Cyrus the not-so-great

OK, a commission for Occam over at alternatehistory.com.

This is a world where the early Persian empire failed to gel, the Phoenician homeland remained an independent state much longer, and no single vast empire on the scale of the Roman one arose to unify all of the lands bordering the Mediterranean.

Not that there haven’t been empires: Carthage, the child of Sidon and Tyre, at one point would rule from the Pyrenees to the Taurus, while the Greeks at one time or another ruled west to Italy and southern Gaul (directly and indirectly), east to the borders of the Iranian plateau, south to Nubia and north to the Carpathians: Egyptian rule over the Levant flowed back and forth in a centuries-long metronome, and would eventually make Nubia a permanent part of its realm, although the conquest of the Ethiopian highlands would eventually prove a bridge too far.

Other Empires would arise: the short-lived Gallic Empire, wrecked by a series of dominoes starting north of China: the Yue-Chi hordes, and later Steppe incursions: the great medieval Slavic empire, of which the later Syldavian empire would be only an echo: the temporary but brilliant Axumite empire in SE Island Asia and south India. And of course the great Empires of the orient, little known around the Middle Sea save by fabulous echo.

The desert Arabs once managed to unify under a charismatic leader and conquered the entire peninsula south of Greek Anatolia, even briefly taking Egypt, but without the glue of a unifying messianic religion, the whole affair fell apart in a century.

The Mediterranean tide of conquest would not reach as far north in the west OTL sans the Romans, and little further in the Balkans: the northern two-thirds of Gaul and the upper Danube lands would never see Greek or Punic conquerors, and the same for the *British Isles, although Punic and Greek traders would be doing good business north of Gaul from early on. (And during this world’s drawn-out industrial revolution, the Albans (British) would sell a crapload of coal to the more technically advanced but industrial resources-poor Mediterranean states). Northern Europe would still be heavily influenced culturally by the Mediterranean cultures, with the Scandinavian peoples and northern Germans being mostly unaffected the longest. Egypt, further from Europe, would be most influential in Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. 

The Americas would be discovered, and colonies would be established by Celts and Kelts and Germanics and Greeks and Phoenician/Punic peoples from Carthage, Tarteshim, and Ocradem. [1] It would be an earlier-starting, more tentative and shipwreck-prone colonization than OTLs: several native and “mixed” states still exist in the modern world. Greeks would drive Punics out of *Brazil, and Egyptians would end up in Australia, mostly because nobody else wanted the place. 

Democracy, long replaced by kings and emperors in the Greek world, would undergo an intellectual revival, and by modern times the Punic realms would typically be run as semi-democratic, oligarchic societies headed by a Suffette elected from the great and wise, or at least rich. Greece would have its own sort of democracy, a federation of republics looser than OTL’s US but tighter than the EC, with the powerful military being somewhat worrisomely the strongest unifying element. Egypt, on the other hand, stuck to tried and true dictatorship, albeit of a form that would have puzzled the heck out of Ramses the Great. 

The “Punics” of Phoenician cultural descent are the most geographically and politically (being a close alliance of five states rather than a centralized/semi-centralized state) diverse of the “Middle Sea Three” and also the culturally most varied, including in different states Celtiberian, Greek, west African, north African/Numidian/aka Berber, native American and Middle East Potluck elements. The fact that they remain an alliance at all amazes the racially homogenous (or so they like to think) Greeks, who historically have had trouble enough sticking together in _spite_ of their similarities. 

The Olympics were ended a millennium ago by a centralizing Greek dictator who thought they excessively encouraged “regional differences” and “localized identities.” There are occasional discussions of reviving them, within the Greek Ocumeme: nobody else sees the point in participating in a Greek Thing.

Technology is generally on a 1930s level, with a current obsession with fast planes and cars and the Greek version of “Popular Mechanics.” Atomic weapons remain distant, some odd ideas on atomic structure having temporarily sent research off into blind alleys, but some doctor in Kemet (Egypt) recently made a successful head transplant (well, successful aside from the paralysis. But it’s preferable to ass cancer). 

Zoroaster’s followers never made it big, never having had a stage on the scale of the Persian empire to operate on, and Judiasm has dwindled to the scale of Parsis OTL. Monotheism’s only powerful bastion is the south Chinese “Temple State”, while Buddhism and Hinduism have spread wider. A “murdered God who arises to save” religion is predominant in the Egyptian sphere and parts of Africa, but comes with a whole flock of other deities, and vague sorts of spiritualism, theism, pantheism, and what might be described as Chinese-type “formalistic religion” are wide-spread. (The Scandinavian states, which carried out human sacrifice to the One-Eyed Hunter of Men until relatively recently, have become almost aggressively atheistic as part of their general drive to become a modern people rather than those “northern barbarians” most southern people dismiss them as). The generally tolerant religious outlook means that there is an easier exchange of ideas, trade and people between east and west and north and south, and those living around the Middle Sea generally think of there being concentric circles of civilization, with themselves of course at the core, but the sweep of lands from the Atlas Sea [2] to the borders of the Bholgar realm and south to the Sahel and Axum are generally considered at least a semi-civilized world (how far this extends to the east is debated, with India sometimes included but less so lately with the rise of Crusading Hinduism: the place of the Bholgar Khanate is hotly disputed. East Asia is Backward If Artistic Despotisms, and the Hesperides are all sorts of things).

Arguments about the Bholgars have become rather relevant again recently with the conclusion of the bloody Syldavian Conflict, in which the Marcomagnian and Bholgar effort to pick up the pieces of the collapsing Slavic empire led to such an upset in balance-of-power that a sizable coalition of powers was formed to make them cough up their gains. Neither of the losing powers has been occupied outright, but enough of Marcomagne has been occupied to keep them peaceful: giant Bholgaria, not so much, and imposing “civilized rules” on them seems like it’s going to be difficult. (At least the much more multiethnic and puppet-dependent nature of the Bholgar empire has had the beneficial effect of a lot of states breaking away sapping its strength.)
An attempt is being made to create a multinational security apparatus: it’s a Middle-Sea centered thing given the somewhat less global nature of this world’s “colonial expansion” and the general lack of participation in the conflict of most Hesperidian powers (the United Triarchies of the Hesperides has returned to isolationism in a huff post-war [3]). At present there is more rules-lawyering than actual progress, and to the east, new threats may be arising…


[1] A tribute to Tormsen’s fine Ocrit TL. May he one day have the (paid) leisure to return to AH!

[2] The word “Ocean” here is reserved for the whole planetary union of salty waters.

[3] Partly over the carping over their slave-holding habits. In fact a lot of countries have what we would term slavery of sorts – enslavement for crimes, debt-slavery, partial citizenship – but the Hesperidian model of hereditary life slavery with little chance of freedom and pure commodification of people is considered excessively harsh, regressive and just plain gross.

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