hmm. the PoD is probabaly the nonexistance of islam which i think ges back to 2000 BC at ismael.
alright aill be serious. the PoD could be anywhere from 476 AD to 632 AD
no Byzantine Empire
The PoD is in 190 BC. Antiochos the Great decided "nah, I'll keep fighting the Romans" after the Battle of Magnesia, and brought up a fresh army. Combined with the Galatians and the relative inexperience of the Roman consul in charge of the Asian army for 189, the Seleukids prevailed. At the time, Rome was actually employing more soldiers than it had even at the height of the war with Hannibal, and was badly overstretched, fighting in northern Italy, Provence, all throughout Spain, Greece, and finally Asia. They were running disastrously low on men, and Antiochos took advantage of that by moving back into Greece and pushing out the Romans with the help of the Aitolians. To make a long story short, Rome was forced after several years of defeats to retreat from Greece and allow Antiochos to redraw the map there. The Republic was wracked with internal political conflicts during the rest of the second century BC, which seriously weakened it; by 100 BC or so it had actually lost control of many of its old 'allies' in Italy, and was given the death-blow by a Seleukid expeditionary force in 71 BC.
Then we have what, fragmented Diadochoi madness? Looks like the Syrian Seleucids held it together, as did the Thracian Kingdom, Ptoelmaics, and Macedon. It looks like the Germanic migrations still happened, we have Lombogardi, Alemanni, Frankish, and...Visigoth? No clue what that Mesopotamian kingdom is. Sassanid Empire is the big Green, obviously. Tadjik, Pashtun, Uzbek, and...Saka, in Central Asia? Khazar is still around, I guess, too. That Purple is probably Kazaks, around the Crimea and Sea of Azov.
Hard to tell where departure is, really.
Seleukids did hold it together and were hegemonic for a short time from Central Asia to Italy in the first century BC before they started breaking up in civil wars. Dude named 'Perseus' founded an empire in the Syrian part of the old Seleukid state that held onto the eastern Med for most of the intervening period via a sexy thalassocracy, though it's declining as of 600 after some ups and downs. Those aren't Thracians, really, they're Greeks, and it's a Bosporan-like "kingdom" ruling over what's essentially a city-state federation - a new development, since the Makedonians (dynasty claiming descent from the Argeads, broke off from the Perseid empire in about 350) were unable to defend them from the Roxsalannoi onslaught. They aren't Ptolies in Egypt either, but another breakaway from the Perseids, the Chrysanthid empire. Germanic migrations went much wackier; the full response is in the post answering gangleri, but the Chatti are in Spain, the Aorsi (after some really confusing Central Asian developments in the mid-second century BC) are in northern Italy, the Siling Vandals rule over that Belgic thingy, and the Bastarnae took over the Gauls. That Mesopotamian thing claims to be the Seleukid Empire, though the ruling dynasty bears no actual relation to Seleukos I; it's very loosely comparable to the Abbasid caliphate in the 12th and 13th centuries, with even some attendant religious influence among the very few who still practice the cult of Seleukos Theos. The green is actually not Sasanian; that is the state of Areia, with a rather interesting syncretic Helleno-Iranian culture that's been enjoying a renaissance of sorts over the last century. In Central Asia, we have the yellow Mazsakata/Massagetai, the purple Hunnic-Hellenic Sogdiane, the red Tantan Qaganate (also called Rouran; it should be emphasized that they are not Avars, who make up part of the Antes' confederacy), the gray Baktria, and the darker gray Antes, which you called Khazars. The purple is the venerable kingdom of the Kimmerian Bosporos.
The main clues as to what the PoD was were the Seleukid remnants in the Med, the lack of any real Roman culture or influence, and, well, repeated guesswork. Kraz bombarded me with questions before he figured it out.
oh. maybe the huns actually brought down Rome and it promptly collapsed allowing smaller states to take over?
Huns are in Sogdiane, and Rome never really was there at all.
All imma' going to say is Southeast Asia is boring.
Intentionally.
Masada said:
Whar's all the former Malay polities of Nakhor Phnom Funan that should be straddling the Kra from east-to-west, the couple of non-tributary but still friendly states that should be further down the Peninsula and also the weird and wonderful stuff that's going on in the upper reaches of what-is-nao-Burma? (Granted, we know next to nothing about any of them: suffice to say that the first were tributaries of Funan, the second existed but other than archeology and a few scant references there's not much to go on and the last lot are lovin' weird considering we know next to nothing about them!)
They don't get their own color until they start doing interesting stuff. Kinda like the people who are in Assam right now. The post-Funan vacuum in Indochina is much like the vacuum that exists right now along much of the Danube (save, of course, the unstable Roxsalannoi state) - ripe for the emergence of something that could kind of be called 'states'.
Masada said:
Then thar's Java, which should by this time have sizable proto-Kingdoms and perhaps Kingdoms if they're linked into the Chinese system of trade. I don't think its to early to find interesting stuff in the north and in the center. Ma' boy the name is escaping me atm, its to early to be thinking of German names Kulke notes that central Java by around this time had already embarked on some epic tomb building and irrigation schemes comparable to the stuff going down on the mainland. The north if it is part of the trade network with China will undoubtedly be a Kingdom, probably a series of principalities united under the aegis of a particularly successful datu, but a 'Kingdom' by Chinese standards none-the-less! The south is likely to be built up as an agricultural hub, probably concentrated more in the center of the island than the south, really, but with feelers potentially already angling for a port.
Then thar's the stuff going on in Borneo, which seems to have been amongst the first of the regions states to evolve. Srivijaya at its height had trouble beating down Borneo and doesn't seem to have ever really managed it. It was originally the port of call for the Chinese merchants, before it was eventually superseded by ports further inside the archipelago, principally Javanese before trade finally found its champion in Palembang. It was still recognizably wealthy despite its slide in relative priority for merchants even a few hundred years later - with some apparently very impressive temples.
As I recall, I asked you about Indonesian stuff on IRC and was met with the response that we don't really know that much about the stuff, and ended up electing to not include anything there due to fear of you NESers hanging out by yourselves masturbating while I sit there playing four of the five sides in a major Mediterranean war. I blame Kraz for creating the impression that this sort of thing might happen. Again, though, if the rest of the world starts to get more crowded, maybe.
Masada said:
Also, what effect has a renewed Palla state had on the spread of Hindu-Buddhism on Far India? They seem to have been kinda instrumental in spreading both in the region and seem in OTL to have maintained good relations and frequent contact with Funan and to a less extent the Malay polities on the Peninsula. So it stands to reason that any increase in strength could be equated to an earlier and more concentrated thrust in that direction. Well, insofar as the Data-cum-Kings care to adopt them... a slightly more entrenched Sangha would be kinda awesome.
Buddhism itself has not done well. One of the major tertiary effects of the PoD was the lack of a powerful Indo-Greek movement into northern India (until much, much later); the Sungas did fairly well at wiping out a lot of the influence and converts state-sponsored Buddhism had acquired in the later Mauryan state. So it is largely Hinduism that was exported (though Buddhist remnants have entrenched themselves in some of the Chinese states, Champa and probably other parts of Indonesia, frankly I didn't think about it too intensely). The Pala themselves (not the same Pala as OTL) received their 'protector' epithet in a military, not a religious sense, as they certainly aren't Buddhist.
Masada said:
I promise I won't jerk off in Srivijaya (which it won't be called), I promise. (Planned mischief in Java excluded)
Hmp. We shall see.
