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QuantumBranching β Buddhist World
#alternate #history #map #buddhism
Published: 2019-01-09 03:39:06 +0000 UTC; Views: 14707; Favourites: 106; Downloads: 125
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Description
A map commission for Giddy Automaton ( www.deviantart.com/giddyautoma⦠) for their scenario of a Buddhism-dominated world. Alexander lives longer, his empire lasts for quite some time and provides a conduit to the west for Buddhism, Rome is strangled in its cradle. By the current day, pretty much all of Eurasia and much of Africa is Buddhist/Hindu, and a growing share of the Americas. The colonization of the Americas was a much slower and more gradual process than in our world, mostly carried out by the politically fragmented Celtic nations and west Africa, and left much of the Americas with enough breathing time for native states to adopt.Technology is getting to a mid-twentieth century level or even a bit further in some fields, although some our-timeline technology has not been duplicated (such as, in a fairly peaceful world, the atomic bomb). Some native American states, the Incas and Aztecs in particular, feeling under economic and cultural pressure from the Buddhist world, have been considering an alliance with the west African monotheists...
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Comments: 17
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I see the Basques seem to have managed just fine. Wonder where alt-me would live? Northern French ancestry, so likely a mix of Celtic and Germanic.
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Did Jews survive as a distinct people, or have they been assimilated by the Aegyptians?
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Personal best guess is that they're pretty different from OTL culturally/religiously, given the different influences in the last 2000+ years, if they still exist. They're a also likely less numerous than OTL, given that 1- there wasn't a Roman Empire to help the diaspora spread (although it's quite possible more of them went towards points East), and 2- there probably were less persecutions, leading to more population mixing/assimilation.
Of course, I could be wrong.
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"19. When asked why they colonized this desolate bit of land, the men of Pretain just said it felt right, somehow"
Downright cheeky
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Cool, it's great to see other Alexander The Great lives Timelines.
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>surviving aztecs and incas when *OTL* was well to the the favorable side of things for amerindian survival.
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Do the same "schools" of Buddhism exist in this TL (Mahayana, Theravada,Β Vajrayana)? If so, how are they distributed?
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It's pretty different: the input from European and middle eastern Buddhists alone would have massive butterflies.
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We need more colonial West Africas in AH.
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Is there more info on the Germanic nations? I am curious as to what their whole scary nihilism thing is all about.
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Well, this was to some extent a bit of a decorative detail rather than something well thought out, and the scaryness is somewhat in the eye of the Buddhist beholder. Β I'm just thinking that with modernization the systematized polytheism of this planet's north Germanic world is going to have a bit of a crisis, it's sun-eating wolves and men descended from ash trees being even less well adapted to a modern scientific world than the Christian creation (Hindu polytheist myth at least has the advantage of immeasurable scale). The European crisis of faith gave birth to some unfortunate reactions: with traditional Nordic Paganism being already on the grim and fatalistic side, I can see things going in some fairly unpleasant directions, [1] although there's no reason for a nihilist to not pursue, say, personal self-improvement rather than the destruction of their enemies (there's no reason for anything except your own personal choices, after all)
[1] We're starting from a place where it's OK to murder someone as long as you're open and public about wanting to murder them, you pay adequate compensation to the family of the deceased, and you don't make a habit of it.Β
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