and language alive, although heavily changed through the introduction of Christianity.
 
Honestly, I think you need the Elamites to become aggressive and assertive long before the rise of the Medes. An Elam with S.Mesopotamia under its control is a start - it may even be key to survival as they could settle the Mesopotamian delta(s).

I'm not sure how that would happen, but at the least the Elamites would dominate the trade routes at sea - and then can use that wealth to bring the Persians/Medes, etc to heel. Either that, or form a strong 'Elam' in the lowlands vs the 'Medes' in the highlands. That would probably require the conquest of all of Mesopotamia though.
 
My long-term-favourite prehistorical PoD might cause this... have the horses on the Eurasian steppe go overhunted and extinct instead of domesticated in the 5th/4th millennium BCE.
Proto-Elamite city states arose around the same time as Sumerian ones, so arguably before the domestication of horses could have affected Mesopotamia and Elam. And they were agriculture-based city states. Such polities would massively profit from the absence of nomads (or at least militarily strong nomads) from the mountains and across the mountains.

For later PoDs, I would put my money with more power and wealth with Elam`s traditional trading partners in the East, i.e. in the Indus Valley. In the late Neo-Assyrian Empire, there`s a reason why Aramaic came to replace Akkadian as the dominant language: the North-Western part of the Empire was a bridge to the socio-economically and politically increasingly important Mediterranean. Elam, on the other hand, increasingly became a backwater because it traditionally served as the bridge between Mesopotamia and the East, what we now perceive of as India. WIth "India"´s development taking place mostly elsewhere and the Indus Valley being a backwater itself over the last centuries of the 2nd millennium BCE and the early 1st millennium BCE, Elam was more or less on the fringe of the developing world, instead of in its centre. With a blossoming Indus Valley, Elamite may well have played the role which Aramaic IOTL played in the Neo-Assyrian Empire (if that empire ever would have come into being and crushed Elam in the first place).

That, in turn, would have greatly increased the chance of Elamite becoming the imperial language of a space-filling empire (the alt-Akhaimenids), just like Aramaic did IOTL. We still have Aramaic fringe groups IOTL today as a result. So maybe in this second scenario, even if nomads from the North (and later the South, i.e. Arabia, and then again from the North) build their various empires in the region, with Elamite being an important language in such a large area, there would still be speakers of Elamite around today, especially if they`re being identified with a religious minority group much later on (like Aramaic IOTL was with Christianity - of course the religious makeup of this world would be utterly different and unrecognisable).
 
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