Map Thread XIX

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Continuing in the Kurgan-free Otterverse:

The Taman Wreck and the world's oldest 'map'

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Discovered in the Kerch Strait and carbon-dated to 1771 BC ± 50y, the Taman Shipwreck provides an invaluable insight into material culture and trade in the early Bronze Age Danubian city-states that succeeded the Vylkove Culture. A sewn-plank ship reconstructed as being roughly 14m long by 3m wide, the vessel foundered in a sudden storm while laden with trade goods and was almost immediately buried in silt, preserving the ship’s contents to a remarkable degree.

A reconstruction of the ship has shown that it would have been seaworthy enough to undertake quite lengthy journeys around the Black Sea either under oar or sail power (although it is highly likely that such journeys as were seldom involved travelling more than a mile or so from the coast except where absolutely necessary). Analyses of the ship’s cargo has unearthed copper sickles and ceremonial axes, ornate pottery, tin (transported from the Erzgebirge to the Danube and then ferried to the Black Sea) and cage-like structures tentatively identified as intended to store hunting otters for export): it is likely that these goods were intended for exchange along the Colchian coast for timber, gold and honey.

The most intriguing find in the shipwreck, however, is a bone fragment about fifteen inches long, which bears deliberate markings on one side: these have (controversially) been identified as comprising, in part, the world’s oldest physical map or itinerary, covering the salient geographical features which could be used as way-points when sailing from an unknown point of origin in the Danube delta (potentially linked with the slightly later city-state of Kütuŋessu. A possible reconstruction of the route (and identification of specific marks with the coastline of the Black Sea) is shown above.
This is incredibly cool. Will this world end up developing a horse analog? Perhaps some version of reindeer or cattle (perhaps even something elephant related?) bred for more horse-like characteristics? Or will this world depend much more heavily on maritime travel to move things around?
 
Here's a project I knocked out over the last couple of days inspired by @Daeres' Crumpleverse maps. This map in particular was developed for my gonzo Star Trek mashup project, the important bits of which can be found in my signature. I'd add more words here but honestly the damn thing's got enough words on it as it is, so I think I'll let it speak for itself:

The idea that I've inspired anyone is ridiculously flattering. Your graphic itself is great, and does feel Trek to look at even with the alterations.
 
View attachment 470900
Here we have Europe and parts of the middle east and africa from Chester A. Arthur's For All Time, circa 1960.

That Bulgarian possession in northwestern Anatolia offends me. Deeply. I hate it.

For me, is not so much the fact that Bulgaria owns territory in northeast Anatolia as it is that the borders are... a little wonky there.

Maybe the author of the timeline gave the specifications for as a rough approximation.
 
For me, is not so much the fact that Bulgaria owns territory in northeast Anatolia as it is that the borders are... a little wonky there.

Maybe the author of the timeline gave the specifications for as a rough approximation.
One of the bigger issues I would say is how the provinces are cut in two rather than being added to a larger one nearby. Makes the straight lines seem even more jarring, like the border was set up just the day before. And looking at the UK, it does seem weird Northern Ireland is the only part of the group with subdivisions.
 
One of the bigger issues I would say is how the provinces are cut in two rather than being added to a larger one nearby. Makes the straight lines seem even more jarring, like the border was set up just the day before. And looking at the UK, it does seem weird Northern Ireland is the only part of the group with subdivisions.

A more organic border for Bulgaria would be to give the country roughly everything that would have been part of the Zone of the Straits as stipulated by the Treaty of Sèvres (aside from Istanbul/Constantinople itself, which goes directly to the USSR) in addition to Greek and Turkish Thrace.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Sèvres#/media/File:Treaty_of_Sèvres_1920.svg
 
I also have an alternate timeline of this timeline departing from this in 1933. The point of divergence is European powers not intervening in Congolese Communist Revolution against the Belgians that led to partition of Congo. That not happening allowed the creation of a socialist republic in the Congo. there were several departures that created a smaller but more widespread and multipolar socialist world. German and Ottoman empires survived in Congoverse when in 1918TL they fell to socialist rule. Collapse of the Socialist world was also different in these timelines. In 1918TL only Peoples Republic of China and 5 puppet states remained while in Congoverse there is the 10 nation New Comintern (also known as the 5th Internationale) while the Soviet Union and Peoples Republic of China both fell apart in which Republic of China reclaimed the Mainland. There was a Morocco wank in this verse too but *EU dismantled it. They are currently trying to decide what to do with the Sahara.
View attachment 470754

Edit: it is 2019 in this map

Just realized that I kinda have another atl of this because I worked on these maps for fun on different computers. They are common up to 1980 and then the different one goes up to 1993. It is different but I can't really call it worse and am currently debating whether I should delete those or not.
 
Here's a project I knocked out over the last couple of days inspired by @Daeres' Crumpleverse maps. This map in particular was developed for my gonzo Star Trek mashup project, the important bits of which can be found in my signature. I'd add more words here but honestly the damn thing's got enough words on it as it is, so I think I'll let it speak for itself:

Nitpick: Nova São Paulo, not Nuevo/a São Paulo
 

Isaac Beach

Banned
@HowAboutThisForAName i’ll miss you man, you were such a good mapmaker and presence on the forum. good luck with all your adventures, and i wish you, your bf (husband? idk) and melon the best.

i bid you farewell.

Awwh. It's a little self absorbed, admittedly, but being described as a presence is really nice and reassuring that my time here wasn't a waste. Partner, but we're coming up to our four year anniversary so you know, wait and see I suppose.

That's a great tribute to my map, many thanks!

I hope I was able to do it justice! Thank you for making the scenario.

Well, I'm sorry to hear it. I'll miss you and your work: I've always enjoyed your maps, and if you feel discouraged by people with superior mapping techniques, imagine how I, still using MS Paint, feel!

(Of course, that's because I'm a procrastinating wanker who can't gin up the motivation to learn how to use a superior system. What are all the cool kids using nowadays, anyway?)

I wish you the best in your new endeavors, and if you manage to get a book out either in electronic or dead-tree format, please let us know.

Hey don't short sell yourself, you're still better at making Worlda's then near about every other AH'er I've met. I certainly use your maps as the standard when making my own. The cool system these days is probably qgis, baffled me though (and my poor hard drive).

Ha! Dead-tree format, that made me genuinely laugh. I most certainly will! I'm already shopping about to get some of my short stories published. Thank you for your well wishes.

@HowAboutThisForAName it was always nice having you dude. I hope your future endeavours run smoothly!

Hey thanks man, I greatly appreciate the sentiment.
 
~~The Great American War~~

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So, there's an interesting backstory to this series of maps. For a while now, I've been thinking of ways to translate alternate history into something like a book or a movie. I've read Harry Turtledove's books and the like, but they usually come off to me as... stale and drawn-out. Maybe it's because I haven't found the right books, but, in my opinion, the best way to tell an alternate history story is on a site like this one online, in a series of posts that act as mini-chapters. This is because alternate history timelines don't really translate well into character-driven storytelling, as timelines usually happen over a period of decades, centuries, or even millennia, and therefore any characters you have are going to die out pretty soon. Honestly, the only real way I can see a traditional AH timeline like the ones on this site and throughout the Internet working in traditional media is as a very long series of comic books/graphic novels. The other problem with bringing AH into the limelight is the fact that the average person just doesn't care about history, nor know enough about it to see what's off. That's why the most famous and well-known pieces of alternate history media have PODs in WWII (The Man in the High Castle, Fatherland) or in the Civil War (Bring the Jubilee, 1862), or they somehow manage to smash both topics into one (Harry Turtledove's TL-191 series). Those two conflicts are what most people know about, at least in the United States, with the American Revolution and WWI coming as distant seconds, since if you mention the name Austria-Hungary to someone on the street and they'll probably think you're not right in the head. (This clip from an episode of Friends, I think, perfectly illustrates how much most people know about history.)

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.

Case in point: welcome to a world where the United States of America, for some reason or another, adopted a monarchy at the end of the Revolution. The reasoning isn't really important. In this timeline, America became a much more divided and culturally diverse place, as the doctrine of Manifest Destiny never unfolded in the US east of the Mississippi. But then, something very similar to it (actually more in line with Italian or German unification manifestos) arises at the turn of the twentieth century. All of North America, by this point, is firmly monarchist, and tied up in a web of global alliances. In 1910, the American king and Californian queen marry, uniting the countries as one under the banner of the United Empire of Columbia. Their neighbors don't like this one bit, and so the Great American War kicks up, itself a significant part of the larger global Great War.

So then, what would my story set in this world focus on? A brave young soldier in the Columbian Army? The new Emperor in his palace in San Francisco? A total nobody in Tennessee only slightly affected by the conflict?

The story would focus on none of these. The story has nothing to do with the Great American War. The story I've thought up for this timeline is a heist movie set in ATL 2019, following the best thieves in the world on their attempt to steal the American crown jewels. The story is definitely alternate history, but not in the traditional sense. It takes place in an alternate timeline, but doesn't really focus on that fact. The movie or book or whatever uses the United Empire of Columbia as a setting, while focusing on characters audiences can follow.

That was a long rant. I'm sure what I said has been said or suggested before, and I'm sure there's someone/something out there that has attempted this. I dunno. I just needed to empty my brain. (Also, I hope this doesn't count as going over "three maps per day," since the maps are all so closely related.)

~~Peace out.
 
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~~The Great American Snip~~

It's a cool idea, but considering the average person's understanding of AH they wouldn't get the idea and say "oh yeah but we don't have crown jewels retard" and then shittalk it. That, and it doesn't have that much for alternate history fans. Unless the scenario is the main focus and everything else is revolving around it, we probably won't have enough info to really dig deep into the POD and the real meat of the subject at hand.
 
It's a cool idea, but considering the average person's understanding of AH they wouldn't get the idea and say "oh yeah but we don't have crown jewels retard" and then shittalk it. That, and it doesn't have that much for alternate history fans. Unless the scenario is the main focus and everything else is revolving around it, we probably won't have enough info to really dig deep into the POD and the real meat of the subject at hand.
I mean, that's just a very, very early draft of what that idea could eventually become (or it might just fizzle out and die in the depths of my imagination, who knows). But it'd be made very clear from the beginning that the United States of America is a monarchy, and is very different from what ordinary people know, but still familiar enough for the setting to not be totally alien. I'd give it a tagline or something that makes it clear this is alternate history. And as for the scenario lacking a lot of meat to it... yeah, that's kind of the point. I thought this up as a "baby's first AH" idea, something to interest new people in the topic. You've gotta work towards something more complex, because, as I said, the average human being doesn't give two shits about anything in history before 1939, 1941 if they're American. This is also an attempt to distance AH from its stereotype of it being intrinsically offensive--after all, when your two biggest scenarios are "the Nazis win WWII" and "the South wins the Civil War", that's kind of what it looks like to an outsider.
 
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The United Kingdoms of the Isles

Demonym: Eilander or Islander
Languages: Standard Eilander, dialects include Norn, Sodorn, and Monic; Scots-Gaelic, spoken as a second language
Population: ~280,000 (84,000 in Mön; 96,000 in Sodor; 100,000 in Nordor)
Flag:
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History:
[excerpt partially adapted from my post in this thread] Around the 12th century, the Kingdom of the Isles simmered under Godred Olafsson's rule, leading to a plot against him led by Somerled, Lord of Argyll. This however would be quashed, and Godred with a heavy hand defeated other rivals to the throne. Though the Scots played a part in Islander politics, the Isles would remain a province under Norwegian, and later Danish, control, with Scottish aims of taking it thwarted largely by the Norse-Scottish alliance against the English. The Isles would become a naval power, its sailors often hired as a counter to the English by Scots and local Irish kings, and later by Hanseatic merchants against the growing control of the Dutch. The Isles would eventually be merged with the Earldom of Orkney[4], the Faroes, Iceland, and Greenland when Norway was united with Denmark.

During the 1800s, nationalism began to grow in the Islanders; continental wars would lead to the union being divided, creating separate kingdoms of Norway, Denmark, and the Isles with the capital in Reykjavik. The smaller islands chafed under Iceland's hegemony, leading to independence movements in which the southern isles gained status as a separate country within the United Kingdoms of the Isles, now composed of the Kingdom of Mön(capital: Tynvollr), the Kingdom of Nordor(capital: Kirkvoe), and the Kingdom of Sodor with the local and union capital at Stjornovagr. Further devolution of powers would lead to greater autonomy of states: Nordor would give autonomy to Hjaltlandseyjar and Færeyjar, while Sodor would cede power to Skíð, Myl, Íl, and Arran.
 

Skallagrim

Banned
It's a cool idea, but considering the average person's understanding of AH they wouldn't get the idea and say "oh yeah but we don't have crown jewels retard" and then shittalk it. That, and it doesn't have that much for alternate history fans. Unless the scenario is the main focus and everything else is revolving around it, we probably won't have enough info to really dig deep into the POD and the real meat of the subject at hand.

It depends on presentation. You need an engaging story to get the general public to watch it, and a cool setting to get alternate history fans and associated groups to watch it. You don't need to focus on the AH aspect too much. I think The Man in the High Castle has done this right, in that it's mostly driven by the plot, mostly uses visuals to show us how different its world is, and doesn't spend a lot of time going into the actual history.

Something like that, except with something more fun than Nazis, would work just fine. @HeX is onto something, I think. The central plot (stealing the crown jewels) is still related to the AH premise, but is not alien in its essential nature. Quite the opposite. Its a recognisable story in a different world.
 
I'd imagine that would be the Onager, considering that they were used for wagon-pulling IOTL before Horses made their way to Mesopotamia.

I'd largely agree, although I also feel that the Bactrian Camel might be a slim possibility. Depending on whether or not those theories about Exmoor ponies representing a relict population of the Eurasian Wild Horse that presumably would have been shielded from being hunted to extinction unlike the ones in Central Asia are true, Europe might be subjugated in time beneath the hooves of Bronze Age Devonian LADS ON TOUR as well.
 
The Taman Wreck and the world's oldest 'map'

Still within the Kurgan-free Otterverse:

Proto-Danubian Sprachräume

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While several artifacts associated with Phase III of the Vylkove Culture (3250-2200 BC) display markings which have been posited to represent a form of proto-writing, the first unambiguous evidence of some sort of script appears in the Culture’s successor city-states. Although untranslated, this script, largely referred to as “Proto-Danubian”, is generally believed to have been a semi-syllabic script making use of ideograms, which was used almost exclusively as an accounting tool and for religious inscriptions.

A stable syllabary of around 120 symbols appears to have developed by around 1700 BC, after which the Danube and Dneiper branches of the script increasingly diverge, with 35% on average of the symbols used in writing samples found along the Danube not being attested in Dneiper writing samples by 1550 BC. This divergence has led to widespread academic acceptance of the theory that the Danube and Dneiper branches of the post-Vylkove city-states had sufficiently culturally and linguistically diverged to treat Proto-Danubian texts dated to this period as two separate languages (tentatively referred to as “Proto-Danubian A” and “Proto-Danubian B” respectively). A reconstruction of the areas in which Proto-Danubian A and Proto-Danubian B were used is shown above.

The Taoriwussa Letter

Discovered in a midden site in Eŋüeti (a city on the Dneiper which contained roughly 50,000 people at its Late Bronze Age peak) and tentatively dated to 1250 BC, this Danubian text represents the first letter from one private individual to another identified in the Danubian culture. The full text of this letter, detailing a complaint between two merchants, is tentatively reconstructed below:

"Tell Sena’i: Taoriwussa sends the following message:

When you came, you said to me as follows: "I will fill your [ship/canoe] <when it comes> with fine hunting otters." You left then but you did not do what you promised me. You placed an otter with no teeth before my messenger and said: "If you want to take her, <take her>; <if you do> not want to take them, go away!"

What do you take me for, that you treat somebody like me with such contempt? I have sent as messengers gentlemen like ourselves to collect the bag with my amber (deposited with you) but you have treated me with contempt by sending them back to me empty-handed several times, and that through dangerous waters. Is there anyone among the merchants who trade with Eŋüeti who has treated me in this way? You alone treat my messenger with contempt! On account of that one <trifling> [measure] of which I owe <?>you, you feel free to speak in such a way, while I have given to the temple on your behalf three [tributes/bags/measures] of fine-wrought copper, and Diwuŋata has likewise given three [measures] of amber, apart from what we both have had written on a sealed tablet to be kept in the temple of Sharü’a.

Take cognizance that (from now on) I will not accept here an otter or <indeed> any other [beast] from you that is not of fine quality. I shall (from now on) select and take the [beasts] individually in my own yard, and I shall exercise against you my right of rejection because you have treated me with contempt."
 
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Precisely - glad you noticed. I've always loved the fact that the oldest proper letter between two individuals that survives is about a rather petty complaint between two merchants about copper quality. "Speaking to the manager" is probably one of those human constants.

Also, are you planning on making this a series @XTrapnel?

Seriously considering it - if I can think of a way of doing it without treading on the toes of "The Book of the Holy Mountain" too much, I might give it a go.
 
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