Gave this a shot. It turned out much better than I had expected. Hopefully it is accepted!
Did lots of mistakes, starting with choosing lakes map with tropical climate. It might have provided decent room to expand and slowed down the AI to make grabbing wonders easier, but it also meant that it took forever to get foreign trade routes or religion spread. I had founded two religions myself before any of the early three spread to my lands. And despite the AI being slow, I missed the oracle. Mansa grabbed it around 1300BC, much earlier than I had hoped for.
Settled on PH marble, second city settled on stone. Then I got super early stonehenge (2360BC I think), because I figured most of my cities would need early border pops and getting the henge that early would allow it to generate a fair amount of culture. After this it was basically major failgold abuse until the end. After I got the first batch of failgold from TGW, I think my slider never dropped below 100% until I libbed nationalism in 660AD. Then I stopped teching, because I had only about 5 cottages and didn't find Printing Press worth teching.
Peter and Brennus were the bad guys on the map, Peter was close to the east and Brennus my neighbor in the south behind the jungle. Took out Peter with HAs. At first I wasn't sure if that was worth it because he settled his second city in the middle of the jungle and I only kept his capital. But Moscow came with a huge amount of forests and allowed me to easily chop Parth, MoM, SoZ and Sistine, combined with NE and later Hermitage for a nice clean GA pool. With Peter out I had also secured my 9 city spots.
Eventually I became Brennus worst enemy. He was hugely backwards, but I still didn't want a war. So I bribed Gandhi, the AP resident, on him one turn before a vote and the next turn the vote came to declare war on the infidels. With the whole world against him I felt quite safe that he wouldn't send his backwards army in my direction.
Got 12 GA and bombed 1-3-8, I think. In addition there was the early Prophet from stonehenge for GA, a scientist to bulb philo and 3 low odds extra guys towards the end (2xGP + 1xGE), settled one prophet and took another GA with the other two guys. Had 4 religions and cathedrals in each of the LCs. Was tight in the end, all three cities became legendary within 2 turns. Rome ended the game with 50010 culture...
Until the last turn I thought the game would end up in a tie with neilmeister, that was when I didn't remember that turn length goes down to 5 years after 1500AD. I was very happy to see the year 1505 show up when I pressed enter for the second last time! Final date 1510AD.