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 then? 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.
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
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.
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)
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://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.
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.