High population. Diversity of peoples and religions/beliefs. Lots of money flowers in LA, enough to allow for "start-up" cults, and enough for cults to take advantage of people and subsist on.

Invading the USSR was always going to be a necessity. Hitler needed to secure access to oil in the Caucasus and possibly Iran (who were keen to ally with him).

The Soviets had a Non-Aggression Pact with the Nazis that was supposed to last until 1949, but they broke it in 1941. I think it's more likely that the Winter War simply shifted the invasion timetable earlier.

Fatimid Dynasty Egypt was a Shia dynasty ruling a Sunni majority but I can't recall any revolts by the Sunnis

Oh, that uh I dunno. I'm sure it happened just super rarely.

It actually happened very often, especially if both men were similarly armed and armored. I'm gonna assume you're referring to pre-modern battles since you mention Samurais and swords.

Usually, the majority of an army was infantrymen wielding melee weapons, and in fact the word "melee" refers to the confusing, scary part of pre-modern battles where two infantry contingents finally clash and don't have much room to maneuver.

Medieval European martial arts manuals have sections on hand to hand combat, including grappling an enemy with a sword or spear with and without your own weapons.

Indian martial arts under the broad label of Kalaripayattu include armed and unarmed instruction. Same with Chinese martial arts.

I don't really know much about other parts of the world, but wrestling and grappling seems to be a fairly universal past-time. You even see Mongol and Turkic wrestling traditions, and those dudes were most famous for horseback fighting. Those skills would probably be necessary for lance-wielding cavalry if they get dismounted.

I'm just here to point out that you keep on waving off every explanation as "ridiculous" but you readily accepted a story involving tamed elephants in Egypt in 2500 BC, which is not backed by evidence.

So like, the Eastern Mediterranean especially in the time after Alexander was super religious syncretic. The Greeks didn't posit Zeus as superior to Amun due to their conquest of Egypt, they took a more practical route to integrate into the existing Egyptian systems by equating Zeus to Amun and worshipping them as the same deity.

The obvious exception were the Jews, who became a little more ethnically closed off in opposition to the polytheism around them. You start to see writers of other ethnicities like Manetho around them talk about how strange and stupid their religion was. That's kind of a proto-antisemitism.

Eventually, you had the Romans come long and conquer the whole Mediterranean but maintaining the syncretic religions as long as their subjects acknowledged the Roman Emperor as divine. This wasn't going to fly in Judaism. You see kind of an escalation where the Romans suppress Jewish religion like destroying their Temple and Jews looking towards the Romans enemies like the Persians for help in gaining their autonomy (and who doesn't want autonomy from a militaristic Empire?). Pretty soon the Jews are viewed as subsersive elements within the Empire who collaborate with the enemy, which should sound kind of familiar.

IIRC, the earliest usage of the word "Eurasian" was used to describe the children of British colonists and their Indian wives.

Anyway, I saw in another comment that you seem to be pretty annoyed by this, but man, language is messy; words change meaning over time, and the same word has different meanings in different contexts.

Like if I told you I'm amped up, I'm not describing the amount of elecrical current in my body.

Most pagans didn't quite believe their religion to be "true" the way Christianity purports itself to be true.

To be a member of a pagan religion, you just had to be the ethnicity of that religion and participate in it's ceremonies and rituals. Christianity, on the other hand, is partly a philosophy that was debated, attacked, and defended. You'd be hard pressed to find a Norse shaman who wanted to discuss Christianity, while on the other hand Christians were the ones who had very compelling arguments for their religion, or I guess the point is that they at least had arguments.

Yes, everybody on this sub knows the absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence...but this is to our best current knowledge.

>On top of that there’s no evidence that mesoamerican cultures stopped developing wheeled carts because of an absence of large domesticated draft animals.

If that's your standard for why they didn't develop wheeled carts, you'll basically never have a satisfactory answer. It's next to impossible to prove a negative using archaeology.

>wheeled carts being drawn by humans have existed in Europe and Asia for centuries, if not millennia.

Okay but that doesn't matter when our earliest archaeological evidence for carts is often tied to cattle; the Brononice pot abstractly depicts a wagon and was found alongside the remains of an auroch. Tripolye culture toy bull is literally a bull on wheels. Evidence for carts and wagons appear in present-day Ukraine just after the introduction of cattle.

It's a boring answer but for whatever reason, humans didn't think they needed a cart until they had some other poor animal to drag it around.

The Great Wall didn't really prevent people from crossing into China, it was more of an early detection system than a true barrier. The Steppe pastures that horse nomads want extend westward, so it was a natural channel for them to go that way.

Pastoralists like the Scythians had been making regular crossings into Europe through the Danubefor centuries before the Great Wall.

The real impetus for crossing into China, and thus the reason for the Great Wall, was to take over parts of a rich civilization. That was a regular occurrence even with the Great Wall in place. When Steppe conquerors noticed new goods being traded from a rich civilization at the other end of the world like Rome, they migrated in that direction.

I'm not sure if "weak" is the right word to describe them.

The Romans were a victim of their own success. They were so rich that everyone wanted a piece of the pie, especially internally.

Corruption was normal, and their emphasis on military conquest meant that at any given time you had several very powerful private citizens with armies loyal to them (and their money) trying to carve out their own empire. They were also willing to hire people outside the Roman Empire.

The Romans conquered other people, and there shouldn't be any surprise when those other people try to conquer them back.

So the Byzantines inherited all of this, and they were constantly in some civil war or some coup or they were attacked by multiple enemies at once. Of course, they also were competing with other empires (especially the Iranian-based ones) for the same resources and territories.

The Egyptians didn't have chariots or horses until 1600 BC so their main method of supply/troop transport was via boat on the Nile. Wherever the Land of Punt was, it didn't seem to be reachable by the Nile.

If Punt was in Arabia, the Egyptians would have had to build an expensive invasion fleet of seaworthy ships, which is outside of their expertise with river ships. If Punt is in Eritrea or Ethiopia, it's too far from the Nile; there is a tributary that flows in that general area called the Atbarah AKA Black Nile but it's not as big or deep as the Nile and not conducive to large boats.

By the time the Egyptians got horses, Kush/Nubia was very strong and the Egyptians had too many problems in the North (the Hittites, whoever was in control of Mesopotamia, the Sea Peoples) to really expand into where Punt might be.

The Timurid Dynasty and their subjects were ethnically diverse but they were majority Turkic and Persian, basically the same as people in places like present-day Kazakhstan and Tajikstan. Timur claimed to be descended from a cousin of Genghis, while his mother was probably a Turk who spoke Persian or a Persian. One of Timur's ancestors married a granddaughter of Genghis, so his dynasty called themselves "Gurkani" or "Son-In-Law."

The Mongols come from, well, Mongolia. Their language isn't related to Turkic or Persian languages. You'll notice I'm separating people pretty broadly by language groups but back then they probably didn't see themselves that different ethnically in a broad sense from Turkic nomads. There was plenty of intermarriage between Turkic and Mongolic speakers.

Nobody knows 100% sure who the Huns were. They predate the Timurids and Mongols by roughly 700 years, and there isn't as clear written records linking them the way the Timurids and Mongols are. We have hardly anything of their language documented, but based on the names of their rulers they were probably Turkic speakers. There appears to be continuity between them and the Bulgars, the Turkic overlords of the people who would become the Bulgarians, so that's a little bit more evidence towards them being Turkic speakers.

The word "Hun" is etymologically related to Xiongnu (if you ever watched Mulan, that's who the "Huns" she fought are based on), the major confederation of Steppe people in the late BCs and early ADs. That confederation probably included the ancestors of Mongols and Turks, but their language the language of the ruling dynasty doesn't seem to be either. Dynasty names over time become ethnic names pretty often (like how Han is used for ethnic Chinese people but originated from the Han Dynasty), so it's probable that some of the Huns' ancestors took on the Dynasty name of their rulers and eventually considered themselves Xiongnu ethnically, then rode West and South. That's the earliest possible link between them and the Mongols.