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.
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.
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.
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.
I find it very a very romantic notion to have unknown areas on the world. Like some desert in the far south, beyond which might lie anything.
Fittingly, the term romance originally meant “to derive from a romantic language”, meaning mostly Latin which was spoken in the Roman Empire.
The texts in reference were largely about chivalry and such. Hence the modern connotations.
So like, romance refers to a time before the world was fully known. :)
We have that today with outer space. For all intents and purposes it is the new ocean, and so far we’ve only put a few skiffs in it.
Yeah, but it’s a lot harder to cross. Like, I could build a shitty boat from wood myself. A spaceship? Not so much. Especially not if it’s actually supposed to leave this gravity well.
It’ll eventually be more commonplace. Probably not build a raft level of simple, but eventually there will be common access.
I doubt we’ll get that far before running out of resources (especially oil, which is necessary for pretty much everything even though not necessarily directly for space travel) and/or climate change ends mass-scale industrial society. Long term space travel is incredibly hard and it has a ton of effects on the human body, and solving those problems will be pretty low on our priority list when shit really hits the fan
Regarding the problem of running out of oil, I look at it a bit like, “we are a plant (biological plant)”.
The plant starts in a seed, which provides it with nutrients (energy) as some kind of starting bonus. It can use these nutrients to develop itself and live, but it will recognize that at some point it will run out of calories and die. So it has to do something about it. What it does, is to develop leaves. These leaves collect the sunlight and this way, the plant has a constant and continuous source of energy/calories. So it can keep on living.
Society has a very similar problem. We have oil, but it is limited. We can use it to develop, but eventually we’re gonna run out of it. So we have to do something about it. Just like a plant, we develop solar panels to collect the sunlight, so we have a continuous income of energy. This way we can live waaay beyond the time of our starting bonus.
You can’t replace petrochemicals with sunlight, let alone convert everything that runs on some form of oil product into eg. electric - not nearly enough rare earths in existence, and hydrogen is not the solution either for the majority for a variety of reasons (starting from ridiculously low energy density to being absolute ass to store)
Crossing large spans of water was very dangerous, because of storms, getting lost, running out of food etc. Nowadays, crossing large spans of empty space is also very dangerous, but the dangers are a bit different. Regardless, I can see many similarities between crossing the Atlantic ocean in the 1400s and going to the moon 500 years laters.
there is an infinite difference between “you can technically do it but you’re 99% likely to die” and “you literally cannot even reach the edge of the atmosphere without a vehicle engineered and built by 5000 people”
AHEM you’ve included Scotland in that, bawbag
It says the known world. Presumably they knew about Scotland.
Aye they didn’t get any further than Perth though! So the vast majority was unknown to them
To be honest they’re welcome to most of the central belt if they’re still interested
The border is the world that was known to Rome. It’s not meant to be a representation of the borders of the Roman empire.
Dunno if East Kilbride actually counts as part of the world tbh
your telling me they reached Malaysia before Finland??
The post says “known to” rather than “visited”, though it’s not clear what that actually means.
But there’s very little in the way of written evidence of the Suomi until way, way more recently than the Roman Empire. It makes sense that they wouldn’t be particularly interested in an area that was sparsely populated, not technically sophisticated, and had little in the way of then-usable resources.
