[kbrannigan]

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.

[santiagobasulto]

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.

[kbrannigan]

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.

[santiagobasulto]

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.

[prmph]

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.

[santiagobasulto]

What! I never said any of that. Never mentioned that people along the nile are "not real africans" and what skin color has to do with it? I just pointed out that the Kush kingdom is NOT sub saharan africa. Why did I point it out? Because of the argument above. The most advanced ancient civilizations were in northern Africa and Mesopotamia. Jeez, Idk why I'm even replying to this comment.

[prmph]

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.

[santiagobasulto]

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.

[JKCalhoun]

I assume people will already understand that any purported compendium of history is necessarily incomplete.

[psychoslave]

Always assume that information is unevenly distributed, this statement included.

[zarzavat]

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.

[AlotOfReading]

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.

[prmph]

This is kind of missing the point.

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

[aswegs8]

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.

But yeah. Evil Eurocentrism am I right.

[kbrannigan]

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.

[hulitu]

> 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".

The African map is strange. I scrolled until 1722 and it shows some isolated countries and the rest is white. They could do better. (I'm european - pale face)

[usrnm]

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?

[zamadatix]

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.

[kbrannigan]

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.

[igogq425]

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!

[adwn]

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.

[prmph]

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.

[adwn]

> 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.

[prmph]

You are making bad faith straw-man arguments.

> 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.

[vman81]

I'll allow it.

[krige]

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.

[mxfh]

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandala_(political_model)

[zulko]

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":

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.

[pell]

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.

[nuggetzs]

Thanks for the rec!

[nflekkhnnn]

No it does not imply that.