Map Thread XXII

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A map from my post on Imperator Michael Alexandrovich who lives in a Russia where Nicholas II was killed in 1905 and he ascended to the Throne. WW1 and the Revolution still happen, but the Whites won the civil war, but Alexandrovich in turn was ousted by a dictator in 1935, rallying the remaining Imperial forces to hold the East. This is map of the Russian Empire and neighbours from 1937.

The thread is: Famous People from an Alternate Universe REDUX.
 
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1. is a collection of Roman Successor states. Trying to fill a map with as many "Empires" claiming to be the true successor of Rome as possible while adding religious chaos and decentralization/feudalization.
And here is a map series about a slightly similar scenario focusing only on England, Wales and Northern France.
Here a realm similar to the Kingdom of Soissons emerges in Wales and Western England. Therefore the growth of Anglo-Saxon kingdoms is slower.
Also multiple Roman Successor States exist in other regions of Europe.
In this sketch of a timeline, I want to give multiple British Kingdoms a chance to have their own short periods of power, leading to a fast succession of the rise and fall of various kingdoms.
Feel free to suggest improvements!

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Gou6AcI.jpg


A map from my post on Imperator Michael Alexandrovich who lives in a Russia where Nicholas II was killed in 1905 and he ascended to the Throne. WW1 and the Revolution still happen, but the Whites won the civil war, but Alexandrovich in turn was ousted by a dictator in 1935, rallying the remaining Imperial forces to hold the East. This is map of the Russian Empire and neighbours from 1937.

The thread is: Famous People from an Alternate Universe REDUX.
A state Roman von Ungern-Sternberg would love.
 
Drawing inspiration from @lou H 's map here, I made my own version of what I imagine Europe looked like around 3000 BC. Basically, everything west of the PIEs is speculation and the rest is still not for sure at this point. The ones in France and Germany and Greece are especially theoretical.

Very very cool, and seems reasonable - I would love to see more of this period featured in Alternate History, what with all of the archaeogenetic evidence coming out in the last few years giving us a clearer picture of what was going on. For example, I used to assume that the expansion of the Uralic languages into Europe preceded the Indo-European expansion, though I think the evidence is mounting that the order was the reverse (as your map would imply) with Uralic languages arriving into Finland at a time when people living there already spoke an Indo-European language.

One thing I will say though is that the numbers in Iberian give me a strong feeling that the Vasconic and Iberian languages on your map are part of a larger family. Which leads me to pose the question: which languages on this map do you think have larger relationships with one another?

My own (admittedly uncertain) take is that given the fact that most Europeans at this time derived a substantial portion (usually a majority) of their ancestry from Anatolian farmers who spread over the continent after 7000B.C., I think we may be looking at one continent-wide language family existing (so to speak) on top of another continent-wide language family.
 
It seems a bit odd that Georgetown and Alexandria would be such large cities here without the capital being around there. Is Maryland the historic shipbuilding hub for Carolina here? Then again, probably took a while for them to decide on or set up a capital in Georgia. Might be risky for the future if the river border of the capital with the Cherokee area shifts.
They're meant to be more mid-sized cities than large ones but I think that's still plausible, even without a national capital there it's still a strategic location (head of navigation of the Potomac). The main shipbuilding hub is Norfolk, and Charleston would have been the original capital before moving it to OTL Atlanta (which I think makes sense as the best place to get around the Appalachians).
 
Very very cool, and seems reasonable - I would love to see more of this period featured in Alternate History, what with all of the archaeogenetic evidence coming out in the last few years giving us a clearer picture of what was going on. For example, I used to assume that the expansion of the Uralic languages into Europe preceded the Indo-European expansion, though I think the evidence is mounting that the order was the reverse (as your map would imply) with Uralic languages arriving into Finland at a time when people living there already spoke an Indo-European language.

One thing I will say though is that the numbers in Iberian give me a strong feeling that the Vasconic and Iberian languages on your map are part of a larger family. Which leads me to pose the question: which languages on this map do you think have larger relationships with one another?

My own (admittedly uncertain) take is that given the fact that most Europeans at this time derived a substantial portion (usually a majority) of their ancestry from Anatolian farmers who spread over the continent after 7000B.C., I think we may be looking at one continent-wide language family existing (so to speak) on top of another continent-wide language family.
Yeah, that large purple area is the language of the Pre-Finno-Ugric Substrate, and would probably get replaced mostly by PIE languages before Uralic as you said. As for Iberian and Vasconic, I left them separate simply because of my lack of knowledge of their relationship, I'll probably go back and change it to combine them at some point. Finally, I was unsure of how thoroughly Anatolian farmers replaced the original people living in Europe, and even if I did make them related I wouldn't know which Anatolian language would be the best candidate to put in Europe. Lou H's original map suggested a NW Caucasian language, but I feel like something like Hattic would work just as well.
 
A redo of my map from the other day only this time with much less guesswork and speculation. Still not 100% accurate though, and probably will never be.

View attachment 841848
No offence and of course you understand this, but I think that any real map of Pre-Indo-European European language families would make this seem comically innacurate. It isn't your fault, since a realistic map of these things is probably impossible to make. Academics have made serious years-long attempts using toponyms and either come out very confused or caused endless arguing and dismissals with their hypotheses. You could even add Afro-Asiatic languages in Northwestern Europe based off this guy's speculations.

This map probably has a similar level of accuracy to those "Finno-Korean hyperwar" maps people make as a joke, not just "not 100% accurate".

With things like the Tyrsenian languages, their speakers had spent a couple thousand years inside of European cultural complexes emanating from other nearby areas of Europe (if native to Europe at all). Also the Rhaeti were in the Alps and spoke such a language, how likely is it they even originated in Italy and not somewhere else in Europe, their language tagging along with steppe invaders and later cultural spread? Villanova culture (Etruscans) is considered to be derived from/part of the Urnfield archeological cultural complex (also gave rise to the Hallstatt Celtic-speakers), which has common burial practices and gold priestly hats with solar motifs (like the Berlin Gold Hat, very distinctive and ritual-looking) so there must have been some cultural commonality. Genetically many individuals found among the Etruscans seem similar to others in the Italian peninsula around them when tested. Some people in Antiquity argued that the Etruscan language and relatives came from Anatolia into Italy, but after the Indo-European invasions. Even modern academics have argued over it due to Herodotus and others claiming this (generally agreeing ancient sources are not very reliable albeit).

Also when Romans arrived in Iberia there were multiple seemingly-unrelated languages, Basque, Iberian, Tartessian etc. Not only does this make your depiction of Iberia unlikely to be realistic, but I have a feeling that pretty much all of Europe (especially with its mountains and peninsulas that keep it divided linguistically and politically in the modern era) would be a patchwork of unrelated or seemingly-unrelated families, kind of like the Precolumbian Americas or Papua New Guinea. Furthermore even a map of Iberia's languages immediately before Roman conquest might not be representative of the peoples living there almost 2000 years prior, as the paternal lineages of these people (Y-chromosome haplogroup) show they more than encountered Indo-Europeans. Basques would be primarily something like G2a, J2 or I2 instead of R1b if this wasn't true I imagine (even if they retain their language isolate, aspects of a matrilineal social structure and some genetic/blood type uniqueness).

The substrate in Finnish is known to be quite unique and the words are not even found in Estonian but from whatever extinct language was in that particular part of Northeastern Europe at the time when the ancestors of Finns turned up in their bogs and forests. The Saami/Lapps have a different identified substrate.

Also there is some debate as to how much the pre-Germanic substrate is even a thing and to what degree the Germanic languages just have weird vocabulary/word etymologies.

Also, is there any evidence whatsoever Pelasgians and Minoans were related in language?
 
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Very very cool, and seems reasonable - I would love to see more of this period featured in Alternate History, what with all of the archaeogenetic evidence coming out in the last few years giving us a clearer picture of what was going on. For example, I used to assume that the expansion of the Uralic languages into Europe preceded the Indo-European expansion, though I think the evidence is mounting that the order was the reverse (as your map would imply) with Uralic languages arriving into Finland at a time when people living there already spoke an Indo-European language.

One thing I will say though is that the numbers in Iberian give me a strong feeling that the Vasconic and Iberian languages on your map are part of a larger family. Which leads me to pose the question: which languages on this map do you think have larger relationships with one another?

My own (admittedly uncertain) take is that given the fact that most Europeans at this time derived a substantial portion (usually a majority) of their ancestry from Anatolian farmers who spread over the continent after 7000B.C., I think we may be looking at one continent-wide language family existing (so to speak) on top of another continent-wide language family.
I think a sprachbund is far more likely than a language family.
The expansion of agriculture and its practitioners into Europe was slow, periodically stalled and stifled by climate and the cold-resistance of crop varieties, saw long-term mixing and influence from the mesolithic inhabitants on multiple fronts, and considering the nature of Anatolia/the Near East from whence they came and the fact they themselves had admixture from Natufians (not just Anatolian Hunter-Gatherers) and from European hunter gatherers whose blood had been trickling into Anatolia since the last ice age, I don't see why the pre-Indo European farmers of Europe should have been culturally homogeneous at all.

I also think sadly (since we will never really have an accurate picture) it's basically fantasy to try and feature prehistory in this genre of fiction, and by definition prehistory is not history.
 
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@Goliath Considering the similarity in vocabulary ends with some numbers, I don't think numbers being similar necessarily indicates a genetic relationship between Basque and Iberian at all. I just remembered from my high school classes (which failed to teach me the language) that Japanese, a major world language, also counts using numbers from a foreign language family (Chinese) due to a long history of cultural interaction and influence. Couldn't you dig up fragmentary evidence of Romanji and Pinyin and make the same argument thousands of years later? Numbers/counting styles make sense for languages in close cultural contact to share anyway since it'd be a simple and very useful way to communicate between them (i.e. exchanging objects, "give me three sheep", "give me five bars of copper" pointing at them to the yokel from another village)

Also, more recent understanding of Japan's population history from genetics indicates that a huge part of Japanese ancestry is not from Jomon Hunter-Gatherers or Yayoi first farmers, but from migrants of mainland Northeast Asia who flooded the island a few centuries after the birth of Christ which I think is even kind of documented lol. This didn't kill the Japanese language or make it genetically related to Chinese. Languages are dynamic and can be spread around and absorbed by their speakers in loads of weird ways, which is also why I think these maps will never be accurate.
 
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No offence and of course you understand this, but I think that any real map of Pre-Indo-European European language families would make this seem comically innacurate. It isn't your fault, since a realistic map of these things is probably impossible to make. Academics have made serious years-long attempts using toponyms and either come out very confused or caused endless arguing and dismissals with their hypotheses. You could even add Afro-Asiatic languages in Northwestern Europe based off this guy's speculations.

This map probably has a similar level of accuracy to those "Finno-Korean hyperwar" maps people make as a joke, not just "not 100% accurate".

With things like the Tyrsenian languages, their speakers had spent a couple thousand years inside of European cultural complexes emanating from other nearby areas of Europe (if native to Europe at all). Also the Rhaeti were in the Alps and spoke such a language, how likely is it they even originated in Italy and not somewhere else in Europe, their language tagging along with steppe invaders and later cultural spread? Villanova culture (Etruscans) is considered to be derived from/part of the Urnfield archeological cultural complex (also gave rise to the Hallstatt Celtic-speakers), which has common burial practices and gold priestly hats with solar motifs (like the Berlin Gold Hat, very distinctive and ritual-looking) so there must have been some cultural commonality. Genetically many individuals found among the Etruscans seem similar to others in the Italian peninsula around them when tested. Some people in Antiquity argued that the Etruscan language and relatives came from Anatolia into Italy, but after the Indo-European invasions. Even modern academics have argued over it due to Herodotus and others claiming this (generally agreeing ancient sources are not very reliable albeit).

Also when Romans arrived in Iberia there were multiple seemingly-unrelated languages, Basque, Iberian, Tartessian etc. Not only does this make your depiction of Iberia unlikely to be realistic, but I have a feeling that pretty much all of Europe (especially with its mountains and peninsulas that keep it divided linguistically and politically in the modern era) would be a patchwork of unrelated or seemingly-unrelated families, kind of like the Precolumbian Americas or Papua New Guinea. Furthermore even a map of Iberia's languages immediately before Roman conquest might not be representative of the peoples living there almost 2000 years prior, as the paternal lineages of these people (Y-chromosome haplogroup) show they more than encountered Indo-Europeans. Basques would be primarily something like G2a, J2 or I2 instead of R1b if this wasn't true I imagine (even if they retain their language isolate, aspects of a matrilineal social structure and some genetic/blood type uniqueness).

The substrate in Finnish is known to be quite unique and the words are not even found in Estonian but from whatever extinct language was in that particular part of Northeastern Europe at the time when the ancestors of Finns turned up in their bogs and forests. The Saami/Lapps have a different identified substrate.

Also there is some debate as to how much the pre-Germanic substrate is even a thing and to what degree the Germanic languages just have weird vocabulary/word etymologies.

Also, is there any evidence whatsoever Pelasgians and Minoans were related in language?
It was honestly more of a fun thought experiment more than anything it's impossible to know what languages were spoken in Europe before the advent of writing.

Yes, it's true the Villanova Culture contributed to what would become the Etruscans but so did the Terramare Culture which likely arose from a mix of Pre-Indo European and Indo-European groups in the Bell Beaker culture.

My reasoning for lumping all of Iberia together is partially in part due to what @Goliath said earlier and a lack of information, and the Tartessians aren't included because they aren't mentioned until much later.

Using genetics as a means to figure out languages isn't foolproof and there are multiple times in the past when languages have changed and the genetics stayed roughly the same, likely due to a language shift caused by a small minority of elites.

I'll admit i lumped all the Pre-Finno-Ugric substrate language together but that is also due to a lack of my own knowledge about the area.

The Bell-Beaker Culture just seemed like the perfect scapegoat to be responsible for the Germanic substrate and that's why they're labeled as such.

The Pre-Greek languages are grouped together in my map only for convenience. If you want to take a crack at a Pre-Indo-European map of Europe, I would be very interested to see it. That time period is very mysterious and i want to see what others think about it.
 
Again, not too sure if this is the proper thread for it, but I'll post my Modern map of Dorne in the modern "Atlas-style" which went with my fic.
If this isn't the right place to put it, please tell me and I'll remove the post.

Y9D2Quq.png
 
Again, not too sure if this is the proper thread for it, but I'll post my Modern map of Dorne in the modern "Atlas-style" which went with my fic.
If this isn't the right place to put it, please tell me and I'll remove the post.

Y9D2Quq.png
No, no, this is very much the sort of thing we like to see.
 
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