Work Like an Ant and You'll Eat Sugar

Notes
- This is a part of the wider world Hatkirby and I are working on, and so the POD is somewhere in the Marcommanic Wars. Despite this, I didn't want to get rid of Islam altogether as I dislike removing major religions wholesale. Instead, Mohammed's journey is simply rather different, and instead of taking over Medina the Hijrah takes him to Jiddah. In an Arabia more interconnected to the wealth of India and Europe, Islam finds a more pluralistic and mercantile bent and does not result in the rise of a globetrotting Caliphate as IOTL, which delimits the religion's spread somewhat but gives it a reputation more akin to Buddhism than modern Islam; pacifistic, esoteric, and popular among spiritualist Hipsters.
- Yemen becomes the crux of trade between Europe and the East (and later East Africa) and sees successive prosperous regimes take up the torch as the middleman of the Maritime Silk Road. This makes them a haven of technological progress and culture as various faiths, languages and ethnicities corroborate in the rich ports of Mocha, Qani, Jiddah and Aden. This leads to huge engineering projects such as the artificial Sayhad Sea and later, when technology approaches our own and even succeeds it in certain areas, the enormous subterranean tunnels under the Gulf of Aden. (Herein known as the Gulf of Qani).
- 'Technistia' refers to physical sciences like engineering, whereas 'Epistemistia' refers to more theoretical fields. This distinction does get fuzzy in areas like Chemistry.
- The title is a Yemeni proverb. I'm sure you can figure out what the implication of it is.