I’d always wanted the World War 2 channel on YouTube to do something like this. They’ve produced incredibly actuate moving borders of every day of WWII for their videos. They’d be a useful historical tool if they were published as an interactive map.
Total plug but this year I scraped 400,000 wikipedia pages with Gemini to create landnotes.org, an atlas where you can ask "what happened in Japan in 1923":
My plan has been to overlay historical map borders on top of it, like the Geacron one from this post, but they all seem to be protected by copyright - and understandably so, given the amount of work involved.
This is very very cool! I went right to the month and year of my birth; kind of the same vibe as finding a newspaper published on the day you were born but all over the world. Thanks for sharing!
Cool project, but seems to be abandoned. At one point I was a subscriber to their premium version, but then started getting spam to the (unique) email address I used for the subscription. I emailed them to warn that their account database might be compromised but never heard back from them (this was back in '22).
Also, back then, their map tiles loading had a very high failure rate when loading, so I wrote a custom caching proxy to make it tolerable (which had built-in retry and also cached any successful response for a very long time).
I always wanted something like a "History of human progress" which when zoomed out shows me something like this:
-2000000 Stone tools
-1000000 Using fire
-6000 Metal tools
-6000 Agriculture
-4000 Writing
1550 Printing
1888 Telephones
1888 Cars
1903 Planes
1941 Penicillin
1941 First computer
1982 Homecomputers
1983 Mobile phones
1990 The internet
2001 Wikipedia
2004 Facebook
2007 IPhone
2022 ChatGPT
And then I can zoom in on particular areas of time and see smaller milestones.
I actually made something quite similar to this with a few friends as an app 14 years ago using Wikipedia data. We called it LineTime, it was a fun little project! (Wow, I even found our video from back then...and man, that really was a LONG time ago https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eW__WZ6pxJ8)
In a grand view removed 1000 years from now the introduction of digital communication and their network effects must have been pivotal though even if it was in a negative way (which very well may be). I just doubt that would then be a point about Facebook specifically as this is just a tiny slice of that era, I think.
We are a tiny slice of history. A thousand years from now we may be hazily recalled as the period that slavery was abolished (edit: sadly enough we probably won't be) , electricity and computers were invented, 3 of the world wars occured, and the first great population explosion and cultural implosion took place. Most electronic information will be lost so our century will be known as the electronic dark ages. All of this will be studied by the advanced artificial intelligence entities and the sentient cockroaches, the last surviving carbon life forms on earth.
It's the reverse of the Cloaca Maxima, the Roman empire sewage system. Facebook is where unprocessed sewage is fed back to the people, straight into their hands.
Radio is a technology. Facebook is an application of technology. The internet would be a better comparison which arguably has overwhelming positive impact.
Radio and internet have both had positive and negative effects. One can also say they are only neutral platforms, and people have then created positive and negative things with them. Same can be said about Facebook or Reddit too IMO. At what point does the morality start, complex question.
Social media was "progress" in the same sense that atomic weapons were.
They certainly have their proponents, and they certainly led to measurable effects on society, so I agree their inventions were important. But "progress"?
I think if social media is WW1, then the launch of Facebook will be considered as the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Not in itself sufficient, but a point that really got some important balls rolling.
That wouldn't be the foundation of Facebook, that would be Facebook introducing the algorithmic timeline. Remember that Facebook explicitly considered it a success because it increased "engagement" while the vast majority of its users reacted negatively to it and when commenting on it indicated that it made them feel worse, that it negatively transformed the kind of social interactions they had on the platform and that it was detrimental to their mental health (because previously Facebook had been centered on 1-to-1 and many-to-1 interactions between peers and now was about 1-to-many interactions with an audience - something I guess Google tried to mitigate in its own social media experiment somewhat unsuccessfully by letting you group your "friends" into "circles").
The revolutionary change that made Facebook uniquely successful wasn't being a social media platform, it was forcing its users (who were so far treating it as a way to keep in touch with acquaintances, old friends and distant family) to compete for each other's attention and offering corporations the opportunity to join that competition - all the while retaining the messaging that the platform is about "social" interactions between peers. And of course mining the everliving #### out of their users' data while non-consensually tracking them across the entire web without their knowledge.
But the "attention is the currency in the marketplace of ideas" concept they launched pretty much defined all "social media" companies from that point on, which is why we nowadays often forget the term used to be much more appropriate in the past (although often constrained to a crowd of very technical nerds).
Oh, and of course they very successfully killed much of the tradition of the Open Web by encouraging a walled garden approach even when it required them to actively defraud their advertisers by lying about the performance of video content. But I think the trophy for launching that extinction event belongs to Apple when they pivoted away from the original web-first concept for the iPhone to the proprietary App Store.
Yes, but I think it makes a nice view to point to some first popular instance of something. Otherwise everything becomes fuzzy. For example, there was AI in the 60s. But ChatGPT was the first that achieved mass adoption.
I've been having fun with the following AI prompt recently:
> You roleplay as the various Ancient Roman (Year 0) people I encounter as an accidental time traveler. Respond in a manner and in a language they would actually use to respond to me. Describe only what I can hear and see and sense in English, never translate or indicate what others are trying to say. I am suddenly and surprisingly teleported back in time and space, wearing normal clothes, jeans, socks and a t-shirt into the rural outskirts of Ancient Rome.
In think this is a fun way to learn languages too.
Sounds like a really interesting story, but the reviews of the English edition by Dutch and German speakers leaves me wondering Is there a better English translation available? It’s hard to tell from the reviews if there’s only one.
I don't think having the Scoti in the northeast of what is now Scotland from 300 BC to 1 BC inclusive is right. I don't think the term appeared until ~300 AD, and it originally applied to people from Ireland: it only later came to be applied to the inhabitants of northern Britain when Irish became commonly spoken there (whether by immigration, conquest, or deliberate self-Gaelicisation under the influence of Irish missionaries).
How do you make this? It doesn't seem to be like Wikipedia has coordinates or map boundaries for ancient empires, so there's no simple way to mine the data.
And if you don't mine it from somewhere, how do you know what to include? How many people will have heard enough about every part of the world to even be able to research ancient borders?
This is the same question as "How would the information even get put into something like Wikipedia in the first place" - knowledgeable people in the field do the work of aggregating academic information and turn it into a database of sorts. This seems to be accomplished in this case by running it as a business with a founder who has a degree in geography and history + a team of variously skilled people (history + tech + business).
It's a very fine-grained data, isn't it... Something like on August 24, 1652, 17:34 local, soldier X killed the last tribesman Y they were fighting and claimed the area for his king Z. And a lot of regions were/are disputed with no clear "ruler", e.g. the no man's land between North and South Korea.
I guess something like this - add timelines for every known point (city, landmark, ritual site etc.) connect the dots in the same year with one another, then apply some reasonable territory estimate to round out the resulting blob, correct for visible mistakes manually.
Just for fun, how would you envision this process working for empires that weren't based on territorial control of cities and landmarks like the Mongols, or based on territorial control of land at all like the Hansa?
These lovely kinds of projects always leave me wanting more. In the same way every telescope leaves me wanting a larger one. Because what they reveal is so immediately interesting.
I would love to be able to slip through time with a slider. Especially if there was enough data on the movement and geographic span of early peoples to represent their story with moving, fading in/out diffusions of color.
And now I am curious! How clearly we have pinned down migration and geographic spans for the history of all human families?
NONE of this is an actual suggestion to do any more work.
The issue is that the timeline is built in a Eurocentric way. Europe (and the Near East) are shown as the starting point of history, while Africa, Asia, and the Americas only appear when Europeans make contact with them.
This hides thousands of years of independent development in those regions—empires, and creates the false impression that they had no real history before Europe showed up.
It repeats an old colonial story where Europe is the main character and everyone else is treated as secondary.
You're implying this is some sort of "malice". It's not that authors are "Biased towards Europe". The reality is that, sadly, there's VERY LITTLE historical records in antiquity besides the ones in "Europe".
For example, I'm from Latin America, and the most important empires in South America (Incas for example) were using writing systems based on threads and knots (called Khipu). Sadly, these records didn't survive. While Mesopotamia and Northern Africa were already using glyphs carved in Stone (and bones, and wood, etc). These had a much better chance of surviving.
Then, what happened, is that modern "europeans" (starting in 200BC, roman times) invested a lot of time to research and learn about History. This is something MIND BLOWING. Most civilizations didn't even care about their predecessors (aside from deity or folk tales). And that's why what we know today about Parthia or Greece comes mostly from European sources. Don't get me wrong, multiple civilizations had the concept of "early historians", especially Chinese and arabs. But not everything always survives.
Let’s consider *Sub-Saharan Africa* (itself a label that lumps dozens of distinct civilizations into a single “other” category). These societies kept recordsnot folk tales, not vague legends, but structured historical accounts.
* The Kingdom of Kush maintained *3,000 years of king lists*.
* Ethiopian monasteries preserved *written chronicles in Ge’ez* for over a millennium.
* Mali’s griots memorized *centuries of dynasty records* with such precision that griots from distant regions told the same histories word-for-word when Europeans finally documented them.
Yet when do these count as "real" history? Only after Europeans wrote them down? Only when archaeology "confirms" what griots already knew?
The map shows detailed Rome but blank Africa, despite these complex states existing for millennia. it's about whose preservation methods and developmental paths count as "real" history worth mapping.
The Kush Kingdom was settled around the Nile, it's NOT sub-saharan Africa.
And yes, there are a lot of historical artifacts spread out in the world. But how much WRITTEN and RECORDED history can you find? You can find a totem buried somewhere in the south of Argentina, so you know you had an advanced culture there. But can you name them? Does it have the ruler's name?
Nobody is arguing that there were advanced civilizations ASIDE from Mesopotamia, China and North Africa. But we have very little written records to name them, classify them, etc.
Around Nile excludes sub-saharan Africa? Seems your knowledge of geography is a bit lacking. The Nile runs through 11 African countries.
And, what does sub-saharan even have to do with anything here? Seems like a weird thing to bring up. The people of the Sudan (where Kush and Meroe, etc were located) are one of the blackest people on the planet, nobody is going to mistake them for Mediterranean people, as has been argued with Egypt, itself an African civilization that had strong links to other parts of Africa.
It's kind of funny. Point out that there were advanced civilizations, writing systems, and historical record-keeping in various parts of Africa, and the response for some people is, "ah, but that's not sub-saharan Africa", or, "but, those were not real Africans", etc, etc.
So, the definition of "real" Africa becomes: whatever seems to confirm your biases about what Africa is supposed to be, quite a circular definition.
If you in ernest take a look at the whole thing you can clearly see how the culture of states/kingdoms slowly spread from Mesopotamia and China to Europe and India. Only after ~3000 years the Roman empire takes over and spreads this throughout Europe. And then another 1500 years pass until the European hegemony really starts.
Also smaller "cultures" which do not constitute states/kingdoms are shown in the map, albeit without color or borders.
You say "culture of states slowly spread from Mesopotamia to Europe" but what template defines a "state"?
The Kingdom of Kush existed for 3,000 years. Aksum controlled Red Sea trade. Great Zimbabwe built massive stone cities. Yet the map leaves them blank because they don't fit the Mesopotamian-Roman model of what states should look like.
Then don’t present it as an Atlas of world history. It should be called an Atlas of Eurocentric history.
Furthermore, we would have had much more records from non-european sources if many European explorers and colonialists had not gone on a rampage destroying whatever indigenous documents and history they could lay their hands on.
As a Latin American I’m sure you know about how the conquistadors destroyed written records.
It's true, they did destroy written records (especially the Khipu I mentioned before).
But what can the creator of this tool do? Call it "partial atlas of history based on what we have left after 5000 years of wars"?
It is what it is, whoever built this atlas included EVERYTHING[0] known or possibly known. The result might be Eurocentric based on all the reasons stated above, but I don't attribute it to malice from the creator of the tool
[0] It's clearly not everything. There's knowledge of the Tehuelche people in my region (Patagonia, Argentina) for example that doesn't show up here.
The meaning of the word "history" is the study of historical records. The events that happened in times before writing are called "pre-history", and similarly the events that happened in places that didn't write things down are out of scope.
History has never been purely about studying literary records. Thucydides' History includes gratuitous use of oral speeches and discussion of events that predate writing. I can't think of a single modern historian who doesn't make use of archaeological data either.
Equating history with writing is a very anachronistic definition that was popular among Renaissance and early modern historians as a way of legitimizing their preference for classical scholarship over the "dark" middle ages. It's not a good rule of thumb for what is or isn't historical.
What I'm saying is there are records that have either been ignored, neglected, or destroyed.
In Mali alone there are millions of historical documents [1] that have not been suitable explored. The Meroitic [2] script that contains historical records is still poorly understood
The map certainly is not built in a eurocentric way. It does reflect the fact that the political history of Eurasia and the Mediterranean region are much better studied and better understood, but this is hardly the fault of the creator of the map. Do you have a better political map of the Americas two thousand years ago?
There was a free alternative to this which always seemed to try more in this regard https://www.runningreality.org/#11/20/500&22.59154,-2.58791&... but I've never actually known enough to say it was actually more accurate or not. At least towards the ~1600s the Americas look a lot more like the history books I saw in school.
The timeline spans "3000 BC" to now, but BC/CE itself is a European framework. The Han Dynasty, Maya, and Kingdom of Kush all had their own calendars and ways of marking significant time. Yet this "world" history uses Europe's reference point as universal.
So yes, the map reflects available documentation. But the very framework - organizing all human history around BC/CE - already embeds a European perspective. The bias isn't what the mapmaker included; it's that European systems became the unmarked "standard" for measuring when history happens.
That's structural Eurocentrism: not intentional, but built into the tools we inherit.
That's an extremely weak argument. Ultimately, it's about the numerical values. Where you set the reference point is secondary as long as you can convert. We could also set your birthday as the zero point. I'm not a Christian and I have to live with BC/CE too. I'm not saying that there is no Eurocentric perspective or that European understanding of history is not shaped by it. But we can reflect on this and correct it. Postcolonial criticism should not go so far as to see the BC/CE system as a structural mechanism of oppression. That's just ridiculous. You'd be better off dealing with concrete economic oppression instead of peddling this Foucault/Spivak/Said nonsense! Sorry for being so blunt, but it upsets me every time. I mean, what's the alternative here? Should we switch to the Mayan calendar now so that it's not so Eurocentric? That's ridiculous. A little Hegelianism (or Laoziism, for that matter) wouldn't hurt you!
The Gregorian calendar is the de-facto global calendar system today, even in cultures and states that are far removed from its Christian and European roots. You might as well complain about the text on the website being in English.
But he is not complaining that we use the Gregorian calendar. He is pointing out that is just one calendar among many, and we should be aware that it is a conscious choice the world has made to use it by convention.
> But he is not complaining that we use the Gregorian calendar.
Yes, he is:
>>> Yet this "world" history uses Europe's reference point [of BC/CE] as universal.
It wouldn't make sense to use any other than the Gregorian calendar for this map, and it also wouldn't make sense to mix different calendar systems.
> He is pointing out that is just one calendar among many […]
But it's not. The Gregorian calendar is the calendar in world wide use today. Giving dates in BC/CE is not an expression of Eurocentrism, it simply reflects reality.
> Yet this "world" history uses Europe's reference point [of BC/CE] as universal.
What in this sentence indicates he think is it wrong to use that calendar? He is saying it is NOT universal. What about that is hard to understand?
> The Gregorian calendar is the calendar in world wide use today.
Again, you are arguing with a straw-man. Please read my comment carefully again. I am not arguing this your statement.
As an analogy, the WWW is the dominant (probably virtually only) form of the internet in use today, but it is only one architecture. There were/can be others, but they failed to gain or maintain traction. A summary from Google:
> Besides Gopher, other historical internet systems and protocols existed before the World Wide Web, including Wide Area Information Servers (WAIS) and the Archie search engine. While the World Wide Web eventually surpassed them all, these systems provided different ways of discovering and navigating information online in the early 1990s.
This is a view that is way too self-flagellatory and incorrect if you actually use the map. The borders are included based on what sources are available and non-european entitities are documented longer than european ones, as long as they have left behind anything to base these borders on. When no definite borders can be traced, the map still offers names of dominant cultures in the region, in the same way whether they're, say, european Celts or south american Paracas.
The most ignorant part of those types of projects is usually the projection of the idea of nation states defined by clearly communicated sphere of influence backwards way before the 1800s. That concept simply does not hold up.
The uncertainty of borders was systemic before that and sometimes simply not a thing at all. Uncertainty visualization in geographic contexts never made it into mainstream visualizations and data formats so far.
This is also very true of the events reported in Wikipedia, see this animated timeline of (a hopefully representative set of) historical events reported in Wikipedia. Is really is "Europe meets the world":
I agree with others in this thread that this more probably "information-biased" than "eurocentric" on the part of the Atlas creator. Pretty sure they wish non-european history was easier to find and aggregate as it would make the project much more compelling (I certainly had this problem with https://landnotes.org/).
I am hoping LLMs will do a lot of good at bridging gaps and surfacing world historical information that didn't make it yet to centralized projects like Wikipedia.
Similarly overlooked is the philosophy of the Americas before European colonization. A great read I recommend to anyone who’s interested: “ Aztec Philosophy: Understanding a World in Motion” by James Maffie
It obviously only focuses on the Aztecs so hardly a deep dive on all there is to learn.
And if we are talking about the constitution, technically parts of Russia, India, Vietnam, Mongolia are also "claimed" by the ROC.
This map should show the areas of actual rule and control (de facto) and don't accept any territory to belong to a state just because they claim sovereignty.
I'll add that most of the "Internet's supporters of Taiwan independence" not only do not live in Taiwan, they have never even visited there -- if they did, they would know that even most of Taiwan's population consider Taiwan and (mainland) China to be one entity. And mainland China mostly agrees with that -- where they disagree is what is the political entity that should govern this territory.
I'm sure that you can see in the map that there's "free are of the republic of china", which wasn't represented in the map, which was the point I raised originally. I never mentioned taiwan independence, you twist the facts and my word for your political agenda.
My experience is a personal one -- a couple of jobs ago I was travelling extensively to Taiwan (on a multi-year ROC visa) and had lots of conversations with people.
I can offer a link to ROC constitution (above):
> Because the ROC constitution is, at least nominally, the constitution of all China, the amendments avoided any specific reference to the Taiwan area ...
Or this passage:
> The position of the PRC and the KMT in Taiwan remains that there is only one sovereign entity of China, united and indivisible.
> Domestically, the major political contention is between the Pan-Blue Coalition, which favors eventual Chinese unification under the ROC and promoting a pan-Chinese identity, ...
(KMT/Pan-Blue are the biggest party historically and currently, however Pan-Green were a majority recently.)
Or this poll result: (2024)
Independence as soon as possible 3.8%
Maintain status quo, move toward independence 22.4%
Maintain status quo, decide at a later date 27.3%
Maintain status quo indefinitely 33.6%
So about 60% are for doing nothing (either for now or forever), while 26% have expressed their preference for independence.
Believing that China and Taiwan should be reunified is not the same as believing that they are, currently, one entity, which is what was originally claimed.
I'm not certain what exactly you address as "what was originally claimed," however the world maps in both PRC and ROC show one China, not two, and I'm not certain why it should be a reason to disqualify TLA on the basis that "it fails to portray the current map accurately, by not to (sic) separating PRC and ROC."
> the world maps in both PRC and ROC show one China, not two
That is irrelevant. The map is not the territory. They are two countries in reality; that is, they operate as two separate sovereign countries in every practical way, regardless of what legal fictions are maintained for political reasons.
This atlas is presumably supposed to be about reality, not about legal fictions.
(BTW: North Korea and South Korea officially claimed to be one country until very recently, and South Korea still does. But every map in the outside world shows them as two. Why should China and Taiwan be treated differently?)
It only looks like this from the West, where the support for independent Taiwan is much higher than in Taiwan itself (not to speak of PRC where it's non-existent.) People in Taiwan don't perceive China as a different country (the way that French perceive Germany for example) but rather as a different (unfortunate) regime over the same nation.
> This atlas is presumably supposed to be about reality, not about legal fictions.
With the current reality in east Ukraine/Georgia/Northern Cyprus/Israel-Palestine/Kosovo/etc.etc.etc., I'm not sure if it's ever possible to get a map that will satisfy everybody, as what is "legal fiction" to you might be "internationally recognised borders" for someone else.
Not very "technically accurate", since it does not represent (at least some?) vassal states differently from their suzerain. For example, compare this [1] map of the Ottoman Empire with the one in this atlas.
Yes, there are several errors. For example, the Gold Coast did not include any part of German/French Togoland. The Gold Coast added some of that territory when it became Ghana in 1957
Unfortunately, the bold title of that "project" doesn't hold well to subject that it pretends to cover. Maybe not complete, but that should be stated.
For example - why since 3000 BC? Why "World History", the World started 3000 BC? I can continue about the mixing of "states" and populations" neither of which is complete on that map.
I would get this as a nice try, but in reality it looks like a school assignment project.
mm..I wish there was a really immersive version of this, something that looked like the map in Crusader Kings 3 but which let you zoom in on what was actually going on in every place at every time. I'm a map junkie and collector, and like to read historical atlases cover to cover. This is cool but it could be so much richer. I didn't take the time to seek out inaccuracies.
If everything is in Wikidata then you can probably do that. It is always going to be a bit hard to get the polish of the data there.
I am a firm believer in that good visualization gives you better data. You can probably get a lot of detail mapping of data in wikidata if you make a map that queries "things happening in BBX during these years)
I checked only North Africa: several mistakes (even inaccuracies in terminology such as showing Berbers and Tuaregs as if they are distinct population groups)
This is the type of visualization that would captivate me for hours on end on Encarta in my early teens. Granted, those were a bit more polished and engaging, but the right mix of edutainment was fascinating to my developing mind.
The world lost many of these learning experiences after Encarta went away. Wikipedia certainly has much more information and is an improvement in many ways, but it's sorely lacking this type of curated and interactive content. Information is much easier to digest when it's presented in formats beyond text and pictures. Encarta had all sorts of experiences like this, from quasi-3D environments to mini-games.
The early web was certainly a limiting factor in what could be displayed on it, but today it can deliver far richer experiences. Authors like Neal Agarwal, Bartosz Ciechanowski, Grant Sanderson, and to an extent platforms like brilliant.org, prove that this is possible. I just wish that the world's largest free encyclopedia also had this.
Sure, history matters, but I'll return the burden on you to argue why Israel/Palestine matters specifically in this context. Otherwise, it's irrelevant noise to the topic at hand.
https://landnotes.org/?location=xnd284b0-6&date=1923&strictD...
https://github.com/Zulko/landnotes
My plan has been to overlay historical map borders on top of it, like the Geacron one from this post, but they all seem to be protected by copyright - and understandably so, given the amount of work involved.
Also, back then, their map tiles loading had a very high failure rate when loading, so I wrote a custom caching proxy to make it tolerable (which had built-in retry and also cached any successful response for a very long time).
They certainly have their proponents, and they certainly led to measurable effects on society, so I agree their inventions were important. But "progress"?
The revolutionary change that made Facebook uniquely successful wasn't being a social media platform, it was forcing its users (who were so far treating it as a way to keep in touch with acquaintances, old friends and distant family) to compete for each other's attention and offering corporations the opportunity to join that competition - all the while retaining the messaging that the platform is about "social" interactions between peers. And of course mining the everliving #### out of their users' data while non-consensually tracking them across the entire web without their knowledge.
But the "attention is the currency in the marketplace of ideas" concept they launched pretty much defined all "social media" companies from that point on, which is why we nowadays often forget the term used to be much more appropriate in the past (although often constrained to a crowd of very technical nerds).
Oh, and of course they very successfully killed much of the tradition of the Open Web by encouraging a walled garden approach even when it required them to actively defraud their advertisers by lying about the performance of video content. But I think the trophy for launching that extinction event belongs to Apple when they pivoted away from the original web-first concept for the iPhone to the proprietary App Store.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_64
Nuance around this fact would be completely lost in 100 years, let alone 1000 from now.
In 1942 he did one for Evolution which is closer to your pitch (log scale Y axis, etc): https://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~2...
> You roleplay as the various Ancient Roman (Year 0) people I encounter as an accidental time traveler. Respond in a manner and in a language they would actually use to respond to me. Describe only what I can hear and see and sense in English, never translate or indicate what others are trying to say. I am suddenly and surprisingly teleported back in time and space, wearing normal clothes, jeans, socks and a t-shirt into the rural outskirts of Ancient Rome.
In think this is a fun way to learn languages too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%A1l_Riata
Edit: The "Scots" are supposed to have conquered the Picts in the mid 9th century leading to what would eventually become Scotland.
And if you don't mine it from somewhere, how do you know what to include? How many people will have heard enough about every part of the world to even be able to research ancient borders?
I would love to be able to slip through time with a slider. Especially if there was enough data on the movement and geographic span of early peoples to represent their story with moving, fading in/out diffusions of color.
And now I am curious! How clearly we have pinned down migration and geographic spans for the history of all human families?
NONE of this is an actual suggestion to do any more work.
It is great as it is!
This hides thousands of years of independent development in those regions—empires, and creates the false impression that they had no real history before Europe showed up.
It repeats an old colonial story where Europe is the main character and everyone else is treated as secondary.
For example, I'm from Latin America, and the most important empires in South America (Incas for example) were using writing systems based on threads and knots (called Khipu). Sadly, these records didn't survive. While Mesopotamia and Northern Africa were already using glyphs carved in Stone (and bones, and wood, etc). These had a much better chance of surviving.
Then, what happened, is that modern "europeans" (starting in 200BC, roman times) invested a lot of time to research and learn about History. This is something MIND BLOWING. Most civilizations didn't even care about their predecessors (aside from deity or folk tales). And that's why what we know today about Parthia or Greece comes mostly from European sources. Don't get me wrong, multiple civilizations had the concept of "early historians", especially Chinese and arabs. But not everything always survives.
* The Kingdom of Kush maintained *3,000 years of king lists*. * Ethiopian monasteries preserved *written chronicles in Ge’ez* for over a millennium. * Mali’s griots memorized *centuries of dynasty records* with such precision that griots from distant regions told the same histories word-for-word when Europeans finally documented them.
Yet when do these count as "real" history? Only after Europeans wrote them down? Only when archaeology "confirms" what griots already knew?
The map shows detailed Rome but blank Africa, despite these complex states existing for millennia. it's about whose preservation methods and developmental paths count as "real" history worth mapping.
And yes, there are a lot of historical artifacts spread out in the world. But how much WRITTEN and RECORDED history can you find? You can find a totem buried somewhere in the south of Argentina, so you know you had an advanced culture there. But can you name them? Does it have the ruler's name?
Nobody is arguing that there were advanced civilizations ASIDE from Mesopotamia, China and North Africa. But we have very little written records to name them, classify them, etc.
And, what does sub-saharan even have to do with anything here? Seems like a weird thing to bring up. The people of the Sudan (where Kush and Meroe, etc were located) are one of the blackest people on the planet, nobody is going to mistake them for Mediterranean people, as has been argued with Egypt, itself an African civilization that had strong links to other parts of Africa.
It's kind of funny. Point out that there were advanced civilizations, writing systems, and historical record-keeping in various parts of Africa, and the response for some people is, "ah, but that's not sub-saharan Africa", or, "but, those were not real Africans", etc, etc.
So, the definition of "real" Africa becomes: whatever seems to confirm your biases about what Africa is supposed to be, quite a circular definition.
Also smaller "cultures" which do not constitute states/kingdoms are shown in the map, albeit without color or borders.
But yeah. Evil Eurocentrism am I right.
The Kingdom of Kush existed for 3,000 years. Aksum controlled Red Sea trade. Great Zimbabwe built massive stone cities. Yet the map leaves them blank because they don't fit the Mesopotamian-Roman model of what states should look like.
Furthermore, we would have had much more records from non-european sources if many European explorers and colonialists had not gone on a rampage destroying whatever indigenous documents and history they could lay their hands on.
As a Latin American I’m sure you know about how the conquistadors destroyed written records.
But what can the creator of this tool do? Call it "partial atlas of history based on what we have left after 5000 years of wars"?
It is what it is, whoever built this atlas included EVERYTHING[0] known or possibly known. The result might be Eurocentric based on all the reasons stated above, but I don't attribute it to malice from the creator of the tool
[0] It's clearly not everything. There's knowledge of the Tehuelche people in my region (Patagonia, Argentina) for example that doesn't show up here.
Equating history with writing is a very anachronistic definition that was popular among Renaissance and early modern historians as a way of legitimizing their preference for classical scholarship over the "dark" middle ages. It's not a good rule of thumb for what is or isn't historical.
What I'm saying is there are records that have either been ignored, neglected, or destroyed.
In Mali alone there are millions of historical documents [1] that have not been suitable explored. The Meroitic [2] script that contains historical records is still poorly understood
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timbuktu_Manuscripts
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meroitic_script
So yes, the map reflects available documentation. But the very framework - organizing all human history around BC/CE - already embeds a European perspective. The bias isn't what the mapmaker included; it's that European systems became the unmarked "standard" for measuring when history happens. That's structural Eurocentrism: not intentional, but built into the tools we inherit.
Yes, he is:
>>> Yet this "world" history uses Europe's reference point [of BC/CE] as universal.
It wouldn't make sense to use any other than the Gregorian calendar for this map, and it also wouldn't make sense to mix different calendar systems.
> He is pointing out that is just one calendar among many […]
But it's not. The Gregorian calendar is the calendar in world wide use today. Giving dates in BC/CE is not an expression of Eurocentrism, it simply reflects reality.
> Yet this "world" history uses Europe's reference point [of BC/CE] as universal.
What in this sentence indicates he think is it wrong to use that calendar? He is saying it is NOT universal. What about that is hard to understand?
> The Gregorian calendar is the calendar in world wide use today.
Again, you are arguing with a straw-man. Please read my comment carefully again. I am not arguing this your statement.
As an analogy, the WWW is the dominant (probably virtually only) form of the internet in use today, but it is only one architecture. There were/can be others, but they failed to gain or maintain traction. A summary from Google:
> Besides Gopher, other historical internet systems and protocols existed before the World Wide Web, including Wide Area Information Servers (WAIS) and the Archie search engine. While the World Wide Web eventually surpassed them all, these systems provided different ways of discovering and navigating information online in the early 1990s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandala_(political_model)
https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/1l3xl8x/events_fro...
I agree with others in this thread that this more probably "information-biased" than "eurocentric" on the part of the Atlas creator. Pretty sure they wish non-european history was easier to find and aggregate as it would make the project much more compelling (I certainly had this problem with https://landnotes.org/).
I am hoping LLMs will do a lot of good at bridging gaps and surfacing world historical information that didn't make it yet to centralized projects like Wikipedia.
It obviously only focuses on the Aztecs so hardly a deep dive on all there is to learn.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_Republic_o...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_China
This map should show the areas of actual rule and control (de facto) and don't accept any territory to belong to a state just because they claim sovereignty.
Four — someone claiming something doesn’t make it true.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ROC_Administrative_a...
I'll add that most of the "Internet's supporters of Taiwan independence" not only do not live in Taiwan, they have never even visited there -- if they did, they would know that even most of Taiwan's population consider Taiwan and (mainland) China to be one entity. And mainland China mostly agrees with that -- where they disagree is what is the political entity that should govern this territory.
I very much doubt this is true — post a source, if you’ve got one
I can offer a link to ROC constitution (above):
> Because the ROC constitution is, at least nominally, the constitution of all China, the amendments avoided any specific reference to the Taiwan area ...
Or this passage:
> The position of the PRC and the KMT in Taiwan remains that there is only one sovereign entity of China, united and indivisible.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Chinas#Current_situation
Or this passage:
> Domestically, the major political contention is between the Pan-Blue Coalition, which favors eventual Chinese unification under the ROC and promoting a pan-Chinese identity, ...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwan
Or this passage:
> As of the 2008 election of President Ma Ying-jeou, the KMT agreed to the One China principle, but defined it as led by [ROC] rather than [PRC].
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_unification#Rise_of_th...
(KMT/Pan-Blue are the biggest party historically and currently, however Pan-Green were a majority recently.)
Or this poll result: (2024)
So about 60% are for doing nothing (either for now or forever), while 26% have expressed their preference for independence.[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwan_independence_movement#O...
That is irrelevant. The map is not the territory. They are two countries in reality; that is, they operate as two separate sovereign countries in every practical way, regardless of what legal fictions are maintained for political reasons.
This atlas is presumably supposed to be about reality, not about legal fictions.
(BTW: North Korea and South Korea officially claimed to be one country until very recently, and South Korea still does. But every map in the outside world shows them as two. Why should China and Taiwan be treated differently?)
It only looks like this from the West, where the support for independent Taiwan is much higher than in Taiwan itself (not to speak of PRC where it's non-existent.) People in Taiwan don't perceive China as a different country (the way that French perceive Germany for example) but rather as a different (unfortunate) regime over the same nation.
> This atlas is presumably supposed to be about reality, not about legal fictions.
With the current reality in east Ukraine/Georgia/Northern Cyprus/Israel-Palestine/Kosovo/etc.etc.etc., I'm not sure if it's ever possible to get a map that will satisfy everybody, as what is "legal fiction" to you might be "internationally recognised borders" for someone else.
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2b/OttomanE...
I am a firm believer in that good visualization gives you better data. You can probably get a lot of detail mapping of data in wikidata if you make a map that queries "things happening in BBX during these years)
This is the type of visualization that would captivate me for hours on end on Encarta in my early teens. Granted, those were a bit more polished and engaging, but the right mix of edutainment was fascinating to my developing mind.
The world lost many of these learning experiences after Encarta went away. Wikipedia certainly has much more information and is an improvement in many ways, but it's sorely lacking this type of curated and interactive content. Information is much easier to digest when it's presented in formats beyond text and pictures. Encarta had all sorts of experiences like this, from quasi-3D environments to mini-games.
The early web was certainly a limiting factor in what could be displayed on it, but today it can deliver far richer experiences. Authors like Neal Agarwal, Bartosz Ciechanowski, Grant Sanderson, and to an extent platforms like brilliant.org, prove that this is possible. I just wish that the world's largest free encyclopedia also had this.
I'm sure you don't want the Iranians claiming ownership of the region due to whatever Cyrus and Darius would have conquered.
Meh.