Diversity Maximized World Map | Atlas Altera
- Thread starter Telamon Tabulicus
- Start date
Project Pitch
Here's my latest video, which attempts to explain the reason behind the project in a simple way.
Chinese Civil War Map
The Chinese Civil War to End all Chinese Civil Wars:
From the Ming to the Qing to the Ming to the RoC and back again to the Ming...
Toponyms of Magin are based on the 1905 pragmatic romanization of the Ming postal service, due to the failure of reaching consensus in the Fourth R.O.C. Conference for the Unification of Pronunciation, held in Nanjing in 1965.From the Ming to the Qing to the Ming to the RoC and back again to the Ming...
The premise here is that the Ming Dynasty manages to survive on the margins of Tayen (OTL Island of Taiwan/Formosa), that the famed Koxingga’s political line evolves into something analogous to the shoguns of Japan, that the Ming are able to benefit both from alliances with the Japanese and leverage Dutch Learning, and then able to capitalize on their coastal gains off the mainland (which happened sporadically in OTL history, even up to areas of the Lower Yangtze) in a period of history that kind of replaces the wokou ravaging of the early Qing Dynasty.
The Ming survive long enough, and are able to gain enough clout, that their legitimacy is used as a political football by the next generation of Han political elites in Magin (OTL southern China), leading to a more successful uprising analogous to the OTL Revolt of the Three Feudatories. From then on, the Ming are able to embed themselves in a complex political web of autonomous Maginese feudatories, Japanese intrigues and minor political ambitions, European imperialism, allowing them to challenge but also compel truce numerous times to ensure co-existence until the turn of the 20th century.
The Qing, for their part, are still able to make major gains in the rest of the continent, excelling in territories where their calvary could dominate (so same as OTL gains in Tibet, Sinkana/OTL Xinjiang and the Dzungar Empire, Mongola etc.). Only, when they start to deteriorate after their first line of astute emperors, they start to lose a lot more than compared to OTL, so that from the 19th to early 20th century, they start losing the Chinese Central Plain to the Ming (this period of heightened hostilities and warfare replaces the OTL Taiping Rebellion).
World War 1 sees a delusional Qing imperial court enter on the side of the Central Powers, leading to the downfall of the Qing and a quick but tumultuous foundation of the state of Manjur analogous to the War of Independence to OTL Turkey’s, complete with population transfers, some mass violence (minus full-blown genocide).
The Ming, for their part, are unable to capitalize on reunification, and start crumbling just like their former foes almost as soon as they reclaim the heartland. Their legitimacy, it seems, has finally run its course, and they rapidly become passe… This leads to republican insurgency, which fragments into a constellation of ethnic nationalists, communists, and nationalists. For a decade or more, the Ming try to stamp out opposition, but are never able to gain decisive victories against their foes.
Fast forward to World War Two, when the Ming are compelled to honour their Japanese allies to join the war and launch a campaign into southern Serica, but similar to Germany’s less competent allies, the Ming’s experiment with empire proves to be a blunder that finally upends the entire empire, giving enough fodder for the marginal insurgencies to blaze into full scale civil war. The Imperial Japanese Army is compelled to help their ally, which ultimately aids in undermining their own ambitions in the war (this time, the IJA enters the continent with a different narrative and moral orientation than OTL, but I’m not sure I can convince you the effects will be drastically too different…but I digress).
Boom! World War Two ends similar in most ways to OTL (more on that in future posts), with the Society of Nations (led mainly by the United States), occupying Okinawa and Fusan, as well as Magin. . Both the Ming and Japan are allowed to keep their core territories, however, and their monarchies allowed to continue to secure peace. For the Ming, this means they retain China proper. The Civil War, which predated the world war, does not conclude, however, as the republicans and communists are unable to form a government with the capacity to claim total victory in the new Ming heartland, China.
The Son establishes a DMZ on the banks of the Yangtze to separate Ming China and the loosely confederated states of Magin, which form around the nationalists, who proclaim a new Republic of China. But … you guessed it. As soon as peace is officially announced, factional alliances of the anti-Ming coalition break down, and now it is the Ming’s turn to start fueling insurgents that might benefit the Ming cause of post-empire hegemony in Magin, even if it is no longer able to full on pursue reunification or reclaim those territories in the presence of the SoN. The decades that follow are thus analogous to the OTL Vietnam War, and American and SoN troops eventually get involved, never directly confronting Ming forces from China, but fighting Maginese insurgents sympathetic to the Ming cause (i.e. OTL Viet Cong). Meanwhile, the nationalists’ uneasy alliance with the three remaining autonomous feudatories (dating back all the way to the early Qing-Ming wars) is strained when the nationalists ramp up on centralization, pushing the feudatories to backchannel dialogue with the Ming.
By the time of the Det or Serican New Year of 1968, a major offensive towards a new hegemonic order is launched, one that will swing power back into balance, eventually leading to the SoN and United States pulling out of Magin (but remaining in Okinawa, Fusan, and ironically, Taiwan, where the Ming first found refuge). Learning to be politically pragmatic just as the past Ming were in their most humbled moments in history, the new Ming China does not pursue total reunification, but rather, a commonwealth of Ming-aligned dominions, supporting convenient local factions and preventing large states from ever coalescing in the south…less these small underdogs learn from the Ming playbook.
And after these periods of tumult interspersed with textual gaps of peace (and presumedly prosperity, rapid development and alter-modernization with less Westernization), is how we get the ethnolinguistically more diverse Serica in contemporary times in Altera.
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Postal Map of Nicaragua (1919)
Postal Map of the Chicuexcan of Nicaragua:
A historical map alluding to the comic incongruent romanization history of OTL China
For a better version of the map, the Deviantart version.
With the help of a Nahuatl-speaker, I've been revamping the toponyms for the Nicaragua (OTL Mesoamerica) part of the fall update for the world map for Atlas Altera. And this little historical postal map is a cool offshoot of our efforts.A historical map alluding to the comic incongruent romanization history of OTL China
For a better version of the map, the Deviantart version.
This is a map of the state of Nicaragua, a federated state which once formed the culturally more resilient Indigenous southern part of the Spanish Main. Upon independence, these territories were at first conjoined with the more criollo-dominated territories of what is now known as Azlana (along with frontier territories further northwes in Arizona and in Texas) to form the Empire of Nicaragua. In 1846, the more Indigenous south revolted against centralisation efforts and the Hispanicization attempts or criollo elites, leading to a civil war that would see American intervention and a brokered peace plan that would lead to the Partition of Nicaragua, forming a Catholic and Spanish-speaking state in the north and a union of autonomous Indigenous altepetls or states in the south.
For the revamp, we had come up with real Nahuatl transcriptions, because the Altera world map is contemporary and the map style requires cities to be transcribed as endonyms. But for this period piece of a map, we decided to Hispanicize everything to produce the maximum amount of cursed toponyms. Yes...we came up with something authentic, and then bastardized/stained it with lore for a different kind of authentic...
The inspiration, of course, comes from the history of OTL Chinese postal romanization, which I've always found quite humorous. Like the Mayan-based script used in ATL Nicaragua, the Chinese writing system proved to be difficult for foreign correspondents to reference when posting mail. To solve this, romanization or transliteration of Chinese into the Latin script was necessary. As it was run by foreigners at the highest levels, the OTL Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs Service, and for a while, its successors, used their own romanization transcription system parallel to other state romanization systems.
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Civilizational Spheres and Cultural Lenses
Civilizational Spheres and Cultural Lenses of the World:
A parody-ish of Huntington's divides in his Clash of the Civilizations
For a better version of the map, the Deviantart version.
This beautifully flawed map and imbibed with reductive Western geographic imaginaries—think Orientalism but applied beyond the Middle East.A parody-ish of Huntington's divides in his Clash of the Civilizations
For a better version of the map, the Deviantart version.
In the blurbs on the map, you can find my criticisms for this kind of a map. But at the same time, it's important to understand why I made this map anyway. I can give one reason why it may be still worth appreciating a more thoroughly thought out equivalent to Huntington's reductive and often arbitrary civilizational divides.
For me, this kind of exercise is useful to showcase Western perspectives, to visualize shortsightedness or oversimplifications baked into our understanding of the world around us. It is important to map out our (Western) imagined geographies, especially if they are flawed but still used/useful in some ways.
When it comes to cultural grouping, people commonly draw associations and use vocabulary that references geographic boundaries to those associations. That's why, even though cultural geography is better studied through core-periphery relationships, I still thought it would be interesting to map out this mental image that a Western bureaucrat or politician or even political scientist might have in the world of Altera.
One can argue that almost all the borders or demarcations drawn on this map can be contested and ought to be blurred. For example, southeastern Europea or Rumelia could be also be grouped with its Anatolian counterparts (grouped as Salmanic) due to shared history, customs, and for a few states, religion. Different people will give different answers, but I thought this layout showcased the best summation or average of those views.
Mob Sports Map
Warring States of Sports:
The Territorial Gains and Competitive Landscapes Over Mob Sports
For a better version of the map, the Deviantart version.
This is the second most preferred sport kind of map that Zveiner and I made for Atlas Altera. This one features the six most prominent "mob sports" or full contact type of football to be played professionally around the world of Altera. I like sports maps because they are an easy way to showcase a very real and relatable part of a place's culture, as sports and games have a large role in culture, especially organized sports nowadays. As I said for the other map, I'm very interested in painting culture with broad-yet-interesting strokes to give people helpful clues of what's going on in the countries of Altera.The Territorial Gains and Competitive Landscapes Over Mob Sports
For a better version of the map, the Deviantart version.
Oh and yes, a couple of these sports I made up completely... One has a nod to quidditch (can you spot it?), and there's also a spinoff of a very popular OTL non-tackle sport.
Looks like it's descended from what would become Australian and Gaelic football in OTL; they're quite close to each other as sports already, in real life, so it's not unlikely that they'd become one in a timeline where, for example, the IRL exodus of the Irish to the United States happened with one or more of the Australian states as their destination instead, even though I'm not sure that's what happened in Altera.
The Georgian pastime conquering most of the Islamic world and northern Asia however, that's fucking wild, and I wonder what was @Telamon Tabulicus thinking there, you said the Iron Curtain's to thank for its spread in northern Italy back on Reddit but, did it become the favourite extra-curricular activity of Caliphate/Ottoman soldiers before then, or...
Yeah, and it has less tenuous Indigenous Australian influence, as the origins of the OTL sport seems to be marred by controversy. And as Neoteros mentioned, there is also the strong connection with Gaelic football here. The lore is probably that Gaelic football spread across the Atlantic and had its own little range of play before the whole sport was supplanted for the more "spectacle"-filled sport of kamari, which was similar enough to just graft onto the existing popularity of Gaelic football (as hard as it is believe that people would abandon the sport, especially the Irish aha).
And yeah, the Ottomans in OTL are a lot more into appropriating from all corners of their empire. In the baseball map, you can see how a Romanian sport became popular in Turcia and then was exported all over the empire.The Georgian pastime conquering most of the Islamic world and northern Asia however, that's fucking wild, and I wonder what was @Telamon Tabulicus thinking there, you said the Iron Curtain's to thank for its spread in northern Italy back on Reddit but, did it become the favourite extra-curricular activity of Caliphate/Ottoman soldiers before then, or...
No, not at all! This month will be when we do all sorts of association football/soccer maps and infographics to coincide with FIFA. These sports are just more of their own group, being all football-esque but also full contact.
I realize it's been a couple months since the last post, but I just started looking at this project more deeply and I've loved learning more about how the world looks ITTL. A big aspect of the project appears to be continued cultural diversity, but I'd like to ask about another sort of diversity in the form of biodiversity. You mentioned that a lot of the iconic Pleistocene megafauna has managed to survive in Siberea and Thulea (as well as presumably northern Hesperea), most notably the mammoths which were domesticated by the Yukaghir. Are there any other examples of species or even entire ecosystems surviving to the present that have been lost IOTL?
On an unrelated note, if you're taking suggestions I think that eventually a map detailing systems of government could be interesting to see which countries are republics or monarchies as well as how democratic different parts of the world are.
On an unrelated note, if you're taking suggestions I think that eventually a map detailing systems of government could be interesting to see which countries are republics or monarchies as well as how democratic different parts of the world are.
Ah, thanks for your suggestions and comments. I appreciate it. I find it hard in general to pique people's curiosities on this forum so I'm always excited when someone comments here.
It's funny you should mention biodiversity. I'm just starting to clean up the biogeographic corner maps in the Chorographical Depictions map that I made a long while back (so the flora and fauna regional schemes...think Wallace). I hope to post the two maps as separate standalone pieces with more labels and less reliance of standalone legends, like in the corner maps of Chorographical Depictions. That said, the map would never get into detail of what species exist where, but could give big clues for what kind of species might exist in the alt-geo places in the southern hemisphere, for instance.
- I am hoping for more monotremes in ATL Australia and Siluria,
- as well as everyone's Thylacine,
- marsupial cougars
- moas
- and Haast eagles,
- as well as perhaps the elephant bird...
- sabre tooth tigers, on their last legs when Europeans arrive, are one of the world's first conservation victories in Argentina,
- heath hens are domesticated early by the Eastern Woodland Culture or the Norse in Windmark....
- the Avalon (Falkland) wolf persists... mammoths and whooly rhinos roam alongside muskox in a Pleistocene park / mammoth steppe areas in northeastern Siberea; if you look at the climate and terrain corner maps of the A Wealth of Nations map, you will see I especially made changes to OTL data to show the mammoth steppe, actually.
And yes, I have in the near future bucket list the task of doing simple democratic index maps (Wiki-style) and regime types too!
Unbelievable? Not really, they're all species that existed alongside Homo sapiens for millennia. Possible? That depends on the species, if it's a threat to humans and/or has especially delicious meat, then it's quite likely it will go extinct; however, those species can still survive in areas most humans would find uninhabitable, or maybe the local humans find some use for them - Malagasy elephant bird cavalry, anyone?
Graphopolitics and the Modern Borders of Writing:
The Prevailing Writing Systems Adopted by States in a Polyscriptal World
For a higher resolution, go to my Deviantart
For explanations, go to this Reddit thread.
The Prevailing Writing Systems Adopted by States in a Polyscriptal World
For a higher resolution, go to my Deviantart
For explanations, go to this Reddit thread.
This is an infographic map that Zveiner, Babus Hospestos, and I made to tell the story of the major writing systems used/backed by states in Altera. If you're unfamiliar with Atlas Altera, visit the website, www.atlasaltera.com. The point of our project is to tell facts through storytelling, because how reality is portrayed often hides the truth. We invented some of the ATL academic lingo and not all of the views/ideas in the write-up is exactly in line with how OTL linguists, anthropologists, or writing systems experts see things, but it's still worth thinking about in the way we put it all together... So, how many of these scripts can you identify?
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One factor to consider is where large settled populations of people have coexisted with megafauna IOTL. Africa is the clearest example, where my understanding is that the wildlife had adapted to humans due to evolving alongside them, hence why the African biosphere is still fairly similar to how it was in the Pleistocene. You also have India though, where despite humans migrating there later you still have megafauna like elephants and tigers, and while this isn’t the case any longer my understanding is that the Middle East and North Africa in antiquity were also much more biodiverse, sharing a lot of fauna with Subsaharan Africa like elephants, lions, and hippos.
So it seems that human settlement can exist alongside megafauna, it’s just a matter of that actually happening in practice. With this in mind I think you could justify having a lot of different species survive to the present that didn’t IOTL.
So it seems that human settlement can exist alongside megafauna, it’s just a matter of that actually happening in practice. With this in mind I think you could justify having a lot of different species survive to the present that didn’t IOTL.
Yeah, that's similar to my line of thinking. I think Java, Sumatra, Iran etc. provide good examples of highly dense human populations living alongside megafauna and apex predators, even if the populations of those animals have become highly marginal and restricted to small pockets of areas. For the moas and elephant birds, I was thinking domestication due to the fact that the birds might not have a flight reflex to humans, and having the tweak that the Austronesians that discover the animals clue in quicker that herding the animals instead of striking them dead might be fruitful in the long run... For the saber tooths, I was hoping the Andes could help, and for the marsupials...well we have until colonialism to prove that they are viable, except Thylacoleo might need something...perhaps surviving in Cantabria (big Tasmania).
I do need to ask - who the heck is living on Antarctica that needs a dedicated alphabet?
There's no official language used across those research stations other than Intersign, a language based on OTL Plains Sign. Officially, in cross-cultural communication, scientists can speak their native tongue while signing the translingual language at the same time (as OTL Plains Sign was used). The only way to notate this is with Kinetic, which is the ATL fancy term for OTL Hamburg Notation. It really isn't used or printed, other than for transcribing for reference, like IPA is.
Ah, I see. So its kind of like how the Chinese script was used by lots of different (unrelated) languages, whilst still allowing for communication.
Exactly! There's not a lot of instances like that. The Chinese script is exactly how i have compared it in the past to explain to people how it works. I wonder if there is a term for describing this translingual aspect.