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Roman World
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 26 May 2024
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I'm not so sure this is accurate, the Romans certainly knew of China at least, to them it was called Serica, and they believed in a Manifest Destiny myth that they would one day conquer it.
Which would have been fukkin' wild if it did play out, I think by that point the capital would have moved to Samarkand or somewhere else in Central Asia just to be able to maintain regulation over the silk road.
And Tacitus described a people he called Fenni in northeastern Europe, and it's been conjectured that he could have meant one of the Finnic peoples around the continental side of the Baltic.
~~There was one legion that got lost in Persia and ended up working for the Chinese.~~
Edit: Maybe, maybe not.
Crassus' lost legion is just conjecture, there's no convincing evidence. It's a fun thought, though.
Is it? Oh, I didn't realise. I'll cross that out.
Yeah, it looks like the main evidence is that there's a mention of a similar formation to testudo being seen in western China a couple decades later, and maybe some Roman-style fortifications. According to Wikipedia a large number of prisoners were sent to Merv somewhat nearby, so it's all very suggestive, but definitely no smoking gun.
They also never annexed Ireland.
Yup. Not because they couldn't, but because they figured they had enough boggy northern European territory, and would rather spend resources on Africa, Persia or the Middle East, which had nice things they wanted.
Thoughts like that make me wish I could travel through time, just watching history and see how different it would be if this or that happened.
Heck, just go back 20k years and you'll see gobs of history we know nothing about.
I would kill for an alternative history TV show, where the Roman Empire and one of the Chinese dynasties control approximately half of Eurasia each. I have no talent for writing, so I dunno what the setup would be.
I kinda like the idea of it opening on a train heist. (If you set the tech at industrial revolution)
Make it a english / Chinese language collab show. Would be heckin' neat.
The harsh realities of Central Asian trench warfare as the Romans continue expanding in bursts and booms with developments in transportation and communication tech allowing greater and greater consolidation of what they have. Even the once mighty Persians are now only another saga told by Latin poets inhabiting a collection of provinces as Roman as Gaul or Germania Magna like the Carthaginians of old.
The wars narrow down to Samarkand as the two great empires tear apart the wide open landscapes of the Steppe to decide who will consume who.
The various Indian kingdoms have thrown in mostly with China knowing the tide is coming for them next, but Rome has made allies in Nusantara and Tamil country through the trade potential to all of them in cracking the jade egg.
China's already played their surprise card deploying their latest in gunpowder warfare technology, but the Romans have adapted in the most Roman way they possibly could, refining the digging process to allow soldiers to form a moving trench line that can crawl up against an enemy while allowing the soldiers to always be easily within cover. Roman propoganda now toutes the shovel as the symbol of Roman discipline and rank coordination.
With this stalemate an espionage operation is launched, two monks dispatched by the Emperor's secret order board a train bound for Nanqing. The Emperor has learned that the Middle Empire is transporting plans for the latest industrial marvel they've pulled out their asses to counter Rome's uncountable numbers. The monks are charged to seize the plans if possible, and make sure they never reach Nanqing if not.
Appropriately alt hist while also being a call out to a real heist that actually happened in real history, that being when Justinian ordered two monks to sneak into China, steal live silk worms, and make it back to Rome so that Rome could destroy China's monopoly on the stuff, and IIRC they pulled it off.
YAAAAAAS. Thanks for this. Exactly the kind of thing I imagined. It would be so dope.