Oof, the anachronistic nature of this history is immediately relevant when the Huns are being used as a catchall term for nomadic steppe peoples in an era when this is dominated by Indo-European tribes and referred to as the Mongolians. A quick scroll confirms that there's no mention of any indigenous peoples in the Americas, period, even as they're touting the great and mighty power of the, uh, Lombards. You get other Eurocentric gems, like Charlemagne being the most powerful ruler in his time, more so than the contemporary Tang dynasty in China or the Abbasid Caliphate, which... yeah, no that ain't right. Also interesting that Napoleon at his height looks to be ⅔ the power of the British Empire at the time?
But more than poking fun at the specific issues in this attempt (and there are many to be sure), I strongly suspect that there's no way to even responsibly attempt such an endeavor. Quantitative data is simply lacking for much of history. Population demographics for well-attested areas such as the Roman Empire at its height is difficult to establish, but if you try to apply it to, say, pre-Columbian North America, the estimates vary by orders of magnitude. GDP estimates are even worse--even today, there are many countries where GDP may be over 25% off, and any number before 1500 may as well be pulled out of an ass.
The bigger question is if it's even reasonable to attempt to condense "power" into something quantitative. Economic power doesn't necessarily lend itself to diplomatic power: the US became the world's largest economic power sometime in the late 19th century, yet it remained a diplomatic lightweight pretty much until the climax of WWI.
This makes sense only if this measures the power of the "empire" rather than the power/GDP of the region. "China" made roughly 20-40% of the world total population [1]. If you include nearby regions not under their control, Japan, Korea, Vietnam and also include India; you are pretty much looking at the population of most of the world. This is still true even today.
This region has the best geography to create massive populations. And massive amounts of people generally correlated with massive powers. The only exception to this was during the early periods of globalization that culminated in Colonialism.
Empires do wither out but their populations do not mostly disappear; which gives "re-birth" to other empires. China-India were always the center of the world but the same couldn't be said for their empires.
Even the first sentence hints in that direction. "A timeline of your country’s whole history stretching back to its inception" would be fairly short for almost all countries unless the label is applied retroactively to multiple coexisting more-and-less intertwined local centres of influence.
For those interested in the history of such history maps, I can highly recommend the book of Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton: "Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline", Princeton Architectural Press 2012. Unfortunately it seems to be out of print, but you might be able to get hold of a second-hand copy. . -- A German translation under the title: "Die Zeit in Karten: Eine Bilderreise durch die Geschichte" is still available.
Without context this map seems to be ridiculously wrong, until you learn that it was created in 1931 by an American, and as a product of that time includes all possible Eurocentric biases. For example, on that map thousands of years of American history are missing. Inka? Aztecs? Mali in Africa? Khmer empire in South-East Asia? Majapahit?
It would be interesting to see more modern visualization that has more focus on cultural and technological achievements rather than on wars and power games.
I'd love to have this. Not just an updated visualization for 2024, but an ongoing project, with an automatic visualization generator, and the data behind that visualization open-sourced, in such a format that invited the history nerds to contribute wiki-style. Even though it will never be "perfect", hitting some 80% mark of relevance/accuracy would be a tremendous boon to anyone studying history.
You might perhaps be interested in my ongoing side-project "Factonaut" at https://www.factonaut.com/ It is a (closed-source) Windows application that allows you to compile historical events in a knowledgebase and easily create chronological overviews. Currently it only supports very simple chronological tables, not maps. The project is in an early stage, and I have a huge to-do list, but only little free-time to work on it. But the application is useable. Its main speciality is that it can handle Julian and Gregorian calendar dates in the same chronology and sort them correctly.
Looks interesting. But, I want something open-source that runs on Linux, takes csv/json as input, and generates a clickable .svg. We come from different worlds :)
Indeed Americans are even worse than Europeans in "(dis)missing the rest of the planet". Have no idea how selective the default is on the other side of the planet, though I can only hope it is _less so_.
Inventions and discoveries sounds as something as close to "objective" as we can get. Cultural would be interesting, but I believe more heavily dependent on the author of the comparison than the achievements.
I wonder if geographical spread of language families would be a decent proxy for that. Though I guess that biases the record in favour of writing systems. Also wouldn't capture second languages which is how a lot of culture spreads. (I should know; English is not my first language.)
I was thinking about something similar, but from a different angle. Language history can demonstrate connections between peoples, times and places. The words show what was important enough to be encoded: say, we have the word „computer“ and it means that very important technology has been developed. Looking at such words we can judge on what could be included on the timeline, which discoveries and inventions have been made. We may find for some words how old are they and what could be their origin. We may trace the words and language structures across continents and thousands of years and reason about technology and knowledge needed for such journey, what climate was there etc. This would create a very interesting map.
I'm really impressed with volume of this work, but I cannot understand, why Ukrainian cossacks not mentioned at all (mixed with USSR), while really saved independent culture and independent mind.
To be exact, peak of cossacks was about 1655 year (yes, unions with Poland and Lithuanian), after which happen quasi-voluntary merge with Russians, and from that time nearly constantly exists Ukrainian anti-empire resistance, mostly eliminated only in mid 1950s, with build of Kakhovka dam, which just flood cossacks.
But more than poking fun at the specific issues in this attempt (and there are many to be sure), I strongly suspect that there's no way to even responsibly attempt such an endeavor. Quantitative data is simply lacking for much of history. Population demographics for well-attested areas such as the Roman Empire at its height is difficult to establish, but if you try to apply it to, say, pre-Columbian North America, the estimates vary by orders of magnitude. GDP estimates are even worse--even today, there are many countries where GDP may be over 25% off, and any number before 1500 may as well be pulled out of an ass.
The bigger question is if it's even reasonable to attempt to condense "power" into something quantitative. Economic power doesn't necessarily lend itself to diplomatic power: the US became the world's largest economic power sometime in the late 19th century, yet it remained a diplomatic lightweight pretty much until the climax of WWI.