Map Thread XIX

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Another map for my Thousand Week Reich timeline.

Full thread here: https://www.alternatehistory.com/fo...ich-a-realistic-nazi-victory-scenario.444582/

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Proto-Danubian Sprachräume

This one isn't entirely a shitpost, I promise:

The 'Tablet of the Priestess'

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Arising in the Early Bronze Age, the Danubian city-state of Iwüŋessa rapidly attained hegemony over much of the Danube and its branch rivers on OTL’s Bulgarian-Romanian border, becoming a local power with diplomatic and trade connections to northern Anatolia, Colchis, the Minoans and Egypt at times. However, by 1400 BC, Iwüŋessa had entered an increasingly rapid decline caused by a combination of soil exhaustion, overexploitation of copper deposits in OTL’s Serbia, disruption of trade routes and rebellions among client peoples: this culminated in the abandonment of the site altogether by 1250 BC.

The ‘Tablet of the Priestess’, discovered in the complex of Iwüŋessa’s ‘Temple of the Otter’ and tentatively dated to 1375 BC, provides multiple avenues for historical review. Its front (shown on the map above) depicts a sigil of Iwüŋessa, a stylised depiction of its control over the surrounding river system – arguably the world’s first proper map showing a location and its environs, rather than providing assistance with a specific journey. This sigil is surrounded by untranslated Proto-Danubian A lettering which would have been archaic even by the time of the Tablet’s preparation (perhaps in a desperate attempt to restore the former glory of the city-state).

The hymn inscribed on the back provides a remarkable psychological insight into the priestly classes at a time when state power was in the process of disintegrating due to a combination of natural and political causes: entirely unlike any other devotional text that has so far been recovered, its concern with barrenness as an extended metaphor and its use of language suggests closer links with Syrian and Near Eastern thought than had previously been believed.

A suggested reconstruction of the hymn is set out below:

“And I passed into the antechamber and I inquired of the attendant where <the goddess> may be; for all good things had passed from the earth and the [screech-owl] cried out to its mate in the [barren places] and the lion cried out <one to another> in the barren places;

And the attendant opened the door to the chamber and I passed beyond the antechamber into the chamber;

And there <the goddess> lay on a [pallet/bed/altar] and clutched her [belly/womb] and lamented for no [child/life] could find purchase in her belly and from her navel the good things of the land and water were no longer brought forth;

And she no longer had the red stone [copper?] to give, nor anything <else> good that lay below her navel, for her <womb> was poisoned and from it only the [beasts] of the barren land would grow;

And the [screech-owl] would cry out to its mate in the [barren places] and the lion would cry out <one to another> in the barren places.”

 
Wait... why was Germany allowed to keep Austria?

It's not really 'keeping' as much as 'being punished together' When direct occupation of Germany ends in the late 60s, Germany becomes an extremely loose confederation of states, one of which is Austria, since Austria is considered part of Germany now. They are all disarmed, their military industry dismantled, and various restrictions put on them. Austria was not lucky by remaining 'part' of the German confederation, more they were lumped in to the 'quarantined' state too.
 
~~The Great American Snip~~

You're probably all thinking "That's cool and all, dude, but what does it have to do with your map?" Well, I kinda had a mini-epiphany (a lukewarm light bulb is aglow above my head) and realized that alternate history really can't be adopted into traditional media like movies or books, and while TV shows usually come out better than most movies do, the medium still isn't suited for it. So how do we get around this? The answer? Use the world of an alternate history as a backdrop for a character-driven story. A movie about Robert E. Lee winning at Gettysburg would not do well, but a movie about a black family within a collapsing Confederacy in the 1970s? Now that's a story.

You had the same realization that inspired my Communist Confederacy works - novels about the CSA winning the Civil War have been done to death, as have novels set in a surviving Confederacy, from Bring the Jubilee to Turtledove's TL 191.

Thus, while I am working on short stories from throughout the period, what timeline there is - debating actually posting one to the forums, so long as it doesn't hurt the odds of publishing the novel - focuses on subverting common tropes and highlighting just what kind of place the CSA would have become, ie, an impoverished hellhole where getting rid of slavery is literally impossible. And the main work is a spy novel set in a vaguely dieselpunk 1940s - because steam has been done to death, and frankly, dieselpunk is cooler - focused on an OSS recruit making his way across a rump Confederacy that underwent a communist revolution a generation prior. Within the novel, the alternate Civil War so many other works fixate on is just what it would have been in OTL - history in the background, that a few brief relevant mentions aside, is mostly untouched on.

Oddly, I actually think I know what caused this focus within the AH genre - it's a focus on worldbuilding over storytelling. I'll be the first to admit, my weakness as a writer of fiction is that while I'm wildly creative at worldbuilding, and courtesy of years spent as a reporter, have a knack for memorable characters and dialog, I'm total rubbish at coming up with plots giving them things to do, which is a bad weakness for a writer to have. Part of what I love about AH is that it's as worldbuilding heavy as Fantasy, where most of the stories have already been written, and you just have to take things in a different direction.
 
Here's something I whipped up. Basically I expanded on my Polwank from the last thread and came up with some details about one of the wars that occurs in it. I'm not sure if it's plausible, or even good, but here it is:

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The War of the Turkish Succession

In 1867, the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire died without an heir, setting off a succession crisis. Within the Turkish Empire, sides were taken. Sakir Terzi and Nermin Aslan ended up being the two nobles who could come to rule the Empire. Aslan had fought in the Caucasus and the Sahara, and he promised to make Turkey more powerful than ever. His vision of what that meant was vague, but his promises ranged from the realistic - an invasion of Circassia and Crimea - to those that nobody took seriously, such as conquering Rome or Morocco. Terzi on the other hand, was a diplomat. He wanted to strengthen the Empire's bonds with its neighbors, especially the Arabic tribes which he claimed would eventually be brought into the Empire.

Poland and Turkey had had a surprisingly cordial relationship for the past couple of centuries (aside from the occasional war over Moldavia). The Ottoman Empire had even supported the Polish-Lithuanian Federation with its new democratic government, while most of the West was convinced that the Polish Revolution would lead to another Horatio Nelson. With this in mind, it was only natural that Poland-Lithuania would take a side in the Turkish Crisis. Terzi made sure that side would be his - promising an independent Transylvania and Lower Hungary in exchange for the Federation's support. The Holy Roman Empire set aside their historic rivalry with Poland-Lithuania to also support Terzi, for two reasons: an independent Lower Hungary would mean there was more between Vienna and the Turks than the thin strip of land that was Upper Hungary, and annexing Lower Hungary to the Empire would give the Catholic, monarchist south an advantage against the Protestant, republican north.

Persia was busy extending its reach eastwards - Russia was creeping south through Central Asia, while France's Domaine de Delhi had already made one state in the Indus Valley a vassal, it wouldn't be long before one or both of them was able to threaten Persia's borders. A destabilized Turkey would have been an opportunity if Persia wanted to expand west, but instead if the Turkish Empire fell to pieces, the Europeans might threaten Persia from the west as well, so it was in the Persian Empire's interests to end the Turkish crisis as soon as possible. Aslan was out of the question - while he'd said nothing about Persia, an expansionist Turkey was a Turkey that might decide its border with Persia could be pushed to the east.

Russia and Sweden both wanted to take a bite out of Poland-Lithuania: Sweden wanted the Federation's Baltic coast, and Russia wanted Rusynia, Galicia, and Moldavia to start with. While they'd both avoided war with Poland since the Fifth Northern War and the Horatian Wars shortly after, those had been decades ago. Now they believed Poland would be weaker - it was less than twenty years after the Polish Revolution, after all, and the Federation had not gone to war since then. So when Poland-Lithuania intervened in the Turkish crisis in support of Terzi, Russia and Sweden immediately counter-intervened in support of Aslan.

Russia, Sweden, and Poland had been the three most influential powers on the Baltic for centuries, but Denmark had a foothold in that sea too, however small, and the Danes did not want to see Sweden become any more powerful, so when Russia and Sweden invaded the Polish-Lithuanian Federation, Denmark declared war on Russia and Sweden. Seeing an opportunity, France declared war on the Holy Roman Empire with the aim of 'securing France's natural borders.' In response, the British Republic declared war on France. The war eventually spilled over into North America as well, when the intermittent wars between the colonies (and between those colonies and the former colonies that had won their independence decades earlier) resumed.

The war lasted for nine years, and would have repercussions for long after that, but in 1876 the Treaty of Budapest officially ended the fighting.

The Terzi dynasty would rule the Turkish Empire for another fifty-three years, but no longer. The independence of Transylvania and Lower Hungary would backfire as Wallachia, Serbia, Croatia, Albania, Montenegro, Greece, and eventually Rumelia started to demand their own independence. At the same time, the military had largely supported Aslan and had suffered heavy losses during the war. The remaining troops resented the Terzi dynasty, and there would be many attempted coups over the years.

France's empire had been shattered. Corsica and Sardinia were now part of Savoy, and therefore the Holy Roman Empire. The Low Countries were divided between Britain and a restored Dutch Republic. The Domaine of Delhi was the Protectorate of Delhi once more, Gujarat was self-governing again, Spain was no longer a French Domain and was in Portugal's sphere of influence, and Catalonia had been severed from France. Portugal and Britain had divided France's remaining colonies between themselves, with the exception of the Domain of Acadia which was instead forced to recognize Canada's independence and Denmark's claims in the Far North.

The Holy Roman Empire, while on the victorious side, had not come out of the war well. The Swedish and French invasions had mostly harmed the northern states, which had opposed the war in the first place. Meanwhile, the south's dreams of bringing Lower Hungary into the fold would not come to pass: first of all, Lower Hungary was not Upper Hungary - the main religion was Orthodox Christianity with significant Muslim and Jewish minorities, unlike the almost universally Catholic Upper Hungary and where Upper Hungarians mostly spoke Latin and German (except for the peasants), Lower Hungarians spoke, well, Hungarian, as well as Turkish; secondly, fighting on the same side in this one war had not erased the rivalry between Vienna and Krakow, and as the Polish-Lithuanian Federation extended its influence into the Carpathians, conflict with the Holy Roman Empire over Lower Hungary would be inevitable. With the North German Uprising of 1890-1893 and the Hungarian War of 1913-1916, the Holy Roman Empire was on the way out.

Sweden had been humiliated more than anything. With a destroyed navy, Scania lost to the Danes, Pomerania to the Germans, and Estonia to the Poles, the Swedish Empire had taken a blow. Sweden would attempt revenge in the Hungarian War, allying with the Holy Roman Empire against Poland-Lithuania, but the Central Alliance would win that war and all Sweden would get is an independent Finland.

Of all the losers, Russia had lost the least. Poland-Lithuania had taken Livonia and forced the Russian Empire to demilitarize Ingria, Ukraine, and the Russian side of the Rusyn border, but nothing more. After Russian troops had been expelled from Poland, the war in that theater had become a war of attrition, and the Polish-Lithuanian government had no interest in expanding east or losing troops by marching further into Russia than necessary.

Speaking of Poland, the Polish-Lithuanian Federation was arguably the biggest victor of the war: Livonia and Estonia were Federation territories and would soon become Republics; the Federation had proved that the Commonwealth's military strength had not diminished after the Revolution; the Federal navy had defeated Sweden in battle, showing that the Baltic coast was finally safe; and they had the newly independent Transylvania and Lower Hungary as fellow republics and potential allies; Bessarabia would be annexed and become part of Moldavia in 17 years; and while industrialization had started decades earlier, now Poland-Lithuania would have decades of peace to complete the process.

The Kingdom of Denmark had two things to show for their part in the war: they could proceed with their aspirations in North America without having to worry about Acadian aggression, and with Scania back in Danish hands they had a slightly larger foothold in the Baltic. The Kingdom of Portugal had expelled France from Iberia and gained some degree of control over Spain and Catalonia - and on top of that, the Domain of the Bengal was Portuguese now. The Dutch Republic, while smaller in size, was free once more and controlled Delhi again, and the government-in-exile was able to return from Dutch Indonesia.

As for the British Republic, the last major war they'd fought in had been a humiliation. The War of the Turkish Succession was Britain's comeback from the Horatian Wars. They'd also gained several of France's colonies in Africa and some land in the Low Countries. Not only that, Britain could now properly consolidate its power in the Malaysian Archipelago without having to worry about French aggression. Nationalism was already on the rise, the Dravidan independence movement was about to get started, and socialists were meeting in London, York, and Manchester, but for now the British Republic was doing well.

[Yeah, when I have ideas they spawn other ideas and then the above happens. Also, I got Terzi's and Aslan's names from an online name generator that I set to Turkish. I don't know if they're realistic for mid-19th Century Ottoman nobles.]
 
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A map of the world in a novel I'm working on. Austria-Hungary stopped collaborating with Germany in the late 1900's and pursued a policy of neutrality and decentralization. The green areas are called Territories of International Sovereignity, and are in fact part of no country. The first territory to be administred this way was Antarctica, with the Argentinian government being mandated to do the few paperwork needed. The Weddell Sea was added to the TIS later. The second was the moon, administred by the US as they were the firsts to land on the moon in the mid 80's, and the first inhabited territory to be under this status was Amazonia, in exchange for a bail out after the terrible economic crisis Brazil suffered from in the 90s.

Africa has been officially decolonized during the Conferency of Johannesburg, where all the colonial empires met (except Portugal, that refused at the last moment) to draw the borders of the new states, helped by ethnologists and pacific independantists. The case of the Congolese territories is a bit specific, as the inhabitants only used the status of internationally recognized state to be left alone. When the Amazonian International Territory became a place where it was officially possible to live under conditions (no volunteer forest fires, no definitive building, no private property, limited hunting, no motors and so on), they demanded to be considered by the oustide as a territory, as Western-like governments had brought them nothing but pain.

As there is few exploited mineral oil resources, the human population is less important (4.8 billions in 2000) and there's less energy consumption per person (they don't have as much electronics as we do and have nothing similar to internet on a global scale for instance), the climate change is still happening, but slowlier, and as the phenomenon seems to evolve stably and slowly, they are still debating if the humans are the cause or not, or if it is some kind of geological or astronomical event.

This world is not an utopia, maybe some quarter-utopia in some fields like environment, as there are still border disputes, most technologies are less advanced, also in the medical field, and the general domestic comfort is lower than OTL, but I think this is a world I'd rather live in. I say this but I keep in mind that I lack the knowledge of some areas, and as it was not designed to be a utopia, some countries had a very complicated history (the main exemple I think of is Brazil in this TL) and some stuffs are done with no intent of being better than in our world (like the Brunei wank or the split of Belgium)



Also, you probably have noticed the poor design quality, so do you guys have some kind of advice for situations like these where there's around a hundred states and you don't know how to produce different enough colors to color all the countries ?
 
Also, you probably have noticed the poor design quality, so do you guys have some kind of advice for situations like these where there's around a hundred states and you don't know how to produce different enough colors to color all the countries ?

I mean, there are dozens of color schemes produced on this site for this exact purpose.
 
I mean, there are dozens of color schemes produced on this site for this exact purpose.

I must admit I haven't really looked at them for two (lame) reasons : I do my maps on paint (or gimp when that damn shift key works, which means almost never) so I can't choose in a color scheme, and I often get confused by all the different colors and possibilities until I forget what I was actually looking for
 
I must admit I haven't really looked at them for two (lame) reasons : I do my maps on paint (or gimp when that damn shift key works, which means almost never) so I can't choose in a color scheme, and I often get confused by all the different colors and possibilities until I forget what I was actually looking for
What do you mean, you can't choose a color scheme in Paint? I exclusively use MS Paint and Paint 3D to make my maps, and what I do is I keep a separate Paint 3D window open at all times with SUCK on it, and when I need a color, I just copy/paste a square of the color from the SUCK diagram to the map, and then Eyedropper that square to use the color.
 
What do you mean, you can't choose a color scheme in Paint? I exclusively use MS Paint and Paint 3D to make my maps, and what I do is I keep a separate Paint 3D window open at all times with SUCK on it, and when I need a color, I just copy/paste a square of the color from the SUCK diagram to the map, and then Eyedropper that square to use the color.

DUH I'm so very dumb o.o

Thank you for the trick, it was so evident that I didn't think of it, I'll try to find a color scheme I like
 
What do you mean, you can't choose a color scheme in Paint? I exclusively use MS Paint and Paint 3D to make my maps, and what I do is I keep a separate Paint 3D window open at all times with SUCK on it, and when I need a color, I just copy/paste a square of the color from the SUCK diagram to the map, and then Eyedropper that square to use the color.

Heck I just use MS Paint, with a separate window with TOASTER open.
 
DUH I'm so very dumb o.o

Thank you for the trick, it was so evident that I didn't think of it, I'll try to find a color scheme I like

Alternatively you can just stretch the Paint canvas wide open and have a copy of the colour scheme on the same page as the map. Admittedly this can be cumbersome as you need to zoom out/in to get to the colours, but it avoids having to minimise/maximise pages all the time. Then all you need to do is use the dropper tool.
 
Today is Argentina's Independence Day, and you bet I have some maps ready.

First a mild Argentina wank, with most of the post 1853 territorial claims:

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Second, an United Provinces of the Río De La Plata.

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Third, the Imperio Unido de Sudamérica under Capaq Inka Tupác Amaru III, plus the Netherlands (royal marriage through Queen Máxima) and the Holy See protectorate.

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(Off-world colonies not shown)
 
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