[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.